The Democrats may have taken control of the house and senate, but make no mistake, corporate interests still control the Congress itself.
Of all the horrific things the went on in the Republican congress, one was the attempt to allow FCC regulations to be rolled back. Remember that? Back in 2003? Michael Powell? News reports of record-setting e-mail volumes to Congress and the FCC?
Is there anything more important in life than information?
In case you just landed here from Mars, let’s get some background first before we look at a giant red flag.
Recap: America, while in debt, is still very powerful militarily. It has a lot going for it, but corruption has become institutionalized in its government, and due to circumstances, the 1947 National Security Act got passed, creating an economy focused on things the Pentagon likes to focus on; like picking fights that don’t need to be fought. Sometime later, another group got control of the situation and redirected the militarized economy towards a new goal: to turn America and the world into a giant corporation. To make it look like, a hundred years from now, there would be a few spots of wealth and affluence, and knowledge , and the rest of the world would be a grey mush of ignorance and general misery.
But in order to do that, to set that world up, information would have to be turned off--which was no easy task because Americans were Americans, and according to the nation it had defeated Hitler and continued to keep the world safe from communism. Those generations were proud, fierce even, and there was no way anyone was going to suggest there be infringement on the free-flow of information in the freest country of ‘em all! If you suggested to George Washington that only the British or some group decides what’s printable in American newspapers, he’d run you through with his sword.
A very common acronym out on the internet these days is MSM, i.e. mainstream media. Another common--though not all-too common--phrase is, PTB, i.e. powers that be. MSM? Just about everyone knows that one. PTB? It’s not entirely accepted. Mostly because it implies a conspiracy theory of some sort. Whether there is a conspiracy, or a multiple of conspiracies, or no conspiracy at all, just plain dumb luck, American history is indisputable about this: during the Reagan years the Fairness Doctrine was deregulated, during the Clinton years media ownership rules were deregulated. Sometime after that Mickey Mouse became the George Bush of some machine that floated us lies about Iraq. But the facts are the facts: the Fairness Doctrine was removed, and media ownership rules we’re deregulated. Deny it if you want but those two things clearly indicate a hidden hand of sorts, a vague dreamy move towards censuring information over the last twenty years. Whatever it is striving to turn out the lights, let’s refer to it as the PTB.
OK, so now where are we? Americans just voted in a Democratic majority, but the Congress itself is still controlled by the PTB, and according to a recent interview broadcast on C-Span, the agenda seems to be at a final culmination. What was the goal? To turn the world into a Wal-Mart world. What had to be done? Information had to be turned off; the lights had to be turned out.
The interview between Ms. Swain and Mr. Theirer on C-Span provides the latest intelligence of the intentions of the PTB.
The interview starts with Ms. Swain asking Mr. Theier to tell viewers who he is and where he’s from. He’s a guy from a think-tank that had spun off from a foundation (The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973; funding upwards of 100 million dollars; produces articles, lectures, conferences and briefings for Congress, Congressional staff, executive branch policymakers, the news media and academia). He goes into how he worked on media matters for the foundation for ten years, but his new think tank was unique in that it focused only on media matters. So here’s a guy from... Academia? The government? No, from a think tank. Oh, well he looks smart, sounds smart--must be smart. Must know what he’s talking about.
He starts out by saying “liberalization” of the media is a good thing, and that, “we should have more of it and not less of it—not more regulation, but less.” And that we should have at least some media reform, “after all, the media world is changing probably more rapidly than any sector of the communications and digital economies sector. It boggles the mind how we’ve had some of these rules on the books for decades and have never really adequately reformed them and brought them up to speed with our modern media market.”
Then Ms. Swain asks about ownership rules, and how big is too big? He uses that word “liberalization” again and says the media is facing more competition, more diversity, more types of outlets for speech and human communications than ever before in history. That our mistake has been to put broadcasting (radio/tv) and communications (phone) into boxes in order to regulate them, but that now, with the advent of cable, satellite, cell phones and the internet, the situation is a mess because we assumed that nothing would ever change. “Well things did change,” he says pointedly.
“The problem was these new technologies defied traditional regulatory classification. and so new boxes had to be invented so they could be inserted, and regulated. But now we have a situation where we have all these different boxes and yet you can use these devices to do almost anything. And so it doesn’t make any sense that we continue to regulate as if it’s 1934 when in reality we live in a world of media abundance, information over-load, and more choice and competition than we’ve ever had before.”
She asks, that if his think-tank could get anything out of the 110th congress, what do they want?
“Well I think that franchise reform is very important but I think the spectrum reform policy issues are even more important. I’m not sure if they’ll be coupled together, or it will be done separately or it will be done at all, but there’s still a lot of room for reform on the wireless front--specifically--we don’t have anything approaching property rights for spectrum in this country. We had a secondary market where spectrum is traded in certain circumstances, but not in others. For example if you are a broadcast television, or wireless holder, you can’t take your spectrum and sell it on the market for anything other than television uses. You have basically a piece of paper that the federal communications gives you that says you’re going to be a television broadcaster, and nothing else . And that limits the flexibility of not only that company, but of that actual spectrum to be redeployed into a better user purpose. So I would hope that we could reform spectrum policy so that we could free up not just new spectrum that’s allocated, but existing wireless uses. To say if the user or holder of that license can find a better use for it, or someone else values it more highly, let them sell it, let them resell it for some other use in fact and see what happens with it.”
His group has drawn up the Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) to apply anti-trust principles to communications policy problems. According to him the battle we’ve been having for ten years has been about what the internet and what is broadband are.
“You can’t believe how many trees have fallen in terms of paper being filed with the FCC trying to determine that. But that’s the kind of battle when you have the type of regulatory structure we have today. You would be better off to clear all that out of the way, and to just have a simple anti-trust law principle govern all these industries, all of these sectors, all these technologies.”
He went on to say we shouldn’t be declaring technology an inalienable right, because at some point someone has to pay for that right, and it can be an expensive right and we’ve been subsidizing telecommunications services, and it costs us a lot of money to do that, and the way things are set up now it’s discouraging “greater diffusion of the technologies that we ought to get out to the masses.” Near the end he asks rhetorically if those technologies be regulated. “Should [technologies] be regulated like broadcasting or should broadcasting be regulated more like them?”
It was hard to slog through so much nonsense, but let me try and clarify. Mr. Theirer confuses technology with information. And for some strange reason, apparently nobody told him “the spectrum” is publicly-owned, and we don’t have anything approaching property rights of "the spectrum" because each industry is granted a license to operate from a segment of it.
Information and technology are apples and oranges. Mr. Theirer confuses mere access to information, with information itself. His think tank advocates “liberalizing” ownership rules when we know that deregulation has resulted in one type of information--PTB information. The type of information that got us into Iraq, and appears poised to get us into Iran.
If you want to know anything other that PTB information, you better be prepared to visit your libraries and internet. Which brings us back full circle to the original Communications Act: any company granted a license must make information “convenient,” it must inform the public what is in the public’s interest to know. Clearly that’s not happening. It’s like the media corporations are McDonald’s: sure you have choices, but you're not eating unless it comes off their grill. We are what we eat.
So what do we do about it? We do know we now have two things which are non-partisan--the vote issue, and the information issue--which will either turn a corner in the coming Congress or they will not.
Remember the most intense scene in the movie The Silence of the Lambs ? It’s the scene where Clarice is in the guy's house, and the gig is up. It may be this moment in the history of civilization. Somewhere within the 110th Congress, the PTB are going to show their hand by not securing the vote, and by not starting the process of divesting media corporations.
I think we can get out of the mess, but I'm not sure there's all the time in the world to do it. I'll clarify, but next diary is about think tanks, institutions, and foundations.
Help: for some reason I've never been able to determine my user number. Could someone tell me mine? And also, can you tell me the user number of john10?