Schumer wants to bust up oil giants

Good idea Chuck.

While you're at it, why don't you break up BIG MEDIA and Bigger collusion between BIG MEDIA and BIG DEFENSE CORPORATIONS, which might be better called OFFENSE, AGGRESSION AND WAR MONGER corporations.

The bigger the company the less vulnerable it is to any kind of popular movement, government intervention and competition from other companies, though the American system does everything it can to suppress competition, and the better positioned the company is to control everything about their market.

Exxon Mobile is a fine example of a behemoth corporation that "explores" for oil, extracts, refines, distributes and prices it, and makes policy in Washington concerning everything about oil, other energy and machines that use oil.

This company made more profit than any other company in the history of the world, all the while blaming 100% increases, or more, in the cost of gasoline at the pump on vague oil shortages, democrats, the EPA and environmental activists.

Without the huge concentration of corporate power in a handful of demonstrably biased, right wing media companies who control over 90% of media in the US, a behemoth like Exxon, with its track record of environmental damages and social irresponsibility at every level, may never have been able to grow so large and cancerous.

Observe what was recently called AOL Time Warner, now Time Warner, industry leader in the effort to destroy net neutrality. Not that it is the worst media company out there. It isn't. It just leaped to mind.

This ugly company holds an enormous chunk of the media place, so even if all AOL customers dropped the service over night, and they should because the service is unreliable and the company engages in unethical and anti consumer behavior, Time Warner will be relatively unaffected and will continue to wield influence by cranking out crap in Time magazine, on CNN and HBO, in Little Brown Books and Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock films, Sports Illustrated, People... and these are but a fraction of the companies controlled by Time Warner, one of only 6 media conglomerates that control the flow of almost all information in the US and are so large as to be almost invulnerable to citizen movements and government regulation..

Is this kind of media concentration healthy for democracy Senator Schumer? A media so concentrated that only one view point, the corporate view point, is allowed on to the television news that most people turn to for information?

Do you ever see, for example, a labor or worker point of view represented in CORPORATE MEDIA? No. How about the view point of a woman with 3 kids on welfare in a work fare program and no health insurance? No? Really? Weird, since it is such a common story.
No, the media is as unipolar as the president desires to be unitary in his interpretation and dictatorial control of our nation.

DO you think it is ethical, sane or democratic for a company like General Electric to own NBC and all its concerns? Do you think if the real business of NBC was reporting the news rather than padding the media place with disinformation designed to obfuscate the truth, confuse the public and create lack of resistance to polices that destroy the very people who are being brainwashed, there might be a higher likelihood that NBC would report the truth on General Electric, a "defense company", not a mere maker of useful, cheerful and increasingly energy efficient light bulbs, but a maker of nuclear missile parts, among other things.

Senator Schumer, I have to tell you, I'm all for breaking up oil companies. I'm all for stringing up their corporate generals by their pedicured toes, but I suspect we wouldn't even have such a big, big problem with UNCHECKED POWER OF OIL COMPANIES if we didn't have what amounts to these companies

In 2004, Bagdikian's revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations -- Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

with such control over our information.

We need an independent press at least as much as we need to break up and regulate oil companies.