CT Blue

An Appeals Court has just struck down the FCC's attempt to impose net neutrality. That ruling, and the rise of the app, may very well spell the end of the independent voices, such as your humble blogger, that have, to a some extent, managed to fight back against the now very much right wing mainstream media. (I do not wish to imply that I am a significant actor in that fight, but Kos, Josh Marshall and their ilk have certainly been a counterweight to a media that tows the corporate line, and the cumulative effect of us little guys cannot be denied.)

We get a bit of a preview of the brave new world that awaits us from an old media example, the Washington Post, which still rests on its Watergate laurels while serving the interests of the 1%:

American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain. A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos – who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder. The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million “cloud” computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be “far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations.”

But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, “few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA.”

The Washington Post’s refusal to provide readers with minimal disclosure in coverage of the CIA is important on its own. But it’s also a marker for an ominous pattern – combining denial with accommodation to raw financial and governmental power – a synergy of media leverage, corporate digital muscle and secretive agencies implementing policies of mass surveillance, covert action and ongoing warfare.

via Norman Solomon at Consortium News

Jeff Bezos may not seem like an evil man, but he does evil things behind his corporate mask. The demise of net neutrality will play perfectly into the hands of men like him, who think first, last and always of the dollar. We can expect that someday soon the only information we can get on the net will be the type of n ot-quite-propaganda we get from Bezo's Post: slanted to suit the needs of the 1% first, and the surveillance state thereafter.

Of course, it would be an easy matter for Congress to reverse the court's ruling.

Yes, I know. I'm laughing too.

Here's further proof, should anyone need it, that “privatizing” public functions often makes those services more expensive and lower quality.

For decades, citizens have been sold on the mantra that the hungry private sector can do a better and cheaper job of providing services than “inefficient” government. Now it is true that there were some badly run government entities that have done better when privatized (the poster child is British Telecom). But particularly on the state and local level, where voters demand a high level of accountability, this premise was always dubious.

First, as we’ve discussed at some length, outsourcing in the private sector often fails to deliver on their promises. But those dead bodies are seldom discussed. The fleeced buyer has every reason to hide the botched initiative. And they are often prohibited from discussing them: corporate IT projects, for instance, have non-disclosure provisions. As a result, CIO Magazine used a series of failed state outsourcing deals as a forensic exercise relevant to private sector, arguing that the problems were broadly the same.

But a new report by In the Public Interest, Out of Control: The Coast-to-Coast Failures of Outsourcing Public Services to For-Profit Corporations, shows why voter should regard outsourcing proposals with considerable skepticism. Remember, a corporate outsourcer will have to preform the same tasks as a government body would, plus he expected to recoup his selling/contracting costs and earn a profit margin. As we’ve seen with mortgage servicers, and the Out of Control confirms, one of the approaches used by private companies to meet their profit targets is to cut corners on compliance with the rules and with service levels. And when outsourcing is motivated not by ideology or a belief that savings can be achieved, but by service problems, all too often there’s reason to suspect that the legislation that the supposedly underperforming bureau is executing is cumbersome or poorly thought out. In other words, the problem is being treated as one of government execution, when it’s actually one of bad drafting or overly complicated requirements that won’t go away by fobbing them off to a private company.

via Naked Capitalism

Not surprisingly, many of these companies go the full Wal-Mart, and exact a hidden subsidy:

The report also reveals that one of the ways these contractors meet their targets is by effectively fobbing costs back on the state, by paying [workers] low wages that force them to rely on public services. in 2008, 80% of the employees working on Federal service contracts made less than a living wage; the level is likely to be similar for state and local contracts. And of course, this means that local governments, perversely, are sabotaging their economies by driving wages and hence demand and eventually their tax bases down.

This is not surprising, so I won't dwell on it more, but I think it helps illustrate a point I've tried to make before. Private companies are certainly good at making things, such as computers, etc., providing that they have competition. I would freely admit that we'd still be struggling with the “C:\” prompt if we had to rely on the government to develop our technology. But government is far superior at providing services. It provides social insurance, for instance, at lower cost and of greater value than private enterprise. The only innovations in which the insurance industry is interested are those that involve new ways to deny coverage. The principles of insurance are well known. It's math, pure and simple. I think we'll find, as we hand over our schools to private enterprise, that the same principle applies. There may be more room for innovation in education than in insurance, but any value added by such innovation will be more than overwhelmed by the harm that will be done to teachers and students alike by profit driven schools. We can see that in the for profit colleges, and we will get no different from for-profit (or pseudo non-profit) grammar schools. We might think we have, for we will no doubt be treated to endless propaganda about how much better our educational system is when we've reduced our teachers to powerless, underpaid and demoralized automatons. But that won't be the reality, no matter what the education CEOs and their bought politicians tell us, just as, despite the propaganda to the contrary, we never have and never will get a decent health care system based on a private insurance model.