US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1681

Today’s vote by a bitterly divided Federal Communications Commission that the Internet should be regulated as a public utility is the culmination of a decade-long battle by the Left. Using money from George Soros and liberal foundations that totaled at least $196 million, radical activists finally succeeded in ramming through “net neutrality,” or the idea that all data should be transmitted equally over the Internet.

The final push involved unprecedented political pressure exerted by the Obama White House on FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, head of an ostensibly independent regulatory body. “Net neutrality’s goal is to empower the federal government to ration and apportion Internet bandwidth as it sees fit, and to thereby control the Internet’s content,” says Phil Kerpen, an anti-net-neutrality activist from the group American Commitment. The courts have previously ruled the FCC’s efforts to impose “net neutrality” out of bounds, so the battle isn’t over. But for now, the FCC has granted itself enormous power to micromanage the largely unrestrained Internet. Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration teamed up with Internet pioneers to promote a hands-off approach to the new industry and keep it free from discriminatory taxation. Many still prefer that policy. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the charity One Laptop Per Child, says that net neutrality “doesn’t make sense” because “the truth is, not all bits [of data] are created equal.” Will Marshall, head of the Progressive Policy Institute (which was once a favorite think tank of Clinton Democrats), issued a statement that net neutrality “endorses a backward-looking policy that would apply the brakes to the most dynamic sector of America’s economy.”

But such voices have been drowned out by left-wing activists who want to manage the Internet to achieve their political objectives. The most influential of these congregate around the deceptively named Free Press, a liberal lobby co-founded in 2002 by Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor. His goals have always been clear. “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.” Earlier in 2000, he told the Marxist magazine Monthly Review: “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.” When I interviewed him in 2010, he admitted he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

In essence, what McChesney and his followers want is an Unfree Press — a media world that promotes their values. “To cast things in neo-Marxist terms that they could appreciate, they want to take control of the information means of production,” says Adam Therier of the blog TechLiberation. Certainly McChesney seems blind to the dangers of media control on the left. In 2007, he co-authored a remarkable survey of the media under Hugo Chávez’s already clearly thuggish regime in Venezuela: “Aggressive, unqualified political dissent is alive and well in the Venezuelan mainstream media, in a manner few other democratic nations have ever known, including our own.”

Despite his astonishingly radical goals, McChesney’s Free Press group was able to leverage foundation cash and academic “research” into an influential force behind net neutrality. Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s first FCC chairman, hired Free Press’s Jen Howard as his press secretary. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, has co-authored a Free Press report demanding regulation of political talk radio. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan cited research from Free Press and other left-wing groups backing net neutrality more than 50 times.

The battle for control of the Internet isn’t over. Over two-thirds of the House and Senate are on record as opposing FCC regulation of the Internet, and a new president could change the policy overnight in 2017 even if the courts don’t block it. But for now, the “media reform” movement led by McChesney and his allies can claim bragging rights for their Saul Alinsky–style outflanking maneuver on Internet regulation. They financed the research behind the idea, installed their political allies in power, got the government to consider them experts on the issues they cared deeply about, and finally ran roughshod over both Congress and an initially reluctant FCC chairman. Conservatives should study how the Left won on this issue even as they acknowledge and fight the illegitimacy of many of the results.

I don't really think US foreign policy should be governed by what makes us look good in the eyes of "the world", but rather by what keeps our interests forefront. Destablizing the largest US-friendly country in the region hardly does this.

Iran just seeks to expand its own influence in the region, and has little regard for anyone else's welfare.

On March 01 2015 01:58 hannahbelle wrote:
But because of that, we know have a situation where Russia is invading a sovereign nation (that Obama promised to defend if they demilitarized several years earlier let's not forget)

On March 01 2015 07:26 KwarK wrote:

Just to be clear, hannah thinks that Obama wrote the Budapest Memorandum following the fall of the Soviet Union and is now failing to live up to his obligations under it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances

Thanks Obama!

On March 01 2015 09:23 xDaunt wrote:

No, he did not write it, but it is patently obvious why presidents should honor treaties signed by predecessor governments/administrations.

The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated as a political agreement. It refers to assurances, not defined, but less than a military guarantee of intervention.[1][19] According to Stephen MacFarlane, a professor of international relations "It gives signatories justification if they take action, but it does not force anyone to act in Ukraine."[18] In the U.S. neither the George H. W. Bush administration nor the Clinton administration was prepared to give a military commitment to Ukraine, nor did they believe the U.S. Senate would ratify an international treaty, so the memorandum was agreed as a political agreement.[19]

On March 01 2015 09:23 xDaunt wrote:

No, he did not write it, but it is patently obvious why presidents should honor treaties signed by predecessor governments/administrations.

The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated as a political agreement. It refers to assurances, not defined, but less than a military guarantee of intervention.[1][19] According to Stephen MacFarlane, a professor of international relations "It gives signatories justification if they take action, but it does not force anyone to act in Ukraine."[18] In the U.S. neither the George H. W. Bush administration nor the Clinton administration was prepared to give a military commitment to Ukraine, nor did they believe the U.S. Senate would ratify an international treaty, so the memorandum was agreed as a political agreement.[19]

On March 01 2015 09:57 KwarK wrote:

Which means that Obama promised to defend the Ukraine when they demilitarized in 1994? Because that's a very specific claim. I don't disagree that commitments carry between presidents but the claim he made was "Obama promised them that they would get American defence if they demilitarized". It sounds to me a lot more like hannahbelle heard that defence was offered in exchange for joining the non proliferation treaty and assumed that Obama made that offer in classic "thanks Obama" style. He made a very specific claim which was factually untrue in a way that should have been obvious to any idiot.

Furthermore


In short, just because he heard the words promise and Obama on Fox doesn't give hannahbelle a license to rewrite history and to insert Obama into events that happened over two decades ago.

On March 01 2015 10:22 KwarK wrote:
He specifically blamed Obama for making that promise, a promise which is 21 years old and was specifically non military. That was what I was objecting to because it is factually false in every conceivable way.

On March 01 2015 10:34 hannahbelle wrote:

Meh get over it. Ukraines demilitarization from Budapest to the initiatives I linked have been done under the assumption Ukraine would be protected. The last round of weapons destruction in 2012 is another instance. It reaffirms the existence of an obligation. Obama, as the guy at the top, has his name attached to it.

You don't get much more "military" than nuclear weapons...