A very few companies control all... and it will be getting worse...
If corporations are 'people'... well, the people are not getting equal treatment.
'We, the people', it's said... don't feel we were excluded, but we didn't have meetings every single day like Comcast and NBC did. And we don't have hundreds of lobbyists on call like they do."
Comcast spent $100 million to get the merger approved. It hired 100 former government employees and paid $8.8 million to 30 lobbying firms to help seal the deal. It dumped a lot of cash all over Capitol Hill in the past two years.
Comcast met behind closed doors with the FCC to map out the future of broadband service and video streaming over the Internet. Anyone who wonders how federal banking regulators got captured by the financial industry, or how lawmakers got neutered by the insurance companies on the health care bill, or how big money is going to buy the next presidential election, all they have to do is to study the Comcast merger. It is a cautionary tale of things gone awry in Washington, where corporate speech is heard and heeded and the voices of actual citizens are ignored.
This how things get accomplished in 'our government.'
Good article... be sure and read all of it.
Note:
And once again.. deregulation rears its' insidious head: In 1984, we got the Cable Act. It was the first major revision of telecommunications policy in the U.S. since 1934. The law deregulated the industry that quickly spread like a cancer all over the country and into fewer and fewer hands. By 1991, just nine companies owned more than half the cable business in the US. Today, six media giants control most of what we see, hear and read.
Regulators presume the innocence, if not the good will, of industry players in whatever game they referee. They are hopelessly utopian in a dystopic world.
All corporations engage in the single-minded pursuit of money. They aren't moral or engaged in fairness, and it sometimes takes years before some kind of remedy can be found for the bad things they do. And by then it can be too late. Think Bernie Madoff, not Bill Gates.
Back to the Future With Comcast
