Microwave - and other forms of electromagnetic - radiation are major (but conveniently disregarded, ignored, and overlooked) factors in many modern unexplained disease states. Insomnia, anxiety, vision problems, swollen lymph, headaches, extreme thirst, night sweats, fatigue, memory and concentration problems, muscle pain, weakened immunity, allergies, heart problems, and intestinal disturbances are all symptoms found in a disease process the Russians described in the 70's as Microwave Sickness.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Profiles in corruption: How telecoms control the state Legislature
The
ambush of Scott Wiener's net neutrality bill was just the latest
example of how one industry holds almost unlimited power in Sacramento.
The last couple of weeks have not been good ones for those who see communications as a social justice issue.
The 2015 Open Internet Order, which ensured Internet
neutrality and fairness, was finally stripped out of the law books per
order of the Trump FCC, now run by a former lawyer for Verizon. San
Francisco’s plan for a publicly-owned fiber broadband network was put on
hold, and all indications are that Mayor Breed will likely bow to
AT&T and Comcast by keeping it from resurfacing. And California’s
own net neutrality bill, designed to reverse what Trump’s FCC had done,
got ambushed by an upstart young Assemblymember. AT&T’s annual “Speaker’s Cup” golf tournament is a case study in out-of-control lobbying.The
California bill’s sponsor, Sen. Scott Wiener, did it right—he listened
to the experts (folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stanford
law professor Barbara van Schewick, and others), and crafted a bill, SB
822, that many regarded as the gold standard in net neutrality, with
protections even better than the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order.
SB 822 was voted out of three Senate committees by healthy margins,
and then passed by the full Senate on May 30 on a 23-12 vote, even
picking up votes from otherwise AT&T-friendly legislators like Kevin
De Leon and Ben Hueso. But they were waiting for it in the Assembly, with knives sharpened. At about 10pm on Tuesday night, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago’s
Conveyance and Communications Committee released amendments designed to
gut the bill, allowing the telcos and cable companies to charge content
providers for the privilege of reaching consumers (that would be you,
dear reader), even though you are paying for Internet access service
that promises non-discriminatory end-to-end access to all content on the
Internet. Under the Santiago amendments, carriers like AT&T and
Comcast could collect twice every time you view a Netflix film or other
content, once in your monthly bill, and once from the content provider.
The next morning, those amendments – released not 12 hours earlier – were rammed through the Committee without debate. Santiago
would not let the bill’s sponsor (or anyone from the public) speak
before the vote, even though Wiener repeatedly asked to be heard, and
complained about the Committee’s irregular (if not illegal) procedure, as shown in video which is shocking even to longtime Sacramento observers.
Santiago acted this way even after receiving extraordinary letters from
Nancy Pelosi and Anna Eshoo, essentially warning him that the whole
world was watching and asking him not to remove key protections in the
bill. What could explain Santiago’s determination to cripple the bill, and
prevent an open discussion before the vote? Maybe the fact that he
received over $66,000 from communications carriers in the several years
before this vote, while other Committee members voting for the
amendments received from $23,000 to $102,000 each. And that the
California Democratic Party has received a great deal more from AT&T, Comcast, and other major industry players.
This story is disturbing enough in its basic outline, but much more
troubling is the long history of exactly this sort of behavior. The big
telecom and cable companies call the shots in Sacramento, with power
that can only be compared to the railroad’s stranglehold on the capital
more than a century ago. Time and again the public interest has been
sacrificed by legislators eager to do the carriers’ bidding. Some have described this as “corruption,”
and while the word is sometimes used too glibly, it might behoove us to
ask what we mean when we talk about “corruption.” At what point do
“normal” if questionable practices become corruption? One of the
dictionary meanings of corruption is “decay, rot.” It is in this sense
that we use the word “corruption”—i.e., conduct that eats away at the
fiber of a democratic society. With that definition in mind, let’s take a look at some examples of how this sort of corruption works:
In 2006, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez shepherded AB 2987, the
innocuously sounding Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act,
or DIVCA, through the State Legislature. DIVCA in fact deregulated the
cable industry in California by destroying local control over cable
franchising and public rights of way, replacing it with a rubber-stamp
process at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). Nunez
didn’t have to draft the bill himself, however – that was taken care of
by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded by the Koch
brothers and other right-wing libertarians, which produces model bills
for state legislatures designed to serve corporate interests.
In the middle of his heavy lifting on DIVCA, Nunez took time out
to be feted at AT&T’s “Speaker’s Cup” at Pebble Beach, where
lobbyists and other corporate representatives paid $10,000 to $50,000
(now $50,000 to $500,000) to “hobnob with Nunez and other elected
officials over golf games, cocktails, spa treatments and dinner,” as the
LA Times put it.
Afterwards, AB 2987 passed the Legislature easily under Nunez’
sponsorship and was signed into law by Republican governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger. One can follow the bloodlines a little more closely: De Leon was
Nunez’ campaign manager, was elected to the State Assembly with Nunez’
strong backing, and later became State Senate President pro tempore.
DeLeon nominally joined his much weaker net neutrality bill to Wiener’s,
but didn’t even show up for the Assembly hearing. Santiago, in turn,
was the district director for John Perez who succeeded Nunez as Assembly
speaker in 2014.
In 2012, State Senator Alex Padilla sponsored SB 1161, another
piece of legislation modeled on an ALEC template, and perhaps one of the
most insidious bills
the California Legislature has ever produced. Supported by an array of
astroturf tech groups and nonprofits supported by AT&T and other
communications industry giants, SB 1161 was sold
as a way to promote tech innovation and “keep the CPUC’s hands off the
Internet,” even though the real impact of the bill was the near-complete
deregulation of broadband service in California. The Legislature bought
the sales pitch hook, line, and sinker, even though the CPUC never had
any jurisdiction over the Internet to begin with – its jurisdiction is
over the wired and wireless infrastructure, and protecting consumers
from deceptive and unfair-practices. Padilla himself received over $100,000 in contributions from telecom industry players, according to some reports, and went on to his reward as Secretary of State.
Padilla’s co-sponsor was L.A. Assemblyman (now State Senator) Steven Bradford, who received political contributions from AT&T and other telecom providers throughout his career. Bradford was referred to in political circles as a “front person for AT&T,”
and was known to sport an elegant woolen crochet blanket with the
AT&T Speakers Cup logo in the middle, thrown smartly over the
leather sofa in his office.
In 2014, another little known young legislator Henry Perea
carried AB 1717 for AT&T and the cellular carriers. This was an
industry initiative to relieve prepaid mobile service operators of their
duty to collect public interest surcharges when their service was sold
through third-party stores. While arcane and innocuous on its face, what
the bill really did was chip away at CPUC’s oversight over universal
service and other public interest programs. The CPUC opposed the bill
and predicted confusion and fragmentation of its programs if the bill
passed, which is exactly what has happened. Litigation has ensued on
multiple fronts, including a lawsuit brought by T-Mobile and other
carriers against the CPUC for its part in trying to implement the Rube
Goldberg scheme designed by the carriers and the Legislature.
This was not a problem for Perea, however. Shortly after passage
of the bill, he resigned with one year left in his Assembly term to
become a lobbyist, first for the pharmaceutical industry and then for the Western States Petroleum Association.
This of course left his district in Fresno without an Assemblyman, and
stuck his constituents with the bill for the 2016 special election which
was expected to cost Fresno taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars. Perea also collected on the front end. He received over $61,000
in direct contributions from the telecom industry. He was also a good
friend to the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, a
non-profit funded in large part by utilities and oil companies. In
2011, 2013, and 2014, CFEE provided Perea with trips to Italy, Eastern Europe, and Chile worth between $9,000 and $10,000 each.
Again, we can follow the money back to AT&T and its cohort. Hueso has received more than $61,000 from the communications industry, and even the often progressive Quirk took over $43,000 from electric and telecom utilities.
Also in 2017, state Senator De Leon prevented a vote on the
Senate floor on a bill which sought to do for privacy what SB 822 did
for an open Internet—restore the rules promulgated by the Obama-era FCC.
After languishing for the better part of a year, AB 375 was just last
week hurriedly amended, passed, and signed by the governor, but only
after a distraught real estate developer named Alistair MacTaggart sunk
millions of dollars into a ballot initiative called the California
Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to do what the Legislature wouldn’t.
All of which brings us back to Miguel Santiago’s mugging of the
net neutrality bill last week. Why does this keep happening? Why do
legislators, some of whom may be very good on other issues like policing
and immigration, even occasionally heroic, as De Leon was on
Proposition 54, turn to jelly and sell out their constituents on
telecom? One reason is that telecommunications is a technically complex area.
It’s also an area in which the industry aggressively seeks to keep its
core operations confidential, wrapped in a fog of euphemisms when
discussion cannot be avoided. Often neither legislators nor the public
understand the details, making it easy for special interests to hold
sway. Legislators who are termed out are easy prey for industry
lobbyists like AT&T’s Bill Devine, 11th most powerful man in the state, according to the Capitol Weekly. A related phenomenon may be apathy. Although communication is about
information equity and affordable access to the digital economy, and
thus a social justice issue par excellence, it is often ignored
by voters, even progressive ones. Net neutrality, for instance, is just
what it sounds like, a rule requiring a level playing field for
communications, which in turn does not pick favorites when it comes to
content or opinion. Seems like a no-brainer for democratically-minded
people. Yet eyes glazed over for years … although this may be changing Perhaps the most telling reason for the communication industry’s hold
on Sacramento are the extraordinarily refined methods of influence it
has developed. The “AT&T Speaker’s Cup,” for instance, began in 1998 under the
auspices of the California Assn. of Highway Patrolmen as a way to honor
former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and generate donations for
campaign funds he controlled. After Proposition 34 capped donations to
individual lawmakers in 2000, AT&T and other telecom and cable
companies began using the Pebble Beach shindig as a way to funnel money
to the state Democratic Party. The event has evolved into a major source of influence, with AT&T and its cohort dispensing
Lady Gaga tickets, GoPros, luggage, and iPad minis for legislators, in
addition to the contributions to the Party. In 2012, the LA Times
reported that AT&T had spent upwards of $14,000 a day on Sacramento lobbying over the prior seven years, a number that has likely doubled over the last five years. CFEE is another example of a sophisticated means of influencing
California decisionmakers, albeit more sophisticated and a little less
secretive than the Speaker’s Cup. It has the trappings of a policy institute,
convening overnight conferences at swank resorts in Napa and Sonoma
Valley, to which it invites regulators and legislators to hear from an
apparently heterogeneous array of speakers, and to partake of
California’s fine food and drink. Although CFEE’s large Board of
Directors contains seats for representatives from environmental, labor
and consumer groups, the ICT (Information, Communication &
Technology) wing of CFEE is nevertheless in the firm control of the
telecom and cable providers, who largely determine its speakers and who
is invited to hear them. In 2011 and 2012,
for instance, then Sen. Alex Padilla and other guests were treated to a
barrage of presentations about the technological wonders that would
await Californians if only the CPUC and other regulatory bodies would
get out of the way. Shortly thereafter, Padilla introduced SB 1161,
forbidding the CPUC to regulate anything that was “IP enabled.” As all
telecom operations were becoming IP enabled, this amounted to a de factoderegulation
of the entire network. From his current perch as Secretary of State,
Padilla has continued to be a regular CFEE attendee. CFEE and the Speaker’s Cup are only two of the many devices the
communications industry has cultivated to get their case in front of
California legislators like Miguel Santiago. So what to do? We as progressive Californians need to have longer
memories about the legislators who carry water for the large telecom and
cable companies. We need more transparency about political
contributions and other perks provided to them, and about their
activities as legislators, so that the public can connect the dots
between bills and contributions. And we also need mechanisms to get our
own views before legislators, like regular town halls (between
elections) and other meaningful opportunities for citizens to ask real
questions about current events and legislation. Campaign finance reform
is another obvious fix, so politicians are freer to be accountable to
the people rather than the sources of large campaign contributions. And
finally, the creation of a unified social justice platform that has
communication rights as one of its core planks. Stay informed. And vote.
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