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Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband
An anonymous reader writes, "Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the 'free market,' but want to ban the country's un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn't know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: 'Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.'"
Goverment helping people or doing nice things for them is Socialism. Socialism is BAD.
Throwing them to the wolves, however is not Socialism, therefore it must be good.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Government helping people in the US is socialism. In fact, any social spending or infrastructure spending in the US is socialism. Paying for grandma's health care is socialism.
Paying Haliburton and other US contractors to rebuild Iraq--that's not socialism. The discriminator is this--who makes the money? If money is being spread among a bunch of little people, then that's socialism. If money is poured into a few large corporations whose executives make tens or hundreds of millions, then that's the free market. If it's profitable for the rich, it's the free market, but if you're giving money to a single mother of 2, then that's socialism. If you're helping the working poor pay their medical bills, that's socialism, and probably creeping totalitarianism.
But we can brag on TV about building schools for Iraqis, and that's NOT socialism. But--you guess it--large American corporations have won contracts to rebuild those schools, along with those huge military bases over there. What is an what is not socialism has more to do with who gets to pocket the money than it does with any fidelity to Karl Marx. Care to look into how much federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans, compared to how much is spent on rebuilding Iraq? If you spend money in New Orleans, then small local firms may get some of the contracts, and the money may be spent, and most importantly earned, locally. If you spend in Iraq, all of the money goes into the coffers of large companies with sweetheart deals, such as Haliburton.
Small mom-and-pop contractors don't have contacts in the Department of Defense and White House. But if you get big enough, you get to engage in nation-building as part of someone's "vision," like PNAC, and then that isn't socialism, even if you're building the very things that WOULD be socialism if you were building it for Americans back home.