The world’s richest man has continued his campaign against Kyiv, this time by using a fake picture of President Zelensky to mock Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The world’s richest man has continued his campaign against Kyiv, this time by using a fake picture of President Zelensky to mock Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
I actually disagree. Despite four years and their best efforts, they couldn’t even dismantle the USPS or ACA or the IRS. I’m actually a bit bullish on our government agencies. Are they under attack? Yes. How can we protect them? More democracy. If we have a healthy democracy, then we have healthy institutions. If we don’t have a healthy democracy, well, we have way bigger problems than whether internet is a government entity or not, because in a fascist state everything is essentially run by an oligarch anyways.
Democracy actually isn’t favorable to Wall Street. It favors labor far too much, and then the pesky issue of taxes. Corporate conglomeration actually wants oligarchy, not democracy. It’s far better for them to have absolute and total control to extort labor and consumers to drive wealth to a select few. Wall Street doesn’t care about democracy, it cares about funneling money to a small amount of people. They can do it in a democracy, but to say that they couldn’t also do it in an oligarchy they participate in is I think opposite what would actually happen.
I loosely agree with that in principle, but modern Republicans like the House Freedom Caucus are not the kinds of oligarchs Wall Street would want. They’re motivated by raw resentment, anger, and a desire to hurt their perceived enemies, not profit. Wall Street doesn’t care at all about “wokeness”; if that’s what customers want, they’ll gladly provide it, whereas you’re increasingly seeing Republicans attack large corporations for not matching their own specific narrow ideology (see, the DeSantis v. Disney fight).
My point isn’t that Wall Street is good - only that they’re reliable and predictable. In a perfect world, I’d absolutely want to see a strong national ISP akin to the USPS that’s completely isolated from political bullshit. In the current political climate though, I’m very concerned for the ability of our institutions to actually remain isolated from political pressures, which could be extremely strong given the power at stake. Pending SCOTUS cases have the potential to rip open a giant hole in the administrative state’s ability to maintain some level of independence from the executive, for instance.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re really wrong, and I completely understand your position. I just don’t think I’m quite as optimistic, or perhaps alternatively, I’m a bit more paranoid.
I appreciate the discussion!
I would say I’m actually just as paranoid. I just trust a government body in a democracy more than I trust a private for profit company in a democracy. If we don’t have a functioning democracy, then I don’t think it matters if it’s a private corporation or a government entity, because either way the government will enforce it’s whims on the utility (eg, surveillance and censoring).
So my argument is, while we still have a democracy we should expand public utilities. They’re not perfect, but I think socially more responsible, more auditable, than private companies who are not motivated by even a loose public good mandate. So given the choice between municipalizing or federalizing internet utilities and a private company, I’ll choose a public good utility every single time. I don’t worry about the USPS reading my mail as a standard of operation, but I know for a fact that a private company would try everything it could to open up that mail and take a peak (eg, you have to opt out of “prioritized mail screening” or something, and then you’d get degraded service). I know this, because private ISPs already try to packet sniff everything you do online and throttle select services.
So I guess my argument is, fear of losing democracy isn’t a good reason to oppose public utilities and social programs, because the realized harm of oligarchic fascism will be the same regardless if it’s a private or public entity (in fact, ironically, fascists will make it a “public entity” and then give its assets and control to whoever the oligarch for that “utility” will be). So since while we have a democracy, public utilities serviced by governments are better, and the results are the same regardless under fascism, we should instead try to bolster public utilities all the more while we can.
To the original suggestion in this thread, taking over a utility like space provided internet, which uses the public owned goods of spectrum and orbit paths, is actually a better benefit to consumers in this case, and honestly one we should support. What’s the alternative? Letting a fascist man baby run it how he sees fit? We already have that. If it’s a government service and our government is taken over by fascists, we’d still have that. But while we have a democracy, let us use it.