Government Killed The Satellitte Star

Lets be perfectly clear about this. If XM/Sirius file bankruptcy this week, it will be the direct result of the Fed's intervention on behalf of its terrestial lobbyist clients. The FTC, DOJ and Congress got paid to kill a company. Period.

'The Exxon Mobil merger took 11 months of review from the FTC in 1999. Now, these two companies competed competitively in 40 markets and the resulting merger has grown into the largest privately held company in the world. ExxonMobil has the largest sales and profits from any privately-held company ever.

Whirlpool's purchase of Maytag took 7 months to approve in 2006. At the time, Whirlpool was the market's largest appliance manufacturer and Maytag was the second. After the acquisition's approval, Whirlpool manufactured over 50% of the dishwashers in the U.S. and 70% of the clothes washers and dryers. Analysts agree that Whirlpool's products' prices have risen since the acquisition.

AT&T's purchase of Cingular, in 2004, took 7 months to be approved. It created the nation's largest cell phone company.Again, Sirius and XM are hoping to merge to own 4% of the radio market.

It's been over a year to decide if Sirius and XM will be a monopoly? Incidentally, Sirius and XM's merger is valued at $4.5 billion, while ExxonMobil's was $80 billion and AT&T's purchase of Cingular was $41 billion." link

Actually it took almost two years for approval, those quotes are from an old article. This is what happens when Big G Government over-regulates industry and unnecessarily interferes in private enterprise. This is what happens when lobbyists (nice flip flop Obama) control Washington.

It should also be noted that a major stipulation in agreeing to let these two companies merge was that they had to give channels to minorities. Much the same way the Fed mandated banks give home loans to unqualified minorities that got us into the recent housing/credit crisis, and much the same way the new stimulus bill plans on fixing the economy by paying people not to work and by forcing companies to invest in unproven technology.

I got nothing against minorities, hell as a heterosexual catholic conservative and caucasian male I now am one, and I still rock a Mini-Disc player, so Im a big fan of unproven/failed technology, difference is Uncle Same that didnt need to write a law or impose a tax to make that the case.

I will close with a quote from President Gerald Ford.

"If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."

From same article, Jim Cramer names names. link (watch the video)