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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Articles: Government - We Need Real Change For most of my life, I just went along, voting in one party or another depending on what my perception was, based on brief perusals of the news, of how badly those in office were doing. I had briefly learned about the Constitution in school, but we didn't study it a lot and, mostly, we only heard about it in rhetoric, as one politician summoned it's legend along with the founding fathers, as they attempted to stir the public into believing what they were espousing. I went through one upheaval after another, first in the computer industry and then in the telecommunications industry, trying to keep my head above water and not really asking why these things were happening. After Viet Nam, I also was against the various wars that this country was led into, but I really didn't wonder why. I have since learned, of course, that almost all of our wars have been fought so that people who already had money, could make more.
I accepted the steady increase in prices for everything as part of the market and something that I just had to deal with. This, too, as it turns out, is not something that is beyond our control or caused by the free market. It is a result of a monetary system that has to increase the money supply and have growth in order not to die.
I listened as people constantly referred to the Telecom Deregulation Act and discussed the issues that the TelCos would be facing that would cause them to have to buy our company's products. I accepted this as just something that the government did that may or may not have been a good thing but it also was just something that we had to deal with. I watched as the brilliant businessmen and women who run the TelCos figured out a way to keep their livelihoods stripped from them and kept our nationwide network running in the process. After a few industry meetings, I began to notice how involved and knowledgeable these business people were in what the government was doing. Many of the Telco owners and managers were also farmers and, seeing them in town or at the meetings driving their pickups in jeans and work boots, you wouldn't suspect their level of knowledge. Sitting down to dinner with them and listening to them talk about their families, farms, fishing, and hunting and, in the next breath, discussing the installation of broadband technology and government issues, you began to understand just how complex their lives were and had to be in order for them to survive. I began to get a clue and to think that the government just might have a lot more to do with the struggles that I had been through than I would suspect.
I was involved with a promising, venture funded telecommunications startup as the .com bubble was created and we were doing very well in our development with only about a year to go before the company took off. We were on the verge of realizing the American dream. We had done everything right and were well positioned to take advantage of all of our efforts when the bubble popped. The same panic that drove the VC firms into the industry, lest they lose out, drove them out, lest they lose more, faster than they got in and there was no reasoning with them. Everyone was getting out and no one had the guts to pay attention to their brains. They had mostly come from manufacturing industries and didn't really understand the service industry anyway. The panic was just like the bank panics and it drove the telecommunications industry to its knees. Solid, profitable companies were forced by stock holders to lay off hundreds of thousands of people in order to try to get their sinking stock prices under control. All of the layoffs did no good, however, and only served to lessen the TelCos capabilities.
When our VCs pulled out and our company closed, I began to wonder how these things happened. As I studied, I discovered that the federal government wasn't supposed to be involved in regulating the Telecom industry in the first place and that its deregulation had only been done at the bequest of the Fed and institutional investors. I discovered that the Telecom Deregulation Actnot only didn't deregulate the TelCos, it stole their property from them forcing them to sell it at below market value. This government theft of private property, after these hard working Americans had spent sixty years buying trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and installing the best communications network in the world, was infuriating.
I watched as the Fed lowered the interest rate in the wake of the .com crash and artificially created the housing bubble. I knew that it, too, would pop and cause this country great harm. I also realized that the same thing had been done to the airline companies along with many of our other once burgeoning industries. I put one and one together and learned that our car companies' demise was a result of the same institutional investors raiding them and not because of their pension plans or inferior products. They were not left the money they needed to develop new technology and manufacturing processes. In the process, Americans and the country were made to suffer while the rich got richer.
Now I read about Obama's broadband and green energy initiative and know that it's just more of the same. These things are already being done, rationally, and we don't have to pay for them. Wind farms already exist in over 34 states and rural telephone companies have been installing broadband technology for over 10 years. What these initiatives will do is impose more government controls, grow the government, spend more of your money, and provide a path for institutional investorsto get involved and create more bubbles so they can strip these industries of money.
The government is in the wrong business and we need to make a real change, not just hope for the change that politician after politician promises us. Trillions of dollars can be poured back into this economy constitutionally and stimulate it without printing, borrowing, and spending a dime.
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