(oops, forgot that checkbox - promoted by SFBrianCL)
Most of us around here are fairly comfortable with the notion that the CDP is not a source of help for progressives and/or the netroots. It seems that it may now be an actual impediment for at least the netroots and better democracy.
The Foundation for Taxypayer & Consumer Rights has done an excellent push on investigating a possible pay for play for Fabian Nunez. As of my last Google News Search, no major news services have picked up on this story, but Matt Stoller of MyDD noticed it yesterday. I saw it a few days ago, but I was hesitant about drawing more attention to the issue. It's definitely a thorny one. It's a complicated story, but I'll try to give a simple version.
So, AT&T and the telcos wanted to get into the cable TV business. The only problem is that currently municipalities have the right to offer an exclusive franchise to one terrestrial cable company. It annoys Comcast and TimeWarner, but they deal with it. Or at least it did annoy them until they were bribed by Nunez and the telcos. How did they bribe them? They dropped the franchise agreement requirements, which required them to provide such pesky services as public access channels and government access.
How did this affect us? Well, the franchise agreements were also another firewall in the net neutrality war. The franchise agreements could have required the service providers to provide a neutral internet. That is gone. The cable companies win, the telcos win. We lose.
But don't worry, Fabian got his too. Nunez raised over $1.7 million from the telcos for the CDP. The CDP, in turn, passed along a $4 million check to Nunez for all his fundraising efforts. According to the letter that the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (PDF) , the check was sent on election day. Why election day? Well, it was in time to place in his 2006 election fund and too late to come into question.
I will leave it to you to draw conclusions about whether this check is fishy. Did Nunez sell out the netroots? Does the money go in and do the favors go out? Is this a quid pro quo? It certainly raises some troubling questions. |
