FCC Approves Cox, Charter Merger On Condition They Promise To Be More Racist

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Hey look everyone! More of that famous populism Trump rode into power on!

The Trump FCC has announced they’re rubber stamping the approval of a merger between two of the nation’s biggest cable companies (Charter, Cox), creating the biggest cable company in the U.S. Struggling Americans were surely clamoring in support of their local shitty cable company getting even bigger, right?

As a condition of the deal, the two companies have promised to be more racist and sexist. More specifically, they’ve promised the FCC they’ll eliminate already fairly pathetic corporate programs acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. The FCC posted this handy infographic on social media that breaks down all of their lies about the deal in an easily digestible way:

Literally none of those claims are true. These deals never result in any of these benefits. There’s more than forty years of concrete evidence proving it. Consolidation across U.S. telecom has consistently resulted in spotty service, high prices, and routinely abysmal customer service.

Cox and Charter don’t directly compete, but their large scale, size, and political influence ensures they’ll have more power than ever to lobby against robust competition more generally.

Remember when Charter was caught creating a fake consumer group to undermine community-owned broadband access in Maine? Or that time New York State regulators found the company was so shitty, and lied so often, that they almost resorted to kicking them out of the state? If you liked that sort of thing, you can now expect more of it, better resourced, at scale. Very exciting!

The debt from the kinds of deals is also always predominately paid off by labor and consumers in the form of mass layoffs and higher prices. These deals never meaningfully serve the public interest, but our captured regulators, consolidated telecoms, and shitty press work together to help pretend otherwise.

The FCC explains the “DEI” provisions this way in their news release:

“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Specifically, Charter commits to recruiting, hiring, and promoting individuals based on the factors that matter most: skills, qualifications, and experience.”

You’re not told what these “safeguards” actually are. Just that Cox and Charter won’t try to give minorities or women a leg up in country full of systemic hatred and intolerance because that might be unfair to a dude.

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to insist that simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exists — or doing literally anything about it — is somehow discriminatory to white men. This is diseased white supremacist thinking; the sheer delusional hubris to think this way, let alone integrate this ignorance into already problematic pro-monopoly policy, is the mind garbage of simpletons.

If you pop around and read the news coverage of this deal (see: this piece from Reuters or this piece at CNN), you’ll notice the consolidated corporate press helps sell the lie that more consolidation somehow serves the public interest. These kinds of stories will parrot the companies’ claims, ignore their history of monopolistic predation, and even downplay the mandated racism as a droll policy bullet point.

CNN author Jordan Valinsky even went so far as to write this sentence with a straight face:

“The transaction is contingent on regulatory approval and could be a litmus test for President Donald Trump’s views on major companies combining.”

Trump’s FCC has rubber stamped every single shitty telecom merger that has crossed its desk. We know Trump loves harmful consolidation, provided he can personally get something from it. A cornerstone of GOP policy has been to coddle monopoly power for literally fifty fucking years! Across every industry in America. None of this is really up for debate. Any “litmus” test was failed long ago.

It’s important to really stop and recognize the way the press routinely normalizes corruption and gives Trump Republicans policy credibility in areas like antitrust that they never had to actually earn. Because there’s just generally so much going on, this merger will largely be ignored. And when the layoffs and higher prices arrive later this year or early next, press and policy folks will be nowhere to be found.

If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest (across government, media, policy, and culturally). If future federal and state governments don’t make antitrust and corruption reform a central pillar of all policy in every sector, we’re quite literally cooked.

Filed Under: antitrust, brendan carr, broadband, cable, consolidation, dei, fcc, media, mergers, racism

Companies: charter, cox