The Protests at Standing Rock Are Necessary. What Happened at Malheur Was Nonsense.

By Aaron Bady, The Los Angeles Times

31 October 16

he rancher-militia occupation last January at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, and the ongoing Native American occupation of the site of a proposed oil pipeline near Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas make for interesting comparisons. On Thursday, for example,  the same day that seven of the Malheur militia members were found not guilty of nearly all charges related to the Oregon standoff, 141 protesters in North Dakota were arrested by a law enforcement officers from at least seven states, using military-grade, anti-riot technology.

Watching the events unfold one after the other revealed a glaring racial double standard. It also showed a profound difference in what is at stake in the two movements.

In Oregon, white ranchers  — dressed  as cowboys, armed to the teeth, claiming to be clothed in the Constitution — protested what they consider to be creeping government tyranny, in the form of federal control of western lands.  Law enforcement let them come and go at will, and sought not to provokethem, giving them time and space to stage their “insurrection.” By contrast, the attempt to derail the Dakota Access Pipeline was met by a stunning show of force: dogs, helicopters, LRAD sound cannons, military vehicles and hundreds of police officers.

White privilege — or white impunity, perhaps — is an unavoidable explanation for the contrast. One man did die in Oregon, on a road outside the refuge and seemingly because he appeared to think the authorities didn’t mean it when they pointed their guns at him. But the last of the occupiers were represented in negotiations by a Nevada state representative. Native Americans with drums and prayer sticks on their own land were not so indulged. That’s one reason the racial component is best understood not just as a double standard, but a single, continuous policy that defines American history.

 It was the federal government that removed native peoples in the first place, opening up eastern Oregon in the 1870s to economic development by white ranchers. When the leaders of the rancher militia, the Bundy family, call on American nationalism to justify their stand, they are in fact calling on a very real history of racial injustice.

Nor is it a coincidence that the contested Dakota Access Pipeline was moved downstream toward the reservation from its initial proposed location upstream of majority-white Bismarck, N.D. Protecting the Missouri River and the water supply of the capital of the state from potential oil leaks didn’t require a popular uprising because “public interest” has never not been defined in white terms.

But as important as the racial issues are, they may mask other aspects of the two movements. The Bundys’ campaign is farcical, a protest against an imaginary threat conducted in symbolic terms. The Standing Rock protest is concrete; it seeks to stop a real pipeline and a real environmental threat.  

The Malheur refuge occupiers were treated so gingerly in part because it was winter, because the place was so isolated, and because little — in the eyes of the U.S. government — was actually at stake.  By contrast, the government sees the Dakota Access Pipeline as an integral part of our national energy policy.  Homeland Security classifies pipelines as critical infrastructure, potentially making it possible to prosecute the protesters as terrorists. 

This difference has to be emphasized: The Native American protesters are standing in the way of one of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s priorities when she was head of the State Department, the development and expansion of natural gas infrastructure. And though Clinton has occasionally opposed pipeline projects, such as  the now-defunct Keystone XL, that opposition has been lukewarm at best. Now it is hard to hear much support for environmental justice or native sovereignty in her call  for “a path forward that serves the broadest public interest.” The shibboleth of “energy independence” requires expanded fracking, natural gas development — and the Dakota pipeline. 

Even casual observers can tell that the Bundy family is well-practiced at political theater. One would be hard-pressed to find Brooklyn millennials who take as many selfies and post as many video-blogs as they do; keeping up with their  self-documentation on Facebook is exhausting. Despite the Thursday acquittals, the Bundys and their followers surely did conspire to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs, and they obviously and flagrantly brought firearms onto federal property, as charged. But the refuge was essentially empty when they occupied it; nothing was in play there except bird watching and conservation. Wildlife sanctuaries aren’t much eyed by Homeland Security and oil companies.

Nowhere is the essential fraud of the Bundy protest more visible than in its attempts to adopt and co-opt native histories of dispossession.  The Bundys have styled  themselves as indigenous people being pushed off their land. A recent Bundy Ranch Facebook post, for example, used Standing Rock’s now viral hashtag, #waterislife, and there have been occasional confused postings about reaching out to the Native American protesters.

Whatever bedtime stories the Malheur militia members may tell themselves — and the tens of thousands who  follow them on social media — Western ranchers and settlers aren’t the victims of the government. In fact, they’ve been the primary beneficiaries of its land-use policies — water and irrigation policies as well as grazing rights and mineral rights. Their grievances are nonsense by comparison with the Standing Rock Sioux; their protests are self-aggrandizing spectacles, without substance.

Water, however, is substantial, and it is a good part of what is at issue in the Dakotas. Though it will be the Sioux who suffer in the short term from the pipeline and what it carries, we all live downstream eventually. If you understand  that global warming is real, it is pertinent that no one is fighting it more directly and consequentially than the Standing Rock protesters.

The Bundy family and their followers are playing dress-up and putting on historical re-enactments. The Standing Rock Sioux are fighting for the  survival of the planet. Which side are you on?

Why Did AT&T and Time Warner Unveil Merger Mid-Election? Panic, Perhaps

By Suzanne McGee, Guardian UK

31 October 16

Denunciations of the deal by politicians may have weighed less than fear that rivals might pre-empt them with synergy of content production and distribution

he dealmakers behind the proposed mega-merger of AT&T and Time Warner have accomplished the impossible: uniting Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their condemnation of the deal.

Trump, needless to say, has been the most vituperative. The merger would “destroy democracy”, he said. But pretty much everyone in Washington has publicly come out against it. Sanders, Clinton’s opponent for the Democratic nomination and now campaigning on her behalf, is already preparing to battle a future Clinton administration to ensure that anti-trust regulators turn thumbs-down on the deal. Lining up beside him? Powerhouse senator Elizabeth Warren.

The two companies and their bankers must feel that they have walked straight into a buzzsaw. The Senate will hold a hearing on it on 7 December, after the election. Will tempers have cooled by then? Maybe, maybe not.

So, what on earth drove Time Warner and AT&T to sprint to the altar during an election season in which populist politicians are dominating the airwaves and the debate? Insanity? Desperation? A sense that there was an opportunity that was just too good to pass up? Or simply an urge to annoy the politicians?

The word to bear in mind might simply be “panic”.

It’s no shock to anyone who keeps an eye on these worlds that companies that distribute all the content that we consume, and the companies that produce it (translation: AT&T as the party of the first part, and Time Warner as the party of the second part) have a vested interest in forging alliances among themselves. The closer and more seamless those alliances are, the faster and more creatively they can work on developing and delivering more of that content for all our devices, especially those smartphones and tablets from which we are unable to wean ourselves.

Those that get it right have captive audiences simply because they are delivering a growing proportion of that content. It’s an enticing prospect.

Analysts have been expecting that we’d see yet another wave of convergence – a buzzword in this media/telecommunications universe for the better part of two decades now, having been behind the merger that formed Time Warner itself in 1995 – for several years.

This time, it’s happening in different ways, not always via mergers. Apple and Time Warner’s HBO have linked their brands already, with Apple distributing the HBO Now service. Imagine what might happen if Apple – with its cash mountain – decided to snap up HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, and pursue the myriad potential synergies between its own platforms and Time Warner’s content?

I suspect it’s safe to say that the folks at AT&T did just that – and panicked.

Or else they considered what might happen if another giant rival with the potential to build a mammoth platform and plenty of cash – like Google, which has already pushed into live-TV streaming – pre-empted them. Or they allowed companies like Amazon or Netflix to get further ahead with their own plans.

Facing that kind of strategic risk, a little bit of political risk may not look like anything terribly threatening. Sure, the politicians may indulge in a lot of saber rattling for the benefit of voters, especially since the deal was announced in the final days of the presidential election campaign. But it will be many months before regulators will rule on it – even if a deep-pocketed rival doesn’t muscle in and outbid AT&T for Time Warner.

Will the public outrage endure? The dealmakers and the board members at both companies seem to be making a calculated decision that the answer is “no”.

That seems optimistic. We already pay far more than citizens in most other parts of the world for basic broadband access, thanks to the fact that most communities offer very limited options to their citizens. Most telecommunications services are equally pricey, relative to those offered elsewhere, from mobile phones to cable television services. The number of cord-cutters continue to grow.

The two companies have an idea of what they’ll do to keep their own customers loyal. “Premium content always wins,” said Randall Stephenson, CEO and chairman of AT&T, in the company’s press release announcing the transaction. “We’ll have the world’s best premium content with the networks to deliver it to every screen. A big customer pain point is paying for content once but not being able to access it on any device, anywhere. Our goal is to solve that.”

At what price, though? Stephenson does refer to delivering “value” to customers, and certainly, you can expect to hear Time Warner and AT&T insist that because their proposed match is a “vertical” merger rather than a “horizontal” one, this should pose less of an antitrust threat. In other words, consumers won’t see prices soar as a result of reduced competition.

In a horizontal transaction, two companies that compete to provide roughly the same kind of services or goods (think, Cox Communications and Comcast), merge and become one, meaning that there are fewer entities involved in setting prices for content as purchasers, or for services as providers. In a vertical transaction, such as the proposed merger, companies that are in different parts of the business (in this case, content and distribution) join forces.

But in markets where competition is already restricted – such as, say, the internet – price increases could be a result of even vertical mergers. That’s the conclusion of studies by one economist, John Kwoka of Northeastern University, who found that of the 1,000 mergers of all kinds that he evaluated over the last two decades, at least a third generated price increases in excess of 10%. A remarkable 80% of them raised prices to consumers to some degree; the average increase was about 7%.

Ponder that, antitrust regulators.

There are plenty of ways in which this could happen. For instance, all of the programming that Time Warner produces could suddenly become unavailable to competitors to the newly merged entity’s rival distributors, except at a much higher price. You have an AT&T smartphone and want to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones? Congrats – you can do so on any device you own for half the price you’d pay if you have a Verizon phone and want to watch on your iPad.

It’s up to the politicians not just to be blowhards about the deal or threaten to axe it. Consumers may end up with great, efficiently delivered and fairly priced content as a result of mergers like the one that AT&T and Time Warner are proposing. The trick is to ensure how that potential is realized. Will the regulators do their job?

That’s why what happens in the weeks following the election is going to be so crucial. Who will the new president choose to advise her (or him) on issues like commerce and telecommunications? Who will (s)he tap for membership on the Federal Trade Commission (which governs antitrust issues) and the Federal Communications Commission (which oversees telecommunications policy, and of which the next president must name a new chairman), two of the key regulators associated with this industry?

Regulators have the ability to lay down the law and make the deal much more consumer-friendly in any number of ways, demanding (for instance) that the new company make HBO shows available more readily via apps or streaming, meaning that we wouldn’t be forced to sign up for costly packages.

For once, all the heated political rhetoric might come in useful, if it ensures that the regulators keep their eye on the ball. I wish I was confident that the attention span of outraged politicians was as long as that of the strategic thinkers and panicky dealmakers – but I’m not.