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Corporatism

FCC Incest: Meet The Cable Cronies Who Control Net Neutrality’s Future

May 23, 2014 Ashley Feinberg, www.gizmodo.com , , ,
The fate of net neutrality has never looked bleaker, with the FCC's proposed rules basically dismantling the free and open internet that we know today. You can thank the agency's notorious revolving door for that; for years, FCC officials and the people they're supposed to be regulating have been playing a horrible game of telecom musical chairs. In fact, according to OpenSecrets.org, 18 industry leaders have both lobbied on behalf of Comcast and spent time in the public sector. Of those, 12 are currently registered as lobbyists for the anti-net-neutrality cable giant, five of whom have served tours with the FCC itself. And that's just Comcast. Of the 465 registered telecom lobbyists, almost 75 percent have gone through the government's revolving door. All that becomes a huge problem when you consider that these well-funded political mercenaries are basically schmoozing up their former colleagues on behalf of net neutrality's biggest enemies. What's more troubling, though, is that it's not just the bottom-feeders who have mixed loyalties. Some of the highest ranking appointed officials at the FCC have deep, vested interests in the very same companies they're supposed to be regulating. These are some of the worst offenders in the big, incestuous orgy that is the FCC-telecom revolving door.

For Profit Internet Providers Preventing Faster, Cheaper Internet

May 23, 2014 Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org ,
If you want to know what a difference a municipally owned internet service can make, just look to Chattanooga, Tennessee. In an article on CNNMoney entitled, "Chattanooga's super-fast publicly owned Internet," journalist James O'Toole describes how Chattanooga is providing the gold standard of internet access, while commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are leaving consumers in the dust, in terms of speed and service: Chattanooga, Tenn., may not be the first place that springs to mind when it comes to cutting-edge technology. But thanks to its ultra-high-speed Internet, the city has established itself as a center for innovation -- and an encouraging example for those frustrated with slow speeds and high costs from private broadband providers. Chattanooga rolled out a fiber-optic network a few years ago that now offers speeds of up to 1000 Megabits per second, or 1 gigabit, for just $70 a month. A cheaper 100 Megabit plan costs $58 per month. Even the slower plan is still light-years ahead of the average U.S. connection speed, which stood at 9.8 megabits per second as of late last year, according to Akamai Technologies. "It's really altered how we think of ourselves as a city," said Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke. "We're a midsized, southern city -- for us to be at the front of the technological curve rather than at the tail end is a real achievement."

Merger Protests Greet Comcast’s Annual Shareholder Meeting

May 22, 2014 Hadas Kuznits, www.philadelphia.cbslocal.com , , , ,
Demonstrators gathered this morning outside Comcast Corporation’s annual shareholders’ meeting to show opposition to the company’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. Outside the Kimmel Center, Delara Derakhshani, policy counsel for Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, says a merger between the two media giants would result in worse customer service, higher prices, and fewer choices. “I would say that they’re sort of notorious for lousy customer service, and they’re just going to have less of an incentive, I think, to address customer needs,” she told KYW Newsradio. Meanwhile, Comcast spokesperson John Demming was on hand to read a written statement from Comcast: “The combination of Comcast and Time Warner Cable will bring significant benefits to consumers, including faster Internet speeds, net neutrality protection, a more reliable and more secure network, low-cost Internet access, and more diverse and independent programming to millions of Americans across the nation,” he read. But Steven Renderos, with the Center for Media Justice, doesn’t think the merger will help consumers at all. “All it really does is it puts Comcast in a position to have more power,” he said.

Unstoppable Right/Left Convergence On May 27th

May 22, 2014 The Nader Page, www.blog.nader.org , ,
Join us Tuesday (May 27, 2014) for an unprecedented one day gathering that will convene leading experts from the Left and Right (such as Jim Hightower, Judson Phillips, Medea Benjamin, Bruce Fein, Ron Unz and more) to find common ground on many of the key issues of our time. Admission is free and a complimentary light breakfast and lunch will be served! Issues to be discussed at the event are: -Civil liberties -The minimum wage -The commercialization of childhood -Corporate welfare -The imperial perpetuation of America’s wars -Trade -The unpunished crimes and misdeeds of Wall Street

The Corporate-Right Wing Attack On Public Broadcasting

May 21, 2014 Anthony Loewenstein, www.theguardian.com , , ,
The war on public broadcasters by corporate media is currently enjoying a resurgence. Britain’s Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has long loathed the BBC, accusing it of supporting “cultural marxism”. In a 2007 lecture, he said the organisation attempted to undermine “the values of conservatism, with a small ‘c’, which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons.” To Dacre, the BBC is a “closed thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak … perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions”. In reality, it would be hard to find any media group in Britain more polarising than the Daily Mail, constantly railing against refugees, Muslims, single women and anybody who threatens its view of the world. We can look forward to the same outlook when it formally launches in Australia this year. Dacre’s comments on the BBC were little different to Rupert Murdoch’s Australian editorial last weekend on the ABC, that alleged managing director Mark Scott had “failed to address bias issues at the national broadcaster, lift standards or impose accountability.” Furthermore (and Dacre would have been proud of this line), “the ABC has an endless list of progressive journalists and hosts sharing their perspectives and an absence of hosts or programmers who are mainstream or, heaven forbid, conservative”.

Democrats Wedded To Money, Not To The People

May 19, 2014 Lee Fang, www.vice.com , ,
Looking for the fight over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in the waning days of the Obama administration? Next Tuesday morning, take the elevator to the eighth floor of a downtown Washington, DC, building and step into the offices of America's Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), the premier lobbying group for some of the largest fracking companies in the world. While much of the talk about a progressive revival revolves around populist figures like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren, there are other, better funded efforts afoot. Corporate titans from finance to natural gas to big retail to telecom are attempting to steer the party, and as the midterms shape up, these interests are pushing to ensure they continue to have wide sway over America's only viable outlet for center-left expression at the polls. Which brings us to the latest venture in corporate-centered party-building and the group hosting a chat in ANGA's headquarters: The NewDEAL. Created by Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and Senator Mark Begich of Alaska, the NewDEAL is one of several cash-rich efforts to resurrect the Democratic Party's flailing bench of electable candidates. This NewDEAL has little in common with President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal platform, which pledged to save capitalism from itself by cracking down on predatory banking institutions and restoring workplace rights for Americans. No, this NewDEAL is a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy nonprofit, a tax vehicle which allows campaign activity without disclosure of donors, and its name is an acronym for "Developing Exceptional American Leaders."

Media Doesn’t Report: US Ruled By Rich, Not A Democracy

May 18, 2014 Steve Rendall, www.truth-out.org ,
American democracy is no longer very democratic, according to a new university study (4/9/14; Perspectives on Politics, Fall/14). Instead, it's dominated by moneyed elites in a process where public opinion has little to no impact on policy. Released a month ago by Princeton's Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page, the study concludes: Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The political scientists looked at more than 1,700 policies over 20 years to find out how public opinion translates into policy, and concluded that where economic elite views diverged from those of the public, the public had "zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact." Bracing news? The study went viral in social media, but has hardly shown up in the US corporate press. A month after its release there have been no network news mentions, nor has it appeared in the most influential newspapers–the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. (The New York Times, 4/21/14 and the Washington Post, 4/8/14 published blog posts on the study.)

These Companies Spend The Most Money To Kill Net Neutrality

May 17, 2014 Lee Drutman and Zander Furnas, www.dailydot.com , , ,
With the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to move forward with a controversial proposal that threatens net neutrality and the open Internet, lobbying activity looks like it has reached a fevered pitch. But for the companies involved—especially the telecom companies that are eager to be allowed to charge more for a “fast lane” of Internet service—lobbying has been at a fevered pitch for almost a decade. Going back to 2005 (when the phrase “net neutrality” first shows up in lobbying disclosure reports), the principle's biggest opponents (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and their allies) have lobbied against net neutrality about three times as hard as the biggest proponents of neutrality (Level 3, Google, Microsoft and their allies). To better understand the lobbying dynamics around net neutrality, we took the long view and tallied up the 20 lobbying organizations that mentioned “net neutrality” or “network neutrality” most often in their lobbying reports between 2005 and 2013. In the top 20, we found an even split: 10 pro-neutrality organizations and 10 anti-neutrality organizations. But when it came to intensity, the lobbying was far from balanced. The top pro-neutrality organizations filed 176 lobbying reports mentioning net neutrality. But the top anti-neutrality organizations far outpaced them, filing 472 reports that mentioned net neutrality. That’s a 2.7-to-1 ratio.

The Rise Of The American Corporate Security State

May 14, 2014 Jesselyn Radack, Berrett-Koehler, www.truth-out.org , ,
Daniel Ellsberg writes of The American Corporate Security State: "Edwards is an extraordinary writer who brilliantly captures the essence of what whistleblowers such as Snowden have sacrificed their careers and jeopardized their personal liberties to convey." Get the book by contributing to Truthout here. Foreword In the pages that follow, Bea Edwards shows the post-9/11 merger of corporate wealth and government power in the United States - beneath a thinning veneer of democracy. The book in your hands explains the way in which this private/public collaboration gives policy-making over to profit-seeking corporate interests, which then become a direct threat to our civil rights and our way of life. Peace and financial stability are the first casualties. Increasingly, well-connected corporate directors, with their privileged access to military resources and the national treasury, placed the country on a permanent war footing even as they dismantled government regulation of their businesses. They made a series of decisions and actions that the public never considered, debated, or approved, even indirectly.

The Free-Trade Regime: Oligarchy In Action

May 13, 2014 Staff, www.fpif.org , ,
The United States is not really a democracy. That’s the (simplified) conclusion of a recent study from Princeton University. Instead, economic elites and special interest groups enjoy tremendous sway in Washington, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Let’s put this assertion to the test by looking at the concrete example of free trade agreements and their relation to democracy and national sovereignty. “Democracy” typically refers to a system of government in which people decide on the rules of their sovereign nation. In the true spirit of democracy and sovereignty, all spheres of policy — including the environment, trade, finance, intellectual property, and culture — must be subject to a fair political process and self-determination. In the modern, globalized world, the institutions of democracy and sovereignty exist in tension with another powerful institution: the global market and its free trade regimes. In one sense, the free-market system sustains democracy. It generates wealth and tempers the centralization of power — two preconditions for democracy. But in another sense, global free-market capitalism conflicts with democracy and sovereignty. This is particularly true for the “neoliberal” variety of capitalism, which has been on the rise since the 1980s. It one-sidedly promotes the principles of global deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and the rollback of the welfare state — all of which increase inequality and redistribute economic and political power to corporations and wealthy individuals.

The Post-Constitutional Era

May 6, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com , ,
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty. “In declining to hear the case Hedges v. Obama and declining to review the NDAA, the Supreme Court has turned its back on precedent dating back to the Civil War era that holds that the military cannot police the streets of America,” said attorney Carl Mayer, who along with Bruce Afran devoted countless unpaid hours to the suit. “This is a major blow to civil liberties. It gives the green light to the military to detain people without trial or counsel in military installations, including secret installations abroad. There is little left of judicial review of presidential action during wartime.”

Economics, Values and Our Collective Fate

April 30, 2014 Daniel Schmachtenberger, www.feature.waveofaction.org , ,
Underneath and driving all of the major problems in our world is the fact that people are more financially incentivized to perpetuate them than to solve them. As long as killing a whale confers a million dollars of advantage to a fishing company, while leaving it alive confers none, we will continue to hunt whales towards extinction. As long as a millennia old redwood tree is worth no specific amount to us alive, but worth $100k as timber, we will continue destroying the tiny percentage of old growth forests we have left. Based on a very old, primitive and barbaric dominator worldview, our economic system doesn’t ask if they are ours to take, and doesn’t factor whose balance sheet the costs show up on. How different is this in its fundamental rationale, than taking Africans as slaves for the economic value their “free” labor conferred? That was not that long ago. If you look at the conditions of the labor force in the third world responsible for manufacturing almost all our goods, you will realize that this still hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think. Our goods economy was built upon and requires the continuance of cheap labor resulting from extreme economic disparity. Get that: our current economic system could not function with anything near economic equality for all.

Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance To Dismantle The Corporate State

April 30, 2014 The Nader Page, www.nader.org ,
We are at one of the most pivotal moments in our country’s political history: Americans are more disillusioned with their political leaders than ever before and large majorities of citizens tell pollsters that big corporations have too much political power. The ever-tightening influence of big business on the mainstream media, elections and our local, state, and federal governments, have caused many Americans to believe they have no political voice. Yet, Ralph Nader—named by Time and Life magazines as one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century—has an impassioned and game-changing message for American citizens: You are not powerless. In UNSTOPPABLE, Nader persuasively demonstrates that there is an emerging Left-Right alliance which has the power to dismantle the corporate-government tyranny. Large segments from the progressive, conservative, and libertarian political camps already find themselves aligned in opposition to the destruction of civil liberties, the bloated and economically draining corporate welfare state, the relentless perpetuation of America’s wars, sovereignty-shredding free trade agreements, and the unpunished crimes of Wall Street against Main Street.

Low-Wage Workers Shame Greedy Restaurant Chains in Massive Protest

April 30, 2014 Mara Kardas-Nelson, www.alternet.org , , ,
Hundreds of low-income workers from around the country demanding better wages, benefits and an end to corporate greed blocked traffic in Washington on Monday morning to start of a day of protests, marches and lobbying Congress for economic justice. The protesters marched along main thoroughfare Pennsylvania Avenue as they headed towards the Capitol, blocking traffic for several minutes at a time at busy locations along the Mall. The activists were in Washington, D.C., for the Rising Voices for A New Economy conference, organized by National People’s Action and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Their coalition included groups like Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), which is using the day to launch a new shaming campaign against the corporate restaurant industry and its national lobbying group, The National Restaurant Association. NRA members are also in Washington for their annual convention and congressional lobbying day. “It’s a shame that people get paid $2.13 an hour—that’s 213 pennies more than a slave was making an hour, and I come from a slave state,” said Darrin Browder,

Nursing Home Lies And Deceit

April 23, 2014 Lynn Petrovich, www.popularresistance.org , ,
As a CPA who, for the last decade, has prepared pro bono tax returns for citizens at the Jersey Shore, I’ve seen a lot of suffering: homelessness, unemployment, chronic illnesses, bankruptcies, suffocating student loan debt, unconscionable medical bills, and the scars of incarceration. Many taxpayers are overwhelmed and depressed, resulting from job losses through economic downsizing and privatizing schemes. They wonder how they’re going to get through the week. Living paycheck to paycheck, their struggles are life-altering, causing anxiety, relocations, and uncertainty. They’re constantly beaten down by public officials who sell them out at every turn. It is a downward spiral from which many never recover. Through my research on abuse at nonprofit hospitals who aggressively pursue the poor, un and under-insured for hospital bills (puffed up by as much as 1,000 percent) while doling out million dollar compensation packages
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