Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston explores in his new book how in recent years, government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected.
Category: Politics
The $100M Giveaway
Put down your highlighter and don’t bother checking your lottery tickets, because the State of Texas has announced a $100 million winner. Only it’s actually 30,000 drivers living in ozone goal non-attainment areas, and it will be doled out $3,000 at a time. And if you or your family are constrained by a certain income level, if you drive a vehicle 10 years old or older that’s been registered in the county for over a year and passed an emissions test up to 15 months ago, yet failed one recently, then the state is willing to pay you $3,000 to scrap your vehicle and get something newer. All in the name of clean air.
Considering that Texas is notoriously clutch-fisted with money for public projects, particularly when the bank account starts with $100 million, this is big news. Especially if your vehicle’s more than 10 years old and has extremely high mileage – or the kind that brings virtually nothing when you go to trade it in – this is a money-for-nothing proposition that can benefit you tremendously. So, before we go on with today’s column, check out the rules for this program at www.driveacleanmachine.com, and then call 1-800-898-9103 to apply for your voucher.
Funny Endorsement
Adam Curry (who lives in England) endorses Ron Paul. Perhaps it is all about the weak dollar vs. pound?
Rolling Over for AT&T: “Video Competition” Bill is a Major Missed Opportunity for Wisconsin
A reader forwarded this full page, color advertisement paid for by large telco (AT&T, etc.) front group TV4us. The advertisement appeared in this morning’s Wisconsin State Journal. The State Journal supports the AT&T “video competition bill”. 
Click to view a larger version
Brian Clark has more:
Vergin said he’s pleased he’ll only have to get one state franchise, instead of having to deal with the 33 different municipalities in his service area.
“That’s a big benefit for us and what I think the bill is all about,” he said.
Vergin said his company’s prices won’t be any lower than Charter’s. But he’s convinced his firm will be able to offer better service and options to bundle cable, phone and wireless service.
He said he was opposed to proposed rules that would have required his company to serve entire communities. He also rejected suggestions telecommunications firms should be ordered to run fiber optic to homes and businesses.
“The 100 requirement would limit us,” he said. “And we are running fiber optic to new construction, but not existing buildings. I just don’t think the government should tell us what technology we should use. The market should decide that. I also think have 50 percent of any area covered is better than none.”
…..
(Charles) Higley (Citizen’s Utility Board Executive Director) said he, too, would have liked to have seen a requirement that companies build fiber optic cable.
“We’ve had promises to build it before and it didn’t come,” he said. “In the future, if not already, broadband is an essential service like telephone and electricity. We think government should require essential services.”
The Governor and Legislature appear to have obtained nothing while giving away significant regulatory changes. A disaster for Wisconsin business, schools residents and public agencies. What a deal for the large telcos: spend money on lobbying and advertising but not fiber to the home. Classic rentier approach: milk the slow copper network that we’ve paid for many times over as long as possible.
Keep in mind Verizon’s FIOS, a fiber to the home product installed in many communities [Service Map] – none in Wisconsin.
I recently had the opportunity to use basic FIOS service while on travel. The service was symmetrical – that is, upload and download speeds are the same. Local dsl services are not symmetrical – AT&T and TDS limit upload speeds to a very slow 768kpbs.
This archaic approach is awful for those of us creating, uploading and backing up media (photos, videos and music, not to mention data heavy scientific applications). FIOS provides at least 5 to 50X the speeds of the fastest dsl service generally available in the Madison area. Slow networks limit entrepreneurial opportunities, particularly emerging home based businesses.
Finally, I spoke briefly some years ago with then Gubernatorial candidate Jim Doyle at a campaign event. I mentioned Wisconsin’s very poor broadband infrastructure. He said he understood these issues but could not address them in his first term but hoped to in a second. Will Doyle leave a legacy of aging, slow copper networks? I put a call into Susan Goodwin, Chief of Staff, for an update.
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A bit of sugar for AT&T. This giant organization is fully capable of implementing a modern, high quality, fast fiber network. They simply need to make the strategic decision, as Verizon has, to upgrade their network. How much longer must we pay for the old, old copper lines? I’ve received excellent, economical service from AT&T’s cell network.
Background:
Mayor Dave’s 2007 Property Tax Letter
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:[72K PDF]
Enclosed you will find your 2007 property tax bill. While the City of Madison processes your taxes, the property tax bill is actually made up of five parts. The Madison Metropolitan School District has the largest share, followed by the City, Dane County, and Madison Area Technical College. A small amount is also levied for the state forestry tax.
The primary concern in our community today is the quality of life and safety in our neighborhoods. This summer and fall, I attended eight listening sessions across the City on these issues. People told me they wanted their City government to make sure their neighborhoods are safe and healthy. In response, the City budget makes the following investments:
- Increasing Police Resources. In addition to 30 new officers, the City budget includes two additional crime analysts to make sure we’ re not j ust stronger, but also smarter, in use of our resources.
- Targeting Bad Landlords. The addition of three new building inspectors and our new nuisance abat ement ordinance give us the tools we need to get after landlords who don’t maintain their properties or adequatel y screen their tenants.
- Strengthening Neighborhoods. We doubled the Emerging Nei ghborhoods Fund to $200,000, giving us quick-access resources to prevent small problems from becoming bigger, more expensi ve ones. We’ re launching a Neighborhood Indicators Project to give us statistical early warning signs of neighborhood decline. The budget also funds another graffiti elimination crew to keep our neighborhoods free of gang-related messages.
- Programs for Young People. We are increasing Communi ty Service programs by over 7%, funding initiatives for after school and youth programs, and doubling the number of youth conservation corps crews.
The City budget also includes park improvements, expanded library hours at some branches, road
projects, energy efficiency initiatives, a new effort to clean our beaches, and other programs to maintain and improve Madi son’ s quality of life.
These words are a useful look at the Mayor’s perspective on local taxpayers.
Everyone’s Poop
“Down the drain, off the brain” is how most people think about it, but human waste—or effluent, as the professionals call it—has a lot to tell us about how we live, what we eat, and who we are.
They say that shit runs downhill. This is commonly understood to mean that the world is an unfair place, except among those few people who actually work with the substance, for whom it is considered something of an article of faith. This is because municipal sewerage systems are powered almost entirely by gravity, which means that when working properly, they move millions of gallons of sewage a day across considerable distances with only a minimum expenditure of energy, a feat of efficiency virtually unparalleled in the annals of engineering. When sewage stops running downhill, as it inevitably does from time to time, very bad things indeed can happen, as they did on Pecan Springs Road, in the Austin neighborhood known as Windsor Park, one morning last September.
I was spending the day with an Austin Water Utility emergency-response crew when dispatch got a call from a woman reporting that two rooms of her house were flooded with sewage. Our crew consisted of a TV truck, piloted by a twenty-year line-maintenance veteran named David Eller, and a flusher truck, driven by another longtime utility employee, named Dale Crocker. At the house, Eller, who wears wraparound sunglasses and looks a little like the country singer Dwight Yoakam, unspooled a thick red cable from the back of his truck. On the end of the cable was a camera about the size of a roll of quarters, which Crocker shoved down into a PVC clean-out pipe near the curb in the front yard. The woman leaned on a walker in her driveway, looking worried.
Excellent Article.
Ministers of Silly Walks
Put yourself at Bernanke’s shoes; better yet, get Paulson’s shoes too and combine them: wear Ben’s shoe on the left and Hank’s on the right. The goal is to try and walk a straight and narrow a line for the economy, without embarrassing yourself. I submit that this is, in fact, impossible.
On the one foot, the Fed is getting screamed at to lower interest rates by at least another 200-250 basis points: PIMCO, Greenspan, The Conference Board, every bank and broker in town and abroad – they all demand and expect cheaper money for a variety of reasons, all immediately and extremely mercenary. The bond fund managers are salivating at the potential of capital gains from short and medium treasurys, the banks and brokers need the massive cash bailout to stanch the bloodletting from their toxic paper and real estate portfolios, the businessmen need the consumer to keep spending and Greenspan wishes above all to remain relevant – even in retirement.
Sarkozy’s Speech to Congress
French President Nicholas Sarkozy [8.5MB mp3 Audio File]:
From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person.
America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who–with their hands, their intelligence and their heart–built the greatest nation in the world: “Come, and everything will be given to you.” She said: “Come, and the only limits to what you’ll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent.” America embodies this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance.
Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That’s what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible.
What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.
The Weird World of Indecency
So as readers of this site know, I represent Robert Greenwald (pro bono) in a some fair use matters. My first work was on his film Outfoxed. Robert has been continuing the campaign against Fox. His latest is a very clever set of attacks on the “indecency” of Fox News. (The purpose is to push the FCC to unbundle cable channels). Watch the video below and you’ll see the point.
Former Technician ‘Turning In’ AT&T Over NSA Program
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts.
Perhaps our elected officials might consider this matter vis a vis AT&T’s flawed video “competition” bill. unlikely