Burger King Patrons May Understand Net Neutrality Better Than You Do

I live in a part of L.A. where the cable TV/internet provider, Spectrum, has been running ads that amount to this: they're slowing down the internet BUT if you pay them, they'll speed it up for you. It's kind of like what Amazon did with Whole Foods when they bought it. They raised all the (already high) prices but if you buy an Amazon Prime card, they'll let you buy their not very organic fake health food for what it used to cost. What a deal! Meanwhile... who knew Burger King was so progressive. This ad (above) is really brilliant in exposing the net neutrality scam for what it is. PLEASE what it and pass it along to your friends so they watch it too.

AdWeek recognized how brilliant Burger King's advertising department is too. Nor was this the first time "On the heels of its brilliant anti-bullying spot last year," wrote Tim Nudd, "Burger King has found another cause it can get behind, and promote with a clever in-store stunt-- net neutrality. Net neutrality is a complicated topic to explain, which is where Burger King came in with a meaty metaphor. It set up a social experiment at a BK location-- with a hidden-camera setup not unlike that of the anti-bullying spot-- and taught Whopper buyers a memorable lesson. In the video below, see how real customers reacted to being charged more for the same quick-serve Whopper-- or, for the regular price, having to wait longer for a Whopper as BK employees intentionally, and seemingly pointlessly, slow down their service.

In December, you’ll recall, the FCC repealed net neutrality rules that regulated businesses that provide internet access to consumers-- opening the door for broadband providers to potentially charge more for better internet speed or higher-quality service.

David Miami, the agency behind so many clever BK campaigns in recent years, made the new spot. It’s very different than the “Bullying Jr.” PSA, but in some ways works similarly.

In place of the more emotional and poignant ending of that earlier spot, here we get a more plainly hostile vibe from the patrons-- which fits the issue at hand better. If you were served a mashed-up burger, you’d be mostly confused; if you’re openly denied good service, you’d probably get annoyed pretty quickly.

There’s plenty of cursing in between the baffled looks; a few patrons even make a move to snatch their Whopper away from the BK employees. There’s a dose of “Whopper Freakout” in here, and you get the sense that the stunt could easily have turned violent-- thankfully, it didn’t.

The pricing board that they showed customers is great, too-- with MBPS, referring to megabits per second in webspeak, changed to mean “making burgers per second.”

...“We believe the internet should be like Burger King restaurants, a place that doesn’t prioritize and welcomes everyone,” says Fernando Machado, Burger King’s global chief marketing officer. “That is why we created this experiment, to call attention to the potential effects of net neutrality.”

I got a very informal note from Maine progressive Jared Golden after I sent him the ad and when I asked him if I could use it in this post, he said sure: "Love the ad, Howie, but here’s the problem with it. If Burger King did this to me, I’d go to their competitor across the street and get a fast burger at no extra charge. In a lot of rural areas though, there’s only one internet service provider. It’s a monopoly and people have gotta take it or leave it. Slow internet, fast internet or no internet. That’s why getting rid of net neutrality is such a raw deal for the poor, the working middle class and small businesses. We can’t afford to pay to play and so the wealthy and corporations get fast access and we are at an even greater disadvantage. Thanks, to Bruce Poliquin and his boss Paul Ryan."

If we're lucky Austin Frerick will be representing Des Moines and southwest Iowa starting in 2019."This Burger King video is brilliant," he told us this morning. "The sad thing about it, many aspects of our economy are moving in this pure unregulated maximum profit extraction mode. College cost works in a similar way with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form. Essentially families disclose all of their financial information in the FAFSA so a college is able to charge them what they think is the highest possible price that they can pay. A group of students at a college dining hall are all consuming the same product (college) yet each are likely paying a different price. We need to end this way of seeing everything in our society as if we were Ebenezer Scrooge."

Progressive reformer Tim Canova is running for the south Florida seat occupied by crooked New Dem Debbie Wasserman Schultz, long a part of the problem, never a part of the solution. She doesn't seem especially interested in net neutrality. Canova is. This is what he told us today: "Net neutrality has served us well. It has provided open access to the internet for all users regardless of income or wealth, thereby facilitating commerce as well as grassroots political organizing. However, Verizon and other large broadband companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against net neutrality and its top lawyer, Ajit Pai went through the so-called 'revolving door' to become chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) where he engineered a 3 to 2 vote to overturn Obama-era net neutrality rules. If allowed to stand, this will create a high speed lane on the web for wealthy corporations and a slow lane for the rest of us. The web will become like cable TV, with expensive packages that limit consumer choice for those with low incomes. It will hamper grassroots organizing. We should see the web, and many of its social media platforms, as natural monopolies that require consumer regulation and antitrust enforcement to protect the public's interests. The only alternative is this creeping privatization of the web that allows huge corporations to limit our speech and exploit consumers for ever higher profits."

Paul Clements, a savvy professor rin Kalamazoo unning for Congress in southwest Michigan, using net neutrality as an issue in his campaign. Yesterday he sent this very thorough report to his supporters:

With billions in new corporate tax cuts, giant internet providers Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T are planning a blitz of spending on new infrastructure. However, without Net Neutrality, new broadband services and speeds will simply be fruit of a poisoned tree.

Long before Tim Wu coined the term Net Neutrality in 2003, internet experts had the concept of “dumb pipes,” which would carry data over the internet without judging its content. Today, with 4k TV over the internet, online gaming, and other resource-intensive uses of the web, carriers rightfully must be judicious in how they prioritize and route traffic. However, we MUST not allow these companies to decide what lawful content we can access, to favor their own content or content of financial partners, or to continue to sell off user data as a condition of using their “pipes.”

When elected, I will author or co-sponsor an “Internet Users’ Bill of Rights.” (And no, I don't think the companies that have spent millions lobbying against Net Neutrality are suitable sponsors for this effort!)

This legislation will include these three principles:

1 No paid prioritization of traffic
2 No blocking of lawful content
3 No resale of user data without express and revocable consent

My opponent, Rep. Fred Upton, is one of Comcast’s best friends in Congress. The amount of lobbying that goes into fighting Net Neutrality is obscene, and hundreds of lobbyists are employed by Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and their trade association. You can learn more from Open Secrets here.

...Don’t trust the promises of these companies that they won’t throttle or discriminate. Their track record assures us that they will

• In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage.
• In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network.
• From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.
• In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, admitted to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results.
• In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.
• In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites.
• From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.
• In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.
• In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products.
• During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.

These examples are shocking-- and things are only going to get worse now that the FCC has sided with the mega-carriers. I’d like to hear from you-- what must be included in a federal “Internet Users’ Bill of Rights”?

You can contribute to Jared Golden's, Austin Frerick's, Tim Canova's and Paul Clement's very grassroots campaigns by tapping on the ActBlue congressional thermometer on the right. Paul's and Jared's opponents both include extremely wealthy politicians. In Paul's case one is also a crooked careerist-- George Franklin, a corrupt lobbyist who calls himself a Democrat but who has been giving the Republican incumbent, Upton, large sums of money for many years. Now he's a "Democrat?" Only in the minds of lunatic establishment freak shows like Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Ben Ray Lujan.

Indications are that Americans are now paying a steep price for our shocking national disdain for labor unions

Have you seen this Brave New Films video (brought to us here by WarOnGreed.org)? A sustained campaign built around it has won some still-too-limited concessions from Burger King -- see below.

"When I mentioned the word 'union,' I was told never, never mention that word again if I want to keep my job."

-- Burger King worker-turned-executive Gene Franques, in the video

"Suppose that China and the United States did have powerful unions. In China, such unions might have pushed for higher wages, social insurance and more domestic consumption. Here, such unions would have preserved more of a manufacturing sector and boosted wages in the service and retail sectors, so that American consumers could have relied more on income than on credit to make their purchases. The two nations would have had more sustainable economic strategies. And the world economy might not now be plunging into what, so far, appears to be a bottomless pit."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his Wednesday Washington Post column,
"The Dysfunctional Duo"

by Ken

Last night Howie talked about the grotesque situation that has developed around the nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis to be the first secretary of labor since . . . well, at least since the Clinton administration who actually believes that the job includes standing up for the rights and working conditions of working people. Anyone who has so quickly forgotten the horror of the Bush regime tenure of now-former Secretary Elaine Chao is directed to Joe Sudbay's Thursday AmericaBlog post, which began:

For the last eight years, America's workers have had the crap kicked out of them by the Bush administration and Republicans on the Hill. We had an anti-labor Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, who is married to the vehemently anti-labor GOP Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell. Those two are worth millions (she was on 13 corporate boards before becoming Labor Secretary) so you can imagine they didn't have much in common with people who actually work for a living. Chao and McConnell were a potent (and very wealthy) combo determined to undermine the safety and job security of America's workers.

Do Americans understand the problems set out in the above Burger King video? ZP Heller offered a valuable take in a Saturday OpenLeft post:

All week long, Brave New Films, SEIU and many progressive bloggers have been holding Burger King's feet to the deep fryer. Together we exposed Burger King's horrendous working conditions; launched a contest asking people to Have It Their Way with Goldman Sachs (Burger King's top shareholder) for squandering $6.5 billion of the bailout on bonuses while average BK workers earn less than the federal poverty line; and staged peaceful demonstrations at Burger Kings across the country protesting the fast-food chain's low wages, lack of healthcare, and lobbying against unionization legislation. So what was Burger King's response? They served up this flamebroiled pile of garbage yesterday: "Burger King Corp. (BKC) believes unions serve a purpose in some workplaces and a number of its guests, vendors and franchisees have positive union membership experiences. BKC is not anti-union. BKC and its franchisees serve a diverse consumer base and, therefore, aim to remain neutral on political issues."

Neutral on political issues, eh? If that's the case, why did Burger King spend $319,648 between 2006 and 2008 lobbying against pro-labor laws like the Employee Free Choice Act? Why did Goldman Sachs spend $15,849,000 in 2008 alone lobbying against the Employee Free Choice? And why, as SEIU's Michael Whitney noted, has Burger King fought this legislation through their involvement with the National Retail Federation, which stands firmly behind an anti-union group called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace?

If Burger King is "not anti-union" as they claim, then let's see them stay out of their workers' efforts to unionize. And if they're "not anti-union," does that mean they're suddenly pro-worker? Then perhaps they should quit dropping hundreds of thousands on lobbying efforts to oppose federal minimum wage hikes. They should improve workplace conditions to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act. And while they're at it, they could also provide their employees healthcare so they no longer have to rely on publicly-funded health insurance programs that cost taxpayers up to a quarter of a billion dollars a year. If Burger King is really "not anti-union," let's see them put their money where their mouth is. Until then, we'll continue to have it our way.

I really don't understand what it is with Americans and labor unions. Is it simply yet another effect of the chokehold the Right has gained over the American mis-education system?

When I was growing up, even though I'm not aware that anyone in our extended family was a union member -- there are more management types in my family history -- Samuel Gompers was a household name. (Gompers was the crusading labor organizer who forged the American Federation of Labor, which when merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 became the powerful AFL-CIO coalition.) It was part of the general public understanding, once upon a time, that the American prosperity of the second half of the 20th century would have been impossible without strong labor unions, because the economy could never have blossomed without consumers to buy the products sold by American industry.

I've got a bad feeling that none of this history is taught to today's students. For Americans who have no idea that, for example, the mines were once operated as something close to slave-labor camps, with the tacit acquiescence and even active support of the U.S. government, maybe we need to schedule nationwide screenings of Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein's shattering 1970 film The Molly Maguires (with huge performances by Sean Connery, Richard Harris, and Frank Finlay)? (Anyone is welcome to borrow my Laserdisk copy.) And slide-show presentations tracing the origins of the ILGWU, including the still-almost-unimaginable horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911?

All useful, but I doubt that it would be helpful. It would all be dismissed as, "That was then. We've gotten past all of that." But of course we haven't. As with so much else that's gone wrong in this country, a lot of it started with Reagan. It was in the Reagan administration that open warfare against unions became not only acceptable but officially approved. Over time, partly in sync with changes in the structure of the economy, such gains as organized labor had achieved were steadily ungained.

There's no question that the unions did themselves no favor with the excessive demands and entrenched corruption that set in at the height of their power. But of course this was a pale reflection of the wanton abuse of power and corruption characteristic of the managements they were dealing with -- where does anyone think the overweening and corrupt union bosses learned it all from? It's notable that the anti-union propagandists were never heard from when crusading union members were trying to reform the unions from within. And it's not hard to understand why: It wasn't the corruption the anti-unionists objected to, it was the very notion of workers being able to push back against the bullying of management. If anything, strong and uncorrupt unions are their worst nightmare.

The liars and delusionaries who preach "the free market" have it that all the problems for which pro-union advocates insist unions are necessary can be solved more simply and fairly by the workings of the free market. The only difference is that the liars know better, while the delusionaries don't. Even if there were such a thing as a free market it would be bullshit, for a panoply of reasons, most of which come back to the basic fact that it's human nature to seek any advantage that's obtainable by any means, and when management has no checks on its powers, it will exploit those advantages in every way possible, dehumanizing workers to the level of merely another commodity, like plant fixtures and raw materials, simply occupying another column on the balance sheet.

But of course we've never had a free market, and it's the last thing the people who claim to champion such a thing want. What they want is for the government to play the role it played back in Molly Maguires days: behind-the-scenes enabler and when necessary active partner of management.

I guess Americans like to think that unionism is a grubby business that's beneath them. Of course in other countries even white-collar workers have benefited from union organization, but Americans like to think they're "individuals" who are above all of that. This may be why so many white-collar Americans were so stunned to wake up and find that their jobs had been outsourced to cheaper workers abroad, kaboom! More perplexingly, even Americans who are bitter and resentful about their poor prospects for job improvement seem to identify with the managements that have worked so hard to trap them in dead-end jobs, and to replace even those jobs with even worse, no-benefits "opportunities."

Economists have told us for decades that in strong union economies, even non-union workers benefit in terms of wages and working conditions from the countervailing force offered by unions to untrammeled management control. In the simplest terms, where there are strong unions, managements wishing to keep them out of their workplaces have to treat their workers with a respect that's likely to vanish with as union options do.

We haven't had many more grotesque national spectacles than that of the predominantly Southern senators, which is to say states from what was once the slave-holding South, states that have invested heavily via massive tax subsidies in non-union auto plants, used the economic meltdown as leverage to try to once and for all destroy the U.S. auto-industry unions. We're talking about intellectual flyweights like Alabama's Richard Shelby and Tennessee's appalling Bob Corker. It might have been funny if it wasn't all so dishonest and shabby and shameful -- the careful cherry-picking of numbers to "prove" the arrogance of the unions, who in fact had already made massive concessions and were the only parties offering additional cooperation.

All of this was churned up by the really fine, thought-provoking Harold Meyerson column I quoted from at the top of this post. Meyerson advances the proposition that we Americans, like our chief international partners in union-hating, the Chinese, pay a steep price for this, and in the economic meltdown the bill has come due. I have too much respect for Meyerson's argument to try to "highlight" it. So here it is in full:

The Dysfunctional Duo

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 18, 2009; A13

We are hemorrhaging jobs just now, but by historic standards, unemployment may look a little low. The official unemployment rate (which understates actual unemployment, to be sure) is at 7.6 percent, a far cry from the 10 percent-plus during the downturn of the early 1980s. In those years, Midwestern manufacturing shed more jobs than it is shedding today. Where's the comparable unemployment now?

It's out there, and then some. Only, it's in East Asia. We've offshored it.

In China, where exports dropped 17.5 percent in January, tens of thousands of factories have closed, and the government estimates that 20 million migrant workers -- rural Chinese who moved to manufacturing zones for the work -- have lost their jobs. Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan all project declines in their gross domestic products this year.


The problem is that East Asia is one big export platform, and its mega-importer -- the United States -- has stopped buying. If the emblematic image of the Great Depression was that of Americans lined up for bread or living in urban shantytowns, the signature image of the current collapse is the acres of Japanese-made cars gathering dust in the immense parking lots abutting the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. According to Morgan Stanley economists, exports account for 47 percent of the output of East Asia's developing economies. Here in the United States, consumption accounted for more than 70 percent of our GDP on the eve of our consumer meltdown.

The solution for East Asia, and China in particular, is to change its economic strategy. Instead of relying so heavily on exports, China will have to increase its domestic consumption. It will have to invest in upgrading its infrastructure and establish social insurance programs so that its citizens, instead of hoarding money, will be able to spend more. It will have to allow wage levels to rise, creating a more stable domestic market for its goods.

Devising a successful economic strategy for the United States is a good deal trickier. When our economic elites offshored much of our manufacturing sector to East Asia and other cheap-labor lands, and took arms against union labor here at home, they ensured that most of the American jobs created over the past quarter-century would come in retail and service sectors that paid less than manufacturing. Every year for the past couple of decades, we've added lots more sales-clerk, cashier and fast-food jobs than we've created in high technology or energy. Yet Americans have been able to maintain middle-class living standards -- not through rising income but through rising debt, available to us because China has funneled the immense revenue it amassed selling us goods back to us in the form of loans that we can no longer repay.

At the center of the global meltdown, then, is the misshapen economic codependency of the United States and China. Each has followed a fundamentally unstable economic model, with one nation suppressing wages so that it could export more and the other living on borrowed funds so that it could purchase more. Despite the sharply different roles that each nation carved for itself, though, a shared characteristic allowed them to chart their ultimately disastrous course.

What do the United States and China have in common? They are the only two major economic powers that are resolutely hostile to unions. In China, any unions not controlled by the state are outlawed, which is why so many protests about unpaid wages and the like take the form of riots; there's no legal way to enforce workers' rights. In the United States for the past 30 years, business has been implacably opposed to labor, routinely violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permitting employees to join unions.

Over the past few years, as global alliances of unions have begun to win agreements with global corporations, there's been one major impediment to such accords. "I always look at the percentage of a company's revenues from two nations, China and the U.S.," says Ron Oswald of the International Union of Food Workers, "in deciding whether to push for an international agreement." That's what happens when worker organizing is all but forbidden.

But suppose that China and the United States did have powerful unions. In China, such unions might have pushed for higher wages, social insurance and more domestic consumption. Here, such unions would have preserved more of a manufacturing sector and boosted wages in the service and retail sectors, so that American consumers could have relied more on income than on credit to make their purchases. The two nations would have had more sustainable economic strategies. And the world economy might not now be plunging into what, so far, appears to be a bottomless pit.

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