After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Cornering the mobile market
It is an Aesop fable that gives us the phrase "the lion's share," which has come to mean the biggest portion of something. However, in the fable, the lion didn't merely take the biggest share of the stag that it and three other animals had hunted down—it took the whole prize.
Today, giant telecom firms are absolutely Aesopian in their lust for total control of the phone business. In the cellphone sector, for instance, a handful of giants are dominant simply because they have the raw money power to outbid smaller competitors for the airwave licenses needed to operate.
To prevent AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, and other big players from cornering the market, the Federal Communications Commission set aside 422 of these licenses in 195 localities across the country, allowing only small companies to bid on them. It was a good way to maintain competition in the industry—but the anti-competitive giants got sneaky. They formed "partnerships" with small companies, giving them the money to win the licenses.
Alaska Native Wireless, for example, is a small outfit that, amazingly, won 44 of these licenses, including a $1.5 billion license to operate in New York City. Where does a little outfit like Alaska Native get billions of dollars? From its "partner," AT&T.
Of the 422 licenses that were supposed to go to small competitors, 95% went to front companies for AT&T, Sprint, Cingular and other giants. Worst of all, these giants used their fronts to qualify for small-business credits to pay for the licenses, costing taxpayers $626 million.