Connect with us

Black Community Opinions

Local Voices: Raped Internet & Taxes $$ Grab

Last week America’s Internet was gang raped by the United States’ Federal Communications Commission. Americans experienced a double whammy with the advent of the co-spined Republican TAX cuts plan, in which 62 percent of the breaks clearly only enrich only the rich.

Gazing back on the Internet debacle, we, the people need only look at the Washington, D.C. beltway speed lanes to see an example of our Internet’s future connection costs. As consumers, we will be put into the slow lane while the wealthy drive by at warp speed, using their Internet E-Z passes that only they can afford. The cost to connect, send and receive ALL data will cost us ALL much more.

For those of us who only have one provider (for example, Charter in Suffolk), you know your costs are going up and your speed is going down. Paying more for less seems to be the American corporate business model for 2017 and the future.

Republicans took Obama’s best legislation of the transparent justice-based Internet: i.e., one person, one vote, one connection, and made it ALL new profit centers of thinly veiled derivative half-truths and fork-tongued billing nightmarish complexities that are owned and operated by your phone and cable (whacked service) providers.

Instead of keeping the Internet the potential example of justice’s light and freedom’s optimism, the FCC just gave away the people’s digital farm. We, the people, will now ALL see more ads, for longer time periods. We, the people, will now have to pay more to slog through the purposely bottle-necked advertising quagmires, just as Big Business wants. We, the people, will no longer have the same opportunities to get our message, product and services or out to the digital universe.

The Internet was not created to have choke points. It was built to share information equally. The FCC has just given away our last great frontier of hope. We, the people, and the internet will never be the same; we, the people, are now prisoners, held hostage monthly to the data police who own the grid outside our homes. The poor get poorer while the wealthy benefit from the 3-2 party line FCC vote.

The Republican Tax Plan is the result of lobbyists spending $3.15 billion in 2016 – roughly $5.6 million per member of the House of Representatives. They out-spent $34 – for every single dollar that was spent supporting unions, according to Robert Riech, former Secretary of Labor. This tax heist attempts to play the “okey doke,” (hokie poke) with the American citizenry. By pretending that average Americans getting a temporary (eight-year) $500-$1,000 dollars more a year, makes it worth the rich driving a gold plated stake through the hearts of the middle class, severely wounding and nearly killing the American dream.

(Check out the movie, “Requiem for the American Dream,” now on Netflix, should you have any doubt.)

So for 4K-8K over the next eight years, each American can watch (over delayed slow band) as corporations live the high life in the lap of luxury. Big Businesses will pay little or no taxes, while not (trickle down) investing in America, American jobs, or her people. They will however, pocket the difference while running up a $1.5 trillion dollar debt to be added to the existing national debt.

Advertisement

Republicans say that estimated projections of 2.9 percent annual growth are conservative. BOSS HOG WASH! O’yeah, you can now hand off all that accumulated wealth to your kids when you die, tax free. (Just what we need- the rich locked in their real ivory towers in perpetuity, with 90 percent of our country’s wealth, while we, the 90 percent of the people, fight for scraps of 10 percent of the leftovers, in the streets and sewers below. The Republicans’ plan also calls for the opening up of Alaska to drilling and killing off of the individual Obamacare mandate.

Why does a company like General Electric need subsidies when they already make billions and pay no taxes? Why do they need a tax cut from 35 percent to 21 percent? G.E. is in off-shore, tax-free generating equity business. They are not coming back, no matter how low we cut their taxes. Why make the business cuts permanent and the people’s cuts temporary? The Supreme Court’s (also conservatively stacked) decision for corporations’ unlimited spending in elections has given corporations a blank check and the deed to the nation. Corporations now buy and fund candidates and election outcomes. The devastating results reveal that corporations have more rights, than we, the people.

My Internet is slowing down even as we speak. The 2018 mid-terms and 2020 elections will be America’s days of reckoning. The battle preparations now, before we, the people, are taxed for sunlight and air we breathe.

Sean C. Bowers is a local progressive youth development coach, author and poet, who has written for the New Journal and Guide for eighteen years. His recent book of over 120 NJ&G articles detailing the issues is available via e-mail at V1ZUAL1ZE@aol.com and he does make large-scale solutions presentations upon request.

Please follow and like us:
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Hide picture