[wplug] The End of the Telcos?

[Zach]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 12:14 PM, terry mcintyre
<terrymcintyre at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  Where I live, only one cable company is legally
>  permitted to offer me services over the cable; only
>  one phone company is permitted by law to offer me
>  services over the land-line. If these monopoly
>  contracts were abolished, several companies would
>  compete to provide service to me and my neighbors. We
>  already see this with phone service. I have been using
>  Vonage over cable broadband; recently, my cable
>  company dropped their phone service rates to compete
>  with Vonage. Sadly, Verizon does not offer FIOS in my
>  neighborhood; if they did compete in this area, I'm
>  sure my cable broadband would improve in speed and
>  drop in price as well.

Preach! ;-)

Competition benefits consumers, gee, who knew?! I have a very
pessimistic and suspicious view of most policticians. For all their
rhetoric about serving the people ad doing what is best for the most
all too often they seem to serve primarily the interests of big
business, well funded special interest groups and PACs and themselves!
Yet we are all to blame for not rousing from our apathy/complacency
and forcing real change en masse. Whauld be more democratic! The
Founding Fathers expected a certain minimum level of competency, moral
decency and unselfishness in both the people and those that represent
them. I am not in favor of mob rule. If the mob is uneducated,
ignorant then you will have bad laws and policy. One must be careful
not to sound elitist when talking about this but part  wishes for a
far more selective electorate! We have a lot of problems but many
places in the world have such institutional corruption and
totalitarianistic types government (Russia is now USRR-lite, China's
draconian punishments still can't keep the local officials in line
much less 1.3 billion people in the long run) so all in all I think
our constitutional republic has accomplished a lot. I just hope our
best days are not behind us. Inflation out of control, recession, US
dollar at historic low, price of oil at historic high, highest jump in
food prices in past 17 years, globalism chipping away at more and more
quality jobs here, etc.  Greenspan gave a good talk on this. He said
basically we need to evolve our economy, we went from an agricultural
economy to an industrial/manufacturing one and then a service based
one. As costs living keep surging (and higher education and health
care will only be available to the rich if things continue unchecked -
absolute free marketism is not conscienable imho you need checks and
some state interventionism when costs escalate multiple times the
inflation rate for year after year!) it seems like there are fewer
quality jobs. Just a generation or so ago if you had a college
education you were almost assured lifelong employment (even with a
single employer), a nice pension plan, health care was affordable but
now it's so chaotic. And that was when most families were single
income with only the father working.  A college education really has
been devalued yet it costs more than ever! Only so many college
graduate can work in Starbucks and bookstores, let alone trying to
support a family on that. Where are we all supposed to work if we keep
losing more quality jobs to outsourcing/globalism every year while
comparable new jobs are not being generated. I think we have seen
where unrestricted greed gets us. Companies in solid financial shape
with good profits keep slashing jobs! The value of their stock is all
that matters. The shareholders expect increasing profits each quarter
now. The global market accounts for some of the losses but not all.
Look at the recent mortga market collapse, the realtors, Wall Street
and investors all knew these valuations were unrealistic and
unsustainable but everyone wanted to make their money while they could
the consequences be damned. The gap between rich and poor is also at a
historic level (in China also) and this even worried Greenspan! I'm
trying to be optimistic about the future but it's really hard.

Zach