Blackburn betrayed you. She took $497,499 from Telecoms, then she voted to let them sell your web history without your permission. Ask her why, call 615.591.5161 ~ Billboards in Blackburn’s District
Our collective disdain of regional monopolies like Comcast and AT&T is one of the very few things that tends to bridge the nation’s deep, partisan divides. Blackburn may just be about to figure that out the hard way. ~ Karl Bode
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Introduction
Someone sent me an article by Karl Bode published recently by Motherboard explaining the reasons why my Congressman Marsha Blackburn is likely to lose her bid to replace retiring Senator Bob Corker in the Senate race in Tennessee. It’s well worth a read.
I thought I would contribute to the understanding of “on the ground” economic details of why Blackburn is in political trouble. Given the facts, it’s likely to get much worse after the August primary when Blackburn has to face off against former Tennessee Governor and Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen.
Bode refers in his piece to pressure on the Republicans to persuade Corker not to retire. The Republican Senate majority is holding on right now by one seat – making a Blackburn loss particularly painful for the Republican Party and administration.
Unfortunately, this is a loss that will be well deserved. I say unfortunately as Blackburn first went to Washington as a friend to small business who voted against the bailouts twice. If you look at the quality of my telecommunication services and the costs, you will understand why I say that Blackburn is no longer a friend to small business.
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Great comment posted at full article:
You spend $15K annually on telecom.
For the same amount, you could build a unity network with the help of a consulting firm. I suggest researching this and getting your neighbors involved. There are no legal impediments to doing this, but you will at some point have to negotiate with AT&T or an AT&T reseller to get an uplink.
Fiber is dead. The monopolies exist because very large companies are the only ones able to hang cable and the barriers to entry for ground-based Internet are too high and frankly, obsolete. 5G is going to change things and the interest in new wireless standards is driven by the fact that terrestrial just doesn’t work from a business point of view. A tree falls within a twenty-mile radius of me, I can be sure that the Internet will be down for hours. The cost of fiber placement and the endless servicing thereof requires considerable investment for margins that are thin at best.
Georgia is dying in its rural parts, same as elsewhere in the country. The depopulation has become severe enough that the state legislature is providing tax incentives — generous ones at that — to entice individuals to move to the dying areas. The fear is that in another 10 or 20 years, the counties affected will not even be able to find semi-competent citizens to run the local governments. Problem is that no one wants to live in an area where satellite is the only option and, having used it, it’s horrible. Very few rural families can afford the rapacious and seedy pricing models for satellite.
What the legislature will not do is look at promoting telework and investing in high-speed Internet access for rural communities. The urban areas are grossly overpriced, create huge amounts of personal and public debt and increase human misery, but are the tax base. Pols cannot push incentives for population dispersal because so much of the revenue derives from commercial and property taxes. Artificially elevated home prices are essential to the whole system of tax feeding. Because of the scams being run by government agencies (which you cover at length), the money that should go into infrastructure will continue to go into the back pockets of fat cats.
Trump will leave office and the infrastructure will still be in a precarious state.
Convincing pols to increase the amount of empty commercial real estate space for the sake of the middle class is a fool’s errand.