America is under siege. Every assumption, every basic fundamental right is under attack. The very premise of America, individual rights, is being destroyed. You won't like what comes after America.
Net neutrality is part of the larger shift to "change" America from our founding principles of unalienable property rights, a free market system and a constitutional republic, toward marxism.
And net neutrality is not a narrow proposal. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski says that net-neutrality rules would apply to all parts of the internet, not just the chunk that’s set aside for internet traffic.
Push back time, people. It's time to start working the phones. Seizing control of the net from the free markets into the clutches of big marxist movement in DC. The FCC is set to vote on proposed regulations Thursday. It's still early in the game, but the fight begins now.
James G. Lakely is co-director of the Center on the Digital
Economy for the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a free-market think
tank. His policy study, "Neutralism: The Strange Philosophy Behind the
Movement for Net Neutrality," can be found at www.heartland.org.
'Net Neutrality' Is Socialism, Not Freedom
Advocates of imposing "network neutrality" say it's necessary to ensure a "free" and "open" Internet and rescue the public from nefarious corporations that "control" technology.
Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language -- and that's saying something. But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.
The modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently doesn't like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks -- in response to millions of individual consumer choices -- is not sufficiently "fair," "open" or "free."
The chairman's remedy is to claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation. This is exactly what the radical founders of the net neutrality movement had in mind.
The concept can be traced to an iconoclastic figure, Richard Stallman, a self-described software freedom activist who introduced the term "copyleft" in the mid-1980s. In his 2002 essay "Free Software, Free Society," Stallman fiercely attacks the idea that intellectual property rights are one of the keystones of individual liberty, so important that patents and copyrights are affirmatively protected in the body of the Constitution.
According to Stallman, "we are not required to agree with the Constitution or the Supreme Court. [At one time, they both condoned slavery.]" Like slavery, he says, copyright law is "a radical right-wing assumption rather than a traditionally recognized one." Rebuking those who might find a Marxist flavor in his call for a "digital commons," Stallman turns the tables, writing: "If we are to judge views by their resemblance to Russian Communism, it is the software owners who are the Communists."
Eben Moglen's 2003 treatise The dotCommunist Manifesto is more honest about the thinking behind net neutrality -- it's sprinkled throughout with the language of communism's great and bloody revolutionaries. The people must "struggle" to "wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind" that has been "stolen from us under the guise of 'intellectual property.' "
How does one bring this about? The professor of law and legal history at Columbia University would start with the "abolition of all forms of private property in ideas."
Most bold and radical of the neutralists is Robert W. McChesney, founder of Free Press -- the leading advocacy group in Washington pushing for net neutrality. In an August interview with a Canadian Marxist online publication called the Bullet, McChesney rejoices that net neutrality can finally bring about the Marxist "revolution."
"At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," McChesney said. "We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
He's right: Net neutrality divests control over the Internet from the private sector to the government. And in typical Marxist fashion, innocuous words -- the language of neutralism and liberty -- cloak an agenda that would crush freedom.
That's the agenda President Obama's FCC is pushing.
Add to this the disaster of Mark Lloyd: Over at Newsbusters
(Audio at Naked Emperor News)
This is of course in addition to Lloyd's rather disturbing perspective on the First Amendment.
"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.
"[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance."
And Lloyd's rather disturbing perspective on Venezuelan Communist dictator Hugo Chavez's "incredible...democratic revolution." To go with Lloyd's bizarre admiration for the thuggishly fascistic manner in which "Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country."
We have said repeatedly that Lloyd is a man myopically focused on race. What is revealed here is more than just that. Listening to excerpts of his offerings at a May 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice reveals a man that finds great fault with our nation's power structure - as he defines and sees it. And in his racially-warped, finite pie worldview, too many white people sit alone in the too few spots atop the heap. They're "good white people," mind you, but ...
This... there's nothing more difficult than this. Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.
We're in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.
So white people, good though they may be, must "step down so" "more people of color, gays" and "other people" "can have power." And thereby "change the problem" of whites running the show.
So who is "in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power?" Why, Lloyd is.
Lloyd now sits astride the FCC, which regulates and oversees a very finite world indeed. That being the radio dial, and the limited number of broadcast licenses that can be issued.
As Lloyd has said repeatedly if not exhaustively in writing, he thinks too few white people hold too many of this finite resource. And he has designed (in his 2006 book Prologue to a Farce) and co-authored (the 2007 Center for American Progress report "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio") a fee, fine and regulatory nightmare to effect a reduction in the number of the licenses they hold so that they may be redistributed to "more people of color, gays" and "other people."
This is how Lloyd wishes to "change the problem." This is his definition of "media diversity."
The tape also contains audio from a July 2007 interview Lloyd did on the very liberal Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)'s CounterSpin radio show, where he had this to say about the so-called "Fairness" Doctrine.
(Which - we will say for the umpteenth time - we KNOW he does not wish to reimpose. Members of the media and the Left [pardon the redundancy] have repeatedly inaccurately reported that we have said he does, so as to ignore our very legitimate concerns regarding Lloyd's plans for "media diversity" and "localism" enforcement.)
What we're really saying is that the Fairness Doctrine's not enough. And that having a sort of over-arching rule that says broadcasters ought to be "fair" or ought to provide issues important to communities and that they ought to do it in a fair and balanced way is simply enough. Unless you put some teeth into that and put some hard, structural rules in place that are going to result in fairness.
So in other words, as stifling, as "chilling" as the mis-named "Fairness" Doctrine was when enforced, it fell and falls way short of Lloyd's censorship intentions. Hence his book and report, the "hard structural rules" he wants to put in place to wring his definition of "fairness" out of the system.
On the tape, Lloyd has an additional gem.
The conversation about how we communicate with each other despite being aware of the clear impressions that I know that I make in rooms that I walk into, when people hear my voice, is a challenge. How much do I express the... I think really pretty obvious complaints of black Americans in rooms full of whites....
There are few things I think more frightening in the American mind than dark skinned black men. Here I am.
We told you he was myopically fixated on race.
I can think of a great number of things far more frightening than dark skinned black men. Government censorship - imposed by anyone of any color - leaps to this American mind.
