There is no pretext too petty or insignificant that a redistributive-minded control-freak politician won’t use it to impose their global Marxist agenda upon the American people. Free speech is a right protecting by the First Amendment. They’re unilaterally adding a right to “free stuff” to the Constitution too, including a phone and Internet access, so that they can further control every aspect of our lives.
The Obama regime already taxes Americans to provide “sponge phones,” also known as “Obama Phones” to the lazy social parasites that feed upon us, but that was just the foot in the door. They’re just getting started.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced on Thursday that the program is about to get bigger, and naturally, much more expensive, to now include “free” internet for those who might grow weary of watching Oprah all day on the couch.
Wheeler cutely described the expansion of the program, writing on the FCC’s website, “I am circulating new proposals to “reboot” Lifeline for the Internet age,” which would include, “establishing minimum standards of service for voice and broadband,” as well as taxpayer money to pay the Internet bills of low-income consumers. Of course, when the program started, in 2008, we were already in the Internet age, but Americans have short memories and they’ll believe anything.
In a modern socialist America, everything is a right that others must be forced to pay for. As Hussein Obama would put it, becoming the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union is “the right thing to do.”
The taxpayer-funded “Lifeline” program provides $9.95 per month for phone service to those who are at or below 135 percent of the poverty line. The premise, as usual, involves fairness and offering an equal opportunity to become productive members of society to the chronic couch potato or street corner fixture.
Lifeline, they claim, permits America’s less fortunate to connect to the nation’s communications networks, allowing them to find jobs, access health care services, connect with family and their children’s schools, and call for help in an emergency. Libraries also accomplish the same thing for a lot less money.
Americans who pay for their own cell phones are currently being taxed 16.1% of their bills so that the feds can support and bribe Democrat voters under the ambiguous label of “Universal Service Fee.” That’s a legitimate-sounding name for a wholly illegitimate program. If they called it what it really is, something along the lines of “phones for parasites,” people might be a bit more vocal in their opposition.
But they’re not complaining now so why not expand the program? Besides, black lives matter; what’s a billion dollars a year wasted if it can allow one poor person to call 911 to report a crime after the fact?
Lifeline expenditures having doubled from $819 million per year in 2008 to 1.6 billion last year, but the true level of taxpayer pilferage is much higher. In 2008 the Universal Service Fee collected an impressive $7.2 billion, an amount that rose to $10.34 billion last year and is projected to be over $12 billion in 2016, and that is before the newly announced Internet subsidies. With the importation and “legalization” of poor Latin Americans, we can certainly expect the “need” to increase.
Chairman Wheeler adopted the typical socialist arguments in his sales pitch and preemptive defense of his reaching deeper into our pockets. Justifying financially raping Americans in order to pay for unknown strangers’ high quality Internet porn, Wheeler said, “30 percent of Americans still haven’t adopted broadband at home…. While more than 95 percent of households with incomes over $150,000 have broadband, only 48 percent of those making less than $25,000 have service at home.”
What more do we need to hear? Dialup is socially unfair and discriminatory. In a socialist society all things must be equal and the United States certainly wants to be socialist, right? Freedom is outdated and “so last century.”
An article published by CNSNews reported data that showed:
According to Census Bureau data released in September, 74 percent of Americans already have access to the Internet at home. Accounting for those who can access it at work, school, or public libraries, Pew Research found that just 15 percent of Americans reported not using the Internet at all.
Of the 15 percent who do not use the Internet, one-third said they had no desire to do so. “They are not interested, don’t want to use it or don’t need it,” Pew reported in 2013. Overall, just 3 percent of Americans reported that they did not use the Internet due to financial reasons.
The Lifeline expansion was made possible largely through the FCC’s Open Internet Order, which reclassified Internet service as a utility and allows the FCC to impose the USF fee on Internet service if it chooses to do so.
But there’s another factor in all of this that the regime isn’t bothering to mention. That is the fact that high speed Internet access is a necessary component of their “Smart Grid” Agenda 21 plans to remotely control our home appliances, energy use, and virtually every aspect of our formerly “private lives.” Americans can’t be expected to voluntarily dial up to have our air conditioner turned off on a sweltering July afternoon. They have to have a system in place to do it without our consent.
Greentechmedia reported in April of 2013 that the multinational corporation, Emerson, and Georgia electric cooperative utility, Habersham EMC, were combining forces “to tackle a different challenge: turning energy-hungry devices like air conditioners and water heaters into real-time utility assets. To get there, Emerson and partners EnerSphere and Jetlun are tapping a $1.5 million federal grant (not from the Department of Energy’s $4 billion smart grid pool, but from the USDA) as part of a consortium delivering rural broadband, said David Drew, business development director at Emerson Climate Technologies.”
They continued, “From there, Emerson, along with Atlanta-based telco-turned-smart-grid connectivity provider EnerSphere and Hong Kong-based energy management company Jetlun, are piloting a ‘bundled intelligent energy management platform.’ Without any need for smart meters, the system will connect thermostats and water heaters to a ZigBee (and someday, Wi-Fi) gateway that rides home broadband to the cloud, and connects back to homeowners’ smartphones and PCs to monitor and manage energy use, all in close to real time.”
David Drew, business development director at Emerson Climate Technologies was quoted as saying, “The Habersham deployment uses Jetlun’s panel meter, appliance module, and intelligent energy management and analytics platform to connect all those devices to the cloud.”
So maybe our benevolent dictator isn’t doing all of this just to give the Oprah-addicts a diversion from their distraction of choice or the opportunity to call 911 to report a drive-by that took place earlier in the evening.
Perhaps they are more interested in monitoring and controlling every aspect of our lives and somebody has to pay for the broadband infrastructure to make all of that possible. Once again that somebody is, ironically, those who are the victims of their abuse of power.
The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal on June 18.
Rick Wells is a conservative writer who recognizes that our nation, our Constitution and our traditions are under a full scale assault from multiple threats. Please “Like” him on Facebook, “Follow” him on Twitter or visit www.rickwells.us. If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it. And if you have the time, check out for more posts here.
Read more at http://universalfreepress.com/big-brother-fcc-plans-new-internet-tax-expansion-to-control-what-happens-inside-our-homes/
No comments:
Post a Comment