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State Senator Admits Cable Industry Helped Write Pro-Industry Legislation
jamie sends in news of comments by David Hoyle, a State Senator in North Carolina, about recently defeated legislation he sponsored that would have limited the ability of government to develop municipal broadband. Hoyle readily admitted that the cable industry had a hand in writing the bill. We discussed the cable industry's extensive lobbying efforts in that region last year. From the article:
"The veteran state senator says cities should leave broadband to the cable companies. 'It's not fair for any government unit to compete with private enterprise,' he says. In the last legislative session Sen. Hoyle tried to put a moratorium on any more local governments expanding into municipal broadband. When the I-Team asked him if the cable industry drew up the bill, Senator Hoyle responded, 'Yes, along with my help.' When asked about criticism that he was 'carrying water' for the cable companies, Hoyle replied, 'I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community — the people who pay the taxes.'"
Yeah, just look at how the Post Office drove UPS and FedEx out of business.
'I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community -- the people who pay the taxes.'"
So much for the idea, hugely popular with the 'business community,' that taxes are always just passed through to the consumer.
I guess he must be a democrat, right?
PS - it isn't this David Hoyle in case anyone else was wondering...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If I were one of his constituents if I would be impressed with his candor or outraged at being sold out. That and I'm fairly certain citizens pay taxes as well.......
I'm going to start my own mercenary company, and the U.S. Army won't be allowed to compete for national defense!
When the I-Team asked him if the cable industry drew up the bill, Senator Hoyle responded, 'Yes, along with my help.' When asked about criticism that he was 'carrying water' for the cable companies, Hoyle replied, 'I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community — the people who pay the taxes.'"
Apparently it's business that pays all the taxes in this country and not the citizens!
Wooohoo! All that tax I've been paying every year around April 15 is an error! There has been some huge oversight and I've been being billed incorrectly.
I'll take a check for the balance Senator. Pay me when you can.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It is a great US myth that corporations fund the government. The actual facts are that the people pay more.
Also the citizens vote. So why are the politicals doing the behest of the corporations ?
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/yearrev2009_0.html
2009 Income Taxes
Individual: $915.3B
Corporate: $138.2B
Business can only pay tax on income from spending. Consumer spending is direct from citizens. Government spending is indirectly from citizens.
This guy needs to be reminded as to who pays his pay-check - especially since business pays proportionately a lot LESS tax than they did a generation ago, and the soon-to-disappear middle class a lot more!
At least he's puting his money where his mouth is, by handing the legislative process over to the private sector.
Where I live in Western Mass, I live in a city with municipal run power and our bill is always cheaper than the cities around us with the "business" run power.
I'm very tempted to write up a proposal to have:
Wouldn't it be tons cheaper and better for the people of my town if the city could provide the sorta service this would require ? And new jobs would be created IN THE CITY...
What a concept, huh ?
UPS Sucks
Hardly a secret that industry basically writes policy and law at both the state and federal level. As expensive as Congressional campaigns are, and with free reign to donate to (aka "bribe") any politician they choose, is it any real surprise that they're calling all the shots? Hell, Dick Cheney even gave the oil companies their own secret task force to write U.S. energy policy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
David Hoyle is... a Democrat
Somehow I suspect that if he was a Republican that would have been mentioned once or twice in the /. Story.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
"I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community — the people who pay for my reelection campaign."
Whenever there's a discussion about privatizing municipal services, private industry's selling point is always that they can do a far better job than government because government is so inept and inefficient.
If this is indeed the case, then shouldn't a municipal broadband should be no threat at all to private industry, and therefore there should be nothing at all for them to worry about.
Only one problem: most municipalities contemplating running their own broadband Internet service are doing it precisely because the cable and phone companies aren't providing the service. It's time to stop thinking about Internet access as a service and start thinking about it as a utility, with the changes in mindset that implies (eg. you don't want parts of your city to be without water or electricity just because the utility companies think it won't be cost-effective to serve them).
Apparently this guy has never heard of Exxon!
Once any business gets large enough, they do creative accounting or move all their "official" offices offshore (do you kow how many businesses are incorporated in Bermuda as a tax haven?) to avoid taxes.
http://blogs.forbes.com/energysource/2010/04/07/exxon-says-it-does-pay-u-s-income-taxes/
If the USA could actually collect what it is owed by big business, we wouldn't *have* a national debt!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
in letting Senator hoyle know exactly what they think of his ideas. Office: 300-A Legislative Office Building Phone: (919) 733-5734 Email: David.Hoyle@ncleg.net Legislative Mailing Address: NC Senate 300 N. Salisbury Street, Room 300-A Raleigh, NC 27603-5925 Terms in Senate: 9 (0 in House) District: 43 Counties Represented: Gaston Occupation: Real Estate Developer/Investor Address: P.O. Box 2567, Gastonia, NC 28053 Phone: (704) 867-0822
Politicians serve the money.
America has died.
You probably voted for it, too.
Translation: I get lots of great kickbacks from these guys, so fuck you, consumer!!!!
Hopefully his constituents aren't asleep and give him the appropriate treatment when his name shows up on the ballot. Business may pay the taxes, but it's the voter that gets to mark the ballot.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've given up with "Party affiliation" as if *that* matters anymore. They are all crooks, regardless of which side they claim to be on. There is only one "side" in Washington DC, the side that represents yourself, and how much you can take from the country.
There's no politician actually representing "the people", without fail, all these guys are elite, wealthy, went-to-the-right-school, skull and bones club, lawyers or businessmen who only wanted to get elected so they could become part of the corruption process.
And they will do or say whatever it takes to "get in", they will promise you the world, hawk wedge issues, and destroy their opponent, all so that they can get in and take as much of the pie as they can get their hands on. It's all a power game.
None of it is about doing anything for the American People.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This senator for some reason seems to have forgotten that the sole reason privately owned services are often preferable to public ones is competition. In every instance that I've seen, a private monopoly is always a disaster. Given that private telco's stop at nothing to avoid competing - a public monopoly is the lesser evil. Free market fans like this guy should spend their energy ensuring that private industry keeps competing rather that trying to raise legal fences around markets that are no longer free because they have degenerated into monopolies. Granted there are many telco's - but if it's anything like here (in Denmark), their broadband cable networks are meticulously dug into the ground without any overlap at all, efectively leaving each customer without any choice. And when a municipal broadband appears - the previous local monopoly is always suddenly able to sell a much better product.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
If you want to annoy a right winger, ask them why we don't privatize the military. They'll go on at length about all the horrible things government does, and how much better it would be if they didn't---except for the military. Funny how the idea of government educating people, or healing people, or employing people, or connecting people to the internet (in this case) is evil and wrong and immoral, but paying and arming a huge body of men and women for the express purposes of maiming, killing and/or oppressing people is perfectly ok by them.
They'll also fail to notice how, unlike education or health care, the military gets funded well, regularly and uniformly at the federal level rather than through some horrific, balkanized, hamstrung funding structure. It's interesting how they do a good job, then, that the military does considering it's so well funded.
I'm a full socialist, and I think the military does deserve the funding it gets, but I find the hypocrisy to be just a little bit galling.
--srj/mmv
What city, specifically? Are they paying subisidies to the power companies to provide citizens with "cheap" energy?
Yeah that would be awesome, governments would get a one-time fee. Then they would have to bail out the industries when it became clear that the reason they were public in the first place was that they couldn't make a profit, or that they still had to provide only the unprofitable part of the service. It would be a win-win for taxpayers who bought privatized government entities!
Of course, lose-lose for everyone else.
No matter how you slice it, taxes are money taken out of private hands by the government. As such, private citizens are the ones who ultimately pay those taxes. If you tax a company, well that tax is then a part of their cost and will be structured in as such. It will manifest as increased prices, decreased compensation, etc. If you don't tax the company but instead tax the purchase, again it shows as a higher price to the consumer. Maybe it is listed on a separate line, but the consumer still pays. If you don't tax that at all but instead tax a person's income, then they just have less to spend, and lower prices are a larger part of their total disposable income.
There just isn't any way around it. So trying to say something like "Businesses pay the taxes," is stupid even were it true (which as you pointed out it isn't). Businesses are made up of, and shopped at by, regular people. Those people are the ones who pay the taxes in the end. Now there's nothing wrong with that, the government needs to collect taxes to provide the services we want, but let's be straight about who's paying.
Where is the 'Democrats' tag? Where is the party affiliation in the summary? And where is the donkey icon? If he was a Republican can anyone here seriously say that there would not be a 'Republicans' tag, the word 'republican' in the summary and the elephant icon?
If you really believe Slashdot is naming party affiliation of Republicans and not Democrats, you should be able to provide a few examples.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
anyone that calls anything about our government "socialist" is simply a troll whose opinion means nuts.
We live in the most pro-corporate state in world history. It doesn't matter which "side" is in control of the U.S. government... whoever is in charge is on some lever a corporatist right now. Socialism is a buzzword to whip shallow thinking people into and uproar.
I'm not American, hence the reason I didn't say "Republican". Not that it matters in the US: the political choices run the gamut from the Right to the extreme Right anyways.
That said, it's pretty safe to make such an assumption. There aren't many actual libertarians, but a heck of a lot of greedy, curtain-twitching, closet-authoritarians in the most countries' political right.
--srj/mmv
It has nothing to do with subsidies; it has to do with regulated business delivering service at cost + 10% profit rather than at market price. Properly regulated utilities produce cheaper products than their unregulated ('competitive') counterparts.
I just can't get over the fact that a state senator (or a US one, really) knows that Gunga Din was a water bearer. Maybe US education is better than I thought.
The bought and the for sale.
Most utilities are not run by the government but by private companies....make any case at all for privatizing them in your view?
Most utilities are regulated. Those that are regulated provider cheaper power than their unregulated counterparts because their prices are based on average cost rather than marginal cost. The states that deregulated their power generation now have higher electric rates. This American belief that unchecked competition automatically produces cheaper products simply isn't true, especially with infrastructure.
Here in Wisconsin, two years ago ATT came to the Capitol with more than a dozen lobbyists and started handing out campaign contributions. They picked a conservative Democrat and a Republican from the Senate and Assembly who would play ball. They handed them a "bill mill" draft of how they'd like to revamp Wisconsin's cable television laws. They did not invite anyone else to the meetings. They didn't invite the over-the-air broadcasters, they didn't invite the cable industry, they didn't invite the community television stations. They listened to ATT. They removed local city control and oversight of cable franchises and replaced it with a state-level franchise system with little to no oversight. They assigned minimal regulatory powers to the department of financial institutions - not the existing Public Service Commission that handles all other telecom. The only powers they assigned were to accept the annual $5,000 franchise application. They were not given any powers to reject any applications. They sunset the ability of cities to assign a surcharge on bills to fund their community television operations. All this, in the name of allowing ATT to be able to cherry-pick which neighborhoods would get U-Verse, without having to offer it to entire communities.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Either the corporations can do whatever they damn well please, or there is *some* sort of organization, be it an official government or a less official entity, in place that serves as a layer of protection between the might of the corporations and the individual citizens. The moment such an organization exists, the corporations *will* try to corrupt it.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
In the first one, the Democrat was named but her 14 cosigners were not. Many were Republicans.
In the second case, there was no malfeasance by Alan Grayson.
In the third case, again, no malfeasance.
In the last case, we have a legitimately bad law proposed by a Democrat.
Congratulations! Your job is now half done. All you have to do is show a similar story where a Republican's affiliation is mentioned. Otherwise, all we have is evidence that Slashdot does not usually name anyone's party affiliation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Isn't the real problem that a State Senator wants to take away the right of municipal governments to decide for themselves if they want to get into the broadband business or not? Surely the residents of a particular locality should be the ones deciding this on a case by case basis, not someone in the state senate.
Cities and counties often give exclusives to cable companies causing death off all competition. Since cities will not allow dozens of companies to be available to every address it is fair enough that cities provide free net services.