One of the major problems with all of the DC media bandwidth being occupied with the debt hostage crisis is that festering turds like the AT&T/T-Mobile merger are probably going to sneak through. I don’t see how creating a new duopoly in cell service will help minorities, but the NAACP is apparently still behind the merger. GLAAD was for it before it was against it, and the NEA is also supporting it. All of those organizations get a lot of AT&T money.
The N.A.A.C.P. got at least $1 million from AT&T in 2009. The N.E.A.’s foundation got $75,000 from AT&T’s foundation last year, according to Politico.com. The Columbia Urban League in South Carolina, which supported the merger, got a $25,000 grant from the foundation.
AT&T got a tax deduction for making those donations, when they should have paid sales tax, since they were clearly just buying influence.
PeakVT
Ha ha ha ho.
alwhite
beergoggles
The LGBT blogs were all on this story over a month ago – one of the good things Avarosis did was making a crapload of noise about this in the LGBT world. Pams House Blend also had really good coverage of it.
RalfW
Flipside is that DADT ended (I know, 60 days…) with a whimper, and I’m pretty sure various Admin departments have a huge window to put new policies in the Federal Register over the next 10 days.
Stillwater
Who knew liberal groups could be bought so cheaply. It’s a disgrace, really.
AAA Bonds
What the fuck?
Observer
The NAACP is just doing what all “liberal” organizations do. Republicans know that all you have to do to shut up a Democrat and have them look the other way is put them on the payroll and they’ll go along with anything because liberals/Democrats don’t really stand for anything.
Happened to Chris Matthews, the departed Tim Russert long time ago. More recently, the Roosevelt Foundation and Pete Peterson. various “veal pen” orgs who get their funding from the same social circles that Obama does. The exec directors of most of those orgs…I mean the list is a long one.
Every super rich person in Washington knows this.
burnspbesq
“Festering turd?” Get a grip.
There’s a process for evaluating the impact of proposed mergers like this for potential anti-competitive effects. DOJ has a role to play. The FCC has a role to play. The new CFPB may have a role to play.
If you’re concerned about this, and want to do something constructive, take it up with them. And stop whining.
ETA: The reality is that given the costs associated with building and operating a cell network in a country the size of the United States, we were always going to have a duopoly. There just aren’t a lot of companies with tens of billions of dollars sitting around waiting to be invested. It’s actually surprising that the shakeout took as long as it did.
Carl Nyberg
The IRS allows this money to be written off as a charitable contribution?
This shows why liberal organizations cannot replace unions as the counterweight to corporate influence in politics. These organizations will always be vulnerable to being bought off by the super rich at key junctures.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Observer
When the top 20% of the population controls controls over 90% of the wealth, how do you keep super rich people from buying influence? A lot of these organizations would just turn into mom and pop operations without the big money donors. Their voices wouldn’t be heard at all.
karen marie
This merger royally pisses me off. If I wanted cell service from AT&T I would not have signed up with T-Mobile.
I currently have a grandfathered “Five Favs” plan. If this merger goes through, the first time I have to replace my phone after the merger I bet they rescind it.
“Free market” my ass.
Shawn in ShowMe: What good is their voice when it promotes the goals of the Big Money Boys over the interests of the people they allegedly exist to serve?
Observer
@Shawn in ShowMe:
In a normal political party – you can look at almost any other rich Western country that has liberal parties – the people and advocates of a movement find a way to take care of their own so that getting rich doesn’t depend on working for the other side. Or the landscape is made in such a way that corporations and broadcasters aren’t exclusively the purview of one political party.
Also too, national broadcasters and less monopoly mergers.
stormhit
@9 Unions support this deal too, in part because AT&T is organized and the other providers are not.
The liberal support for this deal is not just due to some conspiracy of monetary payoffs.
Rorgg
Does this mean John Hodgman gets the perky cute T-Mobile girl? Sock on that, Justin Long!
Or maybe I’m conflating identical commercial strings.
Anyway….
T-Mobile is only a semi-willing participant in this. They’ve actually unveiled a new program as the sun sets on them as an entity: It’s a super-cheap rate plan but you get no discount on the phone itself, you just pay it off in 4-6 monthly installments. So T-Mobile gets the influx of income on the phones it’s selling before it goes *poof* and AT&T gets saddled with a bunch of people grandfathered in on hyper-cheap discounted rate plans.
mistermix
@burnspbesq: Hmm, burnsy, isn’t part of the process that groups representing interests tell the FCC what they think of the merger? So perhaps it isn’t “whining” to point out that those supposedly independent interest groups are heavily influenced by corporate donors.
Did you go to law school with Michele Bachmann, btw?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
if we were serious about telecom, and wireless and internet, we would deal with it as the infrastructure it is. i know, socialism and all that, but the government should have deregulated smarter, and should have made sure the damn phones actually work most of the time.
also, too, i would like some actual high speed with my fiber please. we have products that are crappy because they are consumer driven, and commoditized because cost, and price are everything.
this is where the government has a role, if we were a first world nation.
Shawn in ShowMe
@karen marie
All of these national organizations face a balancing act. The NAACP, for example, sends a ton of kids to college, get the wrongfully accused out of jail and help repeal unjust laws, just to name a few. They couldn’t do that without big budgets.
And of course, the Big Money Boys are gonna extract a price for their contribution — get them to look the other way. You don’t become powerful in this country without selling out to some extent. In a capitalist system, that’s a feature not a bug.
So unless you know of a way to rally millions of Americans to overturn this system and replace it with sosh-ul-ism, people are going to continue swallowing shit sandwiches to get things done.
aimai
Bought off for one million? What a goddamn cheap date. I can’t believe the NAACP didn’t at least have the nous to demand 20 million. I really mean that. Anything less than millions of dollars worth of potential endowment is mere grift. Anything close to putting your organization on a firm footing might be considered almost meritorious.
aimai
R. Porrofatto
Long time ago I had AT&T Wireless. In 2004 Cingular gobbled up AT&T Wireless for a mere $41 billion, paying practically double what the stock price was worth a few months prior. Morgan Stanley and a bunch of other banks, brokers, law firms and consultants made hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. The CEOs and upper-level executives of both companies reaped millions themselves in stock options just for doing the deal. Thousands of employees lose their jobs. Consumers had even fewer choices. Prices rose to pay off the huge debt. Wall Streeters exulted. Bonuses showered upon them.
A few years later Cingular magically “became” AT&T Mobility. I switched to T-Mobile.
Now AT&T seeks to acquire T-Mobile for $39 billion. JPMorgan Chase/Morgan Stanley and a bunch of other banks, brokers, law firms and and consultants will make hundreds of millions of dollars in fees – including the Blackstone Group, a major stockholder in T-Mobile. The CEOs and upper-level executives of both companies will reap millions themselves in stock options just for doing the deal. Thousands of employees will lose their jobs. Consumers will have only two real wireless choices. Prices will rise to pay off the huge debt. Wall Streeters will exult. Bonuses will be showered upon them.
slag
@burnspbesq: Or he could post it on a blog and get several other people to “take it up with them” as well.
And who’s “whining”? You or the guy you’re whining about whining.
You disagree with someone on an issue, discuss the issue. Don’t complain about them “whining”. It makes you look passive-agressive.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Observer
The other Western powers are a lot older than we are. They’ve already gone through their empire phase. With the other Western nations in economic shambles after World War II, the U.S became the defacto superpower. None of the former empires gave up their imperial designs voluntarily.
And since our overlords are not any smarter than their overlords, a lot of lives are going to be thrown away needlessly before we arrive at a government that makes sense.
J Frank Parnell
Come on mistermix, wrong N.A.A.C.P.! The one that got teh sweet AT&T money is the National Ass’n for the Advancement of Cell Phones.
Shawn in ShowMe
All of these national organizations face a balancing act. The NAACP, for example, sends a ton of kids to college, get the wrongfully accused out of jail and help repeal unjust laws, just to name a few. They couldn’t do that without big budgets.
And of course, the Big Money Boys are gonna extract a price for their contribution – get them to look the other way. You don’t become powerful in this country without selling out to some extent. In a capitalist system, that’s a feature not a bug.
So unless you know of a way to rally millions of Americans to overturn this system and replace it with sosh-ul-ism, people are going to continue swallowing shit sandwiches to get things done.
Brachiator
Yeah, the proposed ATT merger with ATT may be a bad deal, and it is one of a number of crappy deals happening in the world of telecommunications and related media.
For example, there is the ongoing attempts to chip away net neutrality, and misleading rationalizations for broadband caps.
@Carl Nyberg:
As another poster has noted, the unions have backed this deal.
There is, fortunately, a lot of good coverage at various tech blogs on these issues, and people need to do whatever they think appropriate to voice their opinions on this issue, including letting your Congress critters know what your views are.
catclub
So why did they not put bush admin torturers on trial in order to slip healthcare through in the middle of the night?
That would have been my plan.
Martin
Well, it probably should go through. But not because less competition is good, but because our telecommunications policy is fucked.
We’ve got 4 major carriers. Because of how the whole system is set up, they tend to run on different protocols and frequencies. Well, that’s just fucking stupid. Regardless of which protocol or frequency is today marginally better than the others, to provide a competitive advantage, it’s going to be shit compared to the worst of the next generation of protocols and frequencies. But in the mean time, we spend 3x-4x more on right-of-ways, cabling, and so on than a nation that had one national protocol, and we get worse coverage because in case nobody has bothered to look out the window recently, the US is really fucking big. Merging carriers would get rid of one set of national mobile redundancies, and that’s ultimately going to help consumers about as much as one less point of competition is going to hurt consumers.
This is utility 101 stuff here. The FCC should work out a mechanism to choose what ‘4G’ will actually be, and then review that annually or so on, and choose a successor when the time is right. The nation get divided up into regions (you might need to pair high demand with low demand areas – if you want NYC, you also have to take Montana) and those regions are auctioned off to whoever wants to build out that 4G infrastructure, meeting certain minimum standards for connections, dropped calls, 911 service, bandwidth, etc. along with an agreement to lease bandwidth at a given rate – regulated just like any other utility. Anyone can bid for these. If McDonalds wants to wire San Francisco, then fine. Now you’ve got increased competition for infrastructure build-out. The bandwidth providers then resell their service to carriers at the pre-approved rate, carriers can then set up whatever plans they want – and they all provide the same coverage because it’s all the same network. They compete on price, service, and the same stuff they do now – phone offering/contracts, etc. Because you’ve gotten rid of the hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure expenses on the carrier side, anyone can now be a carrier. And now you have increased competition on the carrier side as well.
Consumers get better coverage because the FCC ensured that everywhere would be covered, you get more competition, and you get 1/3 or so the cost of build-out by eliminating the redundancy, so you can ask for better service.
Martin
AT&T is also going to get saddled by a ton of iPhone users that have come over onto those plans as iPhone runs fine on T-Mobile, and since T-Mobile is now offering micro-SIMs, anyone can switch easily. There’s a shitload of them, and the 3GS is still a quite nice phone and the first ones sold are now out of their 2 year contracts.
Shawn in ShowMe
From what I’ve been told, $20 million would be over half of the NAACP’s budget. This isn’t a rich organization we’re talking about here. It’s always depended on the kindness of Galtian overlords.
dj spellchecka
ironic that major communication companies are basically buying silence, but here we are…
props for the pixies song title headline….
slag
@Martin:
It seems to me that there are several routes to this endpoint, but I completely agree that this endpoint is where we should be trying to get to. Would that it were so.
dollared
It’s the NEA that should be shot. $75,000? Their members will pay that much in excess billing in the first year post merger.
It makes no goddamn sense for union to support a conservative, politically active monopolist.
C Burkey
I went to a public hearing recently here in Culver City on the AT&T merger and was amazed to see a large crowd of high school students fill the room, holding signs that read Merger=Jobs.
Sure the Union likes the deal. More dues $$.
The people who spoke at this meeting were very passionate–the ones who spoke against it.
The ones who were for it clearly had prepared remarks and many said they were “excited” about the merger. (High times there, whooo hooo.)
All in all, it was pretty depressing.