Monopolists harm America

A number of politicians (mostly Republican) have come out in support of the AT&T / T-Mobile merger. But their arguments do not make sense. Primarily, they cite benefits to America of competition in wireless before the merger. These very benefits would decrease if the merger goes through, despite false promises by AT&T.

These politicians are not in favor of the "free market." They are advocating a consolidation that would be bad for the market, and bad for America, while benefiting a monopolist in an industry where freedom is vital for economic security.

America has had to act against monopolists and oligopolies in the past. It needs to be vigilant again, and do what it must to preserve competition in the market place. Like railroads and the oil companies two centuries ago and AT&T itself in the last century, a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile would result in less innovation, higher prices, and less freedom of information. This process is common when new technologies foster a consolidation of power.

In fact, we need more communication companies in America, not fewer. We need more competition, not less. Much of the innovation in America's communications industry came after AT&T was broken up last time.

AT&T and T-Mobile both run on the GSM technology, most common in much of the world. The other two major carriers, Sprint and Verizon, run via CDMA. By allowing only one major player on the GSM side, there will be no one to challenge AT&T if a technological innovation comes to GSM.

AT&T would be the sole buyer of GSM technology in the U.S., giving it monopolist power over cell phone makers and software providers, to the detriment of consumers.

It is extremely expensive to build out a new cell network, acquire customers and put in place a cell phone company, and nearly impossible to acquire radio spectrum on which cell phones communicate.

In economics speak, the "barriers to entry" into the market are extremely high, and would be more so if dominated by a company is as well-heeled and politically powerful as AT&T.

Communications and information flow are the life blood of our nation, and becoming more critical every day. Control should not be allowed to slide toward fewer and fewer companies, especially when vertical integration may allow them to control what we see, how we see it, what we can buy and how easy it might be to find it.

It is naive to think that AT&T in that position would not use its power to fill its coffers at the expense of anyone and everyone. It would be its duty, in fact. We expect companies to make the highest profit allowable under the law.

For these reasons, government must preserve the free market in any way it can, and right now, the best way to do so is to deny the AT&T and T-mobile merger. The alternative, over the long run, is some form of regulation, which would have fewer benefits and higher cost.

If T-Mobile is to be sold, it should go to another company -- Google or Apple come to mind, though there may be issues there. Berkshire-Hathaway, perhaps. But its independence should be preserved.

In a market as difficult to foster competition as mobile communications, a market as critical to our future, America can not afford to allow monopolists to gain control.

The Snide

We have now seen how much arrogance money can buy. And it's not a pretty sight.

Donald Trump, will you please sit down and quit disturbing the other children?

Donald Trump is a racist. He is a bully. He is a joke of his own making. He is not very bright, and has that irritating middle school narcissism shared by other half-bright wing dings like Sarah Palin.

In fact, there is something just so middle school about that whole clique of Palin and Trump and Bachmann and to a lesser extent, Boehner. Something about the way they back bite, curl their lip at the rest of us, say stupid things and accuse people who point out the stupidity of "hating" or being envious or something else unrelated, like, or, or, or like, you know, they have a bad complexion and their mom, you know, drives an old Ford.

As if they get to say what they want and not be challenged because of who they are.

They get their slavish friends to nominate them for class president because, like, you know, they will put on just the most fabulous dance and play their favorite music, you know, and like if those other people don't like it they just should have been elected and maybe not come and they are just such a drag anyway ...

It's not that they are on the right: There are many, many wonderfully astute thinkers on the right, men and women with good ideas and the ability to articulate them. And it's not that the left doesn't have its own heaping helping of hubris.

But instead of a debate about ideas, we have these plastic Barbie and Ken dolls with their plastic smiles and plastic hair saying stupid things about ... birth certificates? Whether kids who knew him in elementary school remembered the president?

Oh, just shut up. You are tiresome and annoying and if you didn't have money or self generated momentum, no one would bother with you. Very few of those paying attention are friends. They don't really like you, either.

Can anyone, anyone? really compare Sarah Palin and Donald Trump to Obama? To Bill Clinton? To George H.W. Bush? To Eisenhower? FDR? Lincoln? Jefferson, etc?

Ever since the simulacrum Ronald Reagan, senile for a good portion of his presidency, was in office and the right realized it was only necessary to have an image of a president to be the face of policy, an actor instead of an actual person, we have suffered this train of Presidential presenters from the right.

Somewhat like news presenters, standing in front of a camera wearing a slicker in a hurricane, posing as journalists. Speaking of which, to the so-called journalists of America: WTF?

Needed now more than ever, you have ceded your responsibilities to Fox and the Huffington Post? Why are Al Jazeera and Jon Stewart the most reasonable representatives of the Fourth Estate? Where are you? Where have you gone?

Rep. Boehner to sell highways

House Speaker John A. Boehner wants to sell key U.S. highways to private interests that contributed to his reelection campaign.

Interstate 5 from Mexico to Canada would be cut into four sections and "privatized." The first section would run from Mexico through Los Angeles; the second from Los Angeles to Redding, Californa; the third from Redding to Portland, Oregon, and the last from Portland to the Canadian border.

"The sale of this underutilized asset will help with the deficit," Boehner said. "Private enterprise will do a better job."

"Transportation is under attack from both state and federal governments," Boehner said. "These bureaucrats have never set foot in a car factory, and many of them don't even like to drive."

Boehner also says the new owners of the blacktop should be able to set separate speed limits for individual vehicles. The proposal would allow Transport Inc. to "sell" higher speeds to the drivers of BMWs and Mercedes, while limiting the speeds of vehicles from other manufacturers. The same would be true of larger vehicles, such as trucks.

Some independent truckers have worried that the owners of Transport Inc., which has put in a bid for the Oregon section of the interstate, also own trucking companies. They say that Transport Inc. could set higher speed limits for their own trucks, or even limit the number of competing trucks from smaller companies.

"There are other highways if they choose to use them," Boehner said of those concerns.

He also said these complaints actually come from regulators in Washington who oppose the free market. “We see this threat in how the (govt.) is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the highway system,” Mr. Boehner said.

The idea that competition might actually be reduced by monopoly ownership of I5, constructed largely with federal highway dollars, did not concern the Republican.

“The last thing we need, in my view, is the US Department of Transportation serving as traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over trucking companies who have been serving their communities with transportation for decades,” he said to loud applause.

For more on Boehner's remarks, see this.

Boehner's calculating ignorance

If one needs more proof that the Republican Party capitalizes on the venality of its more vulnerable members (yeah, I know, given Sarah Palin that's hard to believe), Republican leader John Boehner provided it this week.

This Sunday on "Meet the Press," host David Gregory asked Boehner if he thought Obama was a Christian and a citizen. Boehner said he did. But about the conspiracy nut jobs who think Obama is a Muslim and was born in Kenya, Boehner said "... it's not my job to tell the American people what to think ... The American people have the right to think what they want to think."

What a facile, manipulative thing to say. Of course people have the right to think stupid things, and not just Americans. The question was whether Boehner has a responsibility to "inform their ignorance," in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

Of course he does. He is not a national leader if he does not. Facts are not matters of opinion or preference. If we can not agree on simple facts, we do not have "One Nation indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for all" (the original wording of the pledge).

But Boehner is not a national leader, he is a right wing flack who would rather use ignorance to further a shallow political agenda. "Informing their ignorance" is politically inconvenient; correcting that ignorance might allow people to think more calmly about more important issues.

"... he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong," said Jefferson. In saying it is not his job to speak truth to his troops, by hiding behind a shallow rhetorical gimmick, Boehner shows the world what he is, and what the Republican Party has become.

In this, Boehner has more in common with those who spread lies and hate about America than he does with the founding fathers of this great nation.

Bank reform and Golden Sacks of crap

Too big to fail is just what it means: any financial reform that leaves standing commercial institutions that are "too big to fail" is doomed.

Any reform that fails to bring these monsters down to a size where they can be controlled, instead of them controlling us, fails to protect the American wage earner.

And just to be clear, breaking up the giant oligopoly banks is about as "free market" a policy as we can envision. Government is not the enemy of business, but it is a referee and protector of the market. When one player, like Goldman Sachs, becomes so powerful that it can successfully manipulate the economy in which it plays, the market is broken and needs reform.

Large investment banks command an horrific percentage of corporate profit in the U.S. (as opposed to our beleaguered and important community banks, the ones that would provide loans to you and me if Chase and company had not sucked up all the dollars). Read more here.

They buy and sell politicians of each major party with a stroke of a pen. They send their minions to work for the regulators. They profit from our hardship.

It is time to recognize that, like the oil and rail monopolies of the past, large investment banks need to be brought down to a size that would allow for greater competition, more transparency, and to allow the market to punish any them, even with failure, for bad decisions. They need to be broken up and a stable, competitive market restored.

The current proposed legislation does not go nearly far enough.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Yes, the heavy lifting of health care reform had to be tackled first. Not cap and trade, not financial reform. Thank you for the vision, the effort, and the guts. Only a few of us believed.

But now, there is some business that HAS to be next. Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

We need oxygen out here. Our local employers who have not already fallen are hanging on by their fingertips. Capital needs to flow again, regardless of it's source, be it relaxed requirements, government spending at a community level, housing subsidies. As quickly as possible, and don't worry about nuance or endless debates about what is "fair."

While you and congress try to figure out how to staunch the wounds caused by the behemoth banks, our local banks are being buried by the weight of Washington's indifference. It's a crisis, even if you don't hear much about it back there where you are all employed.

This needs to be tackled NOW, for the health of our communities, our economy, and frankly, for the Democratic Party.

"Faggot, nigger, baby killer"

These are the words thrown at Congressmen of the United States by Tea Party activists on the day of the health care vote. This is what was encouraged by Republicans from the balconies of the Capitol with hand lettered signs, words actually spoken in the chamber.

Republicans could have helped craft a bill that included their principles, brought more accountability, insisted on limitations to malpractice, increased competition, provided rationale instead of irrationality. Instead, they decided to vilify and destroy.

This is the new language of the Republican party.

Right wing gasbag

Paul Broun is a despicable political hack.

After the health care vote, Broun said to Democrats: “Are you so arrogant that you know what’s best for the American people? ... Are you so ignorant to be oblivious to the wishes of the American people?”

According to Broun, only HE knows what's best for the American people.
Broun, listen up: You LOST the last election. Obama WON the last election. So did the democrats. THAT is the will of the people. Not you, and your posturing morality.

Broun tried to prevent soldiers over seas from buying Playboy. In a stunning display of ignorance, he said that wages paid to soldiers still belonged to the government which should have a say in how those soldiers spend their money. This man is not qualified to be in government at ANY level.

Paul Broun is a gas bag. That he has stolen a coat of red, white and blue just makes him a gas bag and a thief.

Drop abortion insurance.

The abortion issue in the health care debate is divisive, unnecessary and wrong. It is time to drop it and move on to getting health care for more Americans.

Including abortion as a health care entitlement in this country at this time is simply a mistake. It was always an over reaching, an example of the hubris of the left, a bit of Bush-like "we won, get over it." They thought they had the votes to ram it through. Then they didn't.

Aside from the vitriol it was bound to inflame, we can not afford to be a nanny state, taking care of every misstep any individual is likely to make. It is time the left recognized that consequences are as important in reforming the health care system as universal coverage.

That is another use of the word "choice." Enabling every individual we want to insure to avoid any consequences of choices they make is to guarantee a system we can't afford.

It would be nice to increase premiums on people who have too many Big Macs and Big Gulps as well. If they choose to skate the thin ice of obesity, heart disease and diabetes, they and not we should pay the higher price. No, I don't know how to separate life style choices from inherited traits.

But those issue are not hot button issues like abortion. On that we also have to recognize we live in a pluralistic society, and there are some things we just can't ask our neighbors to pay for.

Otherwise they won't pay for anything at all.

The lies of Fox "News."

They lie with numbers. They lie with "facts." Sometimes, they just lie.

Fox News is right wing propaganda. Watch this video.