Comcast Executives Appear To Share Cozy Relationships With Regulators 63
v3rgEz (125380) writes A month before Comcast's announcement of a $45B takeover of rival Time-Warner, Comcast's top lobbyist invited the US government's top antitrust regulators to share the company's VIP box at the Sochi Olympics. A Freedom of Information Act request from Muckrock reveals that the regulators reluctantly declined, saying "it sounds like so much fun" but the pesky "rules folks" would frown on it, instead suggesting a more private dinner later.
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Christ, is this really what passes for news on slashdot these days? "Appears"? Pull the other one!
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And that's hardly anything new, either. Andrea Mitchell of NBC married Alan Greenspan in 1997; he was Chairman of the Fed at the time, and continued in that role until 2006. Nice little bit of "extraordinary access" NBC had there during Clinton's and W's presidencies.
where what! (Score:2)
suggesting a more private dinner where Joozian Three Way orgy was performed
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and you'll end up in a com cast.
Not a VIP box at the Olympics (Score:5, Informative)
They invited them to a party Comcast was throwing at the Newseum in D.C., which is a far cry from "the company's VIP box at the Sochi Olympics."
Re:Not a VIP box at the Olympics (Score:5, Informative)
Wish I had mod points, since AC has it right. If you check the document attached with the article, page 26 has the actual invitation itself, and it clearly says the event is in D.C., rather than in Sochi, and there's no mention at all of a VIP box or anything of the sort. This story went from "Comcast cordially invited them to an opening ceremony event at the Newseum" in the actual invitation to "Comcast invited them to an event for the Sochi opening ceremony" in the article to "Comcast invited them to a VIP box at Sochi" in the \. summary.
It's a non-story. Just regular schmoozing. Though the fact that regular schmoozing is a non-story might be a story in and of itself...
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It's been at that all-time high for several decades now at least. Yes, no one cares much about it or at least not enough people to make it stop.
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Agreed, gave him one of my mod points hehe.
Checked the article myself, it lines up with what AC is saying.
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Then invalidated the mod point by posting in the same discussion..
I modded this insightful.
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The takeaway here is that Comcast is in bed with industry regulators. While we all knew this already, we shouldn't allow that fact to cloud our judgement about the obviously unacceptable state of current affairs.
This email clearly shows a cordial relationship between the correspondents. It should be illegal for corporations to make this kind of offer to a regulator, and
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Maybe they invited the "rules folks" too?
Just regular schmoozing (Score:1)
Really, though, they shouldn't be inviting their *regulators* to anything other than functions related to regulation.
I'm not sure what the uproar is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate Comcast/Time Warner as much as the next guy but... I work in sourcing and this is the exact type of email I would send back to a vendor that is overstepping reasonable G&E (gift and entertainment) bounds. What else should they have said? Just not responded? Jeez.
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Re:I'm not sure what the uproar is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I had that same thought. This is SOP for any professional relationship. The language in the e-mail is very informal but polite, also SOP. Where's the smoking gun here?
Re:I'm not sure what the uproar is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to be clear, I take the response that they made to actually be better than not responding or saying "no thanks" - by bringing up the "rule folks" it clearly indicated that the request was improper to begin with and is a polite way of telling the lobbyist to stop sending such invitations.
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Say it ain't so. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Say it ain't so. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, for awhile I thought it was the overwhelming power of the wealthy that prevented change, but now I get the sense that it is the underwhelming intellectual capability of people like yourself that are dragging us down. Happy 4th. . .
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Exactly and when the regulated schmoozes the regulator, what else could the regulated be trying to sell other than various flavors of corruption? That is why, in this case, the schmoozing can only come at the detriment of society as a whole, and it is a significant example of how rampant regulatory capture is in our society.
"I've been invited to boxes by vendors before"
If I were a stock holder of your company then I would take issue with that because part of the price your
Blatant corruption (Score:1, Insightful)
This is blatant corruption. But it's the US, so nobody will give a shit, and the crony capitalism will continue until it ruins the entire country.
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This is blatant corruption. But it's the US, so nobody will give a shit, and the crony capitalism will continue until it ruins the entire country.
I dislike crony capitalism and worse, the insider oligarchy running this country, but blatant corruption would be him accepting the gift, not declining it.
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There you go again, using that crazy 'murican logic.
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Accepting the gift would certainly be worse. However, regulators should not be on a first name basis with the people they regulate, and shouldn't be inviting each other to dinner, talking about having coffee, preferentially reading their friends' corporate merger justification tracts, and looking forward to the next time they can get together for $whatever. If I did that with, say, a property assessor, it'd be called bribery and I'd be thrown in jail.
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Public Choice Theory (Score:5, Informative)
Regulatory Capture [wikipedia.org] results in regulators being captured.
Troll (Score:2, Insightful)
While Slashdot's modus operandi is soak us in hyperbole and half truths while daring us to make fools of ourselves in this case there is not even a morsel of parity between headline and TFA and as such goes too far.
Headline might as well have read.. "Comcast executives appear to have sexual encounters with unicorns" while casually quoting a document which provides no evidence of the same.
Re: Headline (Score:3)
Oh yeah, almost forgot... (Score:2)
Corruption... (Score:1)
You know it runs deep when you have legal bribing (lobbying) in your country.
Grease the wheels (Score:1)
Different scale but as being a manager or someone senior in IT in the corporate world, you could get a free lunch, dinner, and box seats for something probably 5 days a week if you tried hard enough. One of my guys that left recently was doing this all the time. I didn't mind but eventually they would start calling me. I'd have to explain why our Windows engineer was wrong when he said we are interested in accelerators, some new router, or switching to some company for our corporate MPLS. Why he was me
Obama's Ethics Website (Score:5, Funny)
"I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists â" and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not run my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president."
-- Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA
November 10, 2007
http://change.gov/agenda/ethic... [change.gov]
Yes, this is still up on the Internet, even today.
Make that illegal (Score:2)
That should simply be illegal. It's good to have meetings with related businesses to express concerns etc., but it should be in a plain government meeting room with no perks: no food, no dancers, no music, etc.
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But how would Congress, legislators, mayors, councilmen, etc. be able to "do their jobs" (e.g., secure either their next election's funding or their next job outside of government)?
captcha: swindle
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You should at least allow donuts. Don't be such a hard ass.
Make that illegal (Score:1)
The entire body of elected officials should be quartered in WWII style barracks, with military chow lines, with drill sergeants at every entrance and exit to make sure that they understand what kind of maggots they really are.
Every meeting should be publicly recorded, available 24x7 - there are NO secrets from the people of this country from which all of their "powers" are derived.
If they forget about this, then please refer to Thomas Jefferson.
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebel
Irony... (Score:2)
America.... (Score:2)
...the worst government money can buy.
Ya' think? (Score:4, Informative)
appear ? (Score:2)
Comcast doesn't need to smooze (Score:2)
They have MSNBC to do that.
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Exactly.
I think the most glaring example is in the area of financial regulators. The U.S. federal government has the SEC, OTS, CFTC, FDIC, OCC and a financial crimes unit of the FBI.
Yet they FAILED to prevent the 2007 financial crisis and have FAILED to investigate and prosecute any of the big financial institutions for criminal activity? That undoubtedly demonstrates complicity or incompetence, but AFAIK, nobody in these agencies has been fired or reprimanded for their negligence/complicity.
Rather than i
Telecoms among top lobbying spenders(opensecrets) (Score:2)
The big telecoms are perennially in the top 20 companies/organizations in terms of annual lobbying expenditure. In 2012 for example:
https://www.opensecrets.org/lo... [opensecrets.org]
#10 AT&T $17,460,000
#15 Verizon $15,220,000
#16 Comcast $14,750,000
Imagine what they dump into PACs and campaign contributions? How many regulators are past or future execs in these companies?