Tuesday, June 14, 2005

K Street Legislation

I'm sure that local leaders all over the US are going to be grateful to U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas for his help in keeping municipal budgets focussed on the right things.

His bill (H.R. 2726) to keep broadband infrastructure in private hands is designed to keep that infrastructure out of municipal hands, where it might be provided to people for free.

U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) wants to take state and local governments out of the broadband business. It's for their own good, the former Southwestern Bell executive said.

Under the terms of the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act (H.R. 2726) introduced by Sessions, state and local governments would be prohibited from offering telecommunications, telecommunications services, information services or cable service in any geographic area in which a private entity is already offering a substantially similar service.

"By choosing to invest their limited resources in telecommunications infrastructures, municipal governments often duplicate services already provided by a private entity."


Of course, Mr. Sessions (a former Southwestern Bell executive) is probably unaware that cities just might benefit from providing the service in their down town areas. People might actually stay downtown during their lunch hours or in between sales calls, purchase a meal or a cup of coffee, perhaps even do a little shopping while checking into their office networks to report sales, read email and the like.

Perhaps Mr. Sessions should also explore a bill which prohibits municipal governments from offering road repairs and garbage disposal. It's clear there are private industries already capable of providing those services. He might also look into a ban on cities providing public schools and public libraries. After all, there are any number of Christian Academies, Inc. and Walmarts already in place who could do the job nicely.

In fact, maybe Mr. Sessions should consider introducing a bill banning city governments outright: they are just duplications of organizations that could easily handle everything, for a price.

Moron.

[Thanks to QL in NY for the tip]

1 Comments:

Blogger Horatio said...

Great post. Some privatization is good, but these guys always want to take it to the absolute extreme. The ironic thing is, SBC is a private company, of course, but it's about as efficient as your typical giant government agency. Maybe we should "privatize" SBC, too.

6:26 PM  

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