Monopoly With A Heaping Side Of Extra Racism

One of the Trump administration's core policies is to not just approve giant and terrible mergers, but to make racism and sexism a condition companies must meet if they want regulatory approval.

The latest case in point: the Trump FCC rubber stamped yet another major merger in the telecom industry this week. This time the FCC approved the merger of Cox and Charter, two already massive cable companies, creating the biggest cable company in the nation. Just the sort of "populism" everybody asked for!

This kind of consolidation is always harmful to the public interest. U.S. telecom already sees muted competition at the hands of regional monopolies, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and generally terrible customer service.

While Cox and Charter don't directly compete with each other, their union results in a more politically powerful entity that works tirelessly to lobby the government to erode broadband competition more generally.

Charter, I should note, was once caught creating a fake consumer group in Maine to lie to locals. At a different point they were almost kicked out of New York State for being inherently terrible and lying to regulators. Just the kind of company you want being even bigger and more powerful.

And to pay off the massive deal debt, the merged companies are incentivized to jack up prices, slow down broadband expansion, and fire thousands of "redundant" people. Again: these deals do not serve the public interest. They're the lazy shell games of unremarkable men all out of original ideas.

Trump being Trump, his FCC lied about all of this in a handy infographic they posted to social media after rubber stamping the merger:

That last bit, "no DEI discrimination," is a requirement by the companies that they eliminate already fairly pathetic company programs simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist.

It's framed this way over at the FCC 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.

Basically, the FCC (and Trump administration more broadly) has insisted that acknowledging systemic racism and sexism, and actually trying to prevent it, is somehow discriminatory against white men. So they've forced companies to pinky swear they'll be more racist and sexist in order to be allowed to grow larger.

It's important to pause and appreciate just how utterly diseased this kind of thinking is: the idea that you can mandate that corporations broadly pretend that systemic racism and sexism do not exist. And that this madness can enjoy any kind of meaningful compliance or permanence in the decades to come.

This isn't the first time the Trump FCC has done this; the Verizon Frontier merger had similar conditions. It's sociopathy and white supremacy fused into already shitty, pro-monopoly, anti-consumer policy. It' takes real skill to take America's love of mindless mergers and somehow find a new wrinkle to make it all shittier.

The U.S. corporatist press, as usual, routinely finds unique ways to downplay or ignore all the ugly bits in their useless coverage.

This Reuters story on the merger, for example, treats all of this as perfectly ordinary business under perfectly ordinary regulators. There's no mention that U.S. broadband access is already broadly harmed by consolidation, and the requirement to deny racism's very existence is treated as just normal policy.

It's the same story at CNN, where Charter's long, ugly history of anti-competitive isn't mentioned. Neither is the racism. CNN's journalists go so far as to actually 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.

President Trump's "views on major companies combining" is he loves predatory and harmful consolidation, provided he can get something out of it personally. This isn't up for debate; the U.S. is genuinely too corrupt to function in the public interest. Yet the press is obsessed with downplaying or normalizing it.

The articles on this event will largely parrot the false claims that this deal will result in better broadband access and more jobs. When the inverse inevitably happens in a year or two, U.S. journalism will, with scattered exception, be nowhere to be found. They'll already be off helping sell the next terrible deal.