Whenever the House of Representatives or the Senate holds an important hearing or a committee meeting, Washington's high-paid corporate lobbyists are out in force. They always get a seat at these events, no matter how small the hearing room may be. They pay line-sitters to wait patiently in line for hours, and then surrender their seat when their corporate paymaster saunters in, a few minutes before the scheduled time.
The line-sitters earn about $10 an hour; the companies for which they work charge the lobbyists much more. The line-sitters are low-income folks, often minorities, dressed in tee shirts and bike shorts. The people to whom they surrender their places are usually well-dressed, affluent white males.
Unfortunately, the way the poor get exploited outside House and Senate hearing rooms is a parable for what happens inside those rooms.
A good example is what happened at the Senate Commerce Committee during the last week in June. The Senate Commerce members approved a drastic rewrite of telecommunications law that will benefit all those well-dressed corporate lobbyists and their employers, the nation's largest telephone and cable companies. But it stands to hurt the people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, as well as average families and anyone who cares about democracy. (The entire House already voted for a telecommunications bill as bad, or maybe worse, than the Senate bill, that still awaits a vote by the entire Senate.)
Here's why. The Senate bill, the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act, will permit both cable and telephone companies to bypass local governments and offer television programming under national rules, not local regulation. Right now, if you are a cable customer and your service is lousy, you can call your local cable franchise authority and they can go to bat for you. In the future, you'll have to complain to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an inside-the-beltway agency that has no track record in protecting consumers.
Worse, rules now in place that force a company to provide TV programming to an entire community, and to offer that service at the same price to everybody in the market, will disappear. So it is likely that your cable company, and a phone company that begins to offer television and other services, like high-speed Internet, will fight over the richest consumers in a community, offer them special deals on bundled services, and ignore low-income neighborhoods and rural areas. Rural and low-income families may not get a chance to access the new technology, and they may have to pay more for the services that companies do offer them.
But wait, there are even more reasons to hate this bill. The Senate opted to give in to the big phone and cable companies, and to do nothing to stop them from charging web sites, bloggers, and entrepreneurs for access to their Internet "pipes." That means that A T &T could charge Common Cause a fee to ensure that the millions of AT&T Internet subscribers can reach our web site fast and easily. If we could not pay up, if would be much harder for millions of people to find us. That also means that a couple of kids, working in a garage, with the newest innovation for the Internet - a new Google or Yahoo, -- would not get a chance to reach a huge market because they could not pay the entry fees to those restricted marketplace.
If you like the way cable TV now works - You click through dozens of channels and find mostly junk programs and shopping channels - then you'll love the new Internet. It will be like that. You'll be able quickly access the Internet to buy things, particularly from outlets in which your Internet Service Provider has an ownership stake, or to get television or movies. But access information or talk about ideas or talk to one another? Not so much, as Jon Stewart would say.
Two Senate heroes - Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) took on the phone and cable companies and tried to amend the Senate bill to protect our rights to the Internet as we know it. They came close to a victory. The Senate Commerce Committee tied, at an 11 to 11 vote. But they likely will try again when the bill is up for a vote by the entire Senate. What happens next is crucial for all of us. Do we get to keep the old freewheeling Internet that has encouraged citizen engagement and innovation? Or do we get stuck with an inferior new Internet?
The new Internet would make all of us line-sitters and give priority to the companies that hire those well-paid corporate lobbyists. But unlike the line-sitters, we do not have to surrender our power and our place. There is still time to fight back. Let your Senator and Representative know that you are against their sweeping telecommunications bills. And that you want real "net neutrality" - the freedom access any content and use any application on the Internet you choose, without the interference of your Internet Service Provider. Ask your elected officials about net neutrality when they are home during the August recess. Or call, or write them.
Sign up and become a Common Cause e-activist. We'll keep you informed about this fight, and we'll give you the ammunition to make a difference. Cable and phone companies may have the big bucks. But we have the voices. No member of Congress can afford to ignore thousands of his or her constituents.
