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October 23, 2016

Busting Big and Billionaires-- ATT's merger, Adelson's Endorsement Via Bought Newspaper

By Rob Kall

I believe that big is dangerous. Too big is abnormal, unhealthy and an abomination against nature. We see dangerous bigness in freaks of nature, in corporations and in billionaires.

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Time Warner Offices, Rochester Skyline
Time Warner Offices, Rochester Skyline
(Image by DragonFlyEye)
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I believe that big is dangerous. Too big is abnormal, unhealthy and an abomination against nature. We see dangerous bigness in freaks of nature, in corporations and in billionaires.

In nature freakishly huge creatures do not do well. They die young.

The rise of giant corporations is a relatively new phenomenon. It started several hundred years ago with the East Indies company, which was partly owned by the king of England.

Billionaires have been around for longer. If we include royalty-- kings and queens, emperors and empresses, emirs, shahs-- used to hold their power by claiming they were chosen by and represented god. That time is over.

The reality is, giant corporations and billionaires are incredibly dangerous for humanity, for the planet, for ecosystems and the future of life on this planet. We need to develop values, attitudes, policies and laws that reject them, that make them not only illegal to exist but an abomination to attempt to become.

Today, there are two news items that stand out as obscene threats because of their bigness.

First, AT&T aims to acquire Time Warner. AT&T is already too big. Merging with Time Warner is a very bad idea. A company that provides access to media-- via tens of millions of smart phones, tablets, and Dish TV should not also be in the content business. It's too easy to decide what people should and shouldn't watch, what stories should and should not be told. No company should be able to spend $80 billion to buy another company. There should be size limits on companies. If companies get that big they should be broken up into smaller companies. They should never be allowed to merge to create leviathans that reached new heights of power.

Sheldon Adelson
Sheldon Adelson
(Image by (From Wikimedia) User:Bectrigger, Author: User:Bectrigger)
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Next, we have the Las Vegas Review Journal, which was acquired late last year by Billionaire Sheldon Adelson. It's become the first major newspaper to endorse narcissist Sociopath Donald Trump for president. When I read the headline that a Las Vegas major newspaper had endorsed Trump, I was certain, before seeing the details, that it was Adelson's paper. Billionaires are extremely dangerous people, even the ones with good intentions. They have too much wealth, which gives them too much power and influence.

Newspapers should endorse based on the process most newspapers use. An editorial board composed of journalistic professionals talks to the major candidates and then issues endorsement based on the responses the candidates gave. How can anyone possibly trust a compromised newspaper like the Las Vegas Review Journal, or, for that matter, the Washington Post, which is now owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

I've based my beliefs about bigness on a set of bottom up values I've developed, through hundreds of conversations with people who have spent their lives working with bottom up ideas-- entrepreneurs, activists, politicians, whistleblowers, anthropologists, psychologists, indigenous peoples. For 99% of the time humans exists, bigness such as we see now was considered abnormal, unhealthy and insane. People who tried to accumulate wealth, like billionaires do would be considered insane and shunned by the band or tribe.

Unfortunately, now, there are billions of people who have been raised under the darkness of authoritarian religions and regimes so they have come to accept bigness and the domination that comes with it. They've actually learned to NEED authoritarian figures and social and cultural settings to feel safe. They run to escape situations where equality and lack of hierarchy are created.

We need to develop a new bottom up collection of values, a new value system that builds, from the bottom up, beliefs that see hierarchy as occasionally necessary, but also something very dangerous, that sees acceptance and embrace of authority and authoritarianism as a moral weakness, like alcoholism or addiction. We need to see striving to become extremely wealthy as a form of vice similar to addiction to heroin or sex.

The way we heal these pathologies must start, from the bottom up, in the cradle, with parents being given family leave time to properly raise children. With the right to have a child should come the responsibility to competently parent the child. Every parent should be required to learn what it takes to parent properly. When proper parenting, meaning parenting which produces healthy, well balanced children and adults who function optimally within society, does not happen, narcissistic, damaged, psychopathic or sociopathic or sociopathy tending children and adults are produced-- ones who embrace authoritarianism.

We need to stop allowing the creation of massive companies, stop allowing the existence of billionaires (I've written a whole series of articles on this,) and we need to start giving extended parental leave and requiring parenting training... and provide help to parents so children are raised in properly nurturing milieus. Those are some bigger goals. But today, we need to speak up to stop the AT&T acquisition of Time Warner, and we need to send a message to Sheldon Adelson that his newspaper endorsement isn't worth a penny.



Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.


Check out his platform at RobKall.com


He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity


He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com


more detailed bio:


Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.


Rob Kall Wikipedia Page


Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel


Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel


Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.


Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.


To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.


For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.


Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..


To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.


Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.


His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.


Join the conversation:


On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution


and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation





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