I am really glad that on Wednesday the needle tipped in the proper direction in the Senate — for a change. Of course, now we must keep the pressure on the House of Representatives, remembering that they are the robber baron’s representatives, not our representatives, which is why – just like the senators – they require so much pressure from us to do anything right.
Their natural inclination, for sure, will be to please ISP corporations like Comcast and Verizon in exchange for bribes. However, with so many heists to pull off and with so much public outrage about some of the more visible ones, they may throw us this bone. Then, the White House Billionaire will still want to veto the bill rather than sign it. Can we pressure him to undo the dark deed done by the mole he placed at the top of the FCC? We’ll see.
If we win this battle, it’ll be great since articles like this one and the videos I frequently share on Beanstock’s World will still be accessible to you. If net neutrality does get successfully repealed, however, then you may soon not be able to see such things anymore, because paupers like me can’t afford the ransom money to stay accessible on the Net, and – even if we could – we might still be taken off since we inform and analyze against the cruel establishment which runs the big corporations, including the Big ISPs, which makes us a target. The same goes for digital networking for political and economic change. This, too, is easily curbed by the Big ISPs when they are not kept in check by the Net Neutrality mandate any longer. (And, yes, Net Neutrality could probably be improved over the Title II version which isn’t necessarily perfect; but repealing Net Neutrality instead of making it better for everyone involved is like Ajit Pai curing a headache of mine by lopping off my head. Believe me, I don’t want him as my doctor.)
Remember, those at the top are fairly well united and served by a corrupt system of laws and institutions created by them (and their forefathers), a rigged system that works for them and against us and creates yet another level of unity that overcomes little rivalries between the likes of Donald Trump and other plutocrats who would prefer their own pick of a puppet in the White House. We, the “everyday Americans”, on the other hand, still need to learn to unite around our common interests, one of the main reasons I keep writing and posting articles in my scarce spare time (and why I would welcome your help).
My lingering worry is that individual battles like the fight for a free and open Internet (A.K.A. Net Neutrality) may occupy us so much that we lose sight of the big picture. The establishment can then continue to corrupt the system even more and ultimately win the war about who owns and controls our world. This strategy has been used for many decades. The robber billionaires and their bought handmaidens in politics plus their corporate mass media either scare us about something horrible they may do, or they take something from us in broad daylight, thus to keep us busy with fighting against it. Meanwhile they take ten more things away behind the curtain and rig the system further to rob us even more and to tighten the control they have over us.
It’s a generational refinement process of corruption — something that many not so politically aware folks who live in the moment or with eyes only on their own life spans fail to notice. Yet, the big bosses who each sit on heaps of billions of dollars typically have a long pedigree going back many generations of stealing, hoarding wealth, and passing the hoarded wealth on to their children who then repeat the process or have well-paid managers do it for them with the game prepared by politicians (and thus laws and government institutions) bought with a fraction of that hoarded loot. This is where last winter’s repeal of the estate tax comes in, by the way.
You may think of our nation as an inequality distillery which creates dynasties like the Hiltons, Kochs, and Trumps. Sometimes, some of their political henchmen rise in the hierarchy themselves to start a new dynasty like the Clintons.
It’s high time for us to end the plutocracy that took over after our nation’s founders ended the rule of old-fashioned aristocracy, time for us to free ourselves from wage slavery, debt slavery, and the political marginalization that takes away our ability to fight systemic corruption and outrageous inequality.
Don’t most of us agree that we would prefer a country where we all get to live good lives instead of being trapped in a system that makes and keeps a very few ridiculously rich, wondering what to do with all their excessive wealth, and has most of us struggle in poverty or getting sucked into it?
Maybe those who still have it pretty good in the upper twenty to forty percent need to come to realize that the system has begun to come for them, too, with the goal of raking everything into the vaults of just a handful of billionaires. Everything that isn’t nailed down is fair game to them. They drool over and come for it, pulling the nails out of everything that our ancestors or we ourselves nailed down to protect it for the common good (including the Internet). It’s time we stop and reverse this process and go one step further this time: make excessive wealth hoarding impossible so that there can no longer be a plutocracy, only a democracy.
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Ending Note: It takes me at least 100 hours a month to research and write news updates and analyses and work on my book. Please widely share links to these articles, so this work is not for naught. You can also help in other ways (including much needed financial support). Only together can we change this messed-up world. Let’s do it! 🙂
Beanstock's World 