The “New York Times reported on Saturday”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/politics/17abramoff.html?hp&ex=1134882000&en=215fb6d614b7a14d&ei=5094 that Cato Institute Doug Bandow took money from Lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing sympathetic articles:
bq. A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.
bq. The scholar, Doug Bandow, who wrote a column for the Copley News Service in addition to serving as a Cato fellow, acknowledged to executives at the organization that he had taken money from Mr. Abramoff after he was confronted about the payments by a reporter from BusinessWeek Online.
Why is this important? Mr. Bandow is the author of Cato Institute “columns that attack municipal wireless”:http://www.catoinstitute.org/dailys/07-05-04.html. We’ve known for a while that many of the “research institutes” that come out against any type of government involvement in telecom and internet service “have been aligned with telco and cable companies”:http://wifinetnews.com/archives/cat_sock_puppets.html that lobby against such initiatives.
Now, in at least one instance, we can connect the dots between the money paid to lobbyists by the telco/cable duopolies to advance their agenda, and the anti-municipal wireless and municipal internet position taken by at least one conservative think-tank. While the evidence isn’t direct (yet), it is pretty damning.
Filed under: Muniwireless, News, Policy
