Net Neutrality is the principle that makes the internet a level playing field concerning users' worldwide access to information. To abandon it puts all that power in the hands of internet providers, mostly telecommunications corporations like AT&T and Comcast. Here's a few articles about the FCC's efforts this week to destroy net neutrality and widen the digital divide.
Break the Internet- Common Dreams
FCC's Democratic Commisioners- The Verge
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Donald Trump is a corrupt businessman who poses a real threat to the security of our nation. His history of not paying the people who work for him, and suing people, businesses, and municipalities that do business with him, is well known. How long will it be before he’s suing private citizens for dissent? His move to embed his children into the government with full security clearance displays his nepotism. Filling his cabinet with his campaign donors is textbook crony capitalism and shouldn’t surprise anyone. He bragged about having paid off the same politicians he ran against in order to discredit them, while claiming that he himself was not corrupt, just smart.
Richard Painter, a Republican, and former ethics czar for President Bush, has made this case most forcefully. Trump cannot keep assets that create an ongoing risk of influence peddling by foreign governments or foreign nationals. He especially should not be liable in debt to foreign banks or governments—as his companies reportedly are to Deutsche Bank for more than $300 million. We need a president who is independent of personal interests that might affect his presidential judgment—for the same reasons Trump was right early in the campaign to complain that super PACs compromised the independence of his opponents. Trump’s refusal to comply with the Constitution’s restrictions is plainly reason enough to reject him.
I don’t believe we should or can rely on moral arguments to shape our politics. Government should be about what works in material terms. And yet there is a moral call to vote against Trump. It is not partisan, or ideological, it is simply intelligent.
Mr. Trump has been found corrupt and unaccountable throughout his entire career. 65,444,673 popular votes (over 2.5 million more than Trump) should prove Hillary Clinton a qualified alternative, but the partisan stalemate of the past decade is sure proof that won’t happen.
Sadly, the threat to our country should compel us to negotiate with republicans to substitute another member of their party to the presidency. If you are an elector, please read about the Hamilton Electors, the reasons they reject Trump, and the mechanisms they seek to invoke. If you are an elected official, please let these people know that they will be supported for voting as the Constitution intended. Please put the people of the United States before your parties.
I’ve voted third party every election since 2000 when I was 18. I don’t believe the Democratic Party will even veer left unless there’s a vocal and active progressive movement pushing them that way. It’s not idealism, it’s pragmatism.
That said, I’ve spent the last 8 days viscerally regretting not voting for Clinton and spending the last 18 months petitioning others. I regret avoiding the conversations with my family for 18 months and allowing myself to assume enough people would recognize the danger in Trump. I don’t think voting for Clinton would have changed the election (she won the popular vote handily), but it would have mitigated this nausea in my gut, steaming up into my throat. I would know that I did every conceivable thing to try and prevent—this.
This is not a republican presidency.
This is not a republican revolution.
This is not a Tea Party insurgency.
This isn’t an efficient business-like approach.
This is high stupidity and old-fashioned fascism. New millennium white supremacy courtesy of American entitlement. And no one knows how or why it happened. Least of all the people who are telling us how and why it happened.
Because America is racist.
Because of lost jobs and the forgotten rust belt.
Because of the free market and globalism.
Political apathy.
Third party spoilers.
The craven media’s disproportionate coverage.
Russia.
Satan.
I am already sick of hearing everyone’s explanation of why the Democrats couldn’t pull it off. We did this. All of us. And we don’t have time to waste hunting for scapegoats. That’s Bannon’s job; to provide us with the “long sought after” evidence of political corruption so that we’ll rationalize negotiating with white supremacists who want to throw out the establishment so that they can have the privilege of fleecing us. They know Americans are easily placated.
We’re going to hear it all and they’ll make it sound sophisticated and inevitable but there is nothing sophisticated or inevitable about fascism.
I’ll never advocate violence. I’ll never advocate secession. But I understand people who do. We should all be afraid. And we should not normalize this. People are already talking about the next four years. I’m worried about the first hundred days. I’ll work with Democrats to resist this, but I have no faith they’ll do that unless they’re forced. It’s down to citizens taking the time and the risk to push back every day.
We are not dealing with someone who cares about changing the government, but eviscerating it. That may only take months considering the numbers in the senate and congress. It only takes a second to make a mess the rest of us will be cleaning up for decades. Trump has fed the hate, harassment, racism, and violence of his followers with a wink and a nod since day one.
That is how he was elected. On abject sex appeal. By being a human trainwreck. His win shocked the people who voted for him were more than those who didn’t. They probably don’t regret it, but they weren’t thinking about what would happen if he was president. Now we all get to find out and pass the charge on to the black, brown, and poor. To the kids with no future.
After, whoever’s left will have the privilege of regret.