Internet access is not a “civil right”

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Internet access is not a “civil right”
By Michelle Malkin • December 22, 2010 10:00 AM

Meet the new Internet traffic cops

Internet access is not a “civil right”
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

When bureaucrats talk about increasing your “access” to X, Y, or Z, what they’re really talking about is increasing their control over your lives exponentially. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly-approved government plan to “increase” Internet “access.” Call it Webcare.

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure “net neutrality” by turning unaccountable Democrat appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices, and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The “neutrality” is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC’s scheme is widely opposed by Congress – and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.

Sound familiar?

The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance – and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement. In fact, it was a pretext for creating a gargantuan federal bureaucracy with the power to tax, redistribute, and regulate
the private health insurance market to death – and replace it with a centrally-planned government system overseen by politically-driven code enforcers dictating everything from annual coverage limits, to administrative expenditures, to the make-up of the medical workforce. The costly, onerous, and selectively-applied law has resulted in less access, not more.

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Calling them “nappy-headed” is a rather questionable way of boosting their pride, but never mind that.

Face it: A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. Once again, Democrats are using children as human shields who provide useful cover for not-so-noble political goals.

The “net neutrality” mob – funded by billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and non-profits — has openly advertised its radical, speech-squelching agenda to crusade for “media justice.” Social justice is the redistribution of wealth and economic “rights.” Media justice is the redistribution of speech and First Amendment rights. The meetings of the universal broadband set are littered with Marxist-tinged rants about “disenfranchisement” and “empowerment.” They’ve targeted conservative opponents on talk radio, cable TV, and on the web as purveyors of “hate” who need to be managed or censored. Democrat FCC panelists’ have dutifully echoed their concerns about concentration of corporate media power. As the Ford Foundation-funded Media Justice Fund, which lobbied for universal broadband, put it: This is a movement “grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.”

For progressives who cloak their ambitions in the mantle of “fairness,” it’s all about control. It’s always about control.

con·ser·va·tism noun \kən-ˈsər-və-ˌti-zəm\

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Definition of CONSERVATISM
1
capitalized a : the principles and policies of a Conservative party b : the Conservative party
2
a : disposition in politics to preserve what is established b : a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change; specifically : such a philosophy calling for lower taxes, limited government regulation of business and investing, a strong national defense, and individual financial responsibility for personal needs (as retirement income or health-care coverage)
3
: the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change
See conservatism defined for English-language learners »
Examples of CONSERVATISM

1.

First Known Use of CONSERVATISM 1832

While Attacking Omnibus For Earmarks, McConnell And Senate GOP Asked For Billions For Themselves

Republican lawmakers and candidates have spent the past year railing against congressional earmarks as the embodiment of everything wrong with “business as usual in Washington.” And under heavy pressure from the tea party movement, they approved earmark bans for GOP members in the House and Senate last month.

Yesterday, the Senate unveiled an omnibus appropriations bill to fund the government. Senate Republicans immediately attacked the bill en masse for containing billions in earmarks, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) calling the spending provisions “completely and totally inappropriate” and saying he is “actively working to defeat” the bill. “This nearly 2,000-page omnibus filled with thousands of earmarks,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said, shows that “President Obama and Democrats have apparently learned nothing from this November’s election.”

Yet, the same may be said about congressional Republicans, who themselves requested over $2 billion in the earmarks attached the omnibus, including millions from McConnell himself:

Earlier this year, McConnell asked for $4 million for marijuana eradication efforts by the Kentucky National Guard; $1 million for construction of the Kentucky Blood Center Building; and $650,000 for Advanced Genetic Technologies, a DNA research center at the University of Kentucky.

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “has a $379,000 earmark to study port dredging in Charleston, something he considers key to economic development.” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) championed an earmark that would prevent the state of Texas from converting existing interstate highway lanes into toll roads. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) requested over $16 million in defense-related earmarks.

Appearing on Fox News this morning, Cornyn attacked the omnibus bill for containing earmarks, but host Bill Hemmer confronted Cornyn with his own $16 million request. At first, the senator fumbled and tried to change the subject, but after being pressed, Cornyn defended the merits of his earmarks but not the process, before finally trying to exculpate himself by saying he requested the money “earlier on in the year”:

HEMMER: You yourself has asked for earmarks too. … Can you defend that senator?

CORNYN: Well, I believe I can. But I’m not going to. Because I’m going to vote against this bill. … I think we need an earmark moratorium, which I voted for two years, till we fix this broken system, because it’s become a symbol of wasteful Washington spending.

HEMMER: I get it, but I’m confused then, then why is there $16 million in requests from you? Is that not true?

CORNYN: Earlier on in the year, I did request earmarks that I think are individually defensible. And if we had a debate on the floor, I think I could show how they help our men and women in uniform fight two different wars.

Of course, Cornyn is right to argue that many earmarks have merit and provide necessary funds for important projects in lawmakers’ districts. For this reason, Democrats and a handful of dissenting Republicans rebuffed efforts to impose a binding earmark ban in the Senate last month. Moreover, as retiring Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) said, “We’re fooling the American people when we tell them the problem [with the deficit] is earmarks.”

But if Cornyn and his colleagues are going to pander to the tea party movement and demonize earmarks, they should at least practice what they preach. But so far, they have not. Just three days after the Senate GOP voted to enact their earmark ban, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), the number two Senate Republican, “got himself a whopping $200 million” earmark for his state. Meanwhile, the group of House Republicans most closely aligned with the tea party, those in the Tea Party Caucus, have taken over $1 billion in earmarks over the past year.

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