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We want the airwaves back
Scott Ritcher, September 2006, from NewsTheMagazine.com
I keep getting these ads in the mail from Insight Cable that say, "Are you paying more than $20 a month for your television service?"
Well, yes, I am, and I'm paying it to Insight! (...and that's even after illegally splitting it with my neighbor!)
The back of the ad always has the finest fine print I've ever seen in my life. The legal disclaimer goes on forever and basically says that none of Insight's customers pay $20 a month for anything, even if they sign up for the offer being advertised.
I have always thought of Insight as a horrible company, if only because they are the only cable tv company in Louisville. They charge me more for Internet alone than I was paying for my cable tv, Internet, and landline telephone service combined in Providence, Rhode Island. The rates we pay in Louisville are higher than what people pay in Chicago and other cities with higher costs of living, and the service we get isn't nearly as good.
If you cancel your digital cable service with Insight, they make you drive out to their office to return the cable box and remote. Most cities have several public access channels with a variety of options. Louisville has only one, and it is run by Insight (not the city) and comes with a package of programming restrictions. Insight doesn't even have humans answering their phones.
There seems to be no desire at all to make their customers happy. And why should there be? Insight, surprisingly, doesn't have any stockholders to deliver results to.
In fact, almost no one knows who really owns the company. In July 2005, Insight bought out its shareholders with cash and went from being a company traded on the public market to being a privately held entity. What little is known about its ownership is that at least half a billion dollars of the 2005 deal was put up by (are you sitting down?) the Carlyle Group.
The Carlyle Group is an enormous private equity investment firm, controlled by a handful of people, which is one of the planet's premier investors in aerospace defense, and is a painfully familiar name to anyone who has seen the film "Fahrenheit 9/11."
 Other than Insight Communications, The Carlyle Group's primary business holdings include telecommunications, a variety of infrastructure contract work (millions of it in Saudi Arabia), and a company called United Defense which is one of the largest military contractors in the world.
United Defense manufactures guided missile launching systems, Bradley infantry and cavalry fighting vehicles (what most people call "tanks"), amphibious and armed robotic assault vehicles, Howitzer artillery machines, and a dizzying array of other disgusting killing machines.
Some of those who have been on Carlyle's payroll are an equally dizzying array of people who should be legally banned from profiting from such stuff, if based only on their previous employment history: George Bush the elder (former US president, vice president, and director of the CIA), James Baker (former Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, whose legal challenges and media spin were instrumental in delivering the 2000 election to George W. Bush), Frank Carlucci (former Secretary of Defense and Deputy Directory of the CIA), John Major (former Prime Minister of Great Britain), Richard Darman (former White House Budget Advisor), et cetera.
Basically, the directors and consultants of the Carlyle Group are many of the same people who created the political policies and programs from which Carlyle makes its money. In some cases, they are the father of the President and the man who helped place the President in office.
The first three of those men listed above (at least) have travelled to Saudi Arabia on multiple trips to meet with some of Carlyle's investors, namely the Bin Laden family. Yes, that Bin Laden family. Members of Osama Bin Laden's family invested millions of dollars in the Carlyle Group in the 1990's and earned healthy returns, but divested themselves in 2001 for, well, obvious reasons.
But all that aside, even if you think it's okay for former policymakers to personally profit from those policies; and even if you think it's okay for these same people to make vast sums of money from the connections they made while in office; and even if you think it's okay that your taxpayer dollars made it all possible; or even if you think that the only thing interesting to you out of all this is that Louisville's cable system is of inferior quality and is overpriced; it might at least interest you that the transfer of Insight to the Carlyle Group was against the law. The laws of our city of Louisville, that is.
When Insight changed owners in 2005, it violated a Louisville ordinance (116.37a) which requires the Metro government to approve any such change in ownership BEFORE it takes place. This is apparently part of the agreement that Louisville's government made with Insight some time ago which not only allows them to be the only cable company in the city and to operate without oversight, but also does not require them to carry ANY local stations. In fact, Insight recently removed the city's only non-corporate, independent station, WYCS, from its basic cable package.
This mess disgusts me on so many different levels. Some would argue that at Louisville's level of involvement it's just television and it's not that important. Television is a tool, however, and like the tanks and artillery that Carlyle also sells, tools are only as good as the hands they're in. That is, the same medium that delivers "Kentucky Time Capsule" and "Frontline" also delivers "My Super Sweet 16" and "Who Wants to Marry a Midget."
The bottom line, as I see it, is that Insight does not own the cable television space in Louisville, they only operate it. And they do so as part of an agreement with our Metro government, an agreement of which they arrogantly violated the terms. Furthermore, they violated these terms by shacking up with a company that makes billions of dollars by exploiting taxpayers and selling monstrous contraptions whose only purpose is to help people kill each other.
Carlyle and Insight operate flagrantly above the laws of ethics, the laws of our country, and after breaking our laws here in Louisville, they rubbed it in our faces by taking our only locally-owned station off the lineup.
The time to bring another cable provider into Louisville is long overdue, as is the time to bring in a third or fourth. It's time for our Metro Council and Mayor to show Insight the door, and publicly state that we do not appreciate the way they do business, nor the way they disrespected the opportunity Louisville gave them as the city's sole cable provider.
It seems the only people involved in all this who have shown that they have any concept of the meaning of "conflict of interest" or "impropriety" are the Bin Ladens.
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