The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind Read Free Page A

right had been legislated away so quietly that my Reuters columns were the first to report this trend. The right to a landline was taken away without any news coverage in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. In Kentucky and New Jersey enough attention was aroused that consumer groups fought the changes, but they faced powerful obstacles. AT&T hired thirty-six lobbyists to work the Kentucky state legislature. In California the consumer group The Utility Rate Network (TURN) counted 120 AT&T lobbyists, one for each member of the Golden State legislature.
    The telecommunications companies wanted to build the most profitable electronic toll road possible. Their aim was, first, to spend as little as possible on technology, which ultimately meant slow Internet service for many customers. Second, they wanted to serve areas where lots of customers could and would buy a monthly pass to get on this electronic highway; potential customers in sparsely populated areas were at best incidental to such plans. Third, they wanted to set prices as high as the market would bear, even if it meant many people could never afford to access this electronic roadway.
    Lost in the rush to profitability was the crucial fact that the federal government had established an underlying policy to make telecommunications services available to all at reasonable prices. Compared to the restof the modern world, American phone companies, along with cable television companies, have done a spectacular job of building only what and where they wanted while shoving the cost on to their captive customers.
    Instead of increased competition between the telephone and cable companies, a new cartel emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. While telephone and cable companies posed in public as rivals, Verizon made a deal to sell its branded services over cable company Comcast’s lines, and vice versa. The only risk of real competition arose when some local governments favored the idea of building a municipal telephone, cable television and Internet access system that would be faster and cheaper. The industry responded like sharks, determined to do in the opposition and protect their predatory position. Later in the book, we’ll see how those and other efforts to kill competition fared (see chapter 5 , “In Twenty-ninth Place and Fading Fast,” page 50).
    READING BETWEEN THE LINES
    How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has been turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy since the late 1970s. A host of large industries, including banks, credit card lenders, electric utilities, health care, oil pipelines, Hollywood studios, property insurance, railroads and water companies, all have worked quietly to rewrite America’s economic playbook in their favor.
    In the chapters that follow, we’ll look at how legislatures have rewritten basic business laws, some whose principles date back thousands of years. Too often the goal has been to thwart competition, artificially inflate prices, hold down wages by decimating unions, reduce worker benefits and then restrict or bar access to the courts by those aggrieved. Businesses have gotten policies adopted that have allowed some managers to run corporations as, effectively, criminal enterprises, something modern management and economic theory regard as outside their fields of expertise (and at best implausible) but that criminologists have a name for: control fraud. That means, in short, that those in control run the fraud, as we shall see.
    While schoolchildren are taught about heroic figures who raised the capital to build new factories and fill offices, these days large companiesrely on taxpayers for that money. Almost every brand-name company is in on these deals; state and local governments alone spend at least $70 billion a year of taxpayers’ money to subsidize