If They Are Too Big To Fail, They Are Too Big.

During the last years corporate America has been allowed to consolidate into monopolies. Giant corporations exist today in Telecommunications, Health Care, Automotive Manufacturing, Financial Services and many other industries that are vital to U.S. national security.

Certainly, recent events have taught us that we need to expand our definition of “national security” to include the health and well-being of our financial structure. Washington now tells us that GM is “too big to fail”, that Citibank is “too big to let go” and that a failure of AIG would trigger a global financial disaster . Unfortunately this seems to be true and equally unfortunate is that there are corporations in other industries that are presumably “too big to let go” (Verizon?).

All this has come about because our government “let go”. The last 25 years has seen an unraveling of regulation in many industries and sectors as the idea that “all government is bad” ruled the day. This has been especially true of the Bush Administration which has left several of our governmental departments to atrophy or fall apart almost completely. We hear and see that the departments of Justice, Commerce, Treasury, Energy, Health and Human Services and others have become dysfunctional as ideologues have taken over and career officials have left in droves. Financial, and more to the point anti-trust regulation has deteriorated to a point that is dangerous to our society and our economy.

So the question begs “if it’s too big to fail, isn’t it just too big?”.

While “big” maybe better for upper management and occupants of executive suites (and their compensation) it certainly has not been good for the U.S. consumer and the American economy.

The United States is today 15th in the world in broadband penetration. Broadband is undoubtedly as important to our future as the Interstate Highway System was when Eisenhower envisioned an expansive highway network that would facilitate the ease of movement of goods and people to an unprecedented extent. In Japan it is easy to have a teleconference via cell phone speeding from Tokyo to Osaka on the “bullet train”. In South Korea wireless is ubiquitous and the entire country is covered. And in the United States, Verizon still sells DSL, an outdated 20th century technology, as broadband and the consumer, for the most part, doesn’t understand why the Internet runs so slowly.

While the U.S. has all but sanctioned monopolies our government has not ensured that these mega-corporations serve the public and invest in, build and deploy the latest technologies. Greed and lack of foresight has made us a second rate telecommunications power. And certainly, in the early 21st century, telecommunications, electronic commerce and general interconnectivity are issues of national security.

I believe that it is way past time to look at monopolistic practices in vital industries as a danger to our national security.

It is therefore incumbent upon our new President and his administration to immediatly strengthen national security by assuring modernization and enforcement of regulations that prohibit the growth of any business that is deemed “too big to fail”.