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House Democrats Tell Ajit Pai: Stop Screwing Over the Public (arstechnica.com)
slack_justyb shares a report from Ars Technica: The House Commerce Committee is "reassuming its traditional role of oversight to ensure the agency is acting in the best interest of the public and consistent with its legislative authority," Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) said in an announcement yesterday. Pallone, Jr. and Doyle wrote a letter to Pai, saying that he has made the FCC too secretive and has repeatedly advanced the interests of corporations over consumers. They wrote: "Not only have you have failed on numerous occasions to provide Democratic members of this committee with responses to their inquiries, you have also repeatedly denied or delayed responding to legitimate information requests from the public about agency operations. These actions have denied the public of a full and fair understanding of how the FCC under your leadership has arrived at public policy decisions that impact Americans every day in communities across the country. Under your leadership, the FCC has failed repeatedly to act in the public interest and placed the interest of corporations over consumers. The FCC should be working to advance the goals of public safety, consumer protection, affordable access, and connectivity across the United States. To that end, it is incumbent upon the Committee's leadership and its members to oversee the activities of the FCC."
On Thursday this week, the Communications Subcommittee will hold a hearing about the impact of Pai's net neutrality repeal on consumers, small businesses, and free speech. Witnesses who have been invited to testify at the hearing include former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, cable industry chief lobbyist Michael Powell (who is also a former FCC chairman), and representatives of Mozilla, Free Press, and Eastern Oregon Telecom.
On Thursday this week, the Communications Subcommittee will hold a hearing about the impact of Pai's net neutrality repeal on consumers, small businesses, and free speech. Witnesses who have been invited to testify at the hearing include former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, cable industry chief lobbyist Michael Powell (who is also a former FCC chairman), and representatives of Mozilla, Free Press, and Eastern Oregon Telecom.
Wait, if that is your "traditional role", where have you been? On vacation? Too busy?
about time but what did you expect when you put a former verizon executive in charge.
att and verizon shold be broken up and stay broken up.
Shilling? I have never read a positive post or comment regarding Ajit Pai on slashdot. He is universally hated by anyone who is aware of his professional existence.
Will Slashdot ever again bother to pretend to be impartial journalists?
Dude, I've been here 20 years, this place has never been impartial. Always a strong left-lean with healthy doses of unixlove, windowshate and appledisdain.
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up.. and I fully suspect they are paid trolls. Whoever is doing the paying... get a refund, we see right through you.
You must come from some imaginary site.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up.
+1 for use of the word "boors."
Actually, I'm glad the politicians are through with me after I vote. I'd hate to see that level of idiotic political advertising year round.
That is all.
Once he's finally booted out of the FCC he's got several cushy jobs with lots more $$$ at any of the several companies he's helped. The consumer once again is fucked, over and over and over, while the fucker is well compensated.
I felt the same way. I've been coming here for over a 12+ years and it sure seems that right wing opinions have crept up in the past several years.
sure seems that right wing opinions have crept up in the past several years.
I don't have a problem with civilized opinions from any side. What gets tiresome is what this very thread is full of, should you read it at -1 (which I do, because I'm a sucker for punishment I guess)
It's the incessant, schoolyard name-calling and stick-hurling that makes me want to line them up against the wall and give them a taste of true jack-booted, foot-stomping authoritarian firing-squad.
Seriously. If all that AC drivel name calling truly reflects America today.. we're so fucked it ain't even funny. It's not even smh funny... it's just... ugh. No intelligence. Just parroting and namecalling.
But y'know? I used to think the same of forums. This place here, this is the last that I visit. I gave up on all others. Pointless exercise.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
been more like 10 years that the right wingers came here to 'balance' (cough) things out a bit.
a few posters are real, but most are turfers and bots. very annoying.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Most liberals and conservatives are not assholes. The new problem is that the left and right are being mislabeled as liberal/conservative. All of these terms have been turned on their heads.
The origin of the word Liberal is from Liberty... and today's liberals are anti-liberty to the core. Suppression of free speech, public vilification to ruin people, anti-gun rights, pro-heavy regulation... none of which sounds like liberty.
The origin of the word Conservative is "generally" to preserve what is currently already present and to not change that. Desire to change government institutions, shrink government, repeal laws, and facilitate a police states... none of which sounds like conservatism.
That said... Liberals and Conservatives can get along... if you find out that you cannot get along... then it is more likely that you belong to either the extreme right or extreme left... and there is low chance that being extreme is healthy for either you or your enemies!
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up.
I think it goes back further than that. My sense is that it crept up steadily post-9/11, but spiked after Barack Obama was first elected. The target shifted from him to Hillary Clinton (his presumptive successor) over the next 8 years, with "Benghazi", "but her e-mails", and "lock her up" calls from the right-wing chorus. And it spiked yet again during the lead-up to the 2016 POTUS election, I suspect with help from Russian troll-farms.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Really? Snopes? That's your rebuttal?
Well, it's quicker than citing every single history book written on the subject.
Oh, and if you actually bother reading the Snopes article, they all but admit that yes, the Nazis were left-wing socialists
You really need to work on your literacy. The only parts that make this claim are the ones being debunked, as well as the things the NAZIs promised early in the party's history, but failed to deliver once they were actually in power. Who'd have thunk you couldn't trust NAZIs to deliver on campaign promises. (That last sentence is sarcasm BTW. Just making sure to label it since you're having trouble understanding simple English).
But since it's not written in your native language, I suppose we should give you some leeway in your inability to understand it.
It's one of the reasons why they're no longer considered a trusted fact checker by Facebook.
You got the direction backwards there. They left Facebook, not the other way around.
Trump didn't even get the majority of votes cast, much less have a majority of the people vote for him.
He squeaked by because of quirks in the electoral system.
90% marginal tax rates?
You mean like the 1950s?
Remind me again....that was a massive economic wasteland for the US, right? It must have been from that tax rate. Why, if something else happened it might indicate a particular school of economics isn't actually based in reality.....
Legalized post-birth abortion?
Nah, that's you folks and your gun fetish. So many dead, but it'll be worth it when you get to re-enact Red Dawn. Any day now. Any day. Real soon now....
Geez, you'd think the Democrats would be forced to call their opponents "Hitler!" and "Nazis", those ideas are so fucking lame.
You need to catch up on your talking points. You're supposed to pretend the NAZIs were left-wing. Remembering that they were a right-wing party is double plus ungood.
I'm not sure they're pretending. I've met many in person, including a few fairly intelligent and well educated I really thought would know better. I think a lot of them really are that gullible and/or stupid. Or at least angry and desperate enough to believe anyone who says they'll make things better. Tell them the government is corrupt (which I think we all know), and that you're going to do something about it, you get a lot of people's attention. Then start feeding them increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories, and giving them permission to be ever-larger assholes to... basically anyone whoisn't 100% on board with your agenda... some get turned off, but the ones that stick around, they get more committed to the cause than ever, and increasing lose connection with reality. I've met some who, when confronted with video of Trump's more obviously heinous or stupid statements or actions, simply dismiss them as fakes. And once someone is convinced that the propaganda office is the only source of real news, I really don't know how you can possibly shake their faith.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We OVERWHELMINGLY voted for the Republicans
2% is not OVERWHELMINGLY.
who gained a LOT of seats in the senate
Pre-election polls had you gaining 6 seats. You gained 4. And those 4 were quite close instead of the forecasted blow-out. The Democrats were defending twice as many seats, and many in "red" states, so we lost some. But good news! That flips in 2020, and Republicans will be defending far more seats, many in "blue" states.
Also, you seem to have forgotten that the House had the largest swing since Watergate. How'd that happen if the public OVERWHELMINGLY voted for Republicans?
Almost like it wasn't actually a Republican wave election.....
just refuse to vote for politicians who accept corporate PAC money. Look, right here's a wing of the Democratic party that does just that. They're looking to primary the corporate, Clintonion Democrats next election too.
I'm open to hearing a GOP equivalent but, well, I don't know any. Maybe folks like that jump ship to the libertarian party, IDK. Doesn't matter.
Refuse to vote for anyone who takes corporate PAC money. And vote in your primary. Your vote has orders of magnitude more power in a primary. Politicians don't fear being reelected. They _do_ fear being primaried. Show up and give'em something to be scared of again.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Honestly I think it's high time we put anonymous coward to rest. The ideal behind it is irrelevant. I can't remember a single time AC was used for legitimate whistle blowing, it's just a plaything for trolls and assholes
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Are you seriously attempting to argue that telecommunications does not cross state lines?
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up
No way. They've always* been here. They've just been emboldened by cheeto mussolini, and made louder. I've been arguing with them all along.
* At least since high five digit days, when I started reading.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It does not matter if opinions are "right" or "left".
It only matters if they are stupid or not. Or scientific wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Americans are the same way now. Politics is about name calling these days, pure and simple. No politician is presenting any ideas on what is a good way to govern, instead they only speak in order to bash the opposing but highly similar party.
I didn't leave the left. It left me.
I barely comment here now and I've been here with one username or another since almost the beginning.
I only occasionally bother reading the comments because most threads are so heavily loaded with right wing (hopefully) trolls that I feel like I'm reading Fox News.
The stories are still pretty good, but the conversation is shit.
Combine that with the lack of voting ability and there's really nothing left here to draw you into the comments section.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
In the 50's you were able to deduct all kinds of things.
Having just completed my Schedule A, I can assure you that you can still deduct all kinds of things.
Almost nobody EVER paid those rates.
That is always true of the top marginal rate.
Repealed two-earner deduction
Married filing separately
long-term capital gains exclusion
Instead, we now have a different rate.
state and local sales tax deduction
Was repealed last year.
income averaging
Instead, you can carry expenses forward via an easy-to-create shell company.
income averaging
Very few extremely rich people made wildly different incomes year-to-year.
and exclusion of unemployment benefits
.....you really think the top 10% of the income distribution was collecting unemployment? And that it was a significant part of their income?
Limited IRA eligibility
...still exists, in that there's a rather low cap on IRA contributions. That's why the 401k was invented.
medical expenses deductions
Is the first section of the 2018 Schedule A.
Got bored here.
Seriously, it's almost like you get tax advice from idiots on the radio and TV instead of accountants.
Aaaaand my point gets made for me.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Wow in my decades, now, of slashdot I’ve never...
Beau has shattered all my confidence /. will ever recover.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Always a strong left-lean
Slashdot is, and has been for a long time, the place I come to learn about the latest right-wing talking points from people who believe them and are willing to defend them, at least a little bit. It depends on the story, but the Slashdot userbase does not fit into a single political category. Slashdot users usually deride gun control, and are quite a bit more libertarian than the general populace. These positions are not consistent with a strong left-lean.
I always find it interesting to see how certain topics interact with Slashdot's technically-minded population. Climate change denial, for example, conflicts with a science-positive outlook, and even those people here who are strongly right wing have pretty well rejected certain talking points along those lines. I've seen people elsewhere repeating claims that climate scientists are living the high life, and that climate change is really all about pulling in that sweet sweet research money. That's a real claim that some deniers make, but it's so ridiculous that when I've seen it here it's never gotten much traction. Likewise claims that nebulous unspecified "jobs" are more important than droughts / hurricanes / loss of coastline / etc. The only denier claims that have legs here are ones which give the appearance of being science-positive.
But they do have legs, because Slashdot does not have a strong left-lean. I'm sure there are trolls, but there's a fair share of true believers as well.
You mean it's not a left-wing echo chamber like you're used to, and people with diverse opinions can be heard? Gosh, how awful. And you try to delegitimatize such opinions by calling them trolls. This kind of shit is how we got Trump. Go back to your safe space. You can't compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You absolutely do vote. I vote almost daily. Voting on Slashdot is based on (and always has been based on) the quality of your posts. That's what makes it work so (relatively) well for unmoderated discussions online.
I don't respond to AC's.
It coincided with the arrival of the alt-right. Not saying that the people here are necessarily alt-right, just that the alt-right popularized a lot of techniques that are used by everyone on the right now.
Essentially they updated populism for the social media age. Previously it was harder for populists because the media was the primary way that politicians could reach voters, and journalists had seen it all before and didn't let the bullshit slide. Then social media pushed them aside, people started getting their news from each other, and politicians with a small army of followers could speak to the electorate directly.
Ordinary users adopted techniques like framing, alternative facts, whataboutism and never playing defence. Often not even consciously, just copying what they saw working for other people. And the progressives, the left were too proud to do it, too hung up on principals and bogged down trying to use the truth as their sword when politics had already moved to the post-truth world.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Ok Cartman calm down, it was a joke.
The modern origin of this myth is kinda interesting too. The far right realized that the 1940s Nazis were tarnishing their image. The optics of Hitler and the Holocaust were not good. First they tried pretending that while they shared the same basic goals as the Nazis they planned to reach them through a non-violent, peaceful ethnic cleansing of the United States. When that failed they tried the opposite - "we are far right identarians, you are confusing us with those left-wing Nazis!"
Of course it doesn't help that they continue to use Nazi imagery and rhetoric, continue to praise historical Nazi figures and have basically the same views, philosophy and desire for a racially pure ethnostate.
Still, apparently some people fell for it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Serously? I can't read a single fucking article without the standard ORANGE MAN BAD off topic bullshit AT THE TOP OF EVERY PAGE.....
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
You are aware that right now you're basically sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming LALALALALALA about the whole 90% marginal tax rate thing, right? As another poster already pointed out, the effective tax rate for those in the 90% income bracket in the 50s was 42%.
You do realize that "effective tax rate" is over someone's entire income, right? And that a 90% top marginal rate does not mean that all of their income is taxed at 90%, right?
But I bet your effective tax rate isn't less than half of your income tax bracket.
You lost that bet, quite badly. Again, effective tax rate is over the entire income, "income tax bracket" is only determined by the last $1.
You might be able to convince a bunch of low information idiots, but when you make arguments like you did in your above post, you just make those of us familiar with history think you're a blithering idiot.
You appear to not understand how marginal tax rates work. Best be careful when claiming others are uninformed.
And a study of ultra high tax rates in Europe showed that typically for every 1% increase in income tax rate, a 3% decrease in taxable assets was shown among those who were effective.
And assets are the same thing as income, right? Oh wait....
Also, perhaps one of the points of massive top marginal tax rates is to reduce the assets held by the 0.1%......
Do you know how marginal brackets work? You're only taxed the higher rate on the income above the previous bracket. And anyone making 10s of millions is making it off the backs of other Americans anyway. I don't have sympathy for that. Nobody needs to make that much profit.
It is much easier for capital to move around than in the 1950's. Even the SPLC [washingtontimes.com] moved millions to offshore tax havens. Money moves faster (hello bitcoin). Faster than a government can tax. Even if a government taxes more doesn't mean increase revenue [freebeacon.com]. It's a great talking point to hear about when we had a higher tax rate but many things have changed since then but many things are still the same (raising taxes doesn't mean raising revenue).
So, in Chicago economic theory, high marginal tax rates are massively destructive to an economy, while low marginal tax rates are supposed to create an economic boom.
The fact that it was harder to escape the high marginal tax rates in the 1950s, yet the economy was not crippled by those tax rates, indicates the Chicago school has a wee bit of a problem with their theories. But we already knew that since their theories claimed the 2008 collapse couldn't happen.
The fact that tax avoidance is easier today doesn't actually say anything about the failure of supply-side economics to fit with reality.
The rich, right now, represent roughly half of all revenue for government. Why is that not enough?
Because the top 0.1% own more than the bottom 50% combined. Income taxes aren't the best way to deal with wealth and income inequality, but they're a tool we actually have.
The 1% do not face usually low tax burden by historical standards.
....we were just talking about a 90% top marginal rate. The top marginal rate right now is what, 39%?
Also, the average tax paid for the top 1 percent in the 1950's was 42% not 90.
So, you appear to not understand how marginal tax rates work, and have found an article designed to exploit that. The "tax rate" is based on total income. The top marginal tax bracket is defined by their last dollar of income.
If we take the current 70% for over $10M proposal, that doesn't mean they pay 70% of their first dollar of income. They pay 0% on their first dollar, just like everyone else. 70% is only paid on the income over $10M. Which means their tax rate is going to be way below 70%.
That article was written to exploit you not understanding this.
If I were on the plane with Mao Zedong, Hitler and Ajit Pai with two bullets, I would shoot shitpai twice.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.