legislation

The following is printed verbatim as it was sent to me. This story has local impact.

We need to look at each municipality in Massachusetts, for instance, as well as all states, and see if there is any indication that what might be happening in Washington DC is not happening in the state house or city or town halls.

As it stands with regard to video, municipalities can insist that all video providers are all subject to the same franchise license terms and conditions. That would be proper as well as fair and to best serve our communities, including the Public access (P.E.G.) communities. Thanks to Chuck Sherwood for forwarding this through the Alliance for Community Media.

We should not be asleep on this issue.

Teletruth News Analysis, June 1st, 2010.

To read the full article:
Letters from House Democrats and Senate Repbublicans against
the FCC --- Sponsored by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Astroturfers?
It's open season on the FCC's Broadband plans, from a new proposed bill by
Rep. Stearns (FL), or former politicians tied to astroturf groups --- Are
the phone and cable companies pulling the strings?

To protect the Public Interest, shouldn't these Senators and Congressmen
recuse themselves from voting on issues that directly help their
contributors --- AT&T, Verizon and Comcast?
Astroturfer: Some person, politician, 'expert', company, non-profit or
other entity that takes money from a corporation then uses their influence
for the good of the corporation - usually over the needs of their own
constituents, members, etc.

CNET reports that "Congress rebukes FCC on Net neutrality rules". http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20005834-38.html"The Federal Communications Commission's plan to impose Net neutrality
regulations just became much more difficult to pull off...A bipartisan group
of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no
uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on
broadband providers until the U.S. Congress changes the law...Seventy-four
House Democrats sent Genachowski. a letter saying his ideas will 'jeopardize
Jobs' and 'should not be done without additional direction from Congress'. A
separate letter from 37 Senate Republicans was more pointed. It accused
Genachowski of pushing 'heavy-handed 19th century regulations' that are
'inconceivable' as well as illegal."

Senate Republicans(PDF)

House Democrats (PDF):
The story doesn't mention that these letters are totally partisan --- as the
list of House Democrats and Senate Republicans who signed these letters
reads like a who's who of politicians who, almost all, are
campaign-financed by AT&T, Verizon and the cablecos as some of their largest
contributors.

More suspect, the location of these posted letters are on the Netcompetition
website, an astroturf euphanism for 'this web site is brought to you by
AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to keep their monopoly/duopoly power intact'.
Here's a link to NetCompetition's funding sources: AT&T, Verizon and
Comcast, not to mention a number of 'co-opted' groups like LULAC, who gets
millions in funding from AT&T and Verizon. http://netcompetition.org/index.php/go/about-us-members/ We wonder--- Are the initiators of these letters drafted by/created by some astroturf group who works directly for AT&T, Verizon or Comcast? And doesn't this smack of anti-trust violations when both the cable and phone companies --- the caretakers of the only wires --- are working together to
harm the Public Interest?
The Republican Letter: AT&T, Verizon and Comcast Funding.
Going  through the signatures we find that the majority of these signees
have AT&T, Comcast and Verizon as their major funders. Here are just a few;
John Mc Cain has AT&T as his Number 2 campaign and PAC funding source, Sam
Brownback has AT&T as Number 1, Jim DeMint has AT&T as Number 2, with
Verizon and Comcast making the Top 20.
Top 20 Contributors to Campaign Cmte and Leadership PAC

SOURCE :  Rank Contributor Total

John Mc Cain
2 AT&T Inc $57,500
12 Verizon Communications $34,250
20 Comcast Corp $28,000

Sam Brownback
1 AT&T Inc $11,000

Kay Baily Hutchinson
4 AT&T Inc $37,000

James DeMint
2 AT&T Inc $64,750
12 Comcast Corp $26,500
13 Verizon Communications $26,250

House Democrat Letter(s).

The Democratic letter, signed by 74 Democrats seems to be just as suspect as
a previous letter of House Democrats 'concerned' with the FCC's Net
neutrality' policies. The previous letter signatories showed that monies
were being paid by AT&T and Verizon to almost all of these concerned
Democrats. In short, the Congressmen gets money from a corporation, then
signs onto a letter of concern, which can only help the phone companies and
is against the interests of their own constituents.

The Hill blog mentioned that Congressmen John Dingell also sent a letter.
"Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) sided with major phone and cable companies in a
letter discouraging Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius
Genachowski from a plan to boost the agency's authority over broadband
access providers." Link

It seems that Congressmen Dingell also gets money from the cable and phone
companies, who are major contributors.
To read the rest of this analysis.

From the free press Misty Perez Truedson. Educate yourselves with this one. We ran into one of these while battling the Verizon Bill a few weeks ago ( remember the "Stringer"? ). Here's what Misty writes:

Check out our new AstroTurf tool and Tim Karr’s latest blog post.

-Misty
Unmasking Astroturf

Timothy Karr
Timothy Karr's Unmasking astroturf

If you haven't been paying attention to the work of "astroturf" groups in Washington, in the media and at your local town hall meeting, now's the time to tune in.

These front groups for hire have been everywhere this summer -- spreading misinformation about health care reform, carbon emission caps and financial regulation.

For anyone wishing to present themselves as knowledgeable about what is going with broadband or cable issues, one must read, in my opinion is Bunnie's Blog You will need to read more. The National Cable Telecommunications Association (NCTA) recently produced a white paper on broadband deployment that read like Greek to her and it will to many. Apparently confusion is often a tool used by swindlers and some lobbyist. When I am in conversation with activist, many of them local, the saying which pops up often, usually masked as a joke, regarding legislative matters is that here in the US it's " the best legislation money can buy". I certainly know there are governments that are much worse.

I don't know about you but I am sick of hearing how these racketeers rip us all off and seem to get away with it. The response becomes "what are you going to do?...we have no power.." You know that is BS, legislators and ALL government leadership are supposed to be working for US, the people. How is it that so called leaders seem to forget that ?

A Summary on the Comcast/FCC Net Neutrality Hearing
Posted on February 27, 2008 - 12:10pm.

Comcast Threatens the Open Internet – FCC Hears Complaints
Last summer, users of Comcast internet services reported cut-offs and significant decreases in their download speeds when they were sharing large content such as video, audio and data files using a peer-to-peer sharing application known as Bit Torrent (www.bittorrent.com).
Here is a link to the scoop
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