Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is convening a hearing on the pending Verizon purchase of broadcast spectrum from a cable company consortium. The Committee has called but six witnesses for the hearing. And two of them are radical Leftists – Joel Kelsey and Tim Wu. The organization they have in common is Free Press – the most bizarre of all the Media Marxist joints.
Media Marxists are the media “reform” Leftist subset dedicated to eradicating all private media, Internet and communications ownership.
Leaving you with the government as your sole source of news, Internet and communications.
Not at all radical.
And Free Press is so bizarre, the other bizarre Media Marxists now rarely associate with them. In the recent Leftist coalition to block the AT&T-T-Mobile merger, Free Press was notoriously absent.
So why on Earth are Senate Democrats asking both a current and a former Free Press-er to testify before their Judiciary Committee?
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The current Free Press-er is Policy Advisor Joel Kelsey. But he’s the small fish.
The big fish is former Free Press-er Timothy Wu.
Who is now an Obama Administration Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Senior Advisor to the Office of Policy Planning. He’s also a Columbia Law School professor – shocker, I know, a Marxist college professor.
Before that, Wu was Chair of Free Press’s Board.
But Wu is bigger than all of even that.
…Wu is credited with having coined the term “Net Neutrality.”
That would be this Network Neutrality – the Soros, Google and other Leftist funded “solution” to a non-existent problem.
Net Neutrality is in reality the backdoor green light for the government to regulate every website on the planet.
Think we’re exaggerating?
Let’s listen to another former Free Press-er, its co-founder, Robert McChesney.
McChesney is an avowed Marxist and (shocker) a professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Here’s what McChesney says is the purpose of Net Neutrality:
At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.
Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles -August 9, 2009
In other words, have the government commandeer control of (nationalize) the multi-trillion dollar Internet network.
Leaving you with the government as your sole source of Internet news, Web access and communications.
Not at all radical.
And here is but a tiny sampling of some other not-at-all-radical things McChesneyhas written:
“There is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”
A New New Deal under Obama?
December 21, 2008
“Any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.”
The U.S. Media Reform Movement
September 15, 2008
“Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism. It is impossible to conceive of a better world with a media system that remains under the thumb of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, under the thumb of the owning class.”
Journalism, Democracy, … and Class Struggle
November 2000 issue of Monthly Review
Not at all radical.
All of this from media “reform” Free Press’s co-founder.
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So again we ask:
Why on Earth are Senate Democrats asking two people so intimately associated with the ultra-radical, uber-Leftist, anti-free market Free Press to testify before their Judiciary Committee?
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