Tags
Clutch Cargo, Corruption, Crony Capitalism, FCC, Gumby, Internet, NSA surveillance, Obama, sleaze, The Internet, Tom Wheeler
As most people are aware, last week the FCC, an unelected governmental body that is supposed to be immune to petty political concerns, voted along strict party lines to impose a new and currently mysterious set of rules on the Internet. We don’t know a lot about these regulations yet since like most government regulations they are designed to solve problems that do not actually exist. What we do know is that these new rules are based on old rules that date back to the 1930’s which, among other things, made phone service a monopoly.
I remember those days when there was only one phone company in town. Phones came in only one color, and you did not own your phone, you were only allowed to rent it from the phone company, and we couldn’t watch Gumby and Clutch Cargo cartoons on YouTube, we had to wait until they aired on Saturday morning.
Not much changed until the phone companies were slowly de-regulated. In this age of crony capitalism, please be aware that government’s job is no longer the protection of individual rights, it has mutated and morphed into the protection of itself and the big-money interests that help it get re-elected. What citizens— er subjects want is unimportant now.
The 230 plus pages of new rules are not public yet, and we all know that lawsuits will be filed to stop them, conservative members of congress will rail against them and vow to fight them. But even at this beginning stage it’s a good guess that the rules are designed to squelch speech that the government does not like while also handing out competition crushing favors to the multi-billion dollar companies that currently dominate cyber-space. I also see a future where The Department of the Internet taxes every transaction, page view, email, text message, streaming movie, packet, byte, and bit that moves.
Just a few short months ago, FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, expressed doubts that the Commission even had the Constitutional authority to place such controls on the last bastion of free speech and free enterprise left in the world. For some reason he completely reversed his position and became Obama’s sock puppet.
Of course we all know that the NSA intercepts all our phone calls and e-mails and text messages and has the ability to find out everything about us. And we know that Obama and his operatives have a long history of exposing embarrassing secrets about their opponents. Few recall that he was losing the primary race for US Senate in 2004 when the front runner’s sealed divorce records were made public. In the general election, his Republican opponent’s sealed child custody records were made public, causing him to drop out of the race at the last minute. The next thing you know Obama is a US Senator and immediately begins blowing off work to campaign for POTUS.
Can you imagine how easy it is for the current administration to employ this favored and effective tactic against their political foes in Washington now that the NSA procto-scope of surveillance has infested everyone like high-tech tapeworms? The professional political class in DC are far more vulnerable than ever before. Knowing that whatever sleaze they’ve ever been involved in can be exposed at any moment makes them all as squishy and malleable as Gumby and Pokey in a sauna.
And that, boys and girls is why FCC Commissioners, Chief Justices, House Speakers, and Senate Majority leaders everywhere are doing things that shock and outrage the conservative / libertarian party base, as well as freedom loving people everywhere.