America has a wide digital divide — high-speed Internet access is available only to those who can afford it, at prices much higher and speeds much slower in the U.S. than they are around the world.

But neither has to be the case, says Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. In a video excerpt of this week’s show, Crawford joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices and stifling competition.

“The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill.

Watch Bill’s full conversation with Crawford this weekend on Moyers & Company.

When reporters from Moyers on America visited Lafayette, Louisiana in 2006, residents and officials had taken on the phone and cable companies to build their own fiber-optic broadband network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to the community. BellSouth — an AT&T company — and Cox Communications lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette’s plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers voted to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court.

Watch what happened in Lafayette and what officials hoped a fiber-optic network might mean for their community.

In 2009, the city’s fiber network came online and by 2012 it was paying for itself. In an interview this week, City-Parish President Joey Durel predicted that soon, the fiber network may actually turn a profit for the city. Lafayette — about two hours’ drive west of New Orleans, deep in the heart of Cajun country — now offers residents and businesses one of the fastest Internet connections in the nation, with speeds up to 100 megabytes per second, about four-to-five times faster than broadband connections in most of America.

The FCC recently endorsed controversial plans to provide high-speed Internet to cities across America. At the core of the debate is a discussion over whether Internet access should be provided by government, like water and sewage utilities, or sold by private sector telecommunications companies.

In Lafayette, “The common argument was — because we’ve all been taught this in civics — that government shouldn’t compete in the private sector,” says Durel, a Republican and former chairman of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, who entered office in 2004 as a first-time politician. “And I saw this as not so much government competing with the private sector — I told my citizens, I didn’t see BellSouth as the private sector. I read somewhere that they got more government subsidies at that time than any other corporation in America. That’s quasi-government, in my opinion. That’s not the little shoe store on Main Street.

Joey Durel, City-Parish president

Since Lafayette’s fiber network has come online, the city has attracted numerous entrepreneurs and businesses, including programmers, engineering firms, a visual effects house from California and an oil-related technology company from Houston. But Durel believes it would be much harder today for cities — including Lafayette — to build the network they started in 2007. Politicians are more “weak-kneed,” he says, and the corporate opposition is stronger.

“One town I went to was very interested,” Durel recalled, “[but] the president of their chamber of commerce was the president of [software company] Quest in that state. When I left, I said, ‘Ain’t no way they’re going to get that support from their Chamber of Commerce.’”

According to the media reform group Free Press, 19 states have passed legislation that prohibits municipalities from competing with phone and cable companies the way Lafayette did. Some of those laws are based on “model legislation” authored by ALEC.

“They’re putting their states at competitive disadvantages,” says Durel. “They’re bolstering up the monopolies to not have to invest.”

“I think that 80 percent of America will not have what we have today 20 years from now.”

Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago.

“The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill.

Producer: Jessica Wang. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Lena Shemel.

As telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford pointed out to Bill, over the past decade, America has fallen behind many other wealthy countries in access to high-speed Internet. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently ranked America 15th internationally, with broadband available to only 68.2 percent of households. Compare that with 87 percent in Iceland or 97.5 in Korea. Our slower Internet is also more expensive than in other parts of the world.

According to a report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a certain amount of America’s lack of high-speed Internet can be attributed to population density. America is far more spread out than, say, Korea, and faster connections are possible when the length of the wires from the phone company to your home is shorter. But that’s not the full story — in Canada, a country far less dense than the U.S., 72.2 percent of households have broadband.

The National Broadband Map is a tool to search, analyze and map broadband availability across the United States. The colored portions of the map indicates Internet speed rates of at least 768 kbps.

Where does your community fall within the spectrum of connectivity? The National Broadband Map can tell you (click “Explore Maps”).

Before exploring the data, you can test your own connection speed using the FCC’s quality test. The New York City-based Moyers & Company Web team gets about 10 mbps, if you’re interested.

This article first appeared on The Huffington Post.

Georgia State Capitol building in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by J. Glover courtesy of Wikicommons.

A coalition of Georgia mayors, counties and local activists overcame an industry-backed bill that would have prohibited municipalities from building their own broadband networks.

The bill, HB 282, was defeated in a decisive bipartisan vote. The 94-70 tally marked the end of a string of legislative victories for those who seek to limit Internet choice to a few powerful companies.

Municipal broadband networks have been gaining traction across the country. It’s easy to see why: In many rural and low-income communities, privately offered broadband services are nonexistent. In its 2012 Broadband Progress Report the Federal Communications Commission counted nearly 20 million Americans (the vast majority living in rural areas) beyond the reach of broadband.

The rise of homegrown Internet infrastructure has prompted the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to introduce state-level legislation designed to limit services to a handful of corporate network providers.

ALEC, which receives financial support from AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, has helped pass bills that hamper or outright ban municipal broadband networks in 19 states.

The legislators who sponsored the Georgia bill are major recipients of ALEC “scholarships.” Rep. Don Parsons is an active member of the ALEC Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force. He has received $5,735.48 during his first three three years in the role. Bill sponsor Rep. Mark Hamilton received $3,527.80 in ALEC scholarships in 2008 alone, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

In the last cycle, Hamilton was on the receiving end of thousands in campaign contributions from AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast and Verizon.

“To me this is a philosophical situation,” Hamilton said from the floor on Thursday as he tried to rally members to pass his legislation. “A vote ‘yes’ for this bill means that you support free markets and free enterprise,” he said.

A ‘no’ vote means that you want more federal dollars to prop up cities, Hamilton said.

Hamilton’s private-enterprise argument is a common refrain among those opposing municipal networks. At its core is the belief that phone and cable companies do business without the assistance of U.S. taxpayers.

But other state legislators wondered whether these massive corporations are truly byproducts of a free market. “I do believe in the free market. I do believe in free enterprise, and I do believe in local control,” said Rep. Debbie Buckner, who opposed Hamilton’s bill.

“They talk about [the companies] as if they are totally free market and free enterprise, but doesn’t AT&T get some tax breaks?” she asked. “Didn’t Windstream get some stimulus money? Isn’t that government money?”

Indeed, phone and cable companies have been on federal welfare since their inception. A 2011 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy study shows AT&T and Verizon receiving more than $26 billion in tax subsidies from 2008 through 2010. The FCC’s 2012 report on Universal Service Fund subsidies shows nearly $3 billion in federal payments to AT&T, Verizon and Windstream.

In 2010, Windstream, Corp. — a telecommunications company with services across the South — applied for $238 million in federal stimulus grants to improve its service in 16 states. More than 16 million taxpayer dollars went to upgrade the company’s services in Georgia.

“Phone and cable companies would not be recording the soaring profit margins that they do, if there were truly a free market,’” said Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner. “They have created an unlevel playing field that gives them massive first-mover advantages. The real-dollar benefits of that can’t be quantified.”

“The private companies have not been there for us,” said Rep. Buckner, who represents rural parts of Talbot and Meriwether Counties. “And if they say they’re going to come and be there for us, we don’t know how long it will take them to find us.”

The reality is that these companies have no interest in building out to rural areas. Instead they’ll continue trying to legislate away any local option. Unless more states follow Georgia’s lead, these companies will continue to push ALEC legislation that takes away such homegrown control.

The more people learn about these state bills, the more they’re willing to fight them. In the days before last week’s vote, both Free Press and ColorofChange.org rallied people in Georgia to call their state legislators and protest HB 282.

With more support both inside and outside government municipal broadband can provide better service at lower prices, especially in the many places that are ignored by the phone and cable giants.

Timothy Karr is the campaign director for Free Press, the Free Press Action Fund and SavetheInternet.com. Follow Timothy Karr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimKarr

Main Street in downtown Hugo, Colo. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)

If you’re an American who lives in the middle of nowhere and you want phone and Internet service, you can pretty much have them, albeit in their least sexy form. That’s right, we’re talking about old-fashioned landlines for the phone and (shudder!) dial-up for the Internet. Hyper-wired, connected citizens have long since relegated those services to the dustbin of tech history. But for people living in remote areas (or some low-income neighborhoods), landlines and dial-up are still the lifeblood of telecommunications. Take them away, and you’re sending people back to the Stone Age of telecommunications.

But taking them away is effectively what big telecom companies — companies like AT&T to be specific — may well end up doing if they have their way.

A repairman fixes wires to restore telephone, cable and Internet service to a customer in Oklahoma. Roughly 19 million Americans depend on wires for their telephone and Internet service. (AP Photo)

So when AT&T filed a petition last year with the FCC asking to get out from under regulations and lay its wireline services to rest, it meant trouble for those who rely on them.

But the federal petition is but the most visible part of the strategy. AT&T has been playing a long game, flying under the radar at the state level. How? With the help of ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — of which AT&T appears to be a devoted member. (Not only does an AT&T representative sit on the group’s Private Enterprise Advisory Board, AT&T sponsored ALEC’s most recent conference, the Spring Task Force Summit in Oklahoma City.) Published on ALEC’s website are at least four model bills and statements echoing AT&T’s position on telecommunications regulations — briefly, that there should be little to none.

Chief among the model bills are ALEC’s Regulatory Modernization Act, which allows service providers to elect whether or not they would like to partake in state regulation, which is a little like asking students to elect whether or not they would like to partake in homework. The bill was approved by ALEC’s board of directors in 2009. In the ensuing three years, according to a 2010-2012 “Telecommunications Deregulation” report issued by the National Regulatory Research Institute (NRRI), more than 30 states have considered and/or passed laws eliminating or restricting government oversight and basic service requirements. Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin are just a few to have passed deregulation legislation in the past three years. In each of these states, AT&T is a primary service provider. And in each of these states, a confirmed ALEC member was responsible for introducing the bill.

ALEC publicly endorsed AT&T’s petition this year, submitting public comments to the FCC, which read, in part, that it “believes public policy should become neutral with respect to existing and emerging business models and technologies in the burgeoning broadband ecosystem. Moreover, policy responses should seek to preserve organic market forces and not attempt to replace them with regulatory fiat.” Translation: companies should have the right to do what they want in pursuit of profits. The problem with that, as Jessica Gonzalez, vice president of policy and legal affairs at The National Hispanic Media Coalition told The Nation magazine, is that “it is often the underserved and hardest to reach that are left out when profit maximization is the only consideration driving investment decisions.”

In May, the FCC granted AT&T’s petition. It will begin to “move forward with real-world trials” — promoting the transition from wireline to wireless services – shortly. As for those who will be left with no phone or Internet service? One supposes they’ll just have to write their congressperson, the old-fashioned way. They certainly won’t be able to call and complain.

The post first appeared in The Nation.

In this Dec. 3, 2009 file photo, a sign outside the Comcast Center, left, is shown in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

When it comes to media, bigger is not better. And when it comes to the control of the infrastructure of how we communicate now, the trend toward extreme bigness — as illustrated by Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable and create an unprecedented cable combine — is accelerating at a dangerous pace.

In the aftermath of a federal court decision striking down net neutrality protections that were developed to maintain an open and freewheeling discourse on the Internet, and with journalism threatened at every turn by cuts and closures, the idea of merging Comcast and Time Warner poses a threat that ought to be met with official scrutiny and grassroots opposition.

The point of the free-press protection that is outlined in the First Amendment is not to free billionaire media moguls and speculators to make more money. The point is to have a variety of voices, with multiple entry points for multiple points of view and a communications infrastructure that fosters debate, dissent and democratic discourse.

When media conglomerates merge, they do not provide better service or better democracy. They create the sort of monopolies and duopolies that constrain America’s promise. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was right when he decried “concentration of economic power in the few” and warned that “that business monopoly in America paralyzes the system of free enterprise on which it is grafted, and is as fatal to those who manipulate it as to the people who suffer beneath its impositions.”

Merging the two largest cable providers is a big deal in and of itself — allowing one company to become a definitional player in major media markets across the country — but this goes far beyond cable. By expanding its dominance of video and Internet communications into what the Los Angeles Times describes as a “juggernaut” with 30 million subscribers, the company that already controls Universal Studios can drive hard bargains with content providers. It can also define the scope and character of news and public service programming in dozens of states and hundreds of major cities — including Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC.

That’s too much power for any one corporation to have, especially a corporation that has been on a buying spree. Comcast already controls NBCUniversal and a broadcast and cable empire that includes NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, the USA Network, Telemundo and various other networks.

It’s bad for consumers.

“In an already uncompetitive market with high prices that keep going up and up, a merger of the two biggest cable companies should be unthinkable. The deal would be a disaster for consumers and must be stopped,” says Craig Aaron, the president of the media-reform group Free Press.

It’s bad for musicians, documentary makers and other creators.

“Comcast’s proposed takeover of Time Warner would give one company incredible influence over how music and other media is accessed and under what conditions,” says Casey Rae, interim executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, who noted “the ever present danger of a huge corporation like Comcast — which already owns a major content company — disadvantaging competition or locking creators into unfair economic structures.”

And it is bad for the democratic discourse of a nation founded on the premise memorably expressed by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 when he wrote, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.”

The idea that “all the avenues to truth” would be controlled by a monopoly, a duopoly or any small circle of multinational communications conglomerates is antithetical to the understanding of the authors of a free press, and of its true defenders across the centuries.

So yes, US Senator Al Franken – the Minnesota Democrat who has proven to be one of the most serious and savvy congressional watchdogs on communication policy — is absolutely right when he says, “There’s not enough competition in this space; we need more competition. This is going in the wrong direction.”

Franken has written to the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, urging each of them “to act quickly and decisively to ensure that consumers are not exposed to increased cable prices and decreased quality of service as a result of this transaction.”

The FCC, in particular, has broad authority to review telecommunications-industry mergers, with an eye toward determining whether they are in the public interest. And watchdog groups have been pressuring the commission’s new chairman, Tom Wheeler, to assert the FCC’s authority. For Wheeler, a former president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the lobbying organization for the cable industry, this is will be a critical test of his leadership.

But challenges to this proposed merger must also come from the anti-trust lawyers at the Department of Justice and the congressional watchdogs over consolidation and monopoly issues.

“Stopping this kind of deal is exactly why we have antitrust laws,” says Free Press’s Aaron.

The congressional role cannot be underestimated. The Department of Justice, the FTC and the FCC get cues from Congress. And the voices of members of the House and Senate will play a critical role in determining whether the merger goes forward.

Some of the initial signals have been good.

“This proposed merger could have a significant impact on the cable industry and affect consumers across the country,” says Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, who announced: “I plan to hold a hearing to carefully scrutinize the details of this merger and its potential consequences for both consumers and competition.”

The ranking Republican on the committee, Utah Senator Mike Lee, supports the review, as do public interest groups ranging from Public Knowledge to Consumers Union.

But hearings will not be enough. The Senate, in particular, must send clear signals.

Former FCC Commissioner Mike Copps is precisely right when he says of the idea of creating an even larger telecommunications conglomerate, “This is so over the top that it ought to be dead on arrival at the FCC.”

Copps, who now serves as a special adviser to Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, is also right when he says, “The proposed deal runs roughshod over competition and consumer choice and is an affront to the public interest.”

But the public interest will prevail only if the public, and its elected representatives, raise an outcry in defense of the robust competition that opens “all the avenues to truth.”

The future of the Internet is up for grabs in this 2006 documentary that is still worth watching eight years later. At the time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had effectively eliminated Net neutrality rules, which ensured that every content creator on the Internet — from big-time media concerns to backroom bloggers — had equal opportunity to make their voice heard. Then, as now, large and powerful corporations were lobbying Washington to turn the “information superhighway” into what critics call a “toll road,” threatening the equitability that has come to define global democracy’s newest forum.

Some activists describe the ongoing debate this way: A small number of mega-media giants owns much of the content and controls the delivery of content on radio and television and in the press; if we let them take control of the Internet as well, immune from government regulation, who will pay the price? Their opponents say that the best way to encourage Internet innovation and technological advances is to let the market-not the federal government-determine the shape of the system.

“The genius of the Internet was that it made the First Amendment a living document again for millions of Americans,” says Robert McChesney, a media scholar and activist. “The decisions that we’re going be making … are probably going to set our entire communication system, and, really, our entire society, on a course that it won’t be able to change for generations.”

The documentary tells the story of how phone companies failed to deliver on their promise in the early ’90s to build Internet-related infrastructure, and how, as a result, America fell far behind other countries in terms of residential Internet speed. Karr also follows one Louisiana town’s struggle (watch 2012 update) to fight the phone and cable companies’ lobby and build a high-speed network administered by the local utility company, and investigates the challenge corporate money poses to maintaining a free and fast Internet.

For years, the government has upheld the principle of “Net neutrality,” the belief that everyone should have equal access to the web without preferential treatment.

But now, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a former cable and telecommunications top gun, is circulating potential new rules that reportedly would put a price tag on climbing aboard the Internet. The largest and richest providers, giant corporations such as Verizon and Comcast – in mid-takeover of Time Warner Cable — like the idea. They could afford to buy their way to the front of the line. Everyone else — nonprofit groups, startups and everyday users – would have to move to the rear, and the Net would be neutral no more.

This week, speaking with Bill Moyers about these latest developments are two keen observers of media and the world of cyberspace. David Carr covers the busy intersection of media with business, government and culture for The New York Times. Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, contributor to Bloomberg View and author of, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

Learn more about the production team behind Moyers & Company. Watch the full show »

The week before this 2002 episode of NOW With Bill Moyers aired, a Senate sub-committee met for hearings on a media merger that would create the biggest cable company in America. Bill considers how mergers contribute to skyrocketing cable TV bills, and leads to a situation where just four giant corporations control the music on the airwaves in all the major metropolitan areas. Radio stations in your hometown that you think are live – and local – aren’t. You can access the original Web page for this program at the archived NOW With Bill Moyers website.

TRANSCRIPT

MOYERS: Welcome to NOW.

We begin with the shrinking world of the mass media. Twenty years ago, there were 50 owners of America’s major media outlets. Now there are five.

How a handful of companies came to exercise such control over the media is one of the astonishing stories of our time. And one of the least reported by the mega-media companies affected.

Just this week, a Senate subcommittee met for hearings on yet another big media merger, one that would create the biggest cable company in America.

NOW’S producer Bryan Myers found that many people are beginning to question the benefits of such a merger.

BILL MOYERS: At a popular New York store the other day, we asked some shoppers for their opinions about cable television. Uncharacteristic for New Yorkers, their responses were unanimous.

SHOPPER 1: For me, it just isn’t really worth shelling out 40 or 50 dollars a month.

SHOPPER 2: I think it’s expensive for what I’m getting, I really do.

SHOPPER 3: If it was more choices, maybe the prices would be lower.

MOYERS: Consumers are complaining loudly and often about cable TV these days. The Federal Communications Commission says cable prices increased 7.5% last year, far faster than the rate of inflation at 2.7%. And that’s been the trend for years. Gene Kimmelman runs the Washington office of Consumer’s Union.

GENE KIMMELMAN, CONSUMER’S UNION: Since 1996 rates have shot up about 43%. That’s almost three times faster than inflation.

MOYERS: Consumer advocates fear it’s going to get worse, especially with the impending merger of cable giants AT&T Broadband and the Comcast Corporation.

SENATE HEARING (FROM TAPE): This committee will be in order…

MOYERS: In a Senate hearing this week, that merger came under Congressional scrutiny. Democrats and Republicans alike were skeptical.

SENATOR HERB KOHL (D-WI): We have been asking ourselves over and over again, how is this good for consumers?

SENATOR MIKE DEWINE (R-OH): This trend towards further media consolidation is troubling.

KIMMELMAN: We’ve never seen a cable merger where rates have gone down. As a matter of fact, the larger the cable company becomes, the government data show that the higher the rates go.

MOYERS: AT&T Broadband is already the largest cable company in America. Comcast is now number three. Their marriage would result in the biggest cable company ever, with local systems in 17 of America’s 20 biggest cities, and a presence in 41 states.

KIMMELMAN: You get a company with ownership and influence over cable systems serving more than 30 million households in this country now this is more than 40 percent of the entire cable market.

MOYERS: The FCC’s own numbers show that cable competition is already scarce. There are over 10,000 cable markets in America, but in only 368 of them does the cable operator face what the FCC calls an “effective competitor.” In other words, in over 9600 markets, consumers are basically at the mercy of monopolies.

Public interest advocates say cable mergers not only drive up prices for consumers, they dry up the flow of ideas.

ANDREW JAY SCHWARTZMAN, MEDIA ACCESS PROJECT: The proposed merger threatens the diversity of the marketplace of ideas.

MOYERS: Andrew Jay Schwartzman runs the Media Access Project, a First Amendment watchdog.

SCHWARTZMAN: Any company which shares a large portion of the ownership of mass media gains tremendous power over advertisers, over the video programming markets and over competition with other telecommunications providers.

MOYERS: As cable companies grow larger, Schwartzman says, they begin to restrict access to their systems, demanding exorbitant payments or restrictive conditions to carry programming. One example: when NBC wanted to put its channel “CNBC” on cable, they had to sign an agreement with cable companies that it wouldn’t be a general news service like CNN. Why? Because CNN is owned by a big cable company that didn’t want the competition.

SCHWARTZMAN: The proposed merger will reduce the number of companies that can produce video programming, and it will also place much greater editorial control in the hands of one company. This means that there will be fewer editorial voices. The civic discourse of our nation will be adversely affected.

KIMMELMAN: There is no government oversight of what is offered to the consumer over the cable system. It’s all up to the cable company.

MOYERS: Then there’s the possibility of restrictions on Internet access. In time, cable lines are expected to become the preferred means of connecting to the Internet. But cable companies have the power to pick and choose what sites you can access.

KIMMELMAN: In the same way the cable company controls what channels the consumer receives, in the Internet world, the cable company is in a position to package programming, the high speed connection, the content you can get off the high speed connection and give preferential deals to their own affiliates or anyone they wanna cut a deal with.

MOYERS: At this week’s Senate hearing, the heads of AT&T Broadband and Comcast said not to worry; they are committed to fair pricing and open access. But, say the critics, they’ve heard it before.

SCHWARTZMAN: Absence of competition brings monopoly power and the kind of cable television service we’ve all become used to. “If you don’t like it, forget it. Because we’re the cable company!”

MOYERS: P.S.: In the neighborhood where we live, our cable bill has gone up by more than a third in the last five years for the very same service.

It’s not only customers who get the short end of the stick from these megamedia conglomerates.

Local programming like news and community affairs, often gets reduced or eliminated all together.

Let’s take the case of radio in America. In just five years, four giant corporations have come to control the music we hear on our airwaves in all the major metropolitan areas.

NOW’S Brenda Breslauer and NPR’s Rick Karr report.

RICK KARR: After twenty-six years behind a microphone Becky Wight has arrived in the future of radio. Start with her job title, for instance.

BECKY WIGHT, DJ: Well they don’t call them deejays anymore. They call them air personalities.

KARR: Becky and her colleagues don’t pick the music they play anymore. These days, it’s all done by consultants, committees … and computers.

WIGHT: Radio doesn’t play records anymore. Radio doesn’t even play CDs anymore. Radio stations run generally individual files in a computer for each song.

KARR: Today’s technology also lets Becky create an illusion — that she’s not in her Dallas studio but rather that she’s actually local in Topeka; Omaha; Cleveland; Elkhart, Indiana; Rochester, New York; Montgomery, Alabama; and Hilo, Hawaii. There and in a couple dozen other cities across the country listeners are supposed to think she’s right in the neighborhood.

The technology’s called voice tracking. It lets Becky record her voice then mix it in with music, commercials and jingles.

WIGHT: What I’m going to do is put the song over where my breath mark was, so I’ll stop talking, song will start while I’m breathing and then the rest of it will play.

It gives the local stations the opportunity to literally turn the computer on and lock the front door and go home for a weekend.

KARR: This is the future of radio: quirky, live, and local D-Js giving way to stations on autopilot and “air personalities” turning out “virtual” programs on an assembly line. Critics say a medium that used to operate in the public interest is becoming bland and even misleading.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 ended more than sixty years of limits on how many radio stations one company could own. It used to be four stations in a market; now it’s eight. It used to be that a company could own a total of no more than forty; now there’s no limit. The result: a handful of large firms have been able to buy up hundreds of local stations. Critics say that while many listeners may not have noticed, deregulation means they’re getting less music less news and less local flavor.

In Denver, for instance, four companies now control nearly three quarters of the radio audience. Some of those Denver stations still make radio the old-fashioned way:

They are, to use the industry jargon, “live and local”. That means, in effect, that there’re real DJs spinning real records on the air and taking real calls from listeners.

Cat Collins is program director at a pop and hip-hop station. He says “live and local” simply makes for better radio.

CAT COLLINS: So that when you listen to my station, KS 107.5 from 6 am to midnight, you hear somebody that’s in the studio, playing records at that exact moment, taking phone calls from my audience.

KARR: And they’re actually in Denver?

COLLINS: Yeah, they’re actually in Denver. What a concept, you know?

KARR: But Collins says consolidation is killing off the live, local DJ and giving big radio chains an incentive to save money with voice tracking and similar technology.

COLLINS: I think that deregulation means less choice for the consumer and I think it means more commercials which they don’t like, I think it means less local personalities on the air.

KARR: Cat Collins admits that the company that owns his station — Jefferson Pilot Communications — uses some voice tracking at its seventeen stations. Even he runs his overnight show from a computer. But he’s proud that for the most part, the station’s live and local.

At the number one radio company across town it seems there’s a lot less live and local programming.

SARAH DALSIMER: I’m calling KBCO, 97.3, alternative rock.

KARR: Clear Channel Worldwide owns eight stations in Denver. NOW’s Sarah Dalsimer called request lines at five of the company’s pop and rock stations there.

DALSIMER: KISS-FM, 95.7, KTCL, KBPI, KRFX, 103.5.

She called the Top Forty station, the Alternative Rock station, and the Hard Rock station. She never got through to a real human being.

Clear Channel is by far the largest radio company in the nation. The firm got its start in 1972, with one station in San Antonio, Texas. By the mid nineties, it’d grown to forty-three stations. But after Washington relaxed ownership limits in 1996, it grew to more than twelve hundred stations. Its closest competitor owns fewer than two hundred.

You can listen to Clear Channel from coast to coast: in Los Angeles …in New York City …and in Denver. In all fifty states, in fact.

Forty-seven of Clear Channel’s stations are known as “KISS FM”. It’s part of the company’s vision of creating a national radio franchise.

Clear Channel spends a lot of money promoting the KISS FM brand identity. That’s because the company sees it as being akin to say, McDonalds. Anywhere you go in the country, you know what to expect on a McDonalds menu. Likewise, in 47 cities where Clear Channel owns stations, you know what to expect from KISS FM.

That’s part of the business appeal of consolidation. Advertisers can buy radio ads in bulk.

Radio is only one part of the Clear Channel conglomerate. While you may not have noticed the name, it’s all over the place: The company owns billboards and other outdoor advertising, television stations, a concert promotion firm — it’s even into Broadway shows. It’s co-producer of the hit musical THE PRODUCERS.

This is what a business school prof might call “synergy”: Clear Channel can use its taxi-top ads to promote its Broadway shows and its billboards to promote its radio stations.

Just how big is Clear Channel? Well here in Denver, if you want to listen to pop and rock, there’s 93.3—Clear Channel; KISS FM—Clear Channel, too; 97.3—Clear Channel; classic rock from the Fox, another Clear Channel station; and 106.7—Clear Channel.

Five stations — that’s most of the pop and rock on the air. And that is a problem, according to Jesse Morreale: He’s a concert promoter in Denver. So is Clear Channel.

JESSE MORREALE, CONCERT PROMOTER: They’re the biggest radio broadcaster in the country by far. They’re the biggest concert promoter in the country by far. They did 70 percent of ticket sales last year.

Two years ago, Clear Channel bought the nation’s largest concert and event promoter. Since then, Morreale alleges, Clear Channel’s been trying to put him out of business.

MORREALE: This is a microcosm of what’s happening around the country.

They control the programming for all the radio stations that any of the people in this demographic might listen to.

And it’s not unbiased information that is being given out – the songs aren’t being played because they’re the best songs. The concerts aren’t being talked about because they’re the best or most important concerts.

It’s all based on this financial interest that this company has in the concerts that they are promoting.

KARR: Morreale’s firm — Nobody In Particular Presents — sued Clear Channel last year. The suit alleges that in Denver, “synergy” really means monopoly; it charges Clear Channel with “unlawful, anticompetitive and predatory” practices.

According to the suit, Clear Channel refuses to play certain acts’ music on its radio stations unless those musicians book concerts with Clear Channel.

MORREALE: Play for our concert promoter or you won’t get airplay.

KARR: Clear Channel says, “Hey, this is the way the industry is changed now. We’re just better business people than you are. Sorry, small concert promotion firm. You’re time is over.”

MORREALE: I say that the way that they are operating these businesses together is anti-competitive.

KARR: Morreale says he’s stuck. Clear Channel won’t promote his shows and he can’t afford to buy a radio station on his own.

Clear Channel officials deny the charges in Morreale’s suit but they declined our interview requests. Instead, they sent us this statement, quote: — “Clear Channel’s sheer size isn’t what makes us a formidable competitor. It’s our excellence in understanding the needs and wants of consumers …. In order to do so, we compete hard but fairly and within the rules.”

In the past, the head of the company’s radio division, Randy Michaels, has been more outspoken — even flamboyant: He showed up at a 1999 broadcasters’ conference in the fashion of an ancient Egyptian noble. His entrance was a gag, but his message was serious:

RANDY MICHAELS (TAPE FROM 1999 CONFERENCE): My personal opinion is that this consolidation, the collision of deregulation and technology is going to create the most powerful and the most positive change for radio.

KARR: Michaels told his audience that anybody in the industry who wasn’t headed into the future of radio was gonna have a hard time staying in business.

MICHAELS (FROM TAPE): People are walking around saying, “Grrr. Bull*&@* satellite disk jockeys. Grrr. Virtual radio. Grrr. Bull*&^@, change. Bull (*&%@, owning 600 station ownership. Hey guys! WAL*MART IS OPEN! You can’t do anything about it! I can’t do anything about it!

KARR: Like Wal-Mart, Michaels said, big radio chains are good for almost everyone.

MICHAELS: There is more money in the economy because we’ve created lower costs to the consumer and at the end of the day the standard of living in this country is rising in direct proportion to the efficiencies we are creating.

BARRY FEY, ROCK PROMOTER: When Congress deregulated the radio business, I’m sure they didn’t have this in mind. This is just deregulation on steroids. It’s just gotten crazy.

KARR: Barry Fey helped create the rock touring business; he’s been promoting shows in Denver since the mid-sixties. Fey says Clear Channel has actually increased prices for consumers. He believes the company is using its deep pockets to outbid competitors — like him and Jesse Morreale — and try to price them out of the concert business.

FEY: You’re the little guy in the poker game. You got a limit. Some guy keeps on raising. And he has no hand. Pretty soon, you got to drop out, because you don’t have any money left.

KARR: Fey says that means consumers pay more for tickets. For instance, he says he bid against Clear Channel for an upcoming concert by singer and guitarist Bonnie Raitt.

FEY: We sent in our offer, for Bonnie Raitt $100,000. That’s what the agent asked for. Our ticket price was $30.

KARR: According to Fey, Clear Channel countered with an offer of a quarter million dollars.

FEY: That extra $150,000 is gonna be borne by 9000 people paying $15 extra.

KARR: Bottom line here is Clear Channel came in, outbid you, and consumers pay 50% more for the tickets?

FEY: That’s correct. Correct.

KARR: Were consumers willing to pay that much?

FEY: Well they don’t know they’re paying 50% more, they don’t know I was going to charge them thirty and they’re going to have to pay forty-five.

KARR: Barry Fey says of course Clear Channel has the right to outbid him. And of course Bonnie Raitt was right to take the higher offer. But a windfall for the artist, he says, is bad for consumers. Tickets went on sale two weeks ago and Barry Fey’s prediction was right on the money.

KARR: If consumers are willing to pay that much, who’s hurt?

FEY: The consumer. There’s not an infinite amount of money. Clear Channel makes you believe there is, but there’s not. People budget, and perhaps they would have bought two shows at thirty each, but now they’re only gonna buy one at forty-five.

KARR: The dispute in Denver isn’t the first time Clear Channel’s found itself under legal scrutiny: Two years ago, Florida’s attorney general accused a Clear Channel station of deceiving the public during an on-air contest:

DJ: Be the 25^th caller right now and win an instant 10 grand — it’s easy….

KARR: But it wasn’t as easy as listeners may’ve assumed: The station never mentioned that the contest was running nationwide….

WINNER: Oh my God, Thank you.

KARR: So listeners had no way of knowing that their odds of winning were a whole lot smaller. Clear Channel didn’t admit to any wrongdoing but it settled the matter by contributing eighty thousand dollars to Florida’s Consumer Frauds Trust Fund.

Meanwhile in Waco, Texas Clear Channel’s been accused of effectively controlling more stations than Federal law allows.

GARY MOSS, RADIO STATION OWNER: My argument is that they are illegally running a station, and by them doing this, they have an unfair advantage in Waco, Texas against the other independent guys in the market.

KARR: Gary Moss owns two of the thirteen commercial radio stations in Waco; Clear Channel owns the top four. Earlier this year, Moss filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission alleging that Clear Channel illegally runs a fifth station in violation of federal antitrust rules.

Two years ago the Justice Department ordered Clear Channel to sell off that fifth station because the company controlled too much of the market. In his petition Moss alleged that while on paper Clear Channel sold the station to a firm called Chase Radio in reality nothing changed: He says the station’s still in this building, along with the rest of Clear Channel’s and that it’s still run by Clear Channel.

MOSS: Well, I’m saying that Chase Radio, as well as some other corporations were put together, to get Clear Channel obvious penetration in markets, and fly under the radar of the Justice Department. This was a tactic to get around the laws. So that they can control markets.

KARR: Moss says Clear Channel’s size gives the company an unfair advantage.

MOSS: I am locked out of media buys, by national advertisers. Because Clear Channel can cluster their stations together and say look, we’ve got, you know, 65 share in the market. Or 70 share in the market. Or 80 percent share in the market. And you don’t even go shop anywhere else.

KARR: And according to Moss, Clear Channel’s dominance in the Waco market has had a big effect on listeners’ access to local news and public affairs.

MOSS: Ever since Clear Channel came into the market everybody’s staffs have dwindled down. Today, we no longer can support a news staff. We don’t have anybody on the street covering any of these events. City Council meetings, school board meetings … election returns. Things of that nature. Nor does Clear Channel. I think that hurts the public.

KARR: Clear Channel says its arrangement with Chase Radio is legal. A spokesperson told us the company works within the rules of the system and does what’s best for its advertisers, listeners and shareholders.

But Representative Howard Berman of California has misgivings: In January he called for an investigation of Clear Channel. Berman wrote that he was concerned that the firm was using “shell companies” to flout radio ownership limits in Waco and eight other cities.

Legal and regulatory questions aside what’s the impact of all this deregulation on our culture?

T-BONE BURNETT: Radio in the last ten or twenty years certainly hasn’t been a friend of music. It hasn’t been helping to spread or build community or any of the things that we thought it did in the past.

BONNIE RAITT (AT THE GRAMMY AWARDS): The Grammy for Producer of the Year was presented to T Bone Burnett.

KARR: T Bone Burnett may be the hottest record producer in the world right now — no thanks to radio:

Burnett put together the rootsy, even old-fashioned music on the soundtrack to the film O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU… which won five Grammy Awards this year. He says the record’s sold five million copies because the film was a great ad for the music. None of the credit goes to radio.

KARR: Why didn’t it get played on the radio? I mean why didn’t the radio stations play it?

BURNETT: Well, I mean, the reality is it didn’t test well.

KARR: The Future of Radio is tested on consumers like any other product — say, toothpaste or soft drinks. Burnett says marketing consultants play snippets of songs for potential listeners in focus groups. They’re looking for music that won’t prompt anyone to change the station and miss an ad. Music that’s safe. And once they’ve found it, they put it on the air in heavy rotation from coast to coast. There’s no room for experimentation in the Future of Radio.

BURNETT: So we’re selling them red jelly beans, and green jelly beans, and black jelly beans, and blue jelly beans. Yes. They’re all jelly beans, you know? We’re interested in a cheeseburgers. You got any cheeseburger? You know? “No. We don’t.”

We have given in to some sort of notion of sanctioned music or something in the recording world.

KARR: Burnett says radio still helps sell millions of pop records. That may be good for the music industry, he says, but it’s terrible for music: Some performers have started to second-guess their muses and try to make their music safe enough to fit into the formats on stations owned by Clear Channel and other big chains.

BURNETT: You start using these words like “programming” and “formatting” and “demographics” and all that stuff. And you get really far away from what we all liked about music in the first place, which was you hit that string and it made a crazy sound, you know? It’s very primal.

KARR: Burnett wonders what happened to that old idea of the airwaves as a public trust.

BURNETT: That is not happening. If I may be so bold as to say that the public’s interest in not being served by the modern day radio establishment.

KARR: If T Bone Burnett has his way, fans will challenge the idea of “sanctioned” music. But, like other critics of deregulation, he worries that it may be too late to save radio. That as consultants, committees and computers come to control more radio programming, consumer choice and public service will be as endangered as live, local D-Js. We’ll hear fewer voices and they’ll just speak to — and for — the bottom line.

MOYERS: We turn now to some news about the news, updates on stories we’ve been covering.

First, Marwan Zaloum, the Palestinian leader who trained human bombers for the Al Aqsa Brigades.

Last month, producer Bryan Rich interviewed Zaloum near the West Bank city of Hebron. Marwan Zaloum told Bryan Rich he took responsibility for the training and deployment of suicide bombers.

ZALOUM (TRANSLATED): As a Palestinian fighter, I have played a role. My role, of course, given my experience, and this life I have lived.

I was asked to be in a position of responsibility.

MOYERS: Zaloums’s Al-Aqsa Brigade has claimed responsibility for seven bombings in the past three months, including this attack in a Jerusalem market carried out by Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber.

ZALOUM (TRANSLATED): When Sharon was threatening to open the gates of hell, we were convinced that if we did not own planes, nor tanks, nor missiles, we had one strategic weapon, and that is faith.

We are obliged to use martyrdom operations.

I told you, the gates of hell, we did not want to open them from the beginning.

We say the martyrdom operation is a strategic weapon.

MOYERS: The deployment of these human bombers had landed Zaloum on Israel’s most wanted list, a list that has been getting shorter.

ZALOUM (TRANSLATED): I would like to tell you, without exaggeration, that perhaps I believe and I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am closer to gaining martyrdom, God permitting, and closer, minute by minute, to God almighty.

MOYERS: This past Monday night, Zaloum and his bodyguard were killed on the streets of Hebron.

The car they were traveling in was obliterated by a missile launched from an Israeli helicopter.

In revenge for Zaloum’s death, three Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the Israelis were dragged from their jail by fellow Palestinians and executed.

A mob of Palestinians, including children, soon gathered, spitting on the corpses.

Who knows how many Palestinian children even now are dreaming of becoming martyrs for their cause?

One news report after another says the supply of willing warriors is inexhaustible.

We have some new information about the family you met here last month in producer Tia Lessin’s report on Anser Mehmood.

Anser Mehmood came to America from Pakistan in 1989 on a tourist visa and stayed to work.

Like millions of other immigrants, Mehmood had decided to build a life here and brought his family over from Pakistan, even though his visa had expired.

But in the wake of September 11, Mehmood came under FBI suspicion because he was a truck driver licensed to haul hazardous materials. And on the morning of the attack on the Pentagon, he failed to make a scheduled delivery to Washington, D.C.

Mehmood was taken into custody, along with several thousand other men of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin. He was placed in a New York City detention center.

When we first broadcast this story, Mehmood’s wife, Uzma, had been forced to sell their possessions to pay for food, the bank was threatening to foreclose on their home, and the immigration and naturalization service was threatening deportation.

Uzma and her children had no option but to return home to Pakistan.

UZMA: My kids are used to this life.

It’s not easy for them to go back. They start their education here, and it’s difficult for them to start over in Pakistan. Their education, everything will be ruined.

You know? It, it will take time to get everything back.

MEHMOOD: What happened yesterday? Why did you stay outside?

HARRIS MEHMOOD: Why did I stay outside?

MOYERS: In the days before they left, the boys had their last telephone conversation with their father, who called from jail.

MEHMOOD: I want to see you home before dark, that’s it.

MOYERS: Uzma and her sons are now back in Karachi, Pakistan.

The teenage boys have yet to return to school, as they can neither read nor write in their parents native tongue, Urdu.

Mehmood remains here in custody, although it turned out that it was his company that canceled his September 11 shipment to Washington when they learned of the Pentagon bombing.

Mehmood has been imprisoned for over six months, many spent in solitary confinement.

At the beginning of this month, after pleading guilty to one count of using an altered social security card to secure employment, Anser Mehmood was sentenced to time served.

He remains in a New Jersey jail. The INS has yet to tell him when his deportation back to his family in Pakistan will occur.

And finally, we showed you this memorandum two weeks ago.

It was written by energy giant ExxonMobil to the White House, plotting the removal of the scientist Robert Watson from the chairmanship of world’s panel on climate change.

ExxonMobil has led the movement to discredit the threat of global warming, while Robert Watson heads the scientific community that takes it seriously.

MOYERS: When did you learn that Exxon Mobil had you on its hit list?

DR. ROBERT WATSON: I’d heard a number of months ago that a memo had been sent to the White House arguing that I should be displaced from the head of the inter governmental panel on climate change.

MOYERS: Why? What do they have to fear from you?

WATSON: I think they don’t like the message that I’m portraying.

I represent thousands of scientists across the world, and the conclusion of these scientists is that the earth’s climate is changing and it can be attributed to human activities.

And the dominant reason that we’re changing the earth’s climate is because we’re increasing the concentrations of a gas called carbon dioxide, and that comes from the combustion of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas.

MOYERS: This week, ExxonMobil’s wishes were granted.

Robert Watson was voted out of the chairmanship panel and replaced by one of the current vice-chairs, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

MOYERS: And now a look at stories coming up on NPR radio this weekend.

LYNN NEARY: Hi, I’m Lynn Neary with NPR News.

Listen to NPR’s WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY as we examine the legacy of an historic protest for disabled rights 25 years ago. It started the movement to led to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Also, a conversation with Australian singer songwriter Paul Kelly.

He’s a big star down under, and he’s looking for a bigger audience in this country.

For those stories and the news, tune into in to your local public radio station or visit our web site at npr.org.

MOYERS: This week, we celebrate the 438th birthday of William Shakespeare.

All these years later, Shakespeare’s alive — not only on the stage but in the movies. And there’s a new one on Turner Network Television, featuring Patrick Stewart.

Here’s Patrick Stewart playing a wealthy and egomaniacal Texas rancher named John Lear.

PATRICK STEWART AS JOHN LEAR: From today, I am giving the rank over to you three gals.

I want to get all this settled now so there won’t be any fighting amongst you after I’m gone.

DAUGHTER COLE: Pa, are you feeling all right?

LEAR: I’m feeling fine, Cole yeah, just fine.

I’ve even going to lead the round-up this year, just like always. But I won’t be here forever, and I want to get this matter settled.

DAUGHTER SUZANNA: And who gets which part of the land?

LEAR: Oh, Suzanna, I suppose that depends.

SUZANNA: On what?

LEAR: On who loves their father the most.

MOYERS: Patrick Stewart, whose first role many years ago was in a Shakespearean play. Now as John Lear, Texas rancher, the king of Texans.

It was it was Mr. Stewart’s idea to take the story of King Lear abroad to a wholly different landscape.

His crew wanted a place hospitable to ambition, arrogance, megalomania, and treachery, so naturally they decided on Texas.

My guest knows about these things.

We are both Texans.

He even edited my first book 32 years ago, but survived that banal beginning to enjoy a long and distinguished career as a literary editor in New York.

Soon after his retirement, Herman Gollob went to a performance of Hamlet in New York and fell head over heels again for the work of William Shakespeare.

In two weeks, he’ll publish a memoir of his passion. It’s called ME AND SHAKESPEARE.

Welcome.

HERMAN GOLLOB: Thank you, Bill, good to be here.

MOYERS: The surprising thing is that when I first met you 32 years ago, 33 or 34 years ago, you even talked about how your father had had you memorize Shakespeare when you were ten years old.

GOLLOB: Oh, my Dad, yes, indeed. My daddy had me actually learn the only major speeches of Shakespeare’s great villains– Iago, Richard III, Edmund the Bastard, and Cassius.

MOYERS: Just the villains?

GOLLOB: The villains, only the villains.

MOYERS: Why? Why the villains?

GOLLOB: Well, it was… I’ll tell you, it was… wasn’t so he could trot me out in front of company and I could, you know, perform my, you know, thespic wizardry.

He had a didactic purpose.

He said, “Son, when you grow up, you’re going to run into a lot of greedy, vicious, selfish, envious hombres, and they’re going to be very, very smart, and they’re very sneaky.

They’re going to want to make you think that they’re your friends.

But, believe me, whenever they get a chance, they’re going to stab you in the back and take everything you’ve got.”

MOYERS: Yeah.

GOLLOB: Great motivating, right? Great motivation.

MOYERS: Great preparation for publishing in New York.

GOLLOB: I mean, you know, the end of innocence for little Herb. You know, no WINNIE THE POOH for me and… no, no WIND IN THE WILLOWS, man. It was Iago, et cetera, et cetera.

MOYERS: And did you learn them?

GOLLOB: Yeah, I learn… I learned some of them, as a matter of fact, I did.

MOYERS: Remember any of them?

GOLLOB: You mean now?

MOYERS: Yeah.

GOLLOB: Yeah, I think I could remember a little of “Cassius.” Dare I?

MOYERS: Yes.

GOLLOB: Okay, so I set the scene just a bit, so we’ll know where we are. This is early on Act I, Scene I. I guess it’s Scene I, Brutus and Cassius, they’re standing outside the arena.

Inside the games are being played in front of, you know, Caesar and Calpernia and his retinue. And Cassius has been trying to plant the seeds of doubt and suspicion in Brutus’ mind so that he can join the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar.

And while they’re talking, there’s this great roar comes from the crowd.

And Brutus starts to… Cassius says, you know, “looks like they’re going to heap some more honors on old… old Caesar.”

And Cassius looks at him and says, “My man, he doth destroyed the narrow world like a colossus.

And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves, men that sometimes aren’t masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we were underlings.

Brutus and Caesar, what should be in that Caesar?

Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

Upon what meet that doth though, Caesar, feed that he has grown so great.

Age, thou art shame?

Rome has lost the breed of noble men.”

Well, I dropped a few lines here and there, but…

MOYERS: But ten years old when you learned this.

GOLLOB: Yeah.

MOYERS: And your father wanted you to learn this so you would know there were villains in the world?

GOLLOB: That’s right. Well, you know.

MOYERS: And was he right?

GOLLOB: Well, as a matter of fact…yes

MOYERS: Did you learn this?

GOLLOB: As the years went on, I guess I did meet up with some of these hombres. In fact, I might have been one of them myself at times, you know. Nobody’s perfect.

You learn the lines of Iago and Cassius, et cetera, when you’re a kid and it…tends to warp you.

But you know, coming to this later on in life, Bill, coming back to Shakespeare decades later and sort of re-acquainting myself with these villains and even with some of the sympathetic characters that go astray, I saw a moral principle emerging, if I may use the term.

Namely, how… how dangerous and dehumanizing it is to exalt the intellect over the heart. Pure intellect breeds egotism.

And what’s the great moral struggle of our time has always been egotism versus altruism since the beginnings of time.

I mean, you could say the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel were the allegories about he dark consequences of intellectual hubris, you know?

I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the ethics of the fathers the book of the Talmud which is, you know, the moral sayings…

MOYERS: No, no.

GOLLOB: …and wisdom of the sages.

And rather puts poses that issue in terms of two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I?”

The egotist is for himself alone, and he is ruthlessly ambitious, greedy, riddled, eaten alive within the… greedy for gain, greedy for power.

MOYERS: But isn’t the conflict in Shakespeare between the ego and the altruist, between the egoism and altruism?

GOLLOB: Well, now… well, sure, it’s all good — ego and altruism, good and evil, life and death.

You find that throughout Shakespeare, as you do as a matter of fact through the Bible.

Julius Caesar put his finger on this issue, as far as I’m concerned, when he talks about Cassius to Mark Antony. He says he thinks too much.

“Such men as he be never at heart’s ease while as they behold greater than themselves. And therefore are they very dangerous?”

The irony is that you… look, he could have been just as well talking about Iago or Edmund the Bastard or Richard III.

And as I said, the irony is that he is actually talking about himself and doesn’t know it.

Because Brutus and his soliloquy a little later on when he’s trying to talk himself into assassinating Caesar, trying to rationalize this, says the abuse of greatness is when it just joins remorse from power, and to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known whether his affections swayed more than his reason.

The ironic thing is that he is letting his reason overwhelm his affections at that time.

MOYERS: Do you have a favorite villain in Shakespeare?

GOLLOB: Richard III, I guess, I love. I can’t quote any Richard III.

So I said, well, ironic, I actually played it when I was studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, my first year there. And I had this heavy southern accent.

But, you know, John Barton says that the closest thing to an Elizabethan accent is a Southwestern accent, particularly a Texas accent. So you and I have been talking Elizabethan English all our lives.

MOYERS: If we could only write it.

GOLLOB: And didn’t know it. Well, we haven’t tried yet. Bring up that blank verse.

MOYERS: The fact of the matter is that for all of his understanding of dark deeds and black hearts, for all of his temptations with evil, Shakespeare was not a moralizer, was he?

GOLLOB: No, he was not a moralizer. He was a…a moralist. A moralizer believes in moral certitude. A moralist believes in moral ambiguity.

Shakespeare had this uncanny God-like, and I mean it, God-like understanding of human nature, the human condition.

MOYERS: God-like?

GOLLOB: God, yeah, you know… Andre Gide once said, “Shakespeare is not quite God.”

MOYERS: But he knew the human heart?

GOLLOB: He knew the human heart. And he knew the human heart like few people, like few mortals do.

It’s the contradictoriness of human nature that Shakespeare saw. One minute we’re good, the next minute evil. One minute we’re chaste, next minute lascivious. Selfish one minute, you know…

MOYERS: “Who so firm cannot be seduced?”

GOLLOB: “…be seduced,” where is that from?

MOYERS: Oh.

GOLLOB: Who so firm… one moment, one moment please.

Cassius, after Brutus and the guys have gone off stage in that same scene, has this little weenie soliloquy, okay?

And he’s very happy because he sees that his words have begun to take effect on Brutus.

And he says, “Well, Brutus, thou art noble.

Yet I see thy honorable metal may be wrought from that that is disposed.

Therefore it is meet that noble minds keep ever with their likes for who so firm cannot be seduced.”

Now, you think, as an actor, I’d love those lines.

These are great actor’s parts that… Shakespeare’s villains. Because, you know, Shakespeare’s villains are actors themselves.

MOYERS: No question this was written by a man of the theater, right?

GOLLOB: Well, that’s why no one but Shakespeare could have written these plays.

I don’t want to raise that can of worms right now. But…

MOYERS: Was there one Shakespeare?

GOLLOB: Only a guy who loved the theater, knew the theater could have written these plays, and also the…

MOYERS: And knew the ear, the human ear.

GOLLOB: Yeah, well…

MOYERS: As well as the human heart.

GOLLOB: Yeah, but remember what he did with the language, what he did with iambic pentameter was to revolutionize it.

MOYERS: Give me an example.

GOLLOB: I’ll give you one thing that Ralph Fiennes did that I found very interesting.

When he came out, he burst on stage when he did the “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

And he said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

Well, you know, that’s the iambic pentameter– “to be or not to be, that\is\the question.”

Most actors do not do that.

They use the prosaic, “to be or not to be, that is the question.”

Two interpretations.

But the way Fiennes did it is he’s been struggling with himself and he said, “No, that \is\the question.”

The other one is, “that is the question.”

It seems the more logical…

MOYERS: Yeah.

GOLLOB: …rational way to do it.

These are the subtle things that can be brought in a script, just by changing the… changing the meter.

MOYERS: If Shakespeare were around today and you could assign him one modern figure about whom to write, who would it be?

GOLLOB: I think, get a load of this, that LBJ…

MOYERS: Hmm.

GOLLOB: …would be the greatest subject…

MOYERS: Why?

GOLLOB: …for Shakespeare.

Complicated and contradictory, a true tragic hero, I think, a man who could do great things.

Well, you know him better than I do, Bill, of course.

MOYERS: I know what you mean. Here was a man who was… his heart was saying, “I don’t want to go to war.”

GOLLOB: Yeah.

MOYERS: “I know what’s going to happen if I go to war.” But his head was saying, his…

GOLLOB: Exactly.

MOYERS: His head, yearning to please the rationalist, went to war. His head took him where his heart didn’t want to go.

GOLLOB: But that must have worked with him all his life, Bill.

MOYERS: He was a… a war between egoism and altruism. The good that I would do, I don’t. The evil that I wouldn’t do, I do. I mean, this was Lyndon Johnson. But it’s not untypical of so many of us ambitious people.

Right?

GOLLOB: Let me tell you, we all connect with Shakespeare in some way or another.

You know, the events, the happenings in Shakespeare, we can sort of relate to what’s going on in the world around us in our personal lives.

You mentioned my daddy when he, when he was dying of cancer in a Houston hospital. You know, I went to see him. You know, I lived 2,000 miles away, and I couldn’t be there all the time.

You know, I’m an only child, no family there, so I was really all he had. And I, you know, I couldn’t be there the… during that…during his entire siege.

But he was… well, he looked sort of like Lear — had his white hair, his long, white hair, this white mustache. And he was in great pain, all these tubes coming out of him.

You know, and he was really my best friend, my father. I mean, he was a great man, the most honest, decent, ethical man I’ve ever known.

And here he was dying in great pain, and he said, “You know, son, I just want to go to the other side.”

And I can hear in my mind the lines from the Duke of Kent, at the end of King Lear.

“He hates him, who would on the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.”

And I was stretching my old man out longer. I didn’t want him to die actually. I figured, you know, a miracle will happen, he’ll get better. And of course he didn’t.

MOYERS: And at his funeral?

GOLLOB: I quoted from Julius Caesar, from the… or Mark Antony’s funeral oration over Brutus: “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him, that nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘this was a man.'”

Shakespeare actually believed in the mystery… the mysteriousness of life.

That’s one of the keys to his work.

John Keats, my favorite romantic poet, defined the essence of Shakespeare. He said, “Shakespeare is negative capability.”

That’s what defines him, which is the capacity of being in the world of doubt, mystery, and uncertainty without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.

Shakespeare is not wanton for that irritable reaching after fact or reason. He loved the mystery…mysteriousness of the world.

MOYERS: What’s the key to reading, in just one sentence?

If you want to go in 2002 and discover Shakespeare, what kind of ear do you take?

GOLLOB: The best way to appreciate Shakespeare is to see it. Rent tapes if you can. Go to the theater. I don’t care whether it’s an amateur production or it’s a little, you know, it’s a little, you know, a middle school production. Go and see Shakespeare.

MOYERS: Why?

GOLLOB: Because they are meant to be performed. They’re meant to be heard.

People used to say in Elizabethan times, “Let’s go hear a Shakespeare play.” Now, yeah, sometimes the vocabulary’s a little hard, you know.

You might want to look at the book to see what they’re talking about. Sometimes the syntax might be a little convoluted. But still, the richest language that has ever been written for the stage is Shakespearean language. It can shake you to the core even though you don’t understand every doggone word of it.

MOYERS: Thank you, Herman.

GOLLOB: Thanks, Bill

MOYERS: Herman Gollob, ME AND SHAKESPEARE.

MOYERS: It’s been ten years.

Ten years ago this week, Los Angeles burned.

April 1992 its streets erupted in violence, and when the smoke cleared, 55 people were dead.

The trigger was the verdict in a trial.

Four police officers stood accused of beating Rodney King after he led them on a wild chase through the streets.

The black man’s ordeal was captured on videotape, but the verdict was not guilty.

The policemen went free, and South Central Los Angeles blew.

The photographer Ted Soqui was on the scene ten years ago, and he’s gone back to see what has changed.

TED SOQUI: Everything seemed to be on fire in the city after the verdicts came down, because everyone thought it was going to be guilty.

Just fires everywhere, big plumes of black smoke, and it was this huge old structure, maybe about three, four stories tall.

People were like dancing through the smoke and driving through it like a little game.

Fire trucks finally showed up, and they looked at the building and wrote it off.

They didn’t even try to put out the fire. The fire department drove off.

The weird irony is that the building did not burn down. It actually withstood the fire.

I went inside the building and there’s no scars from there. Everything’s been replaced. It turned into a swap meet.

SECURITY GUARD: It was like a war zone out here. Next thing I know, all the power went out in the neighborhood for about three days.

FRAZIER: And that’s when all the people were coming out and saying, “Well, the police is not stopping anything and they’re not doing anything about it, so we’re just going to do what we want to do.”

MAN IN PARKING LOT: And a lot of people who had businesses here after the riot just folded up and left. A lot of people lost their jobs on account of it, the riot. Lost their livelihood.

SOQUI: Olympic Boulevard and Albany. There was an apartment building for Latino families, and it was affordable. It was huge, and it burned down in the riots.

The people that were living there seemed to be almost like this was the way life is, and we’ve got to start again. There wasn’t any anger.

It was like, “Okay, got to find my, you know, possessions, whatever I can. I’m going to start again.”

It’s still an empty field.

And I assure you, if that happened on some of the nicer parts of the city, if an apartment building burned down, it would be replaced.

But since it was a Latino immigrant place to move into, it wasn’t replaced.

MAN AT GAS STATION: A lot of people use the phrase, “Well, they just burn up their own neighborhood and hurt themselves.” Well, come on. They don’t feel like this is our neighborhood. They feel like they don’t own anything, right?

FRAZIER: They came together and looted the stores. It was no such thing as, “This is mine and this is yours,” or, “You’re Spanish and I’m black.” It was like, “Get what you want.”

WOMAN IN PARKING LOT: I think that you can sense kind of an undercurrent just from talking to people that we are not out of the woods yet at all.

SOQUI: I saw this scene on Adams Avenue. And I was taken aback by the devastation of what the fires from the rioting have done to the businesses and buildings of the street.

Then I saw these kids, and they walked up to me and they said, “Man, you need to get out of here because there was some photographer just down here and he just got robbed.” They were nice little kids.

It just didn’t make sense to see these little children walking down the street with all this destruction.

So coming back to it was kind of a trip, and it feels just as depressed and heavy and xenophobic. The people on the street, they watch you, you know.

But then as I was taking pictures, I saw these kids on bicycles, and they were approximately the same age as the kids back in the original photo in ’92.

MAN WITH RABBIT: Race relations hasn’t improved, you know? And as long as it doesn’t improve, it’s going to stay just the way it is.

MAN AT GAS STATION: Everything is there. All you need is a spark and it would happen again. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t see any fundamental differences between then and now.

MAN IN RED SHIRT: If there was another riot, it would kind of surprise me, and I feel that it’s not necessary in our evolved times where we should be able to all get along.

FRAZIER: I think they’re just as angry. It just doesn’t show as much.

MAN IN PARKING LOT: If they had another riot here that would be one of the biggest mistakes they would make. A big mistake. Burning down anyone else’s home or property is not going to solve anything. All it’s going to do is put you and myself and anybody else in the hole.

SOQUI: It’s not a very friendly place, and it could be.

There’s a lot of great people, but the conditions of the area, there’s nowhere to work. The schools aren’t serving the public.

The streets are beat up, the lampposts are old, and it’s kind of a shame.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

MOYERS: That was the photographer Ted Soqui.

That’s it for this week.

Once again, it’s your turn.

Go to pbs.org and tell us what you think about media mergers, and what you will do when you retire.

For NOW, I’m Bill Moyers.

This transcript was entered on March 27, 2015

The post Virtual Radio, The Massing of the Media, Los Angeles 10 Years Later appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post first appeared at ProPublica.

(Photo: Sean MacEntee/flickr CC 2.0)

Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission voted to ease the way for cities to become Internet service providers. So-called municipal broadband is already a reality in a few towns, often providing Internet access and faster service to rural communities that cable companies don’t serve.

The cable and telecommunications industry have long lobbied against city-run broadband, arguing that taxpayer money should not fund potential competitors to private companies.

The telecom companies have what may seem like an unlikely ally: states. Roughly 20 states have restrictions against municipal broadband.

And the attorneys general in North Carolina and Tennessee have recently filed lawsuits in an attempt to overrule the FCC and block towns in these states from expanding publicly funded Internet service.

North Carolina’s attorney general argued in a suit filed last month that the “FCC unlawfully inserted itself between the State and the State’s political subdivisions.” Tennessee’s attorney general filed a similar suit in March.

Tennessee has hired one of the country’s largest telecom lobbying and law firms, Wiley Rein, to represent the state in its suit. The firm, founded by a former FCC chairman, has represented AT&T, Verizon and Qwest, among others.

James Tierney, director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School, said it is not unusual for attorneys general to seek outside counsel for specialized cases that they view as a priority.

Asked about the suit, the Tennessee attorney general’s office told ProPublica, “This is a question of the state’s sovereign ability to define the role of its local governmental units.” North Carolina Attorney General’s office said in a statement that the “legal defense of state laws by the Attorney General’s office is a statutory requirement.”

As the New York Times detailed last year, state attorneys general have become a major target of corporate lobbyists and contributors including AT&T, Comcast and T-Mobile.

North Carolina is no exception. The state’s Attorney General Roy Cooper received roughly $35,000 from the telecommunications industry in his 2012 run for office. Only the state’s retail industry gave more.

The donations are just a small part of contributions the industry has made in the states. In North Carolina’s 2014 elections, the telecommunications industry gave a combined $870,000 to candidates in both parties, which made it one of the top industries to contribute that year. Candidates in Tennessee received nearly $921,000 from AT&T and other industry players in 2014.

The FCC’s decision came after two towns – City of Wilson in North Carolina and Chattanooga in Tennessee – appealed to the agency to be able to expand their networks.

The vote has rattled some companies. In a government filing earlier this year, Comcast cited the FCC’s decision as a risk to the company’s business: “Any changes to the regulatory framework applicable to any of our services or businesses could have a negative impact on our businesses and results of operations.”

If the court upholds the FCC’s authority to preempt restrictions in North Carolina and Tennessee, it may embolden other cities to file petitions with the agency, according to lawyer Jim Baller, who represents Wilson and the Chattanooga Electric Power Board. “A victory by the FCC would be a very welcome result for many communities across America,” said Baller.

For some residents in and outside of Chattanooga, clearing the way to city-run broadband would mean the sort of faster Internet access that others might take for granted.

For 12 years, Eva VanHook, 39, of Georgetown, Tennessee, lived with a satellite broadband connection so slow that she’d read a book while waiting for a web page to load. In order for her son to access online materials for his school assignments, she’d drive him 12 miles to their church parking lot, where he could access faster WiFi.

Charter, the local Internet service provider, declined several requests by her husband to build lines out to her home. Only last month did Charter connect her home to the Internet. “Even the possibility to jump on [the local utility’s] gigabit network would blow our minds right now,” VanHook said. “There is nothing faster than Chattanooga. Just through meeting them and hearing them speak and having them understand what’s going on, that’s the kind of place I want to do business.”

Leticia Miranda is a reporting fellow at ProPublica. She is a recent graduate of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she was a dean’s fellow. Her work has appeared in both national and local outlets including The Nation, Colorlines and City Limits. You can follow her on Twitter @letidmiranda.

The post How States Are Fighting to Keep Towns From Offering Their Own Broadband appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This piece originally appeared on Medium.

When Comcast tried to merge with Time Warner Cable last year, reaction was swift and negative. Not many people liked the idea of America’s largest and least loved cable company getting any bigger; the deal collapsed after hundreds of thousands of Americans spoke out and federal regulators signaled that they would not let it go forward.

Big Cable should have gotten the message. But here we are just a year later with a new cable mega-merger in the works. This time, Charter Communications wants to snatch up Time Warner Cable along with Bright House Networks.

Unfortunately, this deal hasn’t received nearly as much public attention as the Comcast-Time Warner Cable proposal. The harms it presents are just as serious, however — serious enough for lawmakers and regulators to give this outrageous proposal the attention it merits.

Let’s start with some basics. The three merging companies would create a new Mega Cable company, controlling about one-third of the nation’s cable and cable-broadband markets. In addition, the new colossus would own programming, including regional sports networks all across the country, and would completely dominate some of America’s largest media markets, including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Charlotte, Tampa Bay, Orlando and St. Louis. Finally, the combined companies would have an anti-competitive incentive to preference their streaming-video offering over that of competitors.

When you add it up, the new company would look a lot like, well, Comcast. Yes, this merger would create a new Comcast — a national cable giant with the ability and the incentive to thwart competition, diversity, and consumer choice.

And it gets worse. Because they don’t compete in any markets, Comcast and the new Mega Cable company would stand shoulder to shoulder in control of more than 70 percent of the high-speed broadband market. The two companies would have no incentive to compete against each other, but every incentive to coordinate against their shared marketplace competitors.

Thanks to services like Netflix, Hulu and Sling, television is in the midst of a creative renaissance. These emerging services are finally breaking the decades-long stranglehold of the cable bundle on American consumers who have been forced to collectively fork over billions of dollars in monthly cable bills, largely to pay for channels they never watch. The services’ growth has been fabulous for consumers, content creators and workers in the entertainment industry. Now, just when competition is finally gaining traction, the Comcast-Mega Cable duopoly could squash it.

Then there is the issue of independent programming. Already, too much of the cable dial is filled with content produced by a handful of media conglomerates. When the vast majority of cable homes are served by just two companies, it will become even harder for independent and diverse voices to gain a foothold. That is especially problematic because Comcast and the new Mega Cable will own content that directly competes with independent programmers.

That kind of dominance leads to homogenization of content and the marginalization of independent voices, cutting right to the heart of the public interest in diverse cable offerings that give voters a broad range of perspectives on the issues of the day.

Finally, there is the issue of price and customer service. To finance this deal, Charter will be taking on $27 billion in new debt — about $1,142 for each subscriber. To keep its lenders and creditors happy, the merged company will have every incentive to raise prices and slash service. And because it will face very little competition, the company will run little risk in doing so. How much more beneficial it would be if Charter invested those billions in building cable competition in presently uncompetitive markets!

The bottom line is that this merger is no less threatening to consumers than the Comcast-Time Warner Cable tie-up would have been. It points a dagger directly at competition, diversity in programming and consumer rights. Before it’s too late, the public should send a message telling regulators to once again stand up to the cable giants and stop this harmful merger.

More than 200,000 people have already spoken out, but there’s still time to speak out if you have not already. Take action today to stop this affront to the public interest.

The post The Scariest Cable Merger Nobody in Washington Is Talking About appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

What has the Internet done for presidential candidates lately?

In a recent Nation article, civic technology advocate Micah Sifry heralds the Clinton and Sanders campaigns for using the network to organize potential voters in a way “that has never existed before in American politics.” Leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones and Facebook accounts, they’ve managed to reach millions of people outside traditional politics.

Vox’s Timothy B. Lee credits the Internet for disrupting establishment politics and giving rise to outsider candidates like Sen. Sanders and Donald Trump. Trump’s success “was aided as much by his popularity on cable television as on social media,“ writes Lee. But it’s the candidates’ use of direct-to-voter platforms like Twitter that is “only going to accelerate in the next few elections.”

That’s something. The Internet has revolutionized the ways presidential candidates connect with potential voters. But what have the presidential candidates done in exchange to protect the network that’s become essential to their efforts?

Not much, according to the Free Press Action Fund’s 2016 Internet Voter Guide, which tracks the candidates’ positions on the most pressing Internet issues of the day, like Net neutrality, privacy and the high cost of Internet access.

It’s one thing for candidates to use the Internet to help mobilize their base. But it’s not enough, unless they also recognize that protecting an open, secure and affordable Internet is essential to their own best interests, and to the future of democracy.

According to the Guide, expanding access to the Internet — at a time when more than 34 million Americans lack truly high-speed Internet at home — doesn’t factor in the policy platforms of most of the candidates.

Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have been silent on the issue, and Gov. John Kasich has suggested that consumers are to blame for high broadband prices. In the Republican field, only Sen. Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the race last Tuesday night, backed legislation to expand affordable Wi-Fi deployment and further use of unlicensed spectrum for Internet access.

The Clinton and Sanders campaigns have made proposals to expand access and make connections more affordable to everyone, but are light on specifics.

No candidate, Democrat or Republican, has supported strong, pro-consumer encryption measures. Cruz, Rubio and Trump have all challenged Apple’s right to protect the security of its users from government snooping, and both Democratic candidates vaguely advocated for the FBI and Apple to work together for a solution.

Yet securing our phones is something digital rights advocates are passionate about. Last month, smartphone users gathered in more than 25 cities across the country to protest a court order demanding that Apple assist the FBI in breaking into an iPhone.

Cruz and Trump each oppose the Net Neutrality protections that millions of Americans fought for. Cruz recently signed on to legislation that would repeal the Federal Communications Commission’s open Internet rules — joining former Republican contender Marco Rubio as a cosponsor of the bill.

The Republican opposition to the open Internet is baffling when you line it up against the opinions of their GOP base. According to polling in 2014 and 2015, a vast majority of those who identify as Republican voters support Net neutrality protections. To their credit, both Democratic candidates have advocated for enforcing the Net neutrality rules.

The frequent disconnect between campaigns’ use of the Internet and candidates’ positions on Internet rights is a problem.

Internet voters are a growing constituency with a track record of political action. They are small-business owners who want to reach a larger market, parents and educators fighting for children who don’t have the Internet access they need to do their homework, and people who are struggling to stay connected, apply for jobs online and fully participate in the political process.

They came out by the millions in 2012 to defeat legislation — the ill-fated PIPA and SOPA bills — that would have blacked out large tracts of Internet content without due process. They formed a diverse coalition of online privacy advocates in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations. And in 2015, more than 4 million people pushed the FCC to turn against the influential phone and cable lobby and pass strong Net Neutrality protections.

Candidates ignore Internet voters and the issues we care about at their peril. While they may embrace the network as a catalyst for small “d” democratic organizing, they can’t work against the interests of those who are fighting to keep it open and available to everyone.

The post If Presidential Candidates Love the Internet, They Need to Set It Free appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

“For the reasons set forth is this opinion, we deny the petitions for review.”  Those were the sweetest words I’ve heard in a long while, as the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the ridiculous efforts of the big telecom companies to derail the Federal Communications Commission’s open-internet — or “net-neutrality” — rules.

The decision capped years of struggle between open-internet advocates and the cable and telecom conglomerates. Without strong net-neutrality rules, broadband providers could exercise intolerable levels of gatekeeper control over what users can do, see and say online. The FCC rules just affirmed by the court prevent them from playing favorites by slowing down or even blocking particular websites and applications.

This victory is a testament to the indefatigable work of millions of advocates across the nation who set out to correct a heinous mistake the FCC made 14 years ago. Back in 2002, under the guiding hand of then-Chairman Michael Powell, the commission began surrendering its power to protect consumers. It declared cable broadband an “information service” rather than the more accurate “telecommunications service” that would have permitted closer oversight.

It was the heyday of the Bush-Cheney administration’s rage to deregulate, and the industry lobbyists and the members of Congress sponsored by them applauded the muzzling of the commission’s watchdog duties.  At issue: Is the broadband internet the sole province and plaything of a few giant providers, to be exploited for profits alone, or do we the people get a say in how our communications ecosystem can advance the common good?

I was a commissioner at the time and dissented as strenuously as I could. I warned that the decision would hurt consumers, cripple regulators and undermine the public interest. The internet, I argued, is the greatest engine for economic opportunity and “small-d” democracy since moveable type. We should never have engaged in linguistic jumping jacks to find new ways for broadband providers to over-charge and under-deliver.

I took this message on the road — to public forums and town meetings across America.  Citizens of all stripes were inspiring in their responses. They knew the stakes and took up the fight, calling and marching and emailing and demonstrating for enduring open-internet protections throughout the Bush years and into the Obama administration. They called for a relatively easy solution: for the FCC to reverse the Powell commission’s disastrous deregulation with legally sustainable open-internet rules. Yet time and Republicans — and many Democrats — made excuses for their spineless deference to, and their financial dependence on, Big Cable and Telecom.

Twice the courts rejected weak-tea rules proposed by an FCC that lacked the courage to do its duty on the public’s behalf. In 2014 the agency appeared, once again, ready to roll over. Its latest inchoate proposal would have allowed corporate internet service providers (ISPs) to create fast lanes for the privileged few. These paid-prioritization schemes for the wealthy 1 percent would have pushed nonprofit, independent, diverse and niche voices to the slow lane, choking off and marginalizing the public’s participation in the developing discourse of democracy.

I was thrilled when once again the people spoke up. They rallied from the teeming boroughs of New York City to tiny Baraboo, Wisconsin. They deluged Congress and the FCC with calls and emails that more than once crashed the FCC’s website. Again, the public spoke clearly:  Do not compromise online free speech; correct the Powell-era mistake; and properly reclassify broadband.

Having dedicated much of my career to creating a communications landscape that empowers citizens to make change, I was of course enormously gratified to see everyday Americans stand up to the corporate lobbies. I was even more pleased when the FCC finally heard the people’s demands. In February 2015 the commission righted the wrong and reclassified broadband as a communications service.  

Obviously Big Cable and Big Telecom were having none of it. They immediately turned their lobbyists loose on Capitol Hill to use every means in their playbook to punish the FCC. They floated budget cuts and appropriations riders to nullify the new rules, and they litigated to overturn them.

The court knew better. The facts and law were always on the public’s side, and now the court has upheld every word of the FCC’s new soundly based rules.  The ruling affirms, for all to see, that the FCC does indeed have the legal authority it needs to protect the people’s interest in an open internet.

The industry is pushing back — hard. Though the decision should have put to rest every remaining question, AT&T has already signaled it will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. And just as the good news on the open internet was breaking, House Speaker Paul Ryan listed ending net neutrality as one of his priorities. With Ryan’s blessing, appropriations riders that would hamstring the FCC’s ability to protect consumers and promote the public interest have already passed the House. It’s up to the Senate to block them, and that will prove a tough fight.  

You would think the  providers and policymakers would accept reality by now — that instead of spending so many millions of dollars and so much time lobbying, they would begin deploying and maintaining fast, affordable and competitive broadband across the nation.  Just think of how many scores of cities could have been lighted by now.

So it’s grass-roots time again. We need another uprising of public-interest warriors who will call, demand and rally as they have done twice before. We need to dust off our marching shoes to defend the open internet from the cable and telecom titans. We’ve won an important legal battle, but the fight against entrenched special interests demands constant vigilance. But now we know we can win if we commit to fight and fulfill our obligations as citizens of a self-governing nation.   

Onward to the battles ahead!

The post Net Neutrality Ruling Finally Rights a Terrible Wrong appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post originally appeared at The American Prospect.

Michael Flynn, Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller aren’t the only Donald Trump surrogates who’ve had a very bad couple of weeks.

Ajit Pai, the president’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, was pilloried by The New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards last week after his agency released a rapid-fire series of rulings in a move that resembled Trump’s rush of executive orders. Chairman Pai’s directives, which he issued with zero public input, undermine the open internet and undercut the agency’s Lifeline program, which is designed to make the internet more affordable for families with low incomes.

Pai’s attack on Lifeline drew a swift response. A series of letters from dozens of Democrats on Capitol Hill asserted that Pai’s move to prevent nine internet service providers (ISPs) from serving Lifeline participants was “unfairly punishing” families in need.

Pai managed to draw criticism on the same Sunday from two of the nation’s most prominent and influential newspapers, even as members of Congress piled on. But the condemnation is justified: Pai has long served the interests of massive phone and cable companies, while shafting those ordinary Americans of whom Trump claims to be so fond.

“Many of Mr. Pai’s moves would hurt the people who have the least power,” wrote the Times’ editors. “Congress created the FCC to help all Americans obtain access to communication services without discrimination and at fair prices. Mr. Pai’s approach does exactly the opposite.”

The Post noted that Pai likes to talk the talk of bridging the digital divide — during his first speech as FCC chairman, he said it would be a top agency priority. But when the FCC released his anti-Lifeline action days later, “he opened another gap,” wrote The Post, “this time between his words and his actions.”

It’s the sort of head fake that’s familiar to those who’ve followed Pai’s career as a lead apologist for the phone companies he once worked for—and still serves.

This list of Pai’s miscues on key policy issues makes amply clear the many harmful directions the new FCC chairman will lead the agency through the Trump years.

 
Pai on the 2015 Net Neutrality Proceeding

“[The ruling is] President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet. … Was this proceeding ‘one of the most open and transparent in Commission history’? Not in the least.”

While Pai has said he supports a free and open internet, he’s been one of the most vitriolic opponents of the rules that were put in place to keep it that way. Pai offered a lengthy dissent when an FCC majority passed the agency’s historic Open Internet Order in 2015. In subsequent statements, he claimed the ruling was part of an elaborate Obama conspiracy to “regulate the internet.”

In truth, the rules aren’t internet regulations but a set of regulations to govern broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. And these companies no more constitute the internet than a company like Georgia Pacific signifies the forest. The FCC’s decision reclassified broadband providers under an existing law that preserves the rights we’ve always had to defend ourselves against communications carriers bent on interfering with our speech.

Pai’s complaint about the FCC’s process is a smoking gun with no smoke and no gun. The agency made its legal decisions based on thousands of pages of public-record evidence, and took into account the nearly 4 million comments from internet users, all to return to a foundation built on decades of solid law. All of those records are available to anyone with an Internet connection and the gumption to search the freely available archives at FCC.gov.

 
Pai on the Threat to an Open Internet

“[Net neutrality] regulation was a solution that wouldn’t work for a problem that didn’t exist.”

Pai isn’t alone in making this questionable claim. Calling net neutrality a “solution in search of a problem” is a favorite talking point of phone- and cable-company lobbyists and their many paid surrogates. The principle that protects the open internet is irrelevant, they claim, as blocking has never, ever happened. And if it did, the story goes, market forces would compel ISPs to correct course and reopen their networks.

In reality, many providers both in the United States and abroad have violated the principles of net neutrality — and they plan to continue doing so should Pai’s FCC refuse to enforce the open internet protections.

Whether it’s Comcast blocking access to peer-to-peer technologies (2005), or AT&T forcing Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services (2007—09), or Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones (2012), or any other of the multiple instances in which ISPs have taken away internet users’ right to choose, there can be no question that the problem exists.

And an argument a Verizon attorney made in 2013 before a panel of judges underscores the way ISPs view the internet. If it weren’t for the net neutrality protections, the attorney said, Verizon would be actively pursuing arrangements to prioritize certain types of internet traffic while downgrading other websites and services. Verizon even told the court that the company should have the power to edit the internet — suggesting that ISPs are like newspaper publishers, with the power to pick and choose what their broadband customers and others are allowed to say online.

 
Pai on the Impact the Net Neutrality Rules Have Had on Investment

“Growth in broadband investment has … flatlined.”

“We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation and job creation … [net neutrality’s] days are numbered.”

Pai is a habitual repeater of faulty investment analysis. He’s always eager to draw self-serving but misleading conclusions from bad data.

In the year following the 2015 order, he often cited a single piece of analysis on broadband-provider capital expenditures as proof that the rules harmed investment. But that analysis was provided by an industry-paid operative with a long track record of cooking numbers to suit the policy agenda of large phone and cable companies. In this instance, his analysis selectively removed some capital spending, ignored more legitimate reasons for declines in some individual companies’ investments, and dismissed the large investment increases other companies had made.

Any economic analyst worth her salt will tell you that it’s a fatal flaw to build a conclusion on cherry-picked data. More honest analysis in this sphere considers what every broadband provider is doing, including what they’re saying to their shareholders and to the Securities and Exchange Commission. If Pai had followed this kind of rigorous analysis, he’d have noticed that no company told its shareholders that the 2015 order harmed investment. Indeed, many new fiber and 5G wireless deployments began after the 2015 order, and continued after the DC Circuit upheld the rules against a legal challenge from these same companies in 2016.

To be sure, aggregate investment may decline in some years, relative to pre-2015 levels. Investment projects come to completion eventually, and no cable or phone company builds a network one year only to build it all over again the next year. But this in no way proves that companies are curtailing investments because of net neutrality fears; they’ve made that explicit with their spending decisions and in their numerous public statements to investors and the media, which Chairman Pai has chosen to ignore.

 
Pai on the FCC Effort to Protect Broadband-User Data from Prying ISPs

“Instead of respecting … common sense … the FCC tilts the regulatory playing field by proposing to impose more burdensome regulation on internet service providers, or ISPs, than the FTC imposes on so-called ‘edge providers.’”

Pai dissented when the agency adopted common-sense safeguards for everyday internet users. In this case, the FCC gave people more choice over whether and how broadband providers use their private information.

Under any sensible interpretation of the communications laws that govern the FCC, the companies that carry all of our speech online have no business profiting from the information they gather without our consent. But Pai chose to spin a reasonable response from the Wheeler FCC as a type of crony capitalism that favors companies like Facebook and Google at the expense of poor neglected ISPs like AT&T and Comcast. To be “fair,” according to Pai, you had to ignore the privacy rights Congress granted to people who might want some control over the way phone and cable companies package and resell their private information.

Internet users may be able to choose search engines, email providers and social-media services that reflect their privacy preferences, but there’s no effective competition among broadband ISPs, nor much room for entry by new carriers trying to reach privacy-conscious consumers. Access providers exploit their bottleneck position to collect nearly every detail about who we talk to, what we do and say online and — thanks to location tracking — where we do it.

And most importantly, it’s not a question of whether Facebook and Google are threats to privacy. They are. But that’s no reason to ignore the laws that protect people’s privacy from ISPs, out of some misguided sense that the FCC has to abdicate its responsibilities to be “fair” to companies it has clear jurisdiction to regulate. Without the protections the FCC put in place under Pai’s predecessor, even the savviest consumers would be unable to fully protect their online privacy from prying eyes.

 
Pai on Offering Affordable Broadband to Those in Need

“If we are going to refocus Lifeline on broadband, our goal should be increasing broadband adoption—that is, helping Americans without internet access across the digital divide, not supporting those who have already made the leap.”

In his first speech as FCC chairman, Pai pledged to “bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans.” But within days he was marching to another tune, hobbling one of the main programs the FCC had designed to fulfill that promise.

Lifeline exists to help low-income families, allowing them to connect and communicate without having to make difficult choices about how to allocate scarce resources. Those choices are exactly what Pai’s unlawful (and immoral) approach to universal service fails to recognize. Broadband adoption and affordability issues are not a simplistic on/off switch; they’re intrinsically tied to people’s overall income and spending choices.

In our 2017 report Digital Denied, Free Press explored the digital divide in depth. While Pai insists that many internet non-adopters are capable of paying these costs out of their own pockets, our findings prove otherwise. Among home internet non-adopters within the $35,000–$59,999 income bracket, 22 percent cited “can’t afford it” as their reason for not adopting. Within that same income bracket, 25 percent said they’d be willing to subscribe if prices were lower.

The root cause of the adoption gap is the lack of affordability, and that’s primarily the result of a market with inadequate competition and too few affordable choices.

Pai’s solution, absent Lifeline benefits, is to give significant tax breaks to the handful of powerful ISPs that control the broadband-access marketplace. Sacrificing tax revenue to fund the construction of gigabit networks in below-average-income neighborhoods — despite the fact that most of these deployment projects are under way even without any such tax giveaways — does nothing to make these services more affordable to any of the 69 million people who still lack any form of home internet access.

And Pai’s proposal doesn’t even begin to address the difficult choices that far too many people are forced to make. Families in great need may choose to spend their limited dollars on housing, heat or food. Those who do sign up for broadband to look for jobs or let their kids do their homework may have to give up buying enough of those other essentials every month just to keep the internet connection on.

Helping all Americans get connected to an open and affordable internet involves more than delivering empty speeches. And handing out favors to a few powerful broadband incumbents certainly isn’t the answer. But so far, Pai has given us little reason to believe he’s interested in doing anything other than that. No FCC chair over the past 40 years has been so bent on undermining the agency’s public-service mission and destroying the safeguards on which hundreds of millions of Americans rely.

The post Decoding the Doublespeak of FCC Chairman Pai appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post originally appeared at the Electronic Frontier Foundation*.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed a plan to eliminate net neutrality and privacy for broadband subscribers. Of course, those protections are tremendously popular, so Chairman Pai and his allies have been forced to pay lip service to preserving them in “some form.”  How do we know it’s just lip service? Because the plan Pai is pushing will destroy the legal foundation for net neutrality. That’s right: if Pai succeeds, the FCC won’t have the legal authority to preserve net neutrality in just about any form. And if he’s read the case law, he knows it.

Let’s break it down.

 
The FCC’s Proposal Makes It Impossible to Enforce Core Net Neutrality Requirements

Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a service can be either a “telecommunications service,” like telephone service, that lets the subscriber choose the content they receive and send without interference from the service provider, or it can be an “information service,” like cable television or the old Prodigy service, that curates and selects what content channels will be available to subscribers. The 1996 law provided that “telecommunications services” are governed by “Title II” of the Communications Act of 1934, which includes nondiscrimination requirements. “Information services” are not subject to Title II’s requirements.

Under current law, the FCC can put either label on broadband internet service — but that choice has consequences. For years, the FCC incorrectly classified broadband access as an “information service,” and when it tried to impose even a weak version of net neutrality protections the courts struck them down. Essentially, the DC Circuit Court explained [PDF] that it would be inconsistent for the FCC to exempt broadband from Title II’s nondiscrimination requirements by classifying it as an information service, but then impose those requirements anyway.

The legal mandate was clear: If it wanted meaningful open internet rules to pass judicial scrutiny, the FCC had to reclassify broadband service under Title II. It was also clear to neutral observers that reclassification just made sense. Broadband looks a lot more like a “telecommunications service” than an “information service.” It entails delivering information of the subscriber’s choosing, not information curated or altered by the provider.

It took an internet uprising to persuade the FCC that reclassification made practical and legal sense. But in the end we succeeded: in 2015, at the end of a lengthy rule-making process, the FCC reclassified broadband as a Title II telecommunications service and issued net neutrality rules on that basis. Resting at last on a proper legal foundation, those rules finally passed judicial scrutiny [PDF].

But now, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed to reverse that decision and put broadband back under the regime for “information services” — the same regime that we already know won’t support real net neutrality rules. Abandoning Title II means the end of meaningful, enforceable net neutrality protections, paving the way for companies like Comcast or Time Warner Cable to slice up your internet experience into favored, disfavored and “premium” content.

 
Title II Is Not Overly Burdensome, Thanks to Forbearance

While we are on the subject of the legal basis for net neutrality, let’s talk about the rest of Title II. Net neutrality opponents complain that Title II involves a host of regulations that don’t make sense for the Internet. This is a red herring. The FCC has used a process called “forbearance” – binding limits on its power to use parts of Title II – to ensure that Title II is applied narrowly and as needed to address harms to net neutrality and privacy. So when critics of the FCC’s decision to reclassify tell horror stories about the potential excesses of Title II, keep in mind that those stories are typically based on powers that the FCC has expressly disavowed, like the ability to set prices for service.

What is more, Title II offers more regulatory limits than the alternative of treating broadband as an information service, at least when it comes to net neutrality. Where Title II grants specific, clear and bounded powers that can protect net neutrality, theories that do not rely on Title II have to infer powers that aren’t clearly granted to the FCC. As proponents of limited regulation, these theories concern us. The proper way to protect neutrality is not to expand FCC discretion by stretching the general provisions of the Telecommunications Act (an approach already rejected in court), but to use a limited subset of the clear authorities laid out in Title II.

 
The FTC Cannot Adequately Protect the Privacy of Internet Subscribers

Reclassifying broadband as an information service not subject to Title II also creates yet another mess for subscriber privacy. The FCC crafted good rules for internet privacy, but Congress just rejected them. But it left in place the FCC’s underlying authority to protect privacy under Title II, which leaves privacy in limbo. Abandoning Title II for broadband altogether would mean that the FCC no longer has much of a role to play in protecting broadband privacy — and it’s not clear who will fill the gap.

Some have looked to the FTC to take up the mantle, but just last year AT&T persuaded a federal appeals court that, as a company that also owned a telephone business, the FTC had no power over any aspect of AT&T. That precedent covers the entire West Coast and leaves millions of Americans without recourse for privacy violations by their internet service provider. And there’s no doubt that AT&T and others will try to extend that precedent across the country.

Even without this precedent, the FTC’s enforcement authority here targets deceptive trade practices. The agency will only take action if a company promises one thing and delivers another.  If the legalese in a company’s privacy policy explains how it is free to use and sell your private information, and it follows that policy, the FTC can’t help you.

 
Tell the FCC What You Want It to Do

Although the FCC has stopped taking comments on its website, you can still make make yourself heard via DearFCC.org.

*Editor’s Note: This post was updated from its original form.

The post The FCC Pretends to Support Net Neutrality and Privacy While Moving to Gut Both appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

This post originally appeared at Yes! Magazine.

Nearly 50 years ago, on a presidential campaign swing through eastern Kentucky, Sen. Robert Kennedy promised to help a disabled coal miner build a community center in the tiny mountain town of Hemphill to give idle youth and others a place for recreation and meetings.

James Johnson used the brick-making machine and VISTA workers that Kennedy supplied to create community space and built a park and area for horseback riding.

Years later Johnson developed black lung disease and couldn’t keep the center going. After he died, his widow, Mabel, helped establish a new Hemphill Community Center in this mountainous region in the heart of Appalachia.

Now the Johnsons’ daughter, Gwen, is trying to save this piece of family legacy by opening a catering business inside the center, which saw operating funds diminish as tax revenues from the coal industry declined.

The network of local organizations that helped get Hemphill Catering up and running is part of an unusual form of grass roots economic development underway in this community, staggered by the collapse of coal.

It’s known as the Letcher County Culture Hub, a broad and growing collaboration of arts and media groups, for- and non-profit outfits, community organizations and government agencies that help one another survive and grow.

For example, Appalshop, a media and arts center in nearby Whitesburg, which launched the Hub, donated $5,000 in seed money to help Johnson and co-director Richard Stewart start Hemphill Catering.

Public and private operations hired them to cater events. And local media and technology company, Mountain Tech Media, created a free logo.

The Culture Hub is an incubator of sorts, where a diverse network of partners, 16 to date, share resources and connections, rather than space.

Appalshop’s Ben Fink, who moved to Kentucky in 2015 to manage the project, says it’s called the Culture Hub because “culture is at the center of all of our economic development work — both culture in terms of music, theater, film, radio, art, etc., and a culture of agency, voice, and ownership in central Appalachia.”

A community organizer, theater director and writer, Fink knows there’s a long history of efforts to save Appalachia, like the War on Poverty and the Appalachian Regional Commission. People often ask him how the Culture Hub differs from those.

“My response is always: This isn’t a project about saving Appalachia. This is a project about Appalachians saving … ourselves.”

Gwen Johnson decided to open Hemphill Catering after a neighbor complimented her on her cooking. In the first six months after she and Stewart opened the business, they cleared $2,000 in profits for the community center.

That may not sound like much, but in rural, isolated Letcher County, where the poverty rate of 33 percent is more than twice the national average, success stories like Hemphill Catering are rare.

Now, Johnson, 59, who serves as board member and secretary of the community center her mother still helps run, is going even further. She’s working with the Letcher County Farmers Market in Whitesburg to establish a satellite market at the community center.

The satellite will include the Farmacy Program, where doctors write prescriptions for fresh fruits and vegetables that residents can redeem at the market.

Health care provider Mountain Comprehensive Health Corporation, which created the program, covers the cost.

The Hemphill Community Center is just one of the Hub’s many projects. Others include an amphitheater that stages a summer drama and runs a crafts festival; a new bluegrass festival put on by several volunteer fire departments that made them $2,700 in profit last year; and revival of the oldest square dance series in Kentucky.

An industrial-scale kitchen is in the works to enable agricultural producers to scale up production and commercially package food products.

Another addition to the Hub is a housing nonprofit that aims to fund more affordable housing by encouraging a maple syrup economy in the area.

In 19 months, the Hub has created 10 to 20 new full- and part-time jobs, Fink says. To date, Appalshop has invested an estimated $150,000 to $170,000 in it, while other partners have raised nearly $30,000 in grants and partnerships.

The launch of Hemphill Catering and the success of the bluegrass festival help illustrate how Hub partners have rebounded from the loss of coal revenue to become more self-reliant and entrepreneurial—something the Hub promotes, Fink says.

They benefit in other ways, too.

They can apply collectively for grants they would be ineligible for on their own.

For example, 10 partners made a joint proposal to the regional community development bank and will receive $6,000 to $10,000 in technical assistance to build websites and commission energy audits of their buildings. They plan to retrofit the buildings to lower their energy costs.

That kind of cooperation can help address the distinct challenges facing poor, rural counties, such as spotty internet service. A mere 1 percent of Letcher County’s population has access to broadband internet, as the Federal Communications Commission defines it.

Residents complain that lack of broadband has kept them from getting paid jobs at home or selling their houses, according to the Daily Yonder newspaper. Last November, the county’s fiscal court created a seven-member broadband board, appointing two Hub members, evidence of the group’s growing reputation.

Hub partners already feel the difference. Bill Meade, chief of the Kings Creek Volunteer Fire Department, says before planning a concert, his crew checks the Hemphill Community Center’s schedule to avoid a conflict, since both cater to music fans.

Meade, 73, who can be spotted around town in an industrial work uniform calling women “honey” and men of all ages “young feller,” says the fire department advertises Hemphill’s events or announces them at department functions. “We’ve always been competitive,” he says. “Now we cooperate.”

Meade says partners also attend each other’s functions. “We have a cheering section we never had before,” Johnson says.

Hub partners have managed to sidestep their differences over politics and coal, long-standing divisions that could threaten their ability to work together.

Both Johnson’s and Meade’s families have worked in the coal industry — Johnson’s as workers and Meade’s as owners.

Today the two are on opposing sides of the fight over mountaintop removal strip mining, the practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at coal seams. Johnson was shocked when she learned the Meades engaged in mountaintop removal, but she did not let it come between them.

Politically, Johnson thinks those in the Hub are pretty evenly divided for and against President Trump but recalls only one instance when things got tense.

That was when a critic of Trump made her feelings known during a meeting. Trump’s supporters bit their tongues.

“We are all yoked in a common struggle,” Johnson says, noting that everyone is fighting to keep their organizations financially viable and serve their communities.

The Culture Hub reflects the belief that every community has assets it can convert to economic opportunities to increase local wealth.

In eastern Kentucky, says Fink, those assets include individual enterprise, a strong work ethic, a bent for cooperation and talents for both crafts and technology, such as mechanized coal mining.

Nationally recognized quilters, square dancers and documentary filmmakers attest to these assets.

The Culture Hub is about applying those talents toward local ownership, Fink says. He contrasts that with a familiar culture in eastern Kentucky, where absentee landlords and coal companies “extract all the value out of the land and the people and ship it elsewhere,” leaving people with very little.

The Hub’s development, he says, flies in the face of conventional thinking around how development works. “The prevailing view is that culture is decorative and peripheral, and economic development means bringing in factories,” he says.

The Culture Hub may already be changing that way of thinking. It has hosted two events that drew people from across the country. Additionally, Fink and other Appalshop staff have made presentations at national forums, including Creative Placemaking: The Role of Arts in Community Development, held in Washington, DC, last December.

What’s more, the Hub has been selected as a national test site for PolicyLink’s Arts, Culture and Equitable Development initiative.

Efforts are underway to write a culture hub training curriculum for other poverty-stricken Kentucky communities and Hub staff have been meeting with other organizations in Kentucky and nationwide to encourage creation of other culture hubs.

“This model could certainly work in the Black Belt or Mississippi Delta or anywhere … where there’s marginalized rural populations … who have a lot of knowledge and resilience and a commitment to their neighbors and places,” says Shaunna Scott, Appalachian studies director at the University of Kentucky.

But other experts point to the Hub’s limited reach as a model for economic development. The Culture Hub could never replace all the coal jobs lost or match their wage levels, says Anthony Flaccavento, a consultant in sustainable development.

Yet, he adds, it could be an important part of the economy, creating buzz and new energy and inspiring entrepreneurship. “I think that’s pretty critical, because right now people are somewhere between desperate and totally depressed in many coalfield communities,” he says.

Culture Hub partners have started forming “sub-hubs” for long-term planning to meet local needs. One sub-hub focuses on food, another on people’s energy costs. The partners are ambitious, Johnson says, and want to tackle “everything from the bottom to the top in this county.”

The post After Coal, a Small Kentucky Town Builds a Healthier, More Creative Economy appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

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The post Georgia’s Internet Uprising appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

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