How Corporate Dollars Dominate the Black and Latino Conversation on Network Neutrality

[Commentary] So why are black and Latino civil rights organizations campaigning for the digital redlining of their own communities? Why are black and brown elected officials, LULAC, the NAACP and similar outfits petitioning the FCC to end the relative freedom of the Internet that network neutrality makes possible? And how did voices like those of Navarrow Wright, who echoes the party line of Big Cable and the telecom industry become part of the black conversation on network neutrality?

To start with, people talk, and communities define themselves by their internal civic conversations. But in the U.S., our collective conversations have become the territory, literally the property of soulless and greedy corporations which intrude themselves into every aspect of our private and collective lives, from child-rearing to how we die, and everything in between. In the generation since the Freedom Movement ended, corporate forces have all but extinguished the internal political conversation of black America, by doing away with news programming on black-oriented and other media, and by assuming the role of chief funders for black elected officials and mainline civil rights organizations. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the NAACP, the National Association of Black State Legislators and just about every similar institution you can name all have "corporate advisory boards," "corporate round tables," and such. These are formal arrangements that let AT&T, Comcast, Lockheed, Wal-Mart and other entities send a fat check and a corporate exec, usually a black one, out to help draft the organization's position on policies it wants to weigh in on. This explains why the NAACP, LULAC and similar organizations supposedly representing the interests of black and brown communities, along with platoons of local and federal elected officials have been lobbying the FCC to give Big Cable and the telecom industry absolute control over the Internet. Dependence on corporate funding has turned these elected officials and "civil rights" organizations into corporate whores and whorehouses.