Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: Why the proposed Comcast-Time-Warner consolidation is a terrible idea

I have twice heard Michael Copps speak at Free Press national conferences. He is a former FCC Commissioner, a thoughtful and principled man who now has grave concerns about media consolidation, including the latest proposed mega-deal wherein Comcast hopes to buy Time-Warner. Here are Copps' words on this latest terrible development:

You may wonder why a long-time regulator like me is writing to you. ... I worked at the intersection of policy and journalism as a member of the Federal Communications Commission and saw first-hand how my agency’s decisions limited your ability to accomplish good things. Since I stepped down two years ago, the situation has only gotten worse. I want to do something about it. I want you to do something about it, too. Let me tell you what I saw. I was sworn in as a commissioner in 2001. “What an awesome job this is going to be,” I thought, “dealing with edge-of-the-envelope issues, meeting the visionaries and innovators transforming the ways we communicate, and then making it all happen by helping to craft policies to bring the power of communications to every American.” It was a heady time.... New media would complement the traditional media of newspapers, radio, TV, and cable, ushering in a golden age of communications. ... The FCC that I joined had a different agenda. It had fallen as madly in love with industry consolidation, as had the swashbuckling captains of big media. The agency seldom met an industry transaction it didn’t approve. The Commission’s blessing not only conferred legitimacy on a particular transaction; it encouraged the next deal, and the hundreds after that. So Clear Channel grew from a 1970s startup to a 1,200-station behemoth. Sinclair, Tribune, and News Corp. went on buying sprees, too, and the major networks extended their influence by buying some stations and affiliating with others. Gone are hundreds of once-independent broadcast outlets. In their stead is a truncated list of nationwide, homogenized, and de-journalized empires that respond more to quarterly reports than to the information needs of citizens.

Continue ReadingFormer FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: Why the proposed Comcast-Time-Warner consolidation is a terrible idea

It’s time for public banks

The state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) is a model for Los Angeles and other cities, counties, and states . . . [It] is a major money-maker for North Dakota, returning about $30 million annually in dividends to the treasury – not bad for a state with a population that is less than one-fifth that of the City of Los Angeles. Every year since the 2008 banking crisis, the BND has reported a return on investment of 17-26%. Like the BND, a Bank of the City of Los Angeles would provide credit for city projects – to build bridges, restore lakes, and pay bills – and this credit would essentially be interest-free, since the city would own the bank and get the interest back. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by 35% or more.

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Elizabeth Warren: Obama filling federal bench slots with corporate attorneys

Barack Obama is seeking only skin-deep diversity when he chooses judicial nominees. 70% of judicial nominees come from the corporate sector and only 3.6 percent of the president's nominees have a background in public interest organizations. Elizabeth Warren is concerned: "Power is becoming more and more concentrated on one side," she said. "Professional diversity is one way to insulate the courts from corporate capture."

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Chris Hedges discusses our undoing

Chris Hedges is difficult to read, but not because he is a bad writer. Rather, it is because he is not satisfied with official lies. Consider these observations of Hedges:

Our financial system—like our participatory democracy—is a mirage. The Federal Reserve purchases $85 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds—much of it worthless subprime mortgages—each month. It has been artificially propping up the government and Wall Street like this for five years. It has loaned trillions of dollars at virtually no interest to banks and firms that make money—because wages are kept low—by lending it to us at staggering interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent. ... Or our corporate oligarchs hoard the money or gamble with it in an overinflated stock market. Estimates put the looting by banks and investment firms of the U.S. Treasury at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion. But none of us know. The figures are not public. And the reason this systematic looting will continue until collapse is that our economy [would] go into a tailspin without this giddy infusion of free cash.
Who has the strength to see problems as immense and as obvious as these? Not many people, but their are some.
Yet we, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess.

Continue ReadingChris Hedges discusses our undoing