Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

The independence of black American leadership is under assault by a tsunami of cash. Unprecedented levels of corporate underwriting are subverting black civic organizations. Tens of millions in faith-based federal grants have been deployed to suborn black clergy. Rivers of charitable and campaign contributions have been invested in subduing or silencing the voices of African America elected officials. Predictably, the onslaught is taking its toll.

Last week the House of Representatives passed the COPE Act, which will turn the free and open Information Superhighway into a corporate toll road, and lift regulations that force cable and telephone companies to serve poor and minority areas. Only 46% of Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against it. But in a stunning repudiation of its own historic claims to be the “conscience of the congress” and the authentic voice of African America in national affairs, a mere 13 out of 40 voting CBC members in the House summoned the courage to buck the tide of corporate cash and stand up for their constituents. (The two delegates from Washington, DC and the U.S. Virgin Islands cannot vote on the House floor.) Two-thirds of the Caucus capitulated to corporate power, a more shameful showing than Democratic members as a whole. As “conscience of the congress,” the Congressional Black Caucus is pretty much over.

To comprehend the depths of this betrayal we must understand that there are absolutely no economic development cases which can be made with a straight face for turning the free Internet into a corporate toll road, or for allowing cable and phone companies to deny premium broadband service to all but the wealthiest customers.

The dirty little secret the telecommunications companies will never tell us is that despite the incessant prattle about being the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, the US ranks 16th, according to the International Telecommunications Union, in the percentage of its citizens provided with some form of broadband Internet access. When we can get that access at all, broadband Internet in the US is the slowest and most expensive in the developed world, well behind Japan, South Korea, and all of Western Europe. Bruce Kushnick of www.teletruth.org offers this useful comparison between proposed broadband services in the US and those in South Korea and Japan.

The top broadband speed available to home and business consumers in the US is only 1.5 megabits per second, and most customers pay about $30 per month for that. In France customers get 25 megabits per second for less than a third the price. Singapore is about to offer its citizens 1000 megabits per second. American telcos, on the other hand, say they cannot give us more than 6 megabits per second without the end of network neutrality as a financial incentive.

The claims of cable and telecommunications monopolies that deregulating them and handing the keys of the Internet over to them will erase the digital divide inside the US, provide universal access and keep us competitive with the rest of the world, are simply lies. US consumers have already paid AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, BellSouth, Qwest and the rest of their telecom and cable cousins hundreds of billions in corporate tax breaks and excess fees – the highest phone, cable and Internet charges in the world – to provide universal high-speed access which we have never received. ...

On April 27, BC published two stories about CBC member Bobby Rush's sponsorship of this year's noxious telco legislation. We explained how the Rush-Barton Act, also called the COPE Act or HR 5252, would kill off public access TV, strip towns and cities of the right to force cable monopolies to serve blacker and poorer areas in return for being able to do business in the wealthier parts of town, and allow companies to charge web sites like this one for allowing content or email to reach users. We called attention to the acceptance of a million dollar donation by a tentacle of AT&T to a not for profit organization associated with the congressman. All this earned us a call that morning from a Chicago-based defender of the congressman.

BC was making a big mistake, the caller told us, by leading with the issue of network neutrality. Our deeply misguided caller accused us of playing into the hands of white media activists. Network neutrality, she said again and again in the course of an hour long conversation, was just not "our issue.”

But when a black member of congress accepts a million dollar telco donation for a supposed community-based project in his district, and turns up as co-sponsor of telco legislation to redline and disempower black communities nationwide, along with suppressing everybody’s freedom of access to the Internet, it is indeed a black issue. When AT&T rents black ministers and black Republican sock puppets like the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and even recruits the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation to its team, network neutrality has very definitely become a black issue.

The incongruity of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation finding itself in bed with AT&T, the American Conservative Union and the National Association of Manufacturers is downright striking when you look at who serves on the NCBCP Board of Directors. To start with, there’s Dr. Howard Dean, whose campaign for president would have been impossible without a free and open Internet. There are luminaries like Dr. Joseph Lowery and Dr. Ron Walters of the African American Leadership Institute. We counted at least a dozen representatives of labor unions, including an assistant to AFL-CIO president John Sweeny, the UAW and UFCW, AFCSME, SEIU, and both national teachers unions and the A. Philip Randolph Institute.

The congressman, his donors, and their front organization, Hands Off the Internet claim that handing over the Internet to private corporations and eliminating network neutrality will lower the cost and improve the quality of Internet service for everybody. This is nothing short of an outright lie. According to Stanford University's Dr. Lawrence Lessig in a recent interview with Robert McChesney, broadband Internet access in France, Japan and South Korea and several other countries is cheaper, faster and more widely available than in the U.S. In every case, they do this by making the provision of service to everyone law and public policy, not leaving it up to “the market” or the whims of private corporations.

The whole “free competition” and “leaving it up to the market” argument flies in the face of how AT&T and other telco and cable monopolies came into existence and how they actually conduct their business. As the Univeristy of Illinois's Dr. Robert McChesney explained recently on Democracy Now:

”...the phone companies and the cable companies, which provide Internet access to 98% of Americans and almost all businesses, are viewing – you know, they are companies that were set up by the government. They're not free market companies. Their entire business model has been based on getting monopoly license franchises from the government for phone and cable service and then using it to make a lot of money. And they’re using their political leverage now to try to write a law basically which lets them control the Internet...”

”...what they want to do desperately is be in a situation where they can rank order websites. And websites that come through the fastest to us, to the users of the Internet, (will be) ...the ones that pay them money or the ones they own. And websites that don't pay them come through slower, much harder to get, or in some cases, they’ll have the power to take them off the Internet altogether.”

”...there’s no technological justification for this. There’s no economic justification. It's pure corrupt crony capitalism. They're basically using their political leverage to change this so they get a huge new revenue stream, and it gives them an inordinate amount of power over the Internet.”

In the interview, McChesney also discusses the impact of cable and Internet service to minority communities and how this will be affected by Rep. Rush's legislation.

”...one of the core fundamental aspects of telecommunications policies historically... was the requirement that the phone companies, if they were going to get these monopoly licenses to make a pile of money, they had to serve the entire community. They couldn't discriminate against neighborhoods, against cities. They had to give universal access...they hate that. They basically want to serve just wealthy and middle class communities and skip poor and rural communities. And they’re trying to write it into the law that they can basically... redline, that they can be discriminatory about which communities they offer their best services to and only offer in the most lucrative communities.

Congressman Rush concludes his defense by observing that “The real conflict here is America's unwillingness to invest much needed capital in (oppressed) communities like Englewood.” His legislation though, allows telcos to deny our communities investment in their own communications infrastructure. Cheap, ubiquitous and comprehensive broadband access is as necessary to the economic well-being of our community as good streets.

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