TURNING IT OFF

Getting the attention of corporations is probably the hardest job in the world, mostly because nobody ever answers telephones at corporate offices who actually has any power to do anything about your problem. Usually it ain’t even a person answering. Just some phone menu.

When the tractor driver comes to knock down the evicted tenant farmer’s house in Steinbeck’s "The Grapes Of Wrath," the farmer tells him, "You bump it down—I’ll be in the window with the rifle." "It’s not me," the tractor driver replies. "There’s nothing I can do. You’re not killing the right guy." "Who gave you the orders?" the farmer asks. "I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill." "You’re wrong," the tractor driver answers. "He’s got his orders from the bank." "Well, there’s the president of the bank," the farmer says. "There’s a board of directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank." And the tractor driver answers, "fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, ‘Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.’" "But where does it stop?" the farmer asks. "Who can we shoot?" "I don’t know," the tractor driver answers. "Maybe there’s nobody to shoot."

It’s no shooting offense, true, but AT&T (one of the biggest corporations) thinks they have Oakland over the barrel about cable service.

Reportedly, Oakland is on the low-end of the Bay Area scale when it comes to cable service and the number of channels available. On the other hand, it appears the we pay some of the highest cable rates in the area. Don’t seem fair, does it? But cable conditions in Oakland are not very good because AT&T can get away with it. They’re a monopoly, and that’s how monopolies work. They pretty much do what they have to, and precious little more than that.

It’s going to get worse. AT&T has been trying to move everybody over into digital cable from regular cable, probably because digital cable is more profitable for AT&T. But a lot of subscribers have resisted, mostly because they don’t want to pay the higher rates. So AT&T recently announced that they are going to pull premium movie channels like HBO off of regular cable, so that the only way you’ll be able to watch these popular channels is to subscribe to the more expensive digital service.

The City of Oakland…especially through Councilmembers Larry Reid and Dick Spees…has been protesting this new premium channel policy as well as AT&T’s general policies towards Oakland, but the city doesn’t have a lot of bargaining power. We could refuse to sign the new cable franchise agreement, but because AT&T has been busy gobbling up all its competitors (remember TCI and, before that, Cable Oakland?), there really isn’t a lot of choice. AT&T knows that, which is why they don’t think they have to bend.

So maybe the City needs a little help in its negotiations.

No, not by shooting. But maybe by some of us turning off our cable boxes, and not turning them back on until AT&T negotiates a better deal for Oakland.

I’d imagine that would get the company’s attention.

While we’re talking about temporarily shutting off television programs, I think that’s the long-range answer to the Native American-name problem for sports teams.

A bill is currently pending in the California legislature to outlaw the practice in the state’s colleges and public schools. But that won’t affect the biggest perpetrators, the professional teams. The Indians. The Braves. The Blackhawks. The Redskins. The Chiefs. Folks like them. And it doesn’t affect when California college teams play out-of-state college teams with Native American names…the Florida State Seminoles, for example, who took up the name of my grandfather’s people.

I try to make these things as easy as possible. I just turn off the television when a sports team with a Native American name comes on. Preseason. Regular season. Playoffs. World Series. Superbowl. Don’t matter. If I think it’s wrong, I figure I shouldn’t participate.

And if enough folks do it…these little boycotts…then maybe somebody at one of those corporations will finally pick up the phone to try to find out what’s going on.