Comedy is funnier when it hits you in the gut. That’s what made a famous skit by Lily Tomlin about the phone company’s abuse of customers so memorable, one tag line being “We are omnipotent.”

AT&T is still at it. As columnist James Temple writes in the San Francisco Chronicle Friday:

In August 2006, the California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously to allow AT&T and other companies that provided local telephone service to raise prices at will.

Then-Commissioner Rachelle Chong, a Republican, credited as the driving force behind the deregulation plan, argued that growing competition from Internet phone service and cell phones would keep prices low.

“By the end of the 2010, these rate caps will no longer be necessary,” Chong said when the new rules were being phased in. “The market will be so competitive it will discipline prices.””Price discipline?” That should have ’em rolling in the aisles. Temple goes on to report that AT&T’s flat-rate plan for local calls is up 118 percent and services such as call waiting up nearly 180% since 2006. U.S. median household income is down 8.1% since 2007.

Tomlin’s original crack about omnipotence wasn’t much exaggerated. AT&T’s stranglehold on the California Legislature and the state Public Utilities Commission is near-legendary.

Chong, the AT&T cheerleader on the commission, took  a luxurious junket to Tokyo, funded and run by the telecom industry. Other commissioners and legislators went as well, as reported by Consumer Watchdog, without an ethical qualm.

Also on that 2007 Tokyo trip was the state Assembly’s Utilities and Commerce committee chair Lloyd Levine, who co-authored 2006 legislation sponsored by AT&T and Verizon in 2006 that allowed the telecom companies to to get into the cable and video business with one unregulated statewide franchise, while eliminating local control and consumer protection of all cable services.


Consumer Watchdog fought the legislation, predicting that prices would rise, not fall, customer service would degrade, companies would cherry-pick the richest markets for their much-touted new services and local public-access TV, previously funded by the cable companies, would disappear.

The other co-sponsor of the cable deregulation was then-Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez, who received the language of the proposed bill directly from a corporate/right-wing think tank called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, described thusly by SourceWatch:

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy’s ALECexposed.org

After the cable deregulation passed, AT&T partner Verizon took out full-page ads to thank Nunez personally. Nunez kept on benefiting from telecom donations and sponsorships, even as our predictions about price, service and public access came true.

AT&T is also the sponsor of the legislative Democrats’ chief yearly fund-raising event, the Pebble Beach Speakers Cup, and was a major donor to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Every penny of that lavish spending has gone to legislation and deregulation that boost AT&T’s bottom line at the expense of consumers. And neither the 2013 Legislature nor the governor’s office seems moved to undo the wreckage of AT&T’s deregulatory spree.

No wonder we’re not laughing.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, former research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Today’s California Blog Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Phil Angelides, Arnold Schwarzenegger, CA-04, CA-11, Richard Pombo, John Doolittle, Proposition 89, Proposition 87, health care, telecom.

Governor’s Race — Poll Stuff

• Bill Cavala’s take on the Field Poll.
• Julia Rosen’s take on the Field Poll.
• Randy Bayne on the Field Poll.
• PowerPAC on the Field Poll.
• Julia Rosen on the PPIC Pool.

Governor’s Race

• Riffing off of the PPIC Poll, Frank Russo has a great post on the popularity of the solutions proposed by AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, and the perils of Schwarzenegger’s proposed end-run around it.
• Angelides on Energy.
• Does anyone seriously think that Schwarzenegger will do anything that actually addresses the public’s need for affordable and universal health care? Me neither.
• D-Day is a bit off in his interpretation of this Angelides statement, but he’s right that Schwarzenegger is a tool of big oil.
• Even better from D-Day, a history of Schwarzenegger’s involvement with Ken Lay during the 2001 Enron fleecing of California.
• From ABC, looks like it might be tough for Schwarzenegger on immigration. Can’t get Latinos and please the nativist base. More here, from PowerPAC.
• Fudgsicles for the little people, Arctic AC for Schwarzenegger. Leading by example is so passé.
• Why Latinos are electorally important, and why Schwarzenegger fails them. For more, see Bill Cavala with some context on the California Republican history with Latinos.
• This is a good question. What are Schwarzenegger’s core values?
• It’s hard to say, because he keeps changing his positions, depending on whether it’s an election year or not.
• What we do know is that it’s an election year, so it’s time for Schwarzenegger to pretend to care. More pretending to care.
• P.S. This is what actual caring looks like.

Jerry McNerney / Paid-For Pombo / CA-11

In a nutshell, it appears that Paid-For Pombo’s killing of a buffalo was worth about $5K, which he didn’t repay or document. Mmmm… buffalo meat, seasoned with bribery.

15% Doolittle / CA-04

• Time to rewrite the civics textbooks. Local governments hire lobbyists who give money to 15% Doolittle as campaign contributions (with the 15% kickback), junkets and fancy dinners, then local governments get earmarks. That’s how it works.
• 15% Doolittle: I would save the freezer. Real people with real illness don’t matter to me.
• Do Republicans like 15% Doolittle seriously believe that morality is only a below-the-waist as defined-by-them issue? Never mind, stupid question. Of course they do.

Propositions

• Common Cause and the League of Women Voters say Yes on Prop 89.
• mathature at Daily Kos says Yes on Prop 89.
• s9 at MojoWire says Yes on Prop 87.

The Rest

• Update on AB 2987, the statewide video & internet franchise bill. Some progress has been made.
• This is a really interesting piece on increasing investment and stability in the grid over the long term.
• Ferial Masry (Dem Candidate, AD-37) is opening up a campaign HQ in Thousand Oaks.
• Assembly Member Dave Jones on why Sacramento should not impose a regressive sales tax to subsidize the billionaire who will benefit most from a new Kings stadium.
• Sheila Kuehl on prisons and transportation in the most recent budget.
• Bob Brigham is not all that happy with Barbara Boxer.
• Shorter Dianne Feinstein: I don’t have a clue about why people are concerned about the integrity of their vote.
• One more convert to the popular presidential vote plan.
• Dan Gillmoor thinks the Hearst involvement in the Merc takeover smells fishy.
• Not California, but I have a soft spot for Alaskan politics.

Today’s California News Roundup is on the flip. Teasers: Schmidt spins, Salmon season chopped, immigration mess, telco infrastructure in California, Angelides interviewed.

Schmidt Spins

• John Myers’ Capital Notes notes that Schmidt said both that the election will not be a referendum on Schwarzenegger and that Schwarzenegger will run on his record. Newspeak is alive and well in the Schwarzenegger campaign.
• This AP article running on Inside Bay Area focuses more on the contrast between the Schwarzenegger team’s Bush-Cheney roots and their insistence that Arnold is not that closely tied to Bush.
• Daniel Weintraub notes the number of attacks on Westly and the promise of negative campaigning, though without personal attacks from the Schwarzenegger campaign. That’s a promise, but not the promise it appears to be. The swiftboating of John Kerry was not done by BC04, though they didn’t stop it. Expect whisper campaigns and third party ads from people like the US Chamber of Commerce to do Schwarzenegger’s dirty work.
• Oh, and Carla Marinucci does some steno work.

Everything Else

• The Pacific Coast salmon season will be drastically cut back this year, based on the decimation of the Klamath coho run by excessive damming and agricultural water use. At least it’s not closed, and there may be some remedies over the next few years. Local ocean-caught salmon will be expensive this year, but if you can afford it, support the local fisheries. Farm-raised salmon is not the same thing, and it’s not particularly good for the environment. Tom Stienstra has the rules for anglers. [Side note: the best coverage on this issue today was from the LA Times — not a fishing town paper. Odd, that.]
• Something’s happening in the Senate on immigration. But nobody seems to know what. The SacBee says the bill is tanking. Knight Ridder (through the CC Times) seems more optimistic, but the quotes from the deport-them-all wing of the Republican Party are not encouraging. Either way, the proposal sounds like a mess, dividing up immigrants without a documented date of entry into different groups by length of stay with different citizenship tracks. And even if it passes the Senate in some form, it will go to conference committee, where the radical House Republicans will remake the bill in their image. Whatever happens, more marches are coming.
• Fabian Núñez introduces a bill to allow telcos to compete with cable companies for television services. It sounds like a good idea — more competition and all that — but the devil is in the details (some of which are laid out in the linked article.
• The OC Register has an AP syndication of an interview with Phil Angelides on a number of issues, with requisite counter-quotes from Westly’s campaign and former Bush adviser Steve Schmidt, now running Schwarzenegger’s campaign.
• Steve Westly will be returning $15,000 in campaign contributions raised by a VC fund he later recommended to CalPERS.
• The Chronicle has a brief piece on the upcoming renewal (one hopes) of certain portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The three provisions up (1) require federal approval of new voting procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination, (2) require federal observers in jurisdictions where there’s been intimidation of minority voters, and (3) require bilingual ballots in areas with substantial non-English speakers. These provisions affect different California counties to different degrees, but pretty much every county has the bilingual ballot requirement.
• A new form of Generic Dan Walters Column may have been spotted: Structural Problem X exists. Blame Union Y for it, even though the problem results largely from the anti-government constitutional amendments passed in the seventies and eighties. Today, X = School Funding, and Y = the California Teachers Association.
• This not important to anyone but me, but the Red Vic will now be allowed to sell beer.