Public

The Debate Over Public Internet Broadband Is Heating Up

March 12, 2015 David Morris, www.alternet.org Create! FCC, Internet, Law, Public, Taxes

On February 28th the Federal Communications Commission issued two decisions. One concerned net neutrality, the other municipal broadband. The first garnered by far the most attention, as it should. Net neutrality affects everyone and establishes a fundamental new principle for Internet access. But as another presidential campaign looms the FCC decision on municipally owned broadband may offer more fertile ground for a vigorous political debate on the role of government and the scale of governance. The decision arose from a petition to the FCC by Chattanooga, Tennessee and Wilson, North Carolina asking it to overturn state laws that prevent them from extending their highly successful publicly owned networks to surrounding communities eager to connect.

Reasons Greek Public Broadcasting Shutdown

November 4, 2014 Michael Nevradakis, www.truth-out.org Resist! Capitalism, Greece, Media, Public

The transfer of these valuable broadcast rights for dubious sums provides a strong hint as to the true reasons behind the sudden closure of ERT. These reasons likely have less to do with a desire to "trim waste," combat corruption, or to establish a more independent and transparent public broadcaster in its place. Instead, they have more to do with the interests of Greece's major media and business moguls, who own the country's largest national broadcasters and DIGEA, a consortium of Greece's six largest national private television stations. It is DIGEA that has benefitted the most from ERT's shutdown, as the events of the past year have proven.

Privatization Fails, Will We Learn Government Can Do Better

October 10, 2014 Dan Carpenter, www.nuvo.net Educate! Government, Indiana, Privatization, Public

The money from the Indianapolis water-sewer utility sale is gone, and rates are going up, as the city told us would happen, sale or no sale. The money from the Indianapolis parking meter sale is gone, and rates have risen and billable hours have lengthened, with the collections flowing past city coffers to an outfit in Texas. The money from the Indiana Toll Road lease is gone, and now the foreign consortium running it has declared bankruptcy, ominously struggling against low use combined with raised tolls and much-criticized service. The spectacular failure of IBM’s takeover of welfare eligibility determination, a fiasco that wrought untold suffering upon the poor, disabled and elderly, has the state before the Indiana Supreme Court trying to scratch back tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Public TV: Where The One Percent Rule

October 9, 2014 FAIR, www.fair.org Educate! Inequality, Media, Public

A recent essay in Harper's (10/14) roiled the waters at PBS by arguing that public television is too often geared towards serving the "aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics." Perhaps that's no surprise. A new FAIR study finds that the trustees of major public television stations are overwhelmingly drawn from the corporate sector. Out of 182 trustees surveyed on five station boards, 152--or 84 percent--have corporate backgrounds. Among these corporate-affiliated members, 138 are executives at elite businesses, while another 14 appear to be trustees because of their families' corporate-derived wealth. Seventy-five of the corporate-affiliated trustees are executives from the financial industry; 24 are corporate lawyers.

Many People Support Mass Transit, Why Do Few Ride?

September 23, 2014 Eric Jaffe, www.citylab.com Create! Public, Transportation

Every transit advocate knows this timeless Onion headline: "98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others." But the underlying truth that makes this line so funny also makes it a little concerning: enthusiasm for public transportation far, far outweighs the actual use of it. Last week, for instance, the American Public Transportation Association reported that 74 percent of people support more mass transit spending. But only 5 percent of commuters travel by mass transit. This support, in other words, is largely for others. What's more striking about the support-usage gap is that it doesn't just exist on paper. In addition to saying they support transit funding, Americans back up that support with their own pocketbooks. Time and again at the polls, people are willing to raise local taxes to maintain or expand the transit service that so few of them actually use. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, there were 62 transportation measures on ballots across the country in 2012—many with a considerable transit component—and nearly 80 percent of them succeeded.

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