The No-News, No-Column Column
I don’t have a column this week.
You see, I analyze and interpret the news, trying to find something that others haven’t touched. When there’s lots of news, I have a playground of riches. But during the past week, there were only two stories, and every reporter, columnist, commentator, pundit, bloviator, and blogger weighed in on [...]
I don’t have a column this week.
You see, I analyze and interpret the news, trying to find something that others haven’t touched. When there’s lots of news, I have a playground of riches. But during the past week, there were only two stories, and every reporter, columnist, commentator, pundit, bloviator, and blogger weighed in on it. There was nothing more I could add—from any perspective.
There was the Tiger Woods story. It led off the TV newscasts and took page 1 newsprint for a couple of days, and then became a featured story the rest of the week. One day, the breaking news about Tiger was that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
But, there was also the story of the gate crashers at the White House state dinner. Everyone covered that story. When the pundits finished blaming the Secret Service, they started on the White House staff, somehow making it seem that President Obama himself was guilty of allowing homeland security to deteriorate. Congress, always eager to take the spotlight away from Hollywood celebrities, launched an investigation. Overlooked was that although the gate crashers did get into the State Dinner, they had gone through several security checks, and the only hazard to the President was that he would have to be in the same publicity shot as a bleached blonde.
Now, some may say that the addition of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan is news. They may even claim that a recent report that concluded the Bush-Cheney administration failed to provide requested ground troops to capture a boxed-up bin Laden at the end of 2001 is news. They may claim that neglecting Afghanistan while throwing 170,000 troops into Iraq forced President Obama to beef up the forces in Afghanistan to finish the mission that was supposed to have been finished years ago. But, that’s not news. It’s not even worth commenting upon, especially when all the media resources were devoted to the Tiger Slam and the Tareq and Michaele Salahi invasion.
And that leaves me nothing to say this week. Maybe next week there may be news that 10,000 reporters, columnists, commentators, pundits, bloviators, and bloggers won’t give saturation coverage to. I sure hope so. I need the work.
[Walter M. Brasch, an award-winning former newspaper reporter and editor, is a syndicated social issues columnist, author, writer-producer, and professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. His latest books are Sex and the Single Beer Can, a probing and humorous look at the nation's media; and Sinking the Ship of State: The Presidency of George W. Bush, with a focus upon the shredding of Constitutional protections. Both books are available at amazon.com, and other bookstores. You may contact Dr. Brasch through his website, www.walterbrasch.com.]
walter, my sentiments exactly about the state of the news cycle.
could it be that all of us are holding our breaths while the senate hammers out a healthcare bill that contains a reasonable “public option”?
“Well now” as R L Burnside used to say.
There was that leaked copy of the charges of some telecom for what they get for recording your data for the government, I think it was Sprint.
The was a quick little flurry about the telecoms charging the government X amount for setting up a GPS tracking system on quite a few citizens and then charging a monthly fee to keep the track on for months. Near as I can remember the setup charges were somewhere between $500 and $1500 and was broken down, court order X, patriot act with no court order, X times 2, no legal reason X times 3, etc. Then the monthly fee for keeping track of whomever X times 1.5. Etc etc.
Then the quiet little slip of there were more than 8 million wiretaps last year.
Why is this a story?
You know the government collects info on everyone, what you don’t realize is that this is pure profit once the original date collector is set up. Maybe a couple more big mainframes to buy every year or so, but the rest is automated. From what I saw of the fee schedule everyone with a telephone or wireless hook up is tapped. Say there are 300 million people in the US. Say that only 10 per cent have telephones. The cheapest service was a $15 set up charge.
Recording was more but just take 30 million people with a 15 dollar set up charge. That is pure instant profit of over $450 million dollars for the telecoms. Add on monthly fees, fees based on how much paperwork is generated. Pretty soon you are talking real money. Work with real numbers we’re talking 3 to 8 billion dollars a year.
Now the GPS thing. 8 million people tracked in one year with a set up fee of $500. Why that is $4 billion in profit. Other carriers charged more. All charged a monthly tracking fee. Pretty soon you are talking real money. Probably over a billion a year, could be 5 billion.
Now, I worked briefly as a temp for an unnamed federal agency where I was given huge printouts of bills to another government agency from the telecoms. All that I was supposed to do was add them up, check late fees and enter an amount for checks to be printed and signed by various managers.
It took about 2 days to do all of that. Then since I didn’t have anything else to do, I decided to check what the lines were for. I called all of the numbers listed on one telecom. At least, 50 per cent didn’t ever answer. Probably another 20 to 23 per cent, I heard the fax machine ring tone. I made up a form and sent to every number assuming that all of the non answer numbers were fax machines. Result on one telecom was that the 25 to 30 per cent were dead lines that were not used ever. Office moved, no one shut down the old lines. Leased lines. Dozens of unusable leased lines. I did a rough calculation and figured that monthly this single telecom had billed the government for services that were never usable in the region of 30 per cent of the bill.
The person that I was replacing came back from whatever she had been out of the office for and refused to believe that I had literally done her entire monthly production in 2 damn days.
Her boss had me out of there in a hot flash. I tried to tell him about the millions that he and the gang were sending the telecoms every year. He did not want to hear it.
Point on the telephones is that the government never stops anything that was put in motion and the telecoms are never going to tell the government that someone else stole a cellphone but they were faithfully tracking the sucker that bought the stolen cell phone.
The US government and the state governments could chop their telecom charges at least one third by simply passing a law that if a billed telephone was not used in a month, service would be suspended for 6 months and then disconnect, all automatically. Save billion and billions on that law alone. I could write a workable law in less than a day with a congressional staff person.
Now all of these tracking and tappings aren’t going to ever be stopped unless someone writes a law along the lines of “if no person from the initiating agency checks the record for a month, the requesting agency automatically gets a notice that the tracking will cease in 10 days.”
Then it is automatically stopped.
Any request must name a person responsible for maintenance of the tracking . Any tap that is not closed and has gotten a notice, the person is automatically suspended from their job until a court can asses whether they should be tried for conspiracy to commit fraud against the taxpayers.
I’ve worked a lot of desk jobs off and on for the twenty years after this government job was done. I only worked a couple on single owner businesses that I could not save at least the cost of one unused line. People do not check their telephone bills.
If you need suggestions for what you can do that would be newsworthy, just send me an email.
I’ve worked somewhere between 50 and 120 different positions for pay. I needed 18 more credit hours to have an accounting diploma added to my other degrees in the late 70s. I see so much on the blogs that could be fixed with a signature that I am actually pretending like I can work.
I was really pained to see that my local newspaper gave bigger billing to Tiger Woods, Gatecrash Gate and the climate emails than to the police shootings in Washington. Also, news about the Ft. Hood shootings has vanished entirely.