The High Cost of Phone Service

Phone Service Wants to Take you for a Ride

I have discovered that the breakup of the phone services and the advent of cellular telephones has not really helped the average consumer. I'm not saying cell phones are not useful - becuase they are very convenient. I am saying that with all these advances and the so-called competition, prices should not have skyrocketed as they have. Twenty years ago when there was one phone company the average phone bill was pretty reasonable if you did not make many long distance calls. Bills over one hundred dollars were extreme, today bills like that are commonplace - even if your phone is the same twisted pair (pstn) style that existed since the phone was invented.

Cell phones - Residential phones

Today an low end cell phone with local service gives you a limited number of minutes for about 40 dollars. Unless you are single, a single cell phone in a household will probably not do. So most homes that have a cell phone will likely have two or three of them, and maybe a land line for internet. Having several phones in your home crank your bill up drastically.

Land based phones are not much better, with all the fees that are added on them, including monthly fees just to have a long distance service provider (or to disable long distance service). Local bells have also devised what I like to call the "not really long distance, long distance" or your extended calling area. This short range long distance "service" will charge you at special long distance rates even though you may be calling just down the road. The phone companies do give you a way around this however - with a "metropolitan", "city" or "extended service area" line - which you will pay a premium for of course.

Choices

The break-up of of the phone monopolies was supposed to give us a choice - however, if you have a residential line, you may realize you don't have a choice. In some areas you may still only have one provider; in places where you are lucky enought to have two large providers (Verizon, SBC, Qwest...) - you can't choose. They have already choosen for you - the city is divided up between the various companies. you likely live in an area that is serviced by only one of the companies, but both.

Sure there are the other smaller phone companies - but often these services only serve business customers, or you have to get a an existing phone line through the big companies before you can switch to one of them.

Finally if you wish to have DSL, you probably have to get it throught the same company that your phone service is with. Most of the smaller companies, which can only givve you phone service after you have been established by one of the big companies, are incompatable with DSL.

Does this sound like you have been given a choice? - not really

On top of this, if you don't have a relationship wit one of the big ones, you often have to pre-pay your first month or may have to setup automatic payments by giving them access to your bank account. Such practices are ridiculous for anyone who wishes to maintain control over their finanaces. This brings to mind the recent lawsuit where a large Internet Service Provider had a similar arrangement with its customers. After customers reqested the service be discontinued, the were still being charged monthly fees a year later.

Internet Phone

With the advent of the intenet phone and VOIP you have another option - The phone service may be a bit cheaper than other phones but you have to pay for overpriced cable internet and then get internet phone on top of it. This fast internet solution will start you out at a minimum of around seventy five dollars a month for the internet and the phone. Excluding price, the downside? - when the cable goes, so does your phone.

Tax Funded Prison Gender Changes

Would You Like Your Taxes to Support Sex Changes in Prison?

Read the quoted article at the bottom about prison inmates being able to have gender change operations and homone thereapy drugs to support such operations at tax-payer expense based upon their own identity disorders.

We must not forget, prison is a place for the containment of individuals who have proven themselves to be a detriment to society and therefore are obliged to sacrifice certain otherwise commonplace freedoms for the benefit of and retribution towards the communities they have afflicted. Ift his not a place where such individuals can go and to freely obtain frivolous services and so-called benefits (which would be denied to any person of respectable charater by their own insurace programs) at the expense of the tax-payers and communites they have harmed based upon a deficient mental, spiritual and social standing. The Crime and error here is with the fool at the top, the one who has approved such programs and practices in the first place. These people too, have proven that they do not serve their communites and should be punished for their abuses and forced to pay some sort of retrubution, or in the very least, removed from office.

Quote

New law won’t stop inmates’ sex changes — yet
Aug. 24 hearing to decide whether hormone treatments can continue

AP Associated Press
Updated: 5:38 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2006

MILWAUKEE - A new Wisconsin law barring the use of state tax money for prisoner sex changes won’t stop four inmates from getting hormone treatments until at least August.
The law took effect last week, but two groups have filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the inmates, challenging the statute as unconstitutional.
Judge Charles Clevert Jr. issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the state from stopping the hormone treatments until he holds a hearing on the matter. A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 24.

The law bars the state Department of Correction from using tax dollars for hormone therapy or gender reassignment surgery to treat prisoners for gender identity disorder, in which a person believes he or she belongs to the opposite sex.
The four plaintiffs are the only Wisconsin prisoners getting hormone therapy, which costs from $675 to $1,600 a year.
The inmates claim that stopping the treatments would be cruel and unusual punishment and would violate their right to equal protection.
The legal fight about the treatment started in 2003, when inmate Scott Konitzer filed a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections seeking gender reassignment surgery.
Now known as Donna Dawn Konitzer, she has been getting hormone therapy as treatment for gender identity disorder since 1999.
State Rep. Mark Gundrum, a Republican and one of the law’s authors, predicted the law would withstand the challenge.
“It’s ridiculous to ask the taxpayers to pay for this,” he said.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

High Price of Oil Brings Large Returns

Oil Companies Striking it Rich

In the following article we are told that Exxon Mobile has generated record quatrerly profits amid the exhorbitant fuel prices being charged. However it seems that Oil Companies would have us beleive these facts are not related. Amid the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the war on Terror and the 911 Attacks, oil prices have continued to rise seemingly uncontrollably. The rise in profits, the fact that there is no real oil shortage or infrastructure loss, and executives being called before congress tantamountly confesses there has been exhaustive price gouging similar to cartel practices.

These corporations are hoarding money at the expense of the people they purport to serve. Meanwhile these abused citizens are suffering under higher taxes, lower incomes, and forced into two income households by corporations who underpay them. An indirect result of the corporate greed of these major oil companies is that all products produced, shipped, or facilitated by oil or any of its by-products also suffers from unnatural price increases.

The corporation exists to serve the people who buy its products, not to exact their monies, deny goverments, and control politics. I propose simply to stop bying from Exxon Mobile until some of this grotesqe profit is given back to the communites in some manner. Buy from smaller oil companies, and use other modes of transportation. These ill-minded corporations have need to repent.


Quote
Exxon Mobil posts largest quarterly profit ever
U.S. oil giant reports quarterly sales of $100 billion; Shell profit also soars

Oct. 27: CNBC’s Bertha Coombs reports on Exxon’s Mobil’s record quarterly profit.

Updated: 1:35 p.m. ET Oct. 27, 2005
IRVING, Texas - High prices for oil and natural gas propelled Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC to their best quarterly results ever on Thursday, with Exxon becoming the first U.S. company ever to ring up quarterly sales of $100 billion.
To put Exxon’s performance into perspective, its third quarter revenue was greater than the annual gross domestic product of some of the largest oil producing nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company also set a U.S. profit record with net income of almost $10 billion, according to Standard & Poor’s equity market analyst Howard Silverblatt.
Both Exxon and Shell said their performances were buoyed by higher crude-oil and natural-gas prices, even as output suffered due to a busy hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico.

Exxon’s net income ballooned 75 percent to $9.92 billion, compared with $5.68 billion a year ago. The previous oil-industry earnings record was Exxon’s 2004 fourth-quarter profit of $8.42 billion. Revenue grew to $100.72 billion from $76.38 billion in the prior-year period.
At Shell, third-quarter net income attributable to shareholders grew 68 percent to $9.03 billion, compared with $5.37 billion a year earlier. Including income attributable to minority interests, profit rose 67 percent to $9.39 billion at the Anglo-Dutch company. Revenue rose 8 percent to $76.44 billion, in spite of an 11 percent decline in oil and natural gas output.
“We are capturing the benefits of high oil and gas prices and refining margins,” Shell Chief Financial Officer Peter Voser said, referring to the profit margin on each barrel of crude that is refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
Excluding certain items, Exxon’s profit was $8.3 billion, or $1.32 per share, or slightly below the $1.38 per share expected by analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

Shell said adjusted earnings on a current cost of supplies basis — a measurement that strips out the fluctuating value of the company’s oil and gas inventories — was $7.37 billion, sharply higher than analysts’ forecasts.
Exxon said the hurricanes slashed U.S. production volumes by 5 percent from a year ago, while global daily production slipped to 2.45 million barrels of oil equivalent from 2.51 million barrels.