“The U.S. government has used the merger-approval process to increase its influence over the telecom industry, bringing more companies under its oversight and gaining a say over activities as fundamental as equipment purchases.

“The leverage has come from a series of increasingly restrictive security agreements between telecom companies and national-security agencies that are designed to head off threats to strategically significant networks and maintain the government’s ability to monitor communications, according to a review of the public documents and lawyers who have negotiated the agreements.

“The security agreements, which arise in some deals involving foreign companies, stretch back more than a decade and compel them to honor requests to access their systems. What’s new is that consolidation in the industry and an influx of overseas investment have left much of the industry under the government’s sway.

“The merger agreements shed light on the complicated relationship between telecom companies and the national-security establishment amid a growing debate over the extensive collection of phone and Internet traffic by U.S. spy agencies.”

So the anti-trust process, which was designed a century ago to prevent monopolies, instead centralizes everything around the government monopoly. Ain’t that neat for the government! More:

“Three of the top four wireless carriers now operate under such agreements after Japan’s SoftBank Corp. 9984.TO -1.92% took over Sprint Corp. S -0.80% in a $21.6 billion deal last month and German-owned T-Mobile USA TMUS -0.63% merged with MetroPCS Communications Inc. this past spring. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. VZ -0.34% and Vodafone Group VOD.LN -1.31% PLC, has been operating under a security agreement since its creation in 2000.”

And note that last date: 2000. So this government obsession with taking over all communications, and snooping on all of us relentlessly, began even before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After those attacks, President Bush panicked and got Congress to repeal the Bill of Rights with the unconstitutional, unconscionable and traitorous USA “PATRIOT” Act. The Republican House and the Democratic Senate passed it, so it was a bipartisan assault on our liberties.

Oh, another word for corporatism is fascism. He’s the sort who now rule us:

By John Seiler

California continues to descend into Third World status, complete with corrupt, secretive government. The latest from Dan Walters:

“Let’s not mince words about what the state Senate’s Democratic leader did Wednesday. It was self-serving censorship, the sort of thing that one expects from tinpot dictators, not from those who fancy themselves to be progressive civil libertarians.

“Someone acting for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg suddenly cut off cable television access to a legislative hearing to air facts and arguments about pending ballot measures.”

Pretty soon, Kalifornia will be run buy a “tinpot dictator” like this one: