The Morning Roar: AT&T To Buy DirecTV For $48 Billion, Swiss Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Proposal To Raise Minimum Wage, And CA Gov. Uses Wildfires To Lecture On Climate Change
Did you have a rough weekend? If so, The Morning Roar is what you need to kick-start your week!AT&T To Buy DirecTV For $48 BillionIt seems like only yesterday when we were discussing the prospective Comcast and Time Warner merger on these pages and now it looks like other dominos are beginning to fall. In yet another sign of the massive changes coming to the cable/satellite and broadband market, we heard this weekend that AT&T will buy DirecTV for $48.5 Billion.Here’s a report from the AT&T press release:
DIRECTV is the premier pay TV provider in the United States and Latin America, with a high-quality customer base, the best selection of programming, the best technology for delivering and viewing high-quality video on any device and the best customer satisfaction among major U.S. cable and satellite TV providers. AT&T has a best-in-class nationwide mobile network and a high-speed broadband network that will cover 70 million customer locations with the broadband expansion enabled by this transaction.The combined company will be a content distribution leader across mobile, video and broadband platforms. This distribution scale will position the company to better meet consumers’ future viewing and programming preferences, whether traditional pay TV, on-demand video services like Netflix or Hulu streamed over a broadband connection (mobile or fixed) or a combination of viewing preferences on any screen.The transaction enables the combined company to offer consumers bundles that include video, high-speed broadband and mobile services using all of its sales channels -- AT&T’s 2,300 retail stores and thousands of authorized dealers and agents of both companies nationwide.
The news of this merger will most likely cause more panic in the mainstream media over the ostensible reduction of choice in the cable, satellite, and broadband market. The cause of this frenzy is the assumption that fewer providers will lead to an increase in pricing, which will ultimately lower the quality of programming for the average person.We cannot forget that consumer demand has initiated the necessity for a restructuring of the market. The driving factor causing the mergers in the pay-tv market is the unprecedented increase in demand for streaming content. More and more people are “cutting the cord” and procuring their entertainment exclusively through internet service providers.This begs the questions, why would AT&T buy a satellite company when the market is moving towards streaming content? The two main reasons are DirectTV’s share of the growing satellite market in Latin American, where there is not sufficient infrastructure to provide streaming content, and DirecTV’s exclusive rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket.At the end of the day companies strive to meet demand, because that is how revenue is generated and maintained. The mergers are an effect of the necessary restructuring of cable, satellite, and internet providers. The goal for all parties is to maximize revenue. They are simply aligning themselves to meet consumer demand.Swiss Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Proposal To Raise Minimum WageToday I am very proud of my Swiss heritage. Voters in Switzerland today rejected a proposal to make the minimum wage 22 Swiss franc (about $25 dollars) with a whopping 76% of the vote.BBC News, Geneva provided this analysis:
This was the third referendum on pay in Switzerland in the last 18 months, reflecting concern that the gap between rich and poor is growing here too.Last February the Swiss backed restrictions on bosses' bonuses, but in November they rejected even stricter controls which would have limited top salaries to no more than 12 times that of the lowest paid.The vote is a sign that Switzerland's long tradition of social partnership between business leaders and workers may be eroding: the bankruptcy of national airline Swissair over a decade ago, the disastrous losses suffered by the big Swiss banks in the subprime mortgage scandal, and the huge salaries and bonuses which continue to be paid in the banking and pharmaceutical industries have led many Swiss to lose trust in their business leaders.
The above opinion assumes that a vote on a proposed minimum wage is evidence that there is concern over a perceived income gap between rich and poor. With a little research, it is not difficult to discover the groups behind this proposal, Swiss labor unions. After seeing the voting results, the only thing that is clear to me is that a majority of Swiss voters understand the economic consequence of enacting a minimum wage. A minimum wage hurts the working class by banning employment at certain pay levels, which directly causing people to lose jobs . Once again, the people are way ahead of the politicians.To truly address the growing gap between the crony/political establishment and the rest of the people we need to have a serious discussion about money and central banking. We’ve discussed the immorality of the Federal Reserve system (and central banking in general) extensively on the pages of this website. If we truly want to address the growing income gap between the entitled and the rest of us, the conversation needs to start with central banking.CA Gov. Uses Wildfires To Lecture On Climate ChangeCalifornia Governor Jerry Brown spoke with ABC’s George Stephanopoulous on Sunday morning and immediately politicized the wildfires burning in Southern California by saying, “humanity is on a collision course with nature.”The Daily Caller reports:
The governor almost immediately made mention of global warming, claiming the state’s climate “appears to be changing.”“You say that climate change definitely is at the heart of — at least, a big part of this,” Stephanopoulos noted. “You know there’s a lot of skepticism, particularly among Republicans in Washington, about that. How do you build a consensus to adapt.”“That’s a challenge,” Brown replied. “It is true that there is virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous. I mean, there is no scientific question, there is just political denial for various reasons best known to those people who are in denial.”“We live in a world that is not just business, it’s natural,” the governor lectured. “The natural systems. And as we send billions and billions of tons of heat-trapping gases, we get heat and we get fires and we get what we’re seeing.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that climate change is real. For this to be true studies would need to have been completed that prove emitting in excess a predetermined amount of carbon dioxide has negative effects, which ultimately leads to the destruction of property. The study would need to nail down the specific value where carbon dioxide being emitting causes destruction to property, otherwise every living human would be held responsible for property destructive by way of simply breathing. have yet to see such a study completed and I don’t expect to see one in the near future.Statists often claim that libertarian philosophy does not protect the environment. This simply is not true. Libertarian principles require a strict adherence to property rights, which simply state that you cannot harm another man’s property. Property rights are the greatest protector of the environment.A judicial system based on libertarian ideals would deal with climate change swiftly. Either a plaintiff would prove that another individual or corporation was infringing upon their property by emitting “toxic” levels of CO2 or they would be unable to prove the defendant was at fault for the CO2 they emitted.In the “real” world the only “solutions” that are offered for “climate change” are big government regulations, which are written by the very same crony corporations that the same regulations are expected to keep in line. Politicians like Jerry Brown claim they want to “fight” climate change, but in reality all they care about is maintaining the appearance that they care about the environment and by extension the voters.Read The Morning Roar every weekday Monday-Friday!The Lions of Liberty are on Twitter, Facebook & Google+Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
