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Brain Drain, Admin Failures Threaten the FCC's Role
coondoggie writes "The Federal Communications Commission has brain drain and administration problems that could decrease its effectiveness at a time when advanced service technologies such as wireless and broadband present significant regulatory challenges. On the brain drain front, a report out today (PDF) from watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office stated that from fiscal year 2003 to 2008, the number of engineers at the FCC decreased by 10%. Similarly, the overall number of economists decreased by 14%. While the total number of engineers and economists in the workforce has decreased from 2003 to 2008, the percentages remained the same. The GAO also criticized the FCC's public comment policy, saying, 'While FCC relies heavily on public input to inform its decisions, it tends to do so without giving the public access to the actual text of a given proposal. If parties are able to submit vague summaries that may not fully reflect meetings between FCC officials and outside parties, then stakeholders will continue to question whether commission decisions are being influenced by information that was not subject to public comment or rebuttal and that, in some cases, is submitted just before a commission vote.'"
Why is it that people are so willing to put themselves under government hegemony instead? Neither options are good, but corporate action only exists if consumers exist or government funnels money to them. I guess love of government, love of the people that can slap you in jail (while hating those that charge you more than you like / more than they should for something more) on their whim after "justice theater" in the courtroom are just being fashionable for the times.
News flash: corporations can't do much to you if you don't do business with them. Any corporation could buckle overnight if people acted on principle. But people don't care about principle, and the fact that they can't even act in their own self-interest in business shows that democracy itself is untenable. I guess people just operate under the myth that if we just work hard enough, we can create a perfect government, which is nonsense since the corruption of most western governments is an emergent property of the overall democratic structures in the first place, and believing in a perfect government when people can't be good consumers on a collective level is pretty silly...
A yoke is a yoke no matter whether you label it "democratic" or not.
So, you're screwed either way. Just stop holding allegiance to government (and, of course, corporations).