from the weak-kneed-ignorant-bullies dept
Like many big companies, Verizon eagerly signed up for Trump 2.0 excited to get tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, attacks on organized labor, and oodles of unaccountable subsidies.
But as is often the deal with authoritarian zealots (and force-wielding intergalactic warlords with deep-rooted mommy issues), the deal you think you struck can and will routinely get worse.
Last week Verizon found itself under attack by Trump’s unelected fake engineer manbaby Elon Musk, who publicly accused Verizon of killing air travelers before using his nonexistent authority to covertly elbow in on the company’s lucrative $2.4 billion contract with the FAA.
This week Verizon is finding itself at the receiving end of an “investigation” by FCC boss Brendan Carr over the company’s “diversity practices” (read: an already pretty flaky support for foundational civil rights). Carr clearly wants to leverage Verizon’s hopeful $20 billion merger with Frontier to bully the company into supporting the Trump administration’s ham-fisted assault on foundational civil rights:
“In order to aid the FCC’s resolution of these matters, please reach out to the agency personnel that have been working on Verizon’s pending transactions at the FCC,” Carr wrote. “They are the FCC personnel most familiar with Verizon’s operations due to their merger review activity.”
Carr is also “investigating” Comcast for its diversity initiatives, leveraging rumors that Comcast is hopeful to merger with T-Mobile or Charter during the second Trump administration. The Communications Act does have several references to avoiding discrimination; Carr is abusing the law to pretend that embracing diversity is itself a form of discrimination:
“Carr said in his letter to Comcast earlier this month that the commission would take “fresh action to ensure that every entity the FCC regulates complies with the civil rights protections enshrined in the Communications Act… including by shutting down any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI.”
Right wing propagandists hijacked the term DEI to use it as a bogeyman. Their hope is that the press and public will conflate their racist assault on civil rights with half-assed corporate inclusivity initiatives, in order to normalize racism and frame their bigoted removal on popular and hard-fought civil rights protections as an issue of “efficiency.”
Usually regulators will leverage telecom merger approvals in order to gain something actually beneficial to the public like expanded broadband deployments or some free perks for poor Americans. In Carr’s case, he’s weaponizing government to bully large companies into being more racist.
We’ll see if either Verizon or Comcast (historically close GOP allies) have the actual backbone to stand up to the baseless fake inquiries, or if tax cuts, merger approvals, and union busting are more important than basic human rights (knowing both companies well I have my suspicions).
This is, of course, the exact sort of radical abuse of government power big companies like Verizon (and the “free market Libertarian” think tanks they fund) have long accused progressive reformers of engaging in (often falsely). Here you have a government official actually engaging this kind of behavior while Verizon — and most of its proxy anti-government policy tendrils — sit like quiet little church mice.
The great irony here is Verizon and Comcast’s civil rights records were never particularly robust to begin with. Both companies have routinely been accused of discriminatory broadband deployments that overlook minority communities. And both have co-opted or hijacked civil rights groups as effective policy bludgeons to try and generate fake support for unpopular policy.
There’s no limit of consumer, cybersecurity, and other issues that plague U.S. telecom (U.S. telecoms just suffered the worst Chinese hack in U.S. history). That Carr’s top focus is dismantling foundational civil rights and recent FCC discrimination reforms is a bright, ugly spotlight on a historically pathetic lack of character.
Filed Under: bigorty, brendan carr, civil rights, dei, diversity, fcc, racism, redlining, telecom
Companies: comcast, verizon
