Molly Ivins June 11

AUSTIN, Texas — As though determined to prove that the film "Bulworth" has not an ounce of exaggeration in it, the powerful telecom lobby is now putting pressure on members of Congress who owe it a lot to get the industry out of the only redeeming feature of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The phone companies are trying to weasel out of a commitment they made in '97 to subsidize the cost of connecting schools and libraries to the Internet.

To remind you of the state of play to date, the Telecommunications Act was an outrageous rip-off, pretty much a walking definition of Bad Legislation. That's the little beauty that gave away $70 billion worth of the people's airwaves for high-definition TV and otherwise let the telecom industry have everything it wanted.

The industry said the act would promote competition and lower cable rates, among other joys. As you know, it touched off a tidal wave of communications company mergers and has resulted in higher cable rates than ever, phone slamming and other noxious practices.

In that horror of a bill was one bit of redeeming social value: the E-rate to help connect schools to the 'Net. But now the long-distance firms, such as AT&T and MCI Communications Corp., are claiming that the program — funded by fees collected by the Federal Communications Commission — is too expensive, and they intend to pass the charges on to the consumer.

Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska wrote MCI and AT&T: "In 1996, long distance companies raked in $82 billion in revenues, which are now expected to increase because we heeded your requests to change the law. ... The maximum the entire industry was asked to invest in schools and libraries was $2.25 billion per year — less than 3 percent of the 1996 revenues in the long distance industry alone. ... You have since decided to raise consumers' phone bills rather than absorb this investment in your ample profit margins — in spite of the fact that your industry has been given substantial reductions in access charges, with more to come later this summer. ... You are now complaining about sharing a small piece of a growing pie with schoolchildren and rural and high-cost areas."

Not only are the long-distance phone companies making profits somewhere between obscene and excessive, but you may have noticed that they have plenty of money to advertise all over the NBA playoffs and also apparently to fund a disinformation campaign to convince us that the E-rate is a "stealth tax" somehow secretly stuck on by the FCC.

Now assaulting the E-rate are assorted Republicans, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who hailed the Telecom Act when it was passed as "a revolution in learning so that all citizens of all ages learn appropriately at their convenience in ways we can't yet imagine." But on June 8, Gingrich said he expects the E-rate program to be blocked in the next two weeks.

The latest Republican addition to the annals of cheap, shabby partisan politics is to call the program "the Gore tax," hoping to associate it with the veep's well-known enthusiasm for the Internet.

Sens. John McCain of Arizona (who knows perfectly well how bad the Telecom Act is because he fought it in the first place) and Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and Reps. Thomas Bliley and John Dingell all signed a letter asking the FCC to "immediately suspend further collection of funding for its schools and libraries program." That's a lot of legislative firepower (major committee chairmen), and the red-hots are threatening to cut off all FCC funding.

We know what's wrong with the phone companies: greed. But what so addles our elected representatives that they would deliberately harm schools, libraries and rural health centers in their own districts? The FCC has received 30,000 applications for the E-rate discount of between 20 percent and 90 percent, and more than 70 percent of the applications come to less than $25,000. Further, the FCC has put an annual cap on the E-rate, so there's no way the phone companies can be overrun with requests.

Some legislators are fighting back — not only Kerrey but Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine and, most notably, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who single-handedly creates a new oxymoron: a populist Rockefeller.

Tom Kalil of the National Economic Council told The Washington Post that "long-distance firms have saved $2.4 billion over the last 11 months, several hundred million more than would have been spent under the highest estimates of what E-rate could cost." There is simply no reason to kill this important, effective program, nor is there any way the phone companies can claim this is a "stealth tax" — it was clearly written into the '96 Telecom Act, and it was made abundantly clear to the industry when it was granted the deregulation it asked for that universal service was part of the deal.

This is a singularly disgusting example of corporate greed, made more disgusting by the fact that some of our elected representatives are going along with it. I do hope the ones who are doing so get very large campaign contribution from the industry; maybe it will make them feel better about selling out their constituents.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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