Tis the season. That’s a phrase we hear a ton of around the this time of year. Tis the season to participate in consumerism to show how much you really love someone. Because the only real way to show the abstraction of love is to spend something that’s based in nothing, wrap it up in decorative paper so everyone knows it’s real.
Tis the season to get chastised for saying Merry Christmas. And yeah, sure if you don’t celebrate Christmas that’s obnoxious. But this isn’t the Crusades! So if you don’t really celebrate the holiday, tell that person what you celebrate or what you’d like to be greeted with. Tis should be the season for empathy, education and redemption. Actually that’s what all the seasons should be.
And while we are distracted with how much the holidays will put into the debt of the consumerist cycle, and what greeting your barista should say to you, our rights get stripped away one by one. Tis the season that actual freedom becomes a thing of the past.
The first thing on the chopping block in our Internet Freedoms. Sure yes, I’ve talked about how it’s important to keep Net Neutrality and regulate how the Internet Service Providers, like Verizon & Time Warner Cable, charge consumers for that utility, but that didn’t stop the Federal Communications Commission to revoke Net Neutrality and Title II in the name of profits.
Chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai claims it’s because he wants the government to stop micromanaging the Internet Service Providers and give the people choices over their Internet. But if the ISP’s weren’t like children that keep putting cherry bombs in the Internet anthill, the government could trust them enough to not micromanage them.
Just as a reminder, if you like having content like this show, Act Out with Eleanor Goldfield, Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp, Democracy Now or even the Ben Shapiro show on the Internet you’re gonna want to keep Net Neutrality in place. What this does is let companies like Verizon & Comcast charge what they want for quicker access to independent content and sites they don’t particularly care for. Sure they can’t censor it, but they can slow videos, website, pages and profiles down to a crawl so it’s much more difficult to get the content.
And yes, some people will say it’s not being blocked off the internet, but have you interacted with another human? Most people don’t have the patience to wait for something load more than a second or two. If it does take longer than 2 seconds you might as well set your computer on fire because the rest of the day is ruined and wasted. We’re all on a schedule to watch new cat videos and Star War memes this holiday season! If the FCC wants to give more of this control to the corporate sector they should start fund called “People’s Patience for Profits”.
Sure FCC chairman Ajit Pai likes to say that corporations won’t be creating slow and fast lanes for internet, because corporations have been so good and kind to the people. But the fact is that corporate ISP’s were slowing Internet down before this decision was even made. Charter Communications was suing Time Warner for not providing internet speeds they were promised. Net Neutrality would mean that Time Warner would be in the wrong for not being transparent on what they can and can’t deliver.
Corporate ISP’s are like that friend that makes you a promise to take you to the airport, help you move and even feed your cat. But through a series of excuses and lies, they drop the ball and you miss your flight, have to move all your shit yourself and bury your cat. If you really want to get rid of that friendship, you should bury that cat in your former friend’s front yard.
And if you go to small towns the internet speeds are already slower compared to bigger cities. I was in a small town outside Des Moines, Iowa and a video that normally takes about 5 minutes to upload took about 4 hours. And these towns don’t have too many options on who their Internet Service Providers are. So if Comcast & Verizon didn’t want to give faster service to Iowans under Net Neutrality, then what choice does Iowa have now?
It’s no wonder that when you go to small towns they look like they’re stuck in the 80s. That’s how information access is controlled for these folks. It’s kept slow and any smaller ISP that is looking advance technology is blocked by the big guy that can charge more for faster service. And it creates an even larger divide between the fast city slickers and the simple life of the small townies.
Obviously Ajit Pai has never been outside the bubble that his Verizon masters set up for him. Where they just show him videos of parents exploiting their children’s dental care, baby pandas sneezing and pages after pages of Amazon goods. It would explain why his own video was this…
Notice that according to Pai the internet is only used for buying more shit. Well you can’t learn about history, science, dissent or anything relevant, just fill those voids with more shit you probably don’t need! Look how cool this corporate puppet looks with a lightsaber and an ethernet and fiber optics cable jammed up his ass so the instructions from his overlords get to his brain at lightning speeds!
So this year for Christmas, Ajit Pai and the FCC got the American People the gift of silence. Taking away Net Neutrality means our Freedom of Speech is under attack and has been sold off with a nice bow to the highest bidder. Eventually this will lead to imprisonment for not saying the right Holiday greeting.
Now companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter have all come out against the FCC but I doubt it’s in the interest of us, the consumers. This battle is about who controls the massive Information Highway. At this point most people know that Facebook, Google and Twitter censor the reach of independent media, so unless they’re willing throw their weight in money towards preserving Net Neutrality, I doubt their decisions are based on our Internet freedoms. It’s very much about the control of the information being in their favor.
But there is a glimmer of light from the darkness of Ajit Pai’s reign of Corporate Trollism. New York Attorney General Eric Schienderman is suing the FCC for this ruling. And this is only one of the over 70 lawsuits against Pai! Also, Congress can overturn it within 60 days. So basically to foil plot of Ajit Pai to make everyone have AOL email accounts and prove once & for all that Internet IS a fad, we have 2 months for Congress to band together and for once do the right thing and hope this lawsuit goes all the way up to the Supreme Court.
There’s also the option of a Municipal Public Broadband Network! Eleanor Goldfield of Act Out! talked to Evan Malgrem about this very idea! This means that things like the Internet would be in the hands of the people that use it. The consumers, the public, the proletariat! The power of information at our fingertips.
Tis also the season to con the American people into thinking poor people are stealing their money. House Speaker and King Republican, Paul Ryan says he’ll be working on “Entitlement Reforms” in 2018! Don’t be too excited, he’s not going make Donald Trump Jr. actually get a minimum wage job so he can see how shitty it is. Where we watch Trump Jr. have a panic attack over an Egg McMuffin and spend his 30 minute break crying in front everyone in the drive-thru lane screaming “I shouldn’t have to work this hard for so little money!” NO ONE SHOULD DONNY! Now, get back to the fryers, these burgers won’t flatten themselves.
Paul Ryan wants to cut Medicaid, Medicare and any program that tries to help poor people to save the American budget. This is not a new Republican tactic. This is the same tactic that’s used everytime it comes to actually helping people. Equating social programs with robbing the American people and keeping the country in debt! Creating stigma towards anything that resembles compassion so the only choice that’s out there for the American people is cutthroat competition.
Ryan claims that’s this is how you tackle debt and deficit. While we’re cutting things that create a deficit, how about we cut that over inflated War budget that gets more and more bloated every year. Or the Republicans offer a tax bill that helps the American people instead of rehashing trickle-down economics which has never worked because American Capitalism works on greed, poverty and debt!
But that’s the Grand Old Party for yah! There’s only one word in there that truly describes this party. Old, just regular Old, not the fancy kind with an ‘E’ at the end. You can’t call them Grand. No one equates prestige or excellence from the party that had a hand in killing the Middle Class, and wants to kill even more people with their wars. And if Congresspeople like Paul Ryan think the party is Grand, that’s because they have delusions of grandeur. They’re only looking through the one eye, located on the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill.
It’s not really Party. No one wants to invite the eradicator of compassion to the BYOB party where people are sharing their food, booze and their drugs. If a Republican showed up they’d try to figure out how they can sell the party to next highest bidder, tax every drop of the booze and how to create a crisis for profit with all the drugs at the party. So all they are is old. Constantly convincing you ideas that didn’t work 30 years ago will work today.
Trickle Down Economics would work if we were able to agree that there are some principles of Socialism has some value in this system. If Trickle Down is to work, then the ultra-rich Corporatists and Capitalists would actually give those Tax savings to help the American Middle Class buy those things Ajit Pai wants us to get from the internet.
Basically Paul Ryan & Mitch McConnell would have to go through everyone’s Amazon wishlist and deliver those gifts to our homes. And this would mean that there is a way for Santa to exist and that’s through REAL trickle down & job creation. Well for one day at least!
Also, it would also mean that these corporations can’t use their off-shore Tax Havens that both the Paradise Papers & the Panama Papers discussed. Here's Dr. Richard Wolff talking about how these corporations are being rewarded for cheating and robbery. Rewards for robbery! This is the real Entitlement problem! Thinking you can hide your money, not contribute to the people that work for you and then get a reward for breaking the law. That’s Entitlement and the Republicans are just fine with that. But if you’re a widowed mother for 3 on welfare & medicare, you’re said to be succling at the raw teets of Mother America!
Basically these corporations learned their savings methodology from Pirates.They hid them in these islands and drew a map with dotted lines that shaped like the middle finger to let the American people know that they’re all about fucking us!
So the argument comes down to who you trust. The private or the public sector. Corporations or the government to provide for the people? But it’s one and the same. Our government is owned by the corporate sector. The fact that Congress didn’t immediately overturn the FCCs rulings means they’re in the pockets of those corporations! The government tells us that we need to go to work for corporations that make more money than they pay you just so the Republicans can say they were job creators.
Why not create some jobs that matter? If the Republican Party wants to save itself and the American people then they should look the state of progress and adapt. If you lost your job because of automation or the fact that coal mining jobs are no longer necessary, the government with the corporate sector should help retrain and re-educate people. There is no supply for the job that you used to do, the demand is to adapt.
Singing the tune of job creation and tax cuts for the rich, Republicans are saying the corporations can save the day, when neither of them will. The Private and Public sector are working in tandem to ensure that We the People don’t have choices but the options we are told to choose. That’s why we keep pushing that 2 Party system. It’s why we only 2 choices for the internet. And it’s why we are always battling over Coke or Pepsi, when RC cola is just fine.
These are just two examples of how the government wants to strip your rights away. The right for information and a healthy living. I’ve kept it at 2 because it’s the holidays and also that’s how many things the standard American mind seems to be able to handle at one time. And these are Right wing ideas. And as much as the Right claims to be for a limited government, it seems like they’re all about controlling our lives. The only thing they want to limit is our health, knowledge and the fact that politicians and government agencies should be representing us.
So tis the season to keep your eyes open, your ears tuned in and not forget about these issues. Tis the season to bring these conversations to the dinner table to and talk about what’s going on. If 2017 has proven anything, complacency means we lose. It means that we pause our own progress and we’re only left with outrage. Tis the season to get educated, start communicating and join the fight.