The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

The whole process of getting licenses to broadcast, which took place decades ago, was done behind closed doors by powerful lobbies, and wealthy commercial interests got all the licenses with no public input, no congressional input for that matter.

There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.

But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

Deregulation is a popular term that's used across the political spectrum. And it's one of these terms like "choice," that corporate interests have used because they know their focus-group buzzword testing makes it sound like a popular word. Because, who can be against deregulation? Being free, having liberty, not having someone tell you what to do, being deregulated, hey, that sounds great. But deregulation is a non sequitur in the realm of media policy or media regulation. The issue is never regulation versus deregulation; our entire system is built on media policies and subsidies.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.