SPIKE

THE RABID
MEDIA
WATCHDOG


US West: The Monopolizing Spirit
Even Adam Smith would not have approved of the mega mergers

opinion by John Gorrell
Free Press Contributor

US West is bored with the telephone business. It's an easy cash cow. Instead of taking care of a few loose ends at home, US West Communications has joined the global frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. All of a sudden US West is now the third largest cable-television provider in the U.S., behind TCI and Time Warner Turner, and this does not include its twenty-five percent ownership of Time Warner.

According to Cable World, US West is the largest provider of combined telephone service and cable-TV in Great Britain, and it has a major stake in mobile phone service in Japan. Analyzing the top one hundred telecommunication companies in the world, Telecom Observer found that US West is a major investor in Lithuania, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Russia, India, and France. While US West is the smallest Baby Bell, it is the second fastest growing telephone company in the country and its profits are among the best according to former Chairman/CEO of US West, Richard D. McCormick.

Like any regulated monopoly, US West plays a perpetual cat and mouse game with the state agency charged with guarding it. In 1995 when US West petitioned the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to double telephone rates, raise Internet access by 300%, and increase its take on depreciation, it hauled out a public relations campaign befitting a Congressional race. US West was forced to withdraw its outrageous petitions when it failed to give public notice of its raid on the cookie jar as required by law. It will be back. As long as it does not cross swords with the likes of Microsoft or Intel, the chances of success are pretty good, if history is any guide.

US West can be downright audacious when it comes to the bottom line. While The Company is in hot water for poor service in virtually every state covered by its monopoly, it has fired almost one third of its employees over the past three years, and as Jeanie Stokes of Bloomberg News reported in 1996, US West closed all but 26 of its 520 customer service centers. "US West has experienced record growth in sales, lines added and volume of calls handled, but net income and overall financial performance don't reflect the same kind of growth....We need to free up cash and other resources to make that happen," says Sol Trujillo, Chairman of the Board of US West. In the meantime, with fewer experienced workers and the rest grappling with the work load, US West's downsizing has saved the company $400 million in wages alone, according to the Seattle Times.

It is not the private markets of the world that are the great economic evil, it is the monopolizing of those markets by a few hundred corporations without borders, loyalty, or restraints that Adam Smith described as the "mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit." This capitalist theologian understood the dangers of unfettered commerce and the need to safeguard against greed and monopoly.



Spike Bits

Doug Nufer
The Free Press



Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Submarines

The Defense Department got several precious minutes of free air time during Seafair, when Secretary of the Navy John Dalton joined Seattle Mariner announcer Dave Niehaus in the broadcast booth for part of a game between the Mariners and the Chicago White Sox.
With Niehaus lobbing pitches like, "Seafair just wasn't the same last year, without the Blue Angels," and "Join the Navy, see the world," Dalton swatted out a few dingers to promote the opportunities available to young people in today's Navy.
Broadcast booth invitations usually go to guests "we feel are of interest," such as former ballplayers, according to Mariner broadcast coordinator Randy Adamack, who added that the team received no complaints about the impromptu recruiting commercial that ran while the game was in progress.
According to KIRO radio, a 30-second commercial that runs between half innings costs $700, and a 15-second spot that runs during play-by-play costs $600.
Although listeners can turn down the volume for these predictable intervals, the only way to avoid an infomercial that runs for minutes on end is to turn the game off.



100% Corporate Advertiser-approved?

The Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer outdid themselves trying to downplay a major victory by the Teamsters Union over the management at U.P.S. When the strike ended, headlines threatened workers with retribution (layoffs) and stories predicted tough going for the package delivery service that would have to work hard to win back customers- never mind that most customers sympathized with the drivers and that other delivery services generally charge more than U.P.S. does. If only the union had heeded the craven advice from the editorial pages a few days before management caved in: submit the miserable excuse for a contract one more time to the membership in an expensive yet totally worthless election! Then the outcome might not have been so difficult for the dailies to report.



Not Entirely

In the August 1, 1997 P-I books column, John Marshall succinctly nailed the publishing industry by comparing how two Seattle residents fared with their book contracts. While Rebecca Brown's novel, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, was one of 100 projects under contract that HarperCollins dumped (they paid the writers, but didn't print the books), John Stanford wrangled a 6-figure advance from Bantam on the basis of his reputation as a retired general and gung-ho school superintendent. Brown's The Gifts of the Body (1994) made money for HarperCollins, but Stanford's project in outline form must have showed some bestseller potential. Ironically, the $4 million advance HarperCollins gave Jay Leno for an autobiography that went nowhere makes what they spent on literary writers seem positively affordable. Marshall cited the problem of publishers that are "part of international multimedia conglomerates [who] are looking increasingly to make big bucks on big books by big names."
Marshall later mentioned a Publishers Weekly report of agents who had stopped sending manuscripts to HarperCollins, but said the P-I has no plans to stop reviewing books from publishers that dump their literary writers in favor of celebrities.



[Home] [This Issue's Directory] [WFP Index] [WFP Back Issues] [E-Mail WFP]

Contents this page were published in the September/October, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.