••• The International Writers Magazine: Reality Check USA
Reflections as President Trump readies to sign $1.5 Trillion Tax 'Reform' into law

Welcome Back to Corporate Land • James Campion Net Neutrality, Tax Rates and Deregulation A-Go-Go

It is an interesting plan devised by a man who has bankrupted more businesses than anyone in the history of modern American entrepreneurship, and backed by dinosaurs from the Industrial Revolution run under the guise of some Eisenhower-era dream of the old, America First, anti-global economic structure that has zero chance of working in the current 21st century landscape.
But okay.

The main goal of this Republican-controlled federal government has been to deregulate everything in sight, cede the entire ecological, moral and structural game to not the private sector, but the corporate-level powerbrokers. The idea is to make things so easy for multi-billion dollar businesses they will rush back to this country and provide jobs. This, as stated many times in this space, has never worked in a long-term growth of the economy. I am not going to bore everyone with details, but it can be verified by simply doing the research and crunching the numbers. I invite you to do it.

Having said that, it is important to point out that my criticism of this does not mean I support the complete government-controlled regulation-happy opposite argument. There is free market and then there is fixing the game for corporations. The latter is what we discuss here today.

So far Republicans have done next to nothing in the way of legislation. There is no administration that I can find, at least in the 20th century, that has gone a calendar year having done nothing with or without control of the entire government. Aside from an alarming spate of executive orders, which have purportedly moved the unemployment rate from 4.8 to 4.5 since Donald Trump has taken office, and the continued spike in the stock market, which today, as for the past eight years under the previous administration, means less than it did a half-century ago, because the main percentage of trading is done by the famed one-percent of the citizenry.

It is important to note that I write “purportedly” on these figures, because normally unless a major law is enacted, like say the 2001 Bush tax cuts or the 2009 Obama stimulus package – both passed by single-party control in the first year of those presidents – the economic indicators in the first year of any administration is the result of the previous one’s agenda. This is especially prevalent among two-term presidents, as George H. W. Bush found out in his first term after eight years of Reagonomics.

Either way you stand on this issue, it is easy to see that Trump and the Republicans mean to hand over all control of the American economy to the most powerful corporations, first and foremost through the language in the current tax bill before congress, which has a 29 percent approval of the American electorate. Not that polling or even popularity means anything. It is only illuminating when viewed through the lens of those polled that voted for the Donald Trump that ran as a populist, forgotten-man candidate. Despite being crushed in the popular vote, the president carried the Rust Belt to electoral college victory due to this weak Huey Long charade, which has now emerged as the predictable land-baron, big business stooge he truly is and has always been. The whole “con job” thing Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio bitched about in the primaries is coming home to roost.

But again, if honey deals to the one-percent and corporations in the current language of the proposed tax bill, as covered in this space a few weeks ago, was not enough of a sign that Citizen Trump, The Voice of Johnny Lunch Pale, was a ruse, then the repeal of Net Neutrality by the always upstanding FCC (someone should have sacked this nonsense in the 1970s, but that is a column I have written too many times to fathom, so let’s leave it at that) seals it.

This repeal is the government’s gift to gargantuan service providers to decide the economic structure of the Internet, where, the entire country and really the world lives and breathes. Whether they pledge to or not, your service provider can now gauge consumers, block content they do not have complete or part ownership of, and dismantle any even playing field for start-ups, free-lance users or anyone not a massive, faceless conglomerate.
The chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai says this will free the internet for investment and innovation, as if this is a new thing. Never happened before. There was no 1990s boom, which was the last strong economic period. Everything that has transformed the brick-and-mortar economy into the cyber one never happened, according to Pai, who was an attorney for (ha!) Verizon and has railed against Net Neutrality from the second he took this unelected office in 2012.

No matter where you stand on your economic theories and principles, how exactly is Net Neutrality bad, unless you have the strings of providing access to the Internet.

It reads: “Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. For instance, under these principles, Internet service providers are unable to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.”

You want to pay more money for what you already can do now and/or have your service provider decide what you can and can’t see, to allow only those with more money than you to have better, more complete access to the Internet? Then this is a fantastic ruling.

Again, no matter where you stand on this, we are in a new era of a complete corporate take-over of the American economic landscape. This was mostly true under every previous administration dating back to the earliest days of the American Century, but now it is unashamedly absolute. For the results of this, immediate and long-reaching, we will see whom it benefits.

But make no mistake, we are back in Corporate Land.

© James Campion Dec 15th 2017
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author 

James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, "Midnight For Cinderella" and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.

And coming in June, 2018; “Accidently Like a Martyr, The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon”

And a last word on 'Judge' Roy Moore:

I think they're afraid I'm going to take Alabama values to Washington and I can't wait.
- Republican Senate Candidate Roy Moore Tweet, 12/5/17

You betcha.
Aside from Mississippi, which is one of the great jokes in the history of the human experiment known as the United States of America, Alabama’s abominable track record of civil rights abuses and cultural dumbness, usually backed by some hayseed reading of the Bible, is unprecedented. If you have half a brain you are embarrassed by it and most of the American south, which was allowed to rise from its ignominious beating after the Civil War only to predictably send horrid goons like Judge Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate.

Assuming the nine or ten or twelve (I’ve lost count) non-coordinated accusations of at least sexual misconduct and worse rape of underage girls for years – so bad he was banned from a mall – is a fabricated Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, the fact that a man twice removed from the bench for criminal behavior, who states proudly that no Muslim should be allowed to serve as a civil servant and that homosexuals should be incarcerated, is considered a fair Republican candidate for one of only 100 jobs in the highest levels of our federal government is all you need to know about Alabama.

When Richard Nixon began his Southern Strategy in 1968, peeling off the racist vote from the Dixie-crats, who abandoned the party that fought vehemently against emancipation in the 19th century to pass the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, the fate of the GOP was forever linked with lunacy. And this past week it has been sealed. The RNC, after first abandoning the criminally defiant Moore, is back on board, as is those who tried to save face, like the bottom-feeding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who initially asked for Moore to quit the race only to tell a national TV audience to “let the citizens of Alabama decide.”

(Luckily the 'forgotten voters' came out in force for democracy and the other guy won.) Ed

Alabama is easily suckered by slack-jawed, religious morons who like to wave guns around to act like macho (latently gay) cowboys (spectacularly queer) while telling everyone that anyone above the Mason Dixon line is a godless sexually promiscuous Communist baby-killing dope-heads.

And although most of us are, the real problem is not that there are imbeciles who vote in Alabama, it is that one of only two of our nation’s major parties support and benefit from this weird shit, while telling us who to have sex with, what women can do with their bodies, who should get tax relief, and what constitutes an “American”.
Now, to be fair, the overwhelming support of Moore from our game show president, who himself has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by a dozen women and was caught on tape bragging about doing it for fun, is understandable. Donald Trump, I get. He’s a serial sex fiend and an unrepentant deviant and America elected him president, and really, how can he actually believe abused women accusing another sexual predator is sane behavior? Trump backing this shit-stain makes perfect sense.

Hell, some of my heroes liked them young; Charlie Chaplin, J.D. Salinger, Chuck Berry, Woody Allen. It’s not my thing, but it’s Roy Moore’s thing, and aside from the rape allegations, if he gets his “virgin/whore” kicks trolling young girls in malls and signing their high school yearbooks after taking moonlit strolls and stealing kisses, it’s his thing, and I have no comment, but you know who always seems to have a comment on people’s sexual activates and is quick to judge the morals of every breathing human? Roy Moore.

But, okay, so Moore is a lying hypocrite. There are plenty of them in congress and certainly Alabama. But while in the last few months in Hollywood (producer, Harvey Weinstein, actor, Kevin Spacey), television (NBC and ABC morning show hosts, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose) and even politics (Minnesota Senator Al Franken) when similar cases were revealed, the accused were either ostracized, fired or forced to quit. Roy Moore still wants to go to the U.S. Senate - even though he lost the election to the Democrat Doug Jones by a healthy 1.5%. He won't concede. Evangelists, like any salesmen, are opportunists. And like any sale, their whole phony god thing is mere exploitation, and worse yet, politically motivated. And next to child molestation, which could also be on Moore’s resume, political motivation is as low as it gets.

But more sympathetic, I could not be. I get that your time is nearly over, and this is your act of desperation, your last breath, the death rattle to all your Moral Majority crap that has been discredited and rightly ignored as we move the species into the twenty-first century without you.

My hope, nay, my prayer, if you will, is that soon, when you’re all rotting in your graves, this great, damaged nation, and humanity as a whole, will share chuckle that we ever considered anything you stood for real and binding.
© JC - December 22nd 2017
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

The Tax Reform Shuffle
James Campion 12/02/17
...according to the aforementioned Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office, people making $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion cut.
Wha…? Yeah…it ain’t good

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