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Conflict of Interest May Taint DTV Delay Proposal
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jan 14, 2009 03:28 PM
from the hard-to-find-true-disinterest dept.
from the hard-to-find-true-disinterest dept.
Anonymous writes "Ars Technica has discovered that one of the Obama transition team members advising on the digital TV transition has a conflict of interest that would benefit WiMAX carrier Clearwire over Verizon. 'Barack Obama's call to delay the DTV transition would affect not only millions of analog TV viewers, but also powerful companies with a vested interest in the changeover date — including at least one with an executive on Obama's transition team.'"
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Submission: Conflicts of Interest Behind Possible DTV del by Anonymous Coward
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Impressive... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome to Chicago Politics (Score:5, Funny)
The "C" in Chicago stands for "Corruption".
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Re:Welcome to Politics (Score:5, Funny)
The "C" in politics stands for "Corruption".
Fixed that for you
But, in Chicago, its a capital "C".
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the record was when Rush Limbaugh christened the Obama recession [rushlimbaugh.com] two days after Obama was ELECTED.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:4, Funny)
Rush Limaugh is a national hero. That man has balls, to say the truth when facts are utterly against him.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:4, Insightful)
When Barack Obama stocks his staff with industry insiders, it's corruption. When George W. Bush stocks his staff with industry insiders, it's just politics as usual.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the name "Rupert Murdoch" ring a bell?
In 2003 he owned over 175 newspapers, and every single one of them were pushing pro-Iraq Invasion editorials.
The media is STILL pussy footing Bush. Just a few days ago he said that it was "unfortunate" that no WMDs were found in Iraq. Talk about the most self-centered and retarded things to say. We are extremely fortunate that there were no WMDs found. If they had been found that would mean that 1) There are/were people in Iraq with the knowledge to make them again, and 2) That there are likely more of them in different storage facilities or being off loaded on the black market.
To call it "unfortunate" that we destroyed a country and killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, is a grievous understatement.
The only reason why it is "unfortunate" is because it will forever tarnish Bush's record in the history books.
Yet the media just sweeps away the statement. The guy makes a statement showing that his primary concern is his legacy, not the security of the country, nor the millions of people affected by the war.
Not that I'm a sunshine-daisy Obama optimist. He strikes me as more of a centrist republicrat than a lefty liberal. But taking over after Bush, he'll be hard pressed to do worse.
-Rick
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
At my work, I'm actually not allowed to have a vested interest in a competitor. But I guess government advisory boards can favor different companies if they want, based on vested interests of their advisory board members...
If so, that would be yet another reason governments tend to run worse than private enterprises. :)
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, that would be yet another reason governments tend to run worse than private enterprises. :)
So we have one example of where private enterprise bans conflicting interests and one where government also bans conflicts of interest, but it sounds like that may have been compromised.
Not to say that government as good as private enterprise or better, but that's some shady logic you're using to for a general indictment of government.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:4, Insightful)
P.S.
I should add that Obama's whole proposal of postponing the date is ridiculous, and deflates my confidence in his intelligence. I thought he had a high IQ, but now I'm not so sure. And even if Obama is unaware of the DTV transition issues, his advisers should be aware but they are giving him poor advice. There are several reasons not to delay:
- I already went-out and bought the boxes. I'm prepared and ready to switch to DTV, as are many many many other people.
- TV stations have already hired and scheduled:
--- technicians to arrive on February 17
--- new antennas to install on same date
--- advertising to tell consumers that February 17 is the deadline
- The transition has been in progress for ten years. (From 1999 to 2009.) It's already been postponed from December 31, 2006 to 2009. People have had plenty of time to prepare themselves with new DTV televisions and/or DTV boxes. We should no more postpone the date a 2nd time for these procrastinators than we postpone the April 15 date for tax payments. If people can't get off their overweight asses and get a box, then too bad for them. Again: They've had ten years.
Th only thing that should be done is approve more money for coupons, so they are available well into March and thereby assist people with the upgrade, but otherwise the 2/17 date should stand.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are certain sectors where conflicts of interest are unavoidable. Financial Investing and Politics are two them. The general remedy in these situations is full disclosure rather than suffer a chain of recuses every time you try to get something done. With full disclosure, at least the opposition can frame your decisions properly and decide whether or not they are motivated by personal interest.
That's why Cheney received only a minimal amount of heat for his Haliburton connection. Everyone knew up front what his interests were and had ample opportunity to question his motives.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:4, Informative)
And correct me if I am not mistaken. But he also gave up all personally benefiting assets in Haliburton.
The only assets that remained were in control of his charity foundation.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is my understanding, yes. Though that doesn't completely remove potential conflicts of interest. Trading political favors comes to mind as one way to work around a divestment of assets.
Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a rabid right-winger, who dislikes the issues Obama stands for, I have to disagree on the remedy. In my mind, it's both. Disclosure, but participation in the discussion. And no voting (actual say) on the decision. Allow the rest of the team (and citizens in general) to know his background, but recognise that though there may be a vested interest, he may actually be an expert in the field. Making such a decision without people who actually care (vested interest) and are technical experts in a field is pretty much about as stupid as making the same decision and letting the vested interest (especially an economic interest) run roughshod over the process.
By all means, bring in the experts. Just don't let the ones who will financially benefit actually vote on the outcome.
And I say this without regard to political party.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, there is a difference between a company and a government. A company inherently operates in a particular sector. They have a fairly well-defined scope so it's reasonably easy to pick out who their direct competitors are, who their partners are, and what companies they have no particular link to.
High-level government officials and teams, however, inherently have some level of influence over every imaginable sector/industry. Which means that the chance of a conflict-of-interest arising becomes much higher (if you pick a random economic sector, and you have a group of 10 people, there's a good chance that one of those people will gain or lose in some way depending on decisions made; whether it be because of owning stock, having a family member employed by that industry, etc.).
That having been said, government officials should absolutely be held to a very high standard on conflict-of-interest cases. The appropriate action here would be for that particular Obama team member to recuse himself from any decision-making related to that particular issue. He can remain active in other aspects of planning, but should absolutely not touch anything related to this conflict-of-interest (and the planning/execution should be done in a transparent way so that the public can be confident that he wasn't involved).
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Merely having a conflict of interests is not unethical.
But when that conflict of interest results in government policy which favors those interests, at the expense of competitors, that's potentially unethical. Of such things, corruption scandals are made.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I seem to remember the massive calls for Cheney's head because he was the CEO of Halliburton prior to being elected VP (of course, by that time he had stepped down and divested all shares of that company). All in the name of "conflict of interest"...
The rules work differently depending on which party's partisans happen to have the most mod points when such comments are made.......
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And thanks to his transparency he's shown throughout his Vice Presidency there have been zero questionable activities at all. Those secret energy meetings were kept from the public because they were too "technical" for us. And Halliburton/KBR really did earn all those no bid contracts in Iraq.
Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Informative)
The analogy between the situations is pretty weak.
1) Was Obama ever president of Clearwire? No. Some guy lobbying Obama (not even in his administration) is an executive v.p. of Clearwire.
2) Is the Obama administration going to give Clearwire billions of dollars? No. It's going to make a decision that arstechnica argues might help Clearwire by delaying a competitor.
3) Did Clearwire overcharge the government $1 Billion [bellaciao.org] in "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career" according to a govt. contract officer with 20 years of experience? No. (It's not even possible, since Clearwire isn't getting a payoff from taxpayers).
So equating the two situations only shows that your judgement is clouded by partisanship.
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Re:Impressive... (Score:5, Insightful)
and had been found that his statements that he had removed financial ties to himself and Halliburton to be "steeped in loopholes and legalese and avoidance".
You were saying?
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Let's say what you are saying is true (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, Darth Vader came to the VP office to make money. Let me get the chronology correct here.
1) Leave incredibly profitable private sector job to Become VP, knowing there would be a 9/11 leading to the concern over WMD and that Saddam would not comply with UN resolutions or IAEA inspections, that we would thus invade Iraq, and that Haliburton would become the military's main civilian infrastructure contractor.
2) Invade Iraq
3) ????
4) Haliburton chosen as main contractor by US military
5) Profit.
In other words, even if you impugn the man's character and motives, you still have to give him the foresight to predict all of this, as well as some shred of evidence that he actually influenced the contract selection process of the US Military. To date, there is no evidence - and a mound of contrary evidence - that Cheney had influence over Haliburton being chosen.
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Same-ole, same-ole (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, Obama's campaign wasn't really centered around "I'm going to vet every single postion I fill much more rigorously than anyone ever has before." Not that discovering the present case would have been too dificult to discover, but it's a long shot from Obama saying "You know what? Let's hire someone with conflicting interest on something fairly minor. Make a little extra cash and potentially making things just a little more interesting before I even take office."
Calling it corruption is making a
I'm probably naive (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
According to TFA, Obama, who wants to delay the DTV switch, is doing so (at least in part) based on the input of someone who stands to directly profit from having the transition delayed.
Why: It would seem that this Salemme guy is a Clearwire executive. Verizon, in an attempt to compete with Clearwire, spent $9.4 billion to be allowed to use the spectrum that analog TV is currently on. Obama, on the advice of Salemme, wants to deny Verizon use of that chunk of spectrum, preventing them from competing effectively with Clearwire.
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Re:I'm probably naive (Score:4, Funny)
No experience in the field only qualifies you to run the CIA.
Naw, it'll get you a post [wikipedia.org] at FEMA too......
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an old adage (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. As complicated as politics are and as interconnected as this world is, there's bound to be things that are overlooked. Of course, if you or I were becoming president, we wouldn't make such mistakes, eh?
Or is it that there are not yet enough.... (Score:4, Insightful)
.... viewers switched over to support the economy (re: advertisers)?
Conflict of Interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. It's terrible when political officials in high positions make decisions that conflict with their real world corporate jobs. *coughcheneyhalliburtoncough*
What's the relevance of bringing up Cheney in this manner? Surely your argument isn't that the Bush Administration did it so now the Obama Administration should do it as well?
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Misdiagnosing stupidity as malice (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all for rooting out scandals and Truth, Justice, and The American Way, but when you run the government, you can either pick people who've done things, or who you really like. And people who have done things will have prior relationships with other people, organizations, and businesses.
Let's judge POTUS on what he does, not on what his contacts or their contacts might want.
Delaying the deadline is a dumb idea. We make deadlines so everybody can plan the switch. This transition has been planned for a long time. It's been heavily advertised. The switch will be painful for lots of poor folks who can't afford new equipment or who are bedridden and can't go shopping, but delaying the transition won't change that cold reality.
Keep the train on schedule, Obama.
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't mean an issue does not exist. Just because some big company is going to benefit from a delay in DTV rollouts, does that mean we should cut off our nose to spite our face?
President Elect Obama has a reasonable argument that the market is not ready for DTV. I personally think that it will never be ready for the DTV changeover and that we'll need to do it the hard way anyway, but that's just my opinion. The government had a specific way they wanted this done. They have yet to achieve that goal.
Specifically, many consumers are still unaware of the changeover, or believe that they will need a new television or cable/satellite provider to continue receiving service.
Until the FCC gets much closer to achieving their goals for this changeover, Mr. Obama has a reasonable point.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Specifically, many consumers are still unaware of the changeover, or believe that they will need a new television or cable/satellite provider to continue receiving service."
Are you kidding me? For the small percentage that don't have cable / satellite, how could you possibly miss the unending (and extremely irritating) ads on all the main broadcasting stations about the change, how to know if you'll need to get a converter box, where to get one, how to get a discount / free one, and where to find more information if you still have questions? Anyone who's still unaware or confused about things has something seriously wrong with them to have missed out on this for the last year or else never uses a TV and as such it doesn't affect them anyways.
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So... (Score:5, Interesting)
We've already ruled out the possibility that there _might_ just be a consumer-beneficial reason for pushing back the changeover date? I mean, because it's political, it _has_ to be so someone or some company can game the system and reap megabucks?
Not really a transisiton team member (Score:5, Informative)
Having RTFA...
Salemme is not actually an adviser to Obama. He met with Senator Rockefeller and Tom Wheeler (one of Obama's many advisers) last week. He also donated some money to the Obama campaign. That appears to be the sum total of his involvement. Not very compelling evidence that he is behind the policy, if you ask me.
The assertion that he is a transition team member appears to be outright false.
OT : Why cancel analog? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting analog is a requirement of DTV?
Re:OT : Why cancel analog? (Score:5, Informative)
Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting analog is a requirement of DTV?
The spectrum that analog TV uses was sold off so that companies like Verizon could use it for a new wireless network service. Can't really do that while analog TV broadcasts are still using the spectrum.
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Why cancel analog? Money. (Score:4, Insightful)
The question makes perfect sense, as does the answer.
"Can anyone educate me on why a mandated cutting [of] analog [service] is a requirement of DTV?"
The transition to DTV frees up radio spectrum space currently used by analog. That space is very valuable, and has been sold/licensed for hundreds of billions of dollars. Those who will use the space have a pressing need to access that space ASAP - both to be able to use it at all, and to recoup their very large investment (every delayed day costs them millions in lost revenue).
Yes, technically, DTV can co-exist alongside analog TV. But as most broadcasters & viewers transition to DTV, maintaining that legacy service stalls other technical advancements (ex.: 4G) which would serve a whole lotta people for a whole lotta profit.
Translation: DTV requires cutting analog TV service because not doing so means you (and 50 million other people) don't get your 4G video cell phone just because Gramma wants to watch some podunk TV channel on her 1962-vintage television.
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Re:OT : Why cancel analog? (Score:5, Informative)
I know that seems counterintuitive, but the answer is ultimately fairly simple if you look at the politics behind the DTV switch. A while back, the US government (Clinton Era) decided to sell off the public airwaves to various companies. Of course, in order for these companies to take control of these airwaves and use them for cellphones and what-have-you the analog signal had to be cleared from the airwaves.
The only reason the government was able to do this was with a partially funded mandate, which was to force all analog signal consumers and all analog signal broadcasters to switch to a digital signal. The reason why that would work because in theory you could compress the same number of broadcast stations into the smaller remaining bandwith, provided that they were digitally encoded signals that would be decoded by a digital reciever.
So, the answer to your question is this, this isn't about DTV. This is about a problem that the government created of having sold the analog spectrum that is currently being used for analog TV broadcasts to companies that want to use something else. The government believes that a DTV switchover is the solution to this problem, so they are trying to get the majority of consumers and broadcasters to switch to DTV as soon as possible. That's why they are giving away coupons from the Commerce Department, and running ADs that say "you must switch to DTV."
I also believe that a lot of retailers were hoping that the confusion created in non-technical users regarding DTV was going to drive HD-TV sales, but that's a totally seperate issue.
Of course, the economy doesn't look quite the same now as it did when this switchover was originally mandated for 2009, and that's probably the real reason why there is talk of delaying the changeover.
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Keep people off the rooftops in Feb. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if you do have a converter box, or and HDTV with an antenna, you still don't know what you will be able to receive until after the transition, because some stations will move their broadcast frequency. Also, once the analog broadcasts stop, you'll be able to receive some fringe signals that were overwhelmed by them.
Re:Delays my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
People who haven't switched over yet probably won't ever do it, so just make the damn cut-over and wait for the inevitable news stories about people being left without TV. These stories are going to happen whether you make the switch now or 10 years from now, so just do it already.
The people that haven't done anything about this switch by now must never actually watch their TV, since we've been subjected to crawls about it for more than a year on every broadcast channel, so they won't care anyway. Either that or they've just been too lazy, in which case the only way they're going to actually get a converter is if they get kicked in the pants sufficiently hard by, let's say, having their TV stations go dark.
Just get this crap over and done with so we can move on already.
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Re:Delays my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
the only way they're going to actually get a converter is if they get kicked in the pants sufficiently hard by, let's say, having their TV stations go dark.
Honest question here: is the plan actually to have the stations go completely dark at the switchover date?
Wouldn't it make more sense to have those channels broadcast a continuously looped message that explains in detail how to switch over to digital TV? The message could be maintained for a month, say, after which time the channels would truly go dark to free up the bandwidth. Otherwise people who were not paying much attention will just think their TV is broken.
Even better would be a multi-stage approach; starting with occasional advisory ads and text-overlays (which I guess they are doing now?), then have every commercial replaced with an advisory, then have a perpetual "this channel will stop functioning soon!" overlay on the channel, then a continually looped message explaining the switchover, and finally the channels go dark.
I know that they "shouldn't have to" beat people over the head with this information--but the fact is that many people are probably still not aware that the switchover is going to happen, and could probably use some more insistent messages.
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Re:Who released the hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod disclaimer - I don't support one more than the other. I think just about any politician that's done what it takes to get to the presidency is bound to be a shyster.
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Re:Who released the hounds (Score:5, Interesting)
Odd how this is the sort of post that pops up when it's a problem with the budding Obama administration but not so much when it has anything to do with Bush...
Well I'm not going to defend the OP, since I am cynical and I see no reason to defend Obama from the completely true accusation that he is a politician. Nor am I going to defend a conflict of interest.
But the simple fact is that the scale we're talking about, Bush vs Obama, is ridiculously different. Some low level advisor might get a temporary benefit from a suggestion Obama made regarding delaying DTV switchover, a relatively minor issue. Bush's vice president's former company was handed multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts (where in most cases the claim that this was because only halliburton could do it were flat wrong), to the point of even outsourcing our military's kitchens to this company. That's a conflict of interest that concerns me. If this was Bush, then it'd be his FCC chairman or Secretary of Commerce that was a VP for Verizon, who'd have already been given an exclusive contract for government wifi.
Bush's administration had plenty of minor conflicts of interest of around this level that I really never gave a rats ass about. They suck, but they're largely unavoidable. The difference is basically how important and high up these conflicts go, and how blatantly and severely they direct policy. We'll see how things turn out with the new guy, but right now just looking at the Cabinet-level picks Obama is no Bush and saying that is not inherently 'bias'.
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Re:Who released the hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
Cynicism and complaint are the resorts of losers and followers.
Actually I'd make the argument that as Americans we are supposed to have a healthy amount of skepticism/cynicism towards our Government. As far as complaining goes, that was written into the 1st amendment ("petition the Government for a redress of grievances") as I recall.
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Re:Not neccesarily a conflict (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy may have an interest in the outcome, but he and Obama have a point: the public isn't ready for the changeover, and won't be until those coupons are in their hands (and maybe not even then, but they'll have the coupon for the box and if they choose not to use it that's their problem).
That is, in reality, the actual problem.
Theoretical funding for the coupons has run out, but that's assuming all coupons are redeemed. There are quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth that have not been. Although it is extremely unlikely they will be, the goverment can't just issue more coupons without money behind them.
The correct solution is just to have Congress allow another $100M or so of coupons to be printed, with the caveat that all coupons (even those previously issued) must be redeemed by March 1, 2009 (or some other very near, hard cutoff date).
Also, I really hated the fact that anybody could ask for coupons. I know people who have already invested over $10K in HDTV equipment who asked for them. I don't know if they used them, but it seems silly to me that they would, since they can only be used to purchase basically inferior devices (limited to 480i output). But, those coupons count against the budget.
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Re:At least it isn't Verizon (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon and AT&T are both conglomerations of baby bells. But they're not the same company.
Verizon formed from a merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. Bell Atlantic earlier gobbled up NYNEX.
The "new" AT&T is SBC, renamed. SBC gobbled up Pacific Telesis and Ameritech, the old AT&T, and finally BellSouth.
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