by Bruce Kushnick, May 31, 2017 | Original Huffington Post article here
The following images is a snapshot of the FCC’s Big Freeze Accounting Scandal.
NOTE: On May 24th, 2017, the IRREGULATORS filed comments with the FCC and the Federal-State Joint Board on Jurisdictional Separations to investigate the current FCC accounting scandal. Click for the complete filing or read the summary below.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s agenda as told by an interview with Re/Code, May 5th, 2017, is to use a weed-whacker to remove the accounting rules.
“Re/Code:
“In the early days, you had said that you wanted to take a weed-whacker to remove the rules that are holding back investment. What did you mean by that?
Ajit Pai:
“What I had in mind were some of the regulations that we’ve had on the books for a while that stand in the way of investment in networks. Our Part 32 accounting rules — exceedingly boring, I recognize — but just the fact that companies have to maintain two different sets of books, literally one for their business and one for the FCC’s purposes, and the FCC hadn’t relied on any of that paperwork in years. I asked our staff, ‘When was the last time you looked at these reports?’ They said, ‘Pretty much never.’ We wanted to relieve some of those. Those are the kinds of regulations I had in mind because I want every dollar that a company has to be spent on building out networks, not on paperwork or regulatory requirements that aren’t relevant in 2017, whatever relevance they might’ve had back in 1934 or 1996 or 2015 or whatever.” (Emphasis added.)
In fact, the FCC is wasting no time in whacking those weeds, as there have been at least four separate proceedings, two ongoing, to erase any remaining FCC rules or obligations on the companies, AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink, who control the state utilities as well as the essential infrastructure for wireless.
And then there is the FCC’s “Big Freeze” scandal.
Above is a snapshot of how the FCC’s negligence (failing to examine the impacts of its own rules, “pretty much never”) has caused multiple financial harms. In 2001, the FCC imposed rules and then never examined their impacts for over 16 years.
This created a massive financial shell game that has overcharged customers billions per state.
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The top blue line is flat and shows that from 2003 to 2014, Verizon NY’s local service networks paid the majority, about 60%, of the total “Corporate Operations” expenses (i.e.; expenses for the corporate jet fleet or even the lobbyists and the lawyers that defend removing net neutrality, for example).
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Based on local service revenues, (the pink line), which has been in decline, over $840 million was overcharged in just one year, 2014. The same thing has been happening in every state for over a decade. We will discuss this chart in a moment.
The FCC’s plan is not to fix the impacts that its misguided federal regulations have had on customers or cities or states, but to erase and therefore immortalize the overcharging and harms, while having the government help and protect the incumbent phone companies that control the wires: Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink.
Continue reading “Investigate FCC Accounting Rule Scandal Before Rules Get Erased”
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