January 14 - Obama Calls for More Municipal Broadband Networks; How Citizens Can Reassert Control Over the Public Airwaves; The Republican Move to Undermine the Entire U.S. Regulatory System

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President Obama’s visit today to Cedar Falls, Iowa where he encouraged the building of municipal broadband networks as was done twenty years ago in this small rural city of 40,000 whose residents enjoy one gigabyte per second broadband, the fastest in the country, comparable to households and businesses in South Korea, Japan and France. Christopher Mitchell, the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance joins us to discuss Obama’s efforts to stop cable and telecomm monopolies from pushing state laws to prevent competition while the cable and phone companies continue to charge more and more for poorer and much slower Internet service than the rest of the industrialized world has.

Part 2

Then we take a broader look at the media landscape with Victor Pickard, a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform”. We look back at efforts to maintain the public interest in and influence over, the public airwaves, that has been rolled back since President Reagan ended the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and discuss how citizens can reassert control over the public airwaves to be better informed and educated as opposed to being passive consumers of advertizing and infotainment.

Part 3

Then finally we look into the Regulatory Accountability Act passed Tuesday by the Republican House that modifies the Administrative Procedures Act which has been in existence for 60 years.Sidney Shapiro, the Vice President of the Center for Progressive Reform and Chair of Administrative Law at Wake Forest University, joins us to discuss this effort to undermine the entire U.S. regulatory system over financial and consumer product protections, public and worker health and safety, and environmental protection by making it easy for corporations to challenge and delay new rules by creating some 74 new procedures and requirements meant to gum up the works of government agencies with layers and layers of extra paperwork.