FCC Marxist Coup to End Telephone & Cable Freedoms by "Net Neutrality"

Julius Genachowski is another reason to believe that all the hoopla and ballyhoo about the GOP takeover of Congress is overdone, because Obama-bots and The Won Himself are planning an administrative end run around Congress that will neuter poor weepy Speaker Boehner and his Republican cohorts by Cass Sunstein's silent revolution.

John Fund writes convincingly that the paranoid right that Richard Hofstadter wrote about so long ago is being circumvented, and along with it the American voter, by a POTUS and his accomplices, the lamestream media, who are too clever and are underreported, except by fawning nitwits in the media trying hard to figure out what the original problem is. Bert Lance once famously intoned: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

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 has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience. He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

So the net neutrality regulation is the camel's nose under the tent on the way to nationalization of the media, with the ultimate control of the media by the government.

Those who are aware of Marxist movements are aware that when the media is under government control, the tendency toward one-party government is very strong. Hugo Chavez is a big fan of net neutrality.

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.

Watch for crushing media silence on this media analogy to the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax concocted by thousands of greedy "climate scientists" eager for government funding, which only came if the research was likely to be pro-AGW. Cargo Cult Science was the term by Richard Feynman which described fake research and elaborate grant requests for funding which aimed at achieving a bogus goal, to verify a theorem that the fake 'scientists' wished to 'prove.' In this case, net neutrality has plenty of fake 'research' concocted with a political goal in mind, the denial of free market access by the media. Don't be surprised when we all become honorable Venezuelans.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.

Obama's socialist takeover of the country proceeds apace, with moronic Republicans like Lugar and other RINOs acquiescing in their senile dotage.