If there’s one thing progressives are good at it’s biding their time. In 2008 the times were ripe for a complete progressive takeover of the federal government – two unpopular wars, an economic meltdown (that progressives had quite a hand in creating), a complicit media, and a message of hope and change.
They also had plans, big plans. Plans for redistribution of wealth. Plans for a socialist “green” economy. Plans for Wall Street and health control. After all this time, the 111th Congress and President Obama delivered to them much of what they’ve been waiting for, more than any Congress has given them since the Great Society of the 1960′s. Although much of it will require they wait just a little bit longer. Another thing progressives good at is incrementalism. It’s a pretty smart strategy, by the time the fruits of their policies are known the other party will be in power and take the blame.
Speaking of incrementalism, the progressives also have had plans for the internet for years. I guess you could their vision “media control.” The FCC’s decision to implement a policy of net neutrality is the first step toward that goal, a policy concocted by an admitted socialist, Robert McChesney. John Fund explained in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. (Emphasis mine)
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “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.”
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”
For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.
Free Press is another group funded by radical leftists. Their strategy is the same strategy employed to get the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws passed. The leftist groups that fund them also funded “studies” they could cite to advance their agenda.
To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture “research” on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an “independent review of existing information” for the agency in order to “lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making.”
Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.
The Berkman Center’s FCC- commissioned report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.
These Marxists know what they’re doing – obviously this plan has been in the works for years. This is the first step in controlling the internet unless the next Congress does something to stop them. What’s amazing is that even this last Congress overwhelmingly rejected net neutrality on a bipartisan basis, and Obama’s buddy at the FCC brazenly went ahead and rammed it through anyway.
Someone should alert the media while they still can.
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