Wednesday, August 29, 2012

FCC Launching Huge Internet Tax

Get ready for another transfer of wealth via government confiscation. The FCC is ready to tax internet service in order to fund its Connect America Fund boondoggle.

As is usually the case in corporatist nations – Mussolini told us corporatism is the essence of fascism – mega-corporations support this brazen theft.

“Numerous companies, including AT&T, Sprint and even Google have expressed support for the idea,” reports The Hill today.

The scheme is nothing new. “Consumers already pay a fee on their landline and cellular phone bills to support the FCC’s Universal Service Fund.” The “Service Fund” was devised as yet another grand socialist enterprise “to ensure that everyone in the country has access to telephone service, even if they live in remote areas.”

In 2011, appointed apparatchiks at the FCC “overhauled a $4.5 billion portion of the Universal Service Fund and converted it into a broadband Internet subsidy, called the Connect America Fund. The new fund aims to subsidize the construction of high-speed Internet networks to the estimated 19 million Americans who currently lack access.”

It hardly seems relevant that the FCC lacks statutory authority over broadband. Nowadays, just about the entire government – from Obama’s executive orders to the “Super Congress” – runs by dictatorial fiat.

The FCC’s illegal power grab supported by transnational telecoms has already resulted in the sort of abuses that are routine when the government inserts itself in the business realm.

“Of course the ‘Connect America Fund’ is more than just another flagrant government shakedown of taxpayers and naked bureaucratic power grab,” writes Howard Rich. “Like the ‘Green Jobs’ scam that brought us the infamous Solyndra scandal, it’s yet another example of government fundamentally usurping the private sector’s role of allocating capital.”


Read more: http://teaparty.org/article.php?id=4226

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