Login HereThe most contentious question is whether telecommunications companies that helped the government tap American communications after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks should be granted immunity from lawsuits stemming from their actions. The surveillance was done without permission from the secret court created 30 years ago to protect Americans from unwarranted government intrusions on their privacy.
Senate leaders hoped to decide this week whether to shield the telecommunications companies from the roughly 40 pending civil lawsuits alleging violations of communications and wiretapping laws. The White House says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. If they succeed, the companies could be bankrupted.
Right. AT&T has a market capitalization of roughly $241.8 billion today. Verizon has a market cap of $126.25 billion. Which makes it a bit hard to cry for them in the situation, because nobody this side of Barbara Mikulski thinks they didn't have teams of corporate lawyers advising them about this. But if the AP believes that the potential damages could wipe out these vast corporate empires, it would be interesting to know their math.
The tobacco industry managed to factor in a $145 billion judgment without filing for bankruptcy. The financial world did not slip off its axis.
So calm down, AP. Have a cocktail. Breathe into a paper bag.
Wouldn't want to fearmonger, you know.
Share This 
Spotlight
Hi Jane!
Jane!
One thing I wonder about the AP article: Is the reporter asserting that “If they succeed, the companies could be bankrupted”, or is that meant to be part of what “The White House says”?
Add the market cap of the rest of the telcos and it’s close to a trillion.
Is the AP saying that there are a Trillion worth of damages?
Ah Jane. There you go again, bringing reality into the equation. Haven’t you learned from all your years in movies that folks in corporations have only the most passing acquaintance with reality, even in the best of times?
AP: If Telecom Immunity Doesn’t Pass, AT&T Could Be “Bankrupted”
By: Jane Hamsher
well morally bankrupted for sure
At&T could be bankrupted!?
And the problem is…?
Jane:
This is coming from the White House, not from AP.
And what about the wholesale diversion of data to the NSA, without a warrant, that was done before September 11, 2001? Hmmmmm?
But it’s only fearmongering if it’s about the Constitution or the effects on people who aren’t rich!
The White House says if the cases go forward they could reveal information that would compromise national security. If they succeed, the companies could be bankrupted.
Manipulation tactics used:
* Playing the Victim
* Catastrophizing (i.e. mushroom cloud, anyone?)
No mention of the actual victims of their illegal behavior.
Reframing “the abuse of American citizens’ Constitutional rights” as “compromising national security.”
- Tom
- Tom
Tell you what: We’ll agree to limit actual dollar liability to a reasonable agreed-to limit, contingent on full and open, cooperation on the part of the telcos with Congressional committees investigating the malfeasance. Everybody happy now? No? Somehow I thought not.
If every one of us 300,000 Americans got $1,000 from AT&T, then yeah, they’d be up a creek. So did we all get spied on with the help of AT&T? That’s the only way I can see that this is anything more than rank hyperbole. And yes, I do want my $1,000 - and f*** AT&T.
Bilbo
Yep
I was wondering when it would get around to protecting ATT from bankruptcy. It isn’t important to prevent the crime, just bankruptcy for ATT and the other telecom giants that used to be owned by, we, the people.
I think the people would settle for combination of the following, please suggest other aspects
1. that ATT and all other companies stop acting illegally, and if they did do something wrong, a class action suit for those involved is taken care of.
2. the people that ordered them to break the law they knew they could not break, turn them in? If you were asked by a criminal organization that you thought had the authority, say so and let it be known you were ordered to do so and what you did under these orders.
that might sort it out.
This is a far cry from Dick Cheney’s “You must let Market Forces work without Government intervention” mantra. If AT&T and Verizon and others go under due to their mis-deeds, then there will be other more scrupulous companies (Qwest) to pick up the market share. Sheesh, I thought these guys were Republicans. Why are they looking for the Government to bail out Free enterprise? More intellectual dis-honesty from the Right Wing-o-sphere.
Hey, AT&T had to go through a divestiture once before, over twenty years ago. Maybe they should do so again, just for safety’s sake.
Very roughly ($1Trn/$500M) = $2000 for every American.
Given that all the Telco assets would still be there and could be rearranged in to some more competitive structure afterwards, I think that’s not a bad deal.
Actually, that’s rather brilliant. Calling their bluff, eh?
Kinda like DiFi ’s cool looking ammendment that Marcy’s been touting.
This is the same AT&T that charges elderly widow $14,000 in “rent” for rotary phone
let me get my handkerchief
That link just brings us to this thread.
Yeah, I saw that sentence yesterday and am in the middle of scribbling out a blog post where I argue for jail for executives as opposed to money from their corporations. Actually, the bulk of the piece is about light sentences as opposed to lengthy sentences. Six months in a country club prison as opposed to years and years in a dungeon. The idea is to cause maximum inconvenience and annoyance as opposed to creating a situation where employees simply learn to live without their executives and/or the executives get replaced right away. Short times in jail with some limited communication means they won’t be totally out of the picture, thereby causing maximum inconvenience & disruption to the corporation. Hee, hee, hee! Chuckle, snark!
On the otherhand Jane, while they are likely blowing smoke and seeking sympathy for their poor widdle put-upon selves, maybe, just maybe, they are truly afraid of going bankrupt because their law breaking was so wide, so extensive (vacuuming up ALL calls and ALL emails and ALL text messages and ALL web activities on ALL people and passing them to the NSA) that they really would end up bankrupt if discovery found them so guilty. You, me, virtually all the American citizens who post to this blog, DKos, would be entitled to an unknown settlement amount at, what, $1000 per violation per day? I’ll take that and see them ALL bankrupted if that is what it takes to stop this shit cold and forever.
Elliott,
Here’s the story
Given the current Senate Leadership, passage seems likely. When can the leadership be changed?
I hate to get all free-markety and stuff, but if breaking the law results in AT&T going bankrupt, then it should go bankrupt.
Then, the next multi-billion dollar corporation that has to choose between obeying the law or not obeying the law might make a more responsible decision.
Isn’t that how the free-marketeers keep telling us the Invisible Hand works to protect consumers in the first place?
oo sorry, my bad linky
AT&T charges elderly widow
thanks dakine01!
Yeah. I like Bilbo’s suggestion, too. Call their bluff.
Does the government have to be the one to bring a RICO suit? If so, then it certainly won’t happen until 1/20/09 at the soonest. It seems that that statute would fit this case well. Of course the executive branch (and the Cheney twig) should be named also as massively corrupt organizations.
What I really want at the end of the day is for the Telcos to get punished in no uncertain terms so that they will NEVER pull this crap again, get the NSA secret rooms shut down or, at the very least, opened up to direct judicial oversight, AND for all the data illegally collected to be purged and no copies or backup databases kept that contains that illegally obtained data. It isn’t enough to bring the illegal collection to a halt, the illegally collected data must be rendered unavailable and unusable to the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.
Well boo-frackin’-hoo for ATT. Methinks the White House doth protest too much. Was this what Chee-knee was mind-melding into L’ilDub’s brain when the fire broke out? Or maybe the fire was the ATT version of the horse’s head in the bed for Mr. Chee-knee?
I’m with IrishJim. Qwest does just fine around here–AT&T, no service a’tall. And Qwest seems to have its moral compass intact. ATT, WH, not so much.
~ Prairie
Sounds like a de facto admission of guilt from the WH, doesn’t it?
SO are they saying the liabilities of what they have done is that catastrophic?
Boy, they must have really done some bad shit.
-G
Bankrupted? Wow! That must mean AT&T is extremely guilty in all of this.
…and they know how guilty they are too!
Pat Buchannon expressed a great deal of concern for American corporations in China if their goods would have tariffs imposed on them. Still, he seemed to believe that taxing (he says tariff) them is a good idea. Odd, I thought, the concern Fat Pat and others express for corporations. It is a planted right wing dialogue to get Joe Sixpack to develop sympathy toward the Corporatocracy which rapes and pillages the land under his feet, poisons his air and water and exports his job to cheap labor states. Screw the corporations. If they be risk-takers, let them sink or swim like the rest of us.
Yes, doing otherwise creates what is called a moral hazard. But these folks are only worried about moral hazards for poor people. Moral hazards for corporations are A-OK.
So have any reporters asked AT&T executives whether they’re in danger of going bankrupt from this? Somehow I don’t think they’d say that where their shareholders might hear about it.
The congressional leadership can be changed every 2 years (after each election). First thing in 2009 after the 2008 elections should be a clean slate in both the Senate and the House. Out with Reid and Pelosi and in with Dodd (if he fails in his Prez bid) in the Senate, in with (anyone but Pelosi or Hoyer or other slime) in the House. Clean house in 2009!
I could never be assured or reassured that the data was destroyed tho
Absolutely. The problem is that what the current generation of Repubs call a “free market” is anything but.
Of course that leads in to the question of just how free or regulated any particular market should be (I think it depends on the relative power of the participants myself), but that’s another (long, epic) discussion.
Living in the DC suburbs, I’m well accustomed to ads from industry trade groups claiming their businesses will be completely destroyed if some piece of legislation does or doesn’t pass. This hyperbole is strongly reminiscent of that stuff. Frequently, the feared event does happen, and strangely, their businesses never end up being destroyed. Those ads aren’t cheap; I wonder who they think they’re convincing?
So what if they go bankrupt? The land lines, cell towers and routers are still in place. Just somebody else will own them. Big deal.
Excellent point. If there is even a remote chance of this type of exposure, AT&T would be obligated to disclose this in their SEC filings. Did the reporter research this angle at all? Has AT&T been asked about this alledged “exposure”. Who was the AP journalist?
Shorter AP:
ATT is TBTBS
(Too Big To Be Sued)
Next up: GE, Micro$oft, New$Corp,…
I feel exactly the same way about the airlines. Let them work their own problems out or just go away.
The crying of “wolf!” by bidness as you describe happens ANY time some legislation comes along that threatens to prevent corporations from robbing people blind. They whine about how the minimum wage will bankrupt everyone (NEVER does) or increase unemployment (NEVER does) or how increasing gas mileage standards is just too hard and would cost hundreds or thousands of jobs (it is NEVER as hard as they claim and they do NOT lose jobs).
It’s just the same old same old…though I would like to think that their violation is so extensive that we will ALL be looking at at least $1000 a piece from each telco involved due to their criminal activity. That is $1000 per violation, NOT per person regardless of number of violations.
Bankrupt the hell out of the bastards.
OT, but I heard Rep. George Miller (I think) use a great turn of phrase when talking about the energy bill. Concerning the tax breaks for the oil companies that they had to leave untouched to get the rest of the bill passed, he referred to them as “tax subsidies.”
I really like that. It’s accurate, and it puts it in terms that are much easier to grasp in an “elevator conversation.” “Loophole” is okay, but it implies something accidental, and these are anything but. Sample conversation:
Mindless conservative: “Those Dems want to tax anyone with money, so they’re trying to put these new taxes on oil companies!”
DFH: “Not at all, we just want to eliminate their tax subsidies, since they’re obviously doing well enough now that they don’t need them.”
“The NEW AT&T”
Broke.
Hehehe.
WAITAMINUTE! If AT&T did broke so many laws that it anticipates going bankrupt for doing so, then it OUGHT TO GO BANKRUPT! AT&T clearly has no idea of the concept of justice…
How about naming all of the Senators who voted against this.
Daniel Akaka, Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Jeff Bingaman, Robert Byrd, Thomas Carper, Bob Casey, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Daniel Inouye, Tim Johnson, Edward Kennedy, Amy Klobuchar, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Patrick Leahy, Carl Levin, Blanche Lincoln, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Mikulski, Patty Murray, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jack Reed, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Kenneth Salazar, Chuck Schumer, Debbie Stabenow, Jon Tester, Jim Webb, Sheldon Whitehouse
And how about naming the ones that didn’t show up for the vote
Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Frank Lautenberg, Barack Obama
Lets stop bashing Mikulski and look at the whole picture
I get my phone service from the same people that I get my cable TV and Internet service from, a company called Cox Cable. I suspect many cable companies are now providing phone service and Internet. Aren’t they all part of the telecom companies responsible for providing access to our info, or are they providing service only after they go thru lines that were tapped by the former Bell network? I have no idea how this works.
Great Post on the financial information of these companies Jane. The GOP “bankruptcy/we will have to outsource your job talking point is getting old. Deflating the lies by pointing out how much money they made is perfect.
Also I sure these companies have insurance in case they are sued, so the most we are talking about here is an increase in insurance premiums. The message stop doing illegal stuff and your premiums will go down.
Please do not forget this tactic I’m sure a lot of GOPer’s and Larry Kudlow will be using it in the future.
Great Job!
Bankrupting CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, Washington Post would be a good thing.
simple guilt-trip ploy
not even very sophisticated
these folks are losing their touch
too many scandals - all wrapped together - as the noose tightens… slowly
If it’s coming from a story in their paper, why don’t they get to take blame; they’d surely take credit if there was some due. Or are you saying that no newspaper should
shoulder the blametake responsibility for the way their reporters are allowed to write their stories?The money is an excuse Quest didn’t want to do this and then the CEO had charges brought up on him. I wonder if Bush threatened the other companies?
If they admit to threats then no lawsuit for their companies all they would have to do is testify against Bush.
Which I admit might be dangerous.
You have to realize that Jane (and others) would not be singling Senator Mikulski out on this situation if she had not already singled herself out with her speech.
Chris Dodd addressed this on the floor of the Senate. He was right snarky about it, I thought. He sneered at the idea that any court in this land, even if they found against the Telecos, would bankrupt them.
They all connect back to a “backbone” network. The cable companies buy their “dial-tone” from the Local Exchange Carrier LEC in most instances. The LEC’s are then connected to the backbone or IXC interexchange carriers - AT&T, SPRINT, VERIZON, in some cases now, the LEC and the IXC are the same company (AT&T, VERIZON, QWEST)All backbone networks connect together in peering arrangements. Does this make any sense at all?
I am reminded of one of my favorite Bloom County strips from the 80’s.
Milo and Opus and their friend the wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet are all riding the wheelchair pretending to be in Star Trek with “anti-trust torpedoes” and such. In the last panel they come over a hill and see a billboard for the (then) “New AT&T” with it’s curious spherical logo. They beat a quick retreat shouting “The Death Star!”
Of course we know what happened to the Death Star (twice), don’t we?
“How about naming all of the Senators who voted against this.”
What is “this,” please.
Please be more specific.
Bob in HI
This is the nut of the problem. Particularly with VoIP (Voice over IP). There is a huge switch that Verizon owns on the West Coast - MAE West, and I will guess about 45% of ALL internet traffic from the Mississippi to the West runs through MAE, and that includes VoIP, whether you’re calling across the street or out-of-state.
All the companies have trunk leasing agreements with each other. So your call can route from Cox, to VZ, then backhaul from AT&T.
This is why you don’t have to be an AT&T customer to have been punked by the now notorious “splitter room” that they built at 611 Folsom street in San Francisco.
OH, and while we’re at it, shouldn’t we be getting back *all* that money we paid to the telecoms in taxes back in the early 90s for those fibre-optic cables they were supposed to have builit but never did?
Which reminds me…I got an e-mail from working assets about moving my cell service to their service. Anyone know anything about them? Sounds like they’re really trying to capitalize on this kerfluffle with the big telecos…but don’t they purchase their service from the same telecoms?
I called my senator, told him if I broke the law I’d be sued and bankrupted, and the government wouldn’t bail me out.
And that’s what I want to happen to AT&T for spying on me without my knowledge or consent, and it was illegal as hell.
Dubya bailed out the airlines after nine elva. Republicans love to bail out big bizness and shit on the little guy’s head. We can’t let the airlines go out of bizness, right?
Yeah. We’re fucked if these companies decide they want to spy on us, or the govt forces these companies to let it spy on us.
Dodd really should be the Majority Leader.
Ahh, Dan, you are a national treasure…
“Under direction from the White House General Counsel while the Department of Justice and the CIA Inspector General conduct a preliminary inquiry, we have not publicly commented on facts relating to this issue, except to note President Bush’s immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter. Furthermore, we have not described — neither to highlight, nor to minimize — the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter.”
“The New York Times’ inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story.”
snip
“Yes, nobody in the White House has said anything of substance on the record — but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a controlled and intentional leak intended to steer reporters away. In fact, on December 7, the day after the tape story broke in the New York Times, multiple administration officials spoke to multiple reporters spreading what now appears to be a misleading narrative involving Miers.”
“As Jonathan Karl reported then for ABC News: “Three officials told ABC News Miers urged the CIA not to destroy the tapes.” And CNN reported that on that same day, “two senior administration officials told CNN that then-deputy White House counsel Harriet Miers was aware of the tapes and told the CIA not to destroy them.”
snip
“Is Perino prepared to deny that any of those sources were inside the White House? I doubt it. And for her to suggest that it is taking the high road to refuse to comment on the record about a matter of great public significance is the pinnacle of chutzpah.”
(my bold)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....inionsbox1
The Bushco claim that letting the lawsuits go forward will cause grave damage to national security is political bullshit. Successful suit for damages would require proof that private data was illegally transferred, but would not require specific info about data content or how it is processed by the spooks. Any terrorist with a room temperature IQ who is paying attention already knows that the guvment is collecting all the data. So, where is the damage to national security? Bushco: 1. Does not want to admit complicity in illegal activity, and 2. Gets its knickers in a wad anytime anyone tries to thwart its tricks and games.
Jane, if the wingnuts can’t work themselves (and their obliging media) up into a lather about nothing, what else would they have to do all day?
Breathe into a paperbag? They’d probably think that you meant plastic and accuse you of trying to kill them.
Ahhh, what would this country be without wingnuts?
Yesterday we saw reports that the US was shocked, shocked over the bombing raids in Iraq conducted by Turkey.
Today Turkey reports that they used intelligence given to them by the US to conduct the raids that the US was soooooooooo shocked to hear about.
That explains why Barzani wouldn’t meet with Kinda-Sleazy Rice.
-G
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you cannot have “free enterprise” if you’re holding a gun to the other guy’s head. The government held all the cards in this transaction and I’m pretty sure they were willing to play every single one. I’m talking, “We can pull your license. We’ll bring every department of government to bear down on you. Your CEO could go to jail. How does ‘insider trading’ grab you.” They twisted arms, held a gun to their heads, whatever was necessary to get their way, because that’s the way this bunch plays, and don’t think for a minute they’d hesitate to break any laws that got in their way. Presented with this scenario, and also a much rosier future where they get government contracts and favorable legislation and rulings from the FCC for their cooperation, I think we have some real mitigating circumstances here. I can’t see letting them altogether off the hook, but I blame the government way more. If you were coerced into breaking the law, say someone said they would harm your family if you didn’t, and you did as you were told, would you feel as guilty as if you freely entered into a conspiracy to do the same exact act. Just food for thought.
What will cause “grave damage” to national security is the fact that the US has fallen from #1 in broadband deployment (and #1 in tech leadership) to #16 in broadband (and #5 in tech leadership). This is because the telecoms reneged on their promises to build fibre-optic cable infrastructure, after receiving over $200 billion in tax subsidies.
Kinda. Something like trains that all run on the same sets of tracks, but they all have their own customers and their own train cars and engines, but they all pay some sort of fees to run on the tracks? I get that ultimately the cable company I pay for service pays AT&T or one of the other big formerly Ma Bell companies for the use of their lines, which have now been replaced with fiber optic cable? Close enough for a “lay” person?
Truthout has an article up…CIA tapes…Chertoff…
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121907J.shtml
Well that filled in the rest of what was still nebulous, so I can now say, got it. Thanks!
OT
woo hoo! The missing father & his teenageers in the northern CA mountains have been found/rescued by intrepid volunteers & aside from frost-bite apparently OK.
this is the same type of defense someone comitting murder could use to prevent a trial;
“but if you have me go to trial that might bankrupt me”
what the FRIG is WRONG with these people?
which have now been replaced with fiber optic cable
Nope, it’s still the old copper wires in most cases. See my comment above, which is why our DSL is 100 times slower than Japan, Korea and even Slovenia!
:)
Hey, it’s complex.
Christy has a new thread upstairs.
oh oh oh
isn’t this an admittance of guilt?
It doesn’t matter if they have no part of AT&T or Verizon, etc. Cable internet providers still have to use the internet. The big, major root routers that all your traffic must pass through to, at the very least, go to any website outside the USA, are owned and operated by AT&T and the other big, guilty telcos. That is why the NSA went to them. You cannot get away from using their routers if you use the internet for ANYTHING so you are collected.
The Math: Greenwald’s quote reguarding penalties for violation(s) of the 1978 FISA,
Link: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.....ement.html
The Math: 300,000,000 Americans X $10,000 per each (modestly assuming that each wiretap is only considered once, not recounted each day, week, month, 45 day reauthorization period or whatever as a separate crime) = $3 Trillion. I’d say that amount might bankrupt AT&T.
AT&T should allow investigations to prove that AT&T did less tapping than all 300K Americans (and we find out exactly what they DID do) and then let the horse trading begin. We will reduce/commute their sentence by $1000 per wiretap if they promise to destroy all the data they have illegally collected. We will reduce/commute the telcoms’ sentences by $1000 if the Bushistas stop torturing, $1000 per each if the Bushistas stop extreme rendering, $1000 per each if the Bushistas stop violating rights to habeas corpus, $1000 if the Bushistas repeal the MCA - you get the idea. Commuting their sentences to a certain degree in return for good behavoir might be as good as it gets. Commuting as explained by the Bush folk is not pardoning, amnesty, nor condoning illegality. While I’d like to rub the phone companies nose in their dirt, and maybe bankrupt a few of them to teach them a lesson, it ain’t going to happen.
I’m no legal expert but if it WERE true that there was a known exposure to potential exposure wouldn’t that be something that they would be required by disclosure laws to inform their shareholders about?
I think it’s REDICULOUS to grant the president some kind of inherant right to look up my wifes dress and steal my property
don’t forget, the president “delegates” his authority to whoever did anything, he makes believe he did it in some kind of “secret presidential order”
frig the assumption this guy is not going to steal from us and frig the assumption that he’s not going to use information he gathers to get lawmakers to do his bidding
frig that paragraph
My local (rural) telephone company laid along my road last year. I asked one of the owners (who also supervised and does some repair) if this meant superfast internet or if they were considering providing media beyond telephone or internet. The answer: the DSL rates went SLIGHTLY down but the tiers were the same old slow shit. They were not planning on expanding into media delivery (we have satellite because that is all there is out there) unless they could find someone who would join with them to provide the media.
I was disappointed to say the least. They are no where near to even tickling the capacity of the fiber they just installed and they can’t see their way to ramp up their DSL speeds (while leaving the price the same-ish)? What the hell? They just installed a 100-lane highway and they are only using the shoulder. There is something at the very core wrong with our system. There is no reason we shouldn’t be able to match Japanese speeds almost nationwide. ESPECIALLY when fiber is in your own front yard!
The telecoes didn’t have to do this. They did, anyway, dirty ass motherfuckers. Fuck ‘em, piss on ‘em.
AT&T might go bankrupt, maybe Verzion too?!?!?….Boo Hoo. You want to play? Then you gotta pay! That’s what you get when you f**k the American people.
I’ll be the first to say that the President (and Co) have no rights to warrantless wiretap, warrantless datamining, warrantless data interpretation (does 6 degrees of separation from the original suspect = innocence sort of thing), warrantless data retention (how secure is that? ) or warrantless data destruction (who chooses what goes, and when?). All of that - no the President does not now, and has not had those rights since 1978, if he ever did.
However, he has done that, in an accessory to the crime fashion. He got the telecoms, who knew better, to do his dirty work. They should pay both in jail time and money, for their crimes. However, if I did the math correctly, $3 trillion plus 1.5 billion man years in prison is not going to happen. I’m saying that Congress should offer partial commutation of the penalties in return for rather draconian concessions from the Bush administration. It is not amnesty, nor a pardon, nor is it perfect: the telcoms will have to admit that they are guilty of breaking the law, submit to more Congressional and legal oversight, pay up some money, and the Bush folk will have give up some stuff that they’d really rather not talk about during an election cycle.
There is no reason we shouldn’t be able to match Japanese speeds almost nationwide.
Except the greed of the telecoms. Oh, just found an article published today showing how far behind the US has fallen and what it means for our economic future.
Since broadband is a fairly new capability, there are few studies estimating its economic impact that are based on actual experience. But there are some clear indicators. One study looked at growth across 21 OECD countries from 1970 to 1990 and found that about one-third of per capita GDP growth could be attributed to telecommunications infrastructure investments — and notes these investments yield excessive returns compared to other forms of infrastructure. Another estimated that ubiquitous deployment of broadband may result in $500 billion worth of economic growth.
I watched the FISA debate most of yesterday. I could not decide which was more outrageous . . . Sen. Hatch’s defense of the telecom’s financial frailty, Sen. Session’s critique of ‘civil libertarians,’ or Sen. Nelson’s ‘troubled’ conscience. I finally felt I could do nothing less than contact my own senator (Nelson of Florida) . . . to tell him how ‘troubled’ I was about his position. Other Floridians may want to do likewise. I stated:
Senator Jeff Sessions came to the Senate floor during debate of FISA legislation and had the unbelievable audacity to utter: “The civil libertarians among us would rather defend the constitution than protect our nation’s security.”
I watched as you claimed to be “troubled” by the retroactive immunity language in the FISA bill. I was troubled that you did not address Senator Session’s MORE TROUBLING statement. Derogatorily referencing ‘civil libertarians,’ Sen. Sessions obviously (or perhaps intentionally) failed to acknowledge this very important truth: If our legislators do not DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION, as they swear under oath to do—what ‘national security’ will there be to protect! We will no longer be the nation our forefathers struggled to birth . . . but a banana republic, rife with corruption, run by corporations, overseen by puppet politicians, and always ready and eager to trample “we the people.”
I hope you will speak more vociferously for WE THE PEOPLE when the FISA legislation once again comes to the floor of the Senate. The telecommunication companies who were complicit in abridging our CONSTITUTIONAL rights should not be given preference above and beyond that extended to ordinary citizens. If they broke the law, they should be punished. Quite frankly, if they go bankrupt (as some would mislead us to believe), then so be it. The financial condition, the “importance” of their position in our society, their ‘ignorance’ of the law . . . none of these are valid reasons to exempt them by means of retroactive immunity, for criminal behavior. Since they maintain they are endowed with all the rights of personhood, let them be treated in the same manner (criminally and civilly) as would an individual ‘person.’
Yep. I think you have got it.
I never ceases to amaze me that prospects, however unlikely, of corporate bankruptcies create so much heartbreak while millions of children left without health coverage barely raises an eyebrow.
Somewhat OT but tangentially relevant is an an article in The Guardian, (UK) by that indefatigable environmentalist, G Monbiot. The gist of his piece is that the real need is to decouple corporate finance from politics in the USA. He refers particularly to US intransigence re global warming but that analysis applies to a slew of other issues.
He highlights Gore’s shenanigans to sink the 1997 Kyoto summit although he lays the blame at the door of the energy corporations and credits Gore with doing what was politically possible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....27,00.html
It is the list of all of the Senators that voted against Cloture.
Available at this site that provides the votes for everything in Congress
http://projects.washingtonpost.....votes/435/
I continue to support Barbara (Babbs) Mikulski in her right to vote as she sees fit, along with 76 other Senators, 35 of them Democrats. She felt that when the President asked for the records and assured the telecom industry that they were acting within the law, they provided what they felt was demanded.
Discussing the problem is one thing but I object to a Senator being called DUMB to provide comic relief. I frequently call her office and find both them and her very responsive to most liberal viewpoints. And again she was one of the 23 brave Senators who voted against the 2002 Iraq war. She deserves my respect and yours
http://projects.washingtonpost.....votes/435/
This site provides the voting records of congress. 76 Senators voted the same as Barbara Mikulski. I simply named the ones that voted the same way, and the ones that did not show up. Not trying to make waves just want a valid look at the realties of the vote. I may or may not agree with her choice in this vote, but she is the Senator and not terribly out of line with 35 other Democrats including Jim Webb.
I just want to re-emphasize that in these wiretapping discussions, that it’s not just the telephone companies as MadDog pointed out a couple days ago. Your internet service providers are using all kinds of technology to turn over info to law enforcement and I mean outside the scope of a criminal investigation of any type. They are saving your searches and turning them directly over to DOJ as are many search engines, and your ISPs may well be participating in a Magic Lantern type program. I think LHP did a nice post a few weeks ago sorting out some of these mechanisms, and EW may have done a recent one also. MSN was doing this for a long time until exposed and lied to their employees about it for a good amount of time and then apologized. DOJ has continued to press for this summoning the major Telcos and Comcos and Search Engine executives to DC to tell them what the Bush Mukasey OLC monarchy