GETTING THE MESSAGE - AT 8:17 A.M. ET: 

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. may have this response to the U.S. government’s offer of $7.2 billion for high-speed Internet projects: Keep it.

Unlike the businesses that welcomed the $787 billion stimulus package approved by Congress last month, the two biggest U.S. phone companies have reservations. They’re urging the government not to help other companies compete with them through broadband grants or to set new conditions on how Internet access should be provided.

“I don’t think there’s much for them to gain financially from going after this money,” especially if the government attaches strings to it, said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in Washington.

COMMENT:  Maybe some American corporations are getting the message.  You lie down with bureaucrats, you wake up with socialists.  But the question is when the American people are going to start to resist the greatest power grab we've had in Washington in generations.  I certainly don't mean to defend some of the companies that have gotten help.  Some of them have been horribly and cynically run.  But we should be extremely careful about transferring private control to public control, assuming, as some Americans apparently do, that Washington will be wiser, more competent, or more honest.  There isn't much history to back up that assumption.

March 31, 2009