Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Privacy’

The Obama White House has created an uncertainty surplus as investors and corporations wonder what kinds of anti-business regulation the president might end up supporting.

This uncertainty is why we hear so much speculation about the economy moving toward recovery but not fast enough to create new jobs. Job creation requires investment and investment requires confidence. Even Wall Street adores certainty, and uncertainty over Obama’s intentions is causing businesses to sit on their cash instead of plowing it back into the economy.

As of the end of March, non-financial companies in the U.S. were holding on to $1.84 trillion in cash, a staggering 26 percent increase from a year earlier. Even companies with good earnings are reluctant to convert those earnings into capital investment and hiring until they get a clear sense of the regulatory climate that’s going to take root under Obama. And companies looking for signs of a pro-growth regulatory regime won’t find any comfort in the president’s apparent fondness for net neutrality regulation of the broadband Internet. Call it rent control for the Internet.

Like rent control, the changes being pushed like net neutrality by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with White House backing are almost confiscatory when it comes to broadband networks that are the backbone of the Internet in America.

Mr. Genachowski’s “Third Way” plan for net neutrality regulation would force broadband operators to sell capacity on their networks to other companies, including rivals, at prices and conditions dictated by government regulators. You know where that leads: innovation is killed; stagnation and capacity shortages ensue.

By reclassifying broadband from an information service to a telecom service, the FCC would give itself sweeping powers to micro-manage America’s broadband networks. Unlike the Bell telephone networks of yesteryear, these broadband networks were not built with government subsidies in the form of monopoly markets and guaranteed returns. They were built and financed by their entrepreneurial owners, at their own risk.

Read more at Fox News

New U.S. Push to Regulate Internet Access

The Internet “Kill Switch”

US Cybersecurity Czar wants online “identity cards”

There go the 4th and 5th Amendments!

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Read more at Yahoo News

Senate Democrats Pass Bill Allowing Govt to Collect Addresses, ATM Records of Bank Customers

The Cyber Space Two Step: Privacy vs. Washington’s Big Brother Agenda

President Obama was highly critical of the Bush administration’s implementation of the Patriot Act but conceded at the time that it was a necessary evil.  While running for president he said that he would look into “dialing back”  various elements of the act.  

In February 2010, however, President Obama not only allowed all the current provisions under the Patriot Act to stand, he extended them for a year.

Last week, not only did he fail to pull back some of the FBI’s jurisdiction on information gathering, he seems to have expanded the previous law by adding four words to illuminate for federal law enforcement what powers they actually hold. Section 505 of the Patriot Act, covers National Security Letters (NSL’s) that are to be administered to various communications service providers (phone companies and ISP’s) by the FBI.  It allows them to secretly demand information regarding users private information.

Under the expanded definitions the information is allowed to be obtained without a court order for a person having been suspected of a crime, without said person ever even knowing they are being investigated:

• Your basic subscriber records, including your true identity and payment information;
• The identity of anyone using a particular IP address, username, or email adress;
• The email address or username of everyone you email or Instant Message, or who e-mails or instant messages you.
• The web address of every website you visit.
• Allows authorities to gain access to your private credit and financial information -
• Your ISP, bank, any other business from which the FBI gathers your private records is barred by law from notifying you.

Previously the language under the Patriot Act was vague and ambiguous; it requires Internet service providers to produce the records said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division. “As written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests.”

To assist in clarification, the administration added four words, “electronic communication transactional records” despite many issues brought to light by the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as the ACLU. Essentially, the Department of Justice is asking Congress to pass this broad new language meant to expand the kinds of data that can be acquired through National Security Letters.

The administration’s proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns. In a statement released Thursday, Senator Patrick Leahy D-VT said, “While the government should have the tools that it needs to keep us safe, American citizens should also have protections against improper intrusions into their private electronic communications and online transactions”.  Senator Leahy plans to hold hearings in the fall on this and other issues involving the law.

Read more at New Patriot Journal

Obama’s Assaults on Liberty Proceed Unabated

Poor Richard’s Internet

Government caused the problem, so of course the solution is… more government and violation of 4th Amendment rights.   How about we register and fingerprint the POLITICIANS who were responsible for the mortgage crisis, starting with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Mortgage loan originators will have to be fingerprinted and sign up to a central registry to do business in future, according to final rules issued on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

The rules are part of the Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008, also called the S.A.F.E. Act.

They were issued by the Fed, Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Office of Thrift Supervision, Farm Credit Administration and National Credit Union Administration.

Mortgage brokers came under tough scrutiny in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis, with some lawmakers and regulators sharply critical of underwriting standards and practices that were seen as so loose they helped foster a housing price bubble.

Read more at Reuters

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

President Obama signed into law Wednesday the massive 2,400-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – the most consequential piece of legislation affecting the financial sector since the Great Depression.

Touted as a much-needed solution for Wall Street greed, President Obama said, “Because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”

Yet, before the ink had dried, the first signs of the law’s negative effects emerged.

The three largest credit-rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings – immediately alerted bond issuers not to use their ratings, as they assess their legal exposure created by the bill.

This will affect the $1.4 million bond market, made up largely of consumer loans.

New bond sales – required by law to include credit rating information in all mortgage, auto, student loan and credit card loan documentation — will come to an abrupt halt.

Unfortunately, most Americans are unaware of the new law – much less how it will directly affect their daily lives.

The bill was passed with nearly unanimous opposition by Republicans, citing the bill will hurt families still hurting from the recession.

“Millions of Americans are struggling to find jobs,” said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “And yet all they see in Washington are Democrats passing massive bills that, at their core, seem to have one thing in common: more job loss.

“The White House will declare this bill a victory. But for millions of Americans struggling to find work, for millions of small-business owners bracing themselves for all the new regulations they’ll have to deal with, for ordinary Americans who just wanted to see an end to the bailouts, this bill is no victory.”

House Republican leadership has called for the financial law’s repeal.

“The real pain caused by this bill will be felt on Main Street,” said Republican Study Committee chairman Tom Price, R-Ga. “Ordinary companies will now face much higher costs if they try to hedge against common business risks like rising energy prices.  And the new agency, supposedly charged with protecting consumers, will actually make even credit-worthy families and businesses unable to access the credit they need to invest in their futures.

“Dodd-Frank would not have prevented the current financial crisis, and it will not stop the next one. This is not financial reform.  House Republicans introduced a plan over a year ago to fix the financial sector with common sense reforms aimed at the actual root causes of the crisis. Democrats instead chose to give Washington unprecedented control over Americans’ economic choices while ensuring the practice of taxpayer bailouts continues uninterrupted.”

Derek V. Baker, director of congressional affairs for Americans for Limited Government, said, “Only in Washington can a bill be signed in to law in response to one of America’s greatest financial collapses with two of the prime culprits of the collapse on hand to receive praise for their efforts. Though there are multiple reasons for the housing market collapse and subsequent financial meltdown that ensued, it is a fact that the government policies aggressive pursued and implemented by Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank to rig the market and force lenders to meet artificial loan thresholds and quotas were a driving force behind the 2008 financial crisis as well.

“And yesterday, they got rewarded for their efforts with an ‘attaboy’ from the president of the United States.”

Read more at CitizenLink

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

The Dodd-Frank Assault on Economic Recovery

Contrary to Barack Obama’s rhetoric about protecting consumers, his new financial reform law represents a dangerous big government power grab that willfully ignores the true roots of the recent financial crisis.

It is also the latest example of America’s “march to Marxism,” the not-so-gradual implementation of a command economic system in which the free market is taxed and regulated into oblivion while new and expanded government bureaucracies wield unprecedented power.  Like last year’s failed economic stimulus (which was nothing but a bureaucratic bailout) and this year’s health care reform law (the largest entitlement expansion in a generation), Obama’s latest Orwellian scheme is once again being sold to the public as a necessary, even responsible measure.

“Because of this reform, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Obama said. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts, period.”

Of course as Obama was making this pronouncement, the taxpayer tab for bailing out government-owned mortgage behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to soar.  That bailout will now cost taxpayers at least $400 billion, according to the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, although a deteriorating housing market could push the total above $1 trillion.

Among the chief culprits of the 2008 collapse, Fannie and Freddie became a central repository for much of the toxic debt associated with government-mandated, high-risk loans – like the $2.4 trillion pumped by the government into “mortgages for affordable housing” in 2000.

“Had Fannie and Freddie not been there to buy these loans, most of them would never have been made,” writes Mark A. Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute. “And had the taxpayer not been standing behind Fannie and Freddie, they would have been unable to fund such large purchases of subprime mortgages.”

Ironically, the chief author of Obama’s so-called reform bill – Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) – has had a front-row seat to this brewing crisis for years.  Yet rather than correctly diagnosing and fixing the problem, he used his influence to block efforts that could have helped prevent the meltdown.

Read more at Rasmussen Reports

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

It should come as no surprise that Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the bill’s primary authors, would fail to end the numerous government distortions of our financial and mortgage markets that led to the crisis. Both have been either architects or supporters of those distortions. One might as well ask the fox to build the henhouse.

Nowhere in the final bill will you see even a pretense of rolling back the endless federal incentives and mandates to extend credit, particularly mortgages, to those who cannot afford to pay their loans back. After all, the popular narrative insists that Wall Street fat cats must be to blame for the credit crisis. Despite the recognition that mortgages were offered to unqualified individuals and families, banks will still be required under the Dodd-Frank bill to meet government-imposed lending quotas.

While apologists for government-mandated lending are correct in pointing out that much of the worst lending was originated by state-chartered lenders, such as Countrywide, and not federally chartered banks, they either miss or purposely ignore the truth that these non-bank lenders were selling the bulk of their loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or the government corporation Ginnie Mae. About 90 percent of loans originated by Countrywide, the largest subprime lender, were either sold to Fannie Mae or backed by Ginnie Mae. Subprime lenders were so intertwined with Fannie and Freddie that Countrywide alone constituted over 25 percent of Fannie’s purchases.

While one can debate the motivations behind Fannie and Freddie’s support for the subprime market, one thing should be clear: Had Fannie and Freddie not been there to buy these loans, most of them would never have been made. And had the taxpayer not been standing behind Fannie and Freddie, they would have been unable to fund such large purchases of subprime mortgages. Yet rather than fix the endless bailout that Fannie and Freddie have become, Congress believes it is more important to expand federal regulation and litigation to lenders that had nothing to do with the crisis.

Read more at the CATO Institute

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

Financial Reform Bill: Big Brother’s Bureaucratic Absolutism

Gov’t pushing risky lending again?

The Dodd-Frank Assault on Economic Recovery

Bailout Bonanza: Why Dodd’s “Reform” Bill Makes the Problem Worse

Making the Housing Crisis Worse

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records–that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year–must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity.

The obesity-rating regulation states that every American’s electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.”

The law also requires that these electronic health records be available–with appropriate security measures–on a national exchange.
 
The new regulations are one of the first steps towards the government’s goal of universal adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by 2014, as outlined in the 2009 economic stimulus law.  Specifically, the regulations issued on Tuesday by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, define the “meaningful use” of electronic records. Under the stimulus law, health care providers–including doctors and hospitals–must establish “meaningful use” of EHRs by 2014 in order to qualify for federal subsidies. After that, they will be subjected to penalties in the form of diminished Medicare and Medicaid payments for not establishing “meaningful use” of EHRs.

Read more at CNS News

Obamacare grants sweeping new powers to HHS Secretary

Barack Obama celebrated the passage of the new financial regulation bill yesterday.  So did Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.  And why not?  It’s not as though they’ll have to pay for the new bureaucracies and regulation imposed on the American financial system.  For that matter, it won’t be the bankers, either.  Who pays? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:

Big banks facing big drops in revenue are looking to Main Street to make up the difference.

Checking accounts, bank statements, even popping into your local bank branch could carry a hefty cost as the nation’s mega-banks scramble to offset expected damage from the sweeping financial overhaul. The uncertain future has overshadowed otherwise strong second-quarter earnings at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.

All three companies beat expectations this week with profitable results. Yet their stocks tumbled, helping send the wider market sharply lower Friday.

This is so basic that people inside the Beltway never learn it.  Costs imposed on businesses get passed to consumers. It doesn’t matter where those costs originate, whether they come from materials, labor, rent, taxes, or regulation.  All of those figure into the price paid by consumers for the product or service provided.

The AP focuses on the impact of the big banks, but to a certain extent, they have a competitive advantage.  Not only do they have a better economy of scale, at least some of the burden from the new regulations will be static rather than dynamic.  That means the costs will hit smaller banks and financial institutions harder, which will force them to raise prices higher than their larger competitors.  Eventually that will erode their competitive position and push more consumers into fewer institutions, which makes the entire system more vulnerable to a single point of failure.

How will consumers get hit with these new regulations?  Expect more fees on more transactions, including paying premium prices for doing business face to face with bank tellers and other employees.  Banks will start demanding higher minimum balances and start charging higher fees on accounts that don’t make the cut.  Bank of America will lose between $7 and $10 billion just on charges for debit and credit cards alone, money that will get made up by its customers somewhere.

Read more at Hot Air

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

From Hot Air:

Just two years after the implosion of easy credit nearly cratered the entire Western financial structure, the same people who caused it are returning to their old habits.  Fannie Mae has embarked on a new program to offer easy credit to people who may not be able to pay it back in a desperate attempt to ignite the economy.

It’s especially bad for Fannie Mae. After all, a private lender will have to pay the price for bad decisions — oh, excuse me, that’s not entirely true any more, is it? With Congress passing the financial regulation bill, the federal government now has a regulatory lever to seize private firms and put us all on the hook, just as Congress and two White Houses did with TARP.

However, Fannie Mae is in the middle of a rescue already, and costing taxpayers over $200 billion for it in combination with its sibling GSE, Freddie Mac. It has no business offering $1000-down loans until it cleans up the huge mess left over from its previous subsidizing of bad subprime loans. Want to guess whether they’re securitizing this paper in mortgage-based securities?

Data Show Federal Policy Triggered Mortgage Meltdown

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Federal Government Was Culprit in Housing and Economic Crisis, Says Congressional Report

Act From Which An Acorn Grew, And An Economy Died, Lives On

Fannie, Freddie request another $18 billion in bailout money

Fannie, Freddie Can Now Get Unlimited Aid

Democrats in their own words: Covering up the Fannie/Freddie scam that caused our Economic Crisis

Democrats continued tearing the Constitution to shreds Thursday, voting to pass Obama’s tyrannical government takeover of Wall Street, which will impose hundreds of crushing new regulations on all the banks that drive our economy.

You think jobs are going overseas now? Just wait.

As I have noted, this latest economy-killing assault on the free market (which was made possible by a small handful of treacherous Republican sellouts):

• gives Obama the power to arbitrarily deem any financial institution he pleases a “threat” to the economy and dismantle it with virtually zero oversight,
• protects the interests of the biggest Obama campaign donors, like Goldman Sachs, while raking all the smaller banks–the ones that had nothing to do with the meltdown–over the coals,
• deliberately ignores the root cause of the collapse–Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which Democrats have spent the last decade protecting from any and all reforms so they could go on raiding them for campaign contributions on their way down)–even as their staggering losses continue to bankrupt the country,
• perpetuates this “too big to fail” culture while ensuring endless, massive bailouts,
• uses more government control to pretend to reign in the “recklessness” of Wall Street, which never even existed until Democrats forced banks to lower their lending standards while federally insuring their losses (i.e., turned Wall Street into a taxpayer-insured casino),

At least some Republicans are calling for this insanity to be repealed.

Read more at the Examiner

Financial Reform Bill: Big Brother’s Bureaucratic Absolutism

New Financial Reform Bill is Unconstitutional

View on YouTube

That wooshing sound in your ears is actually your 4th Amendment rights being flushed down the toilet.

Right Wing News reports:

It may take decades to discover all of the malignancies tucked away in the thousands upon thousands of pages of unread leftist legislation Comrade Obama & friends have been ramming through into law. Here‘s something that’s already come to light in their “comprehensive” attack on the financial sector:

A little noticed section (Section 152, page 63) of the Obama administration’s Financial Reform bill would create a new 1,000-employee office within the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Financial Research, which is raising alarm bells among Senate GOP staff, who say the entity would have broad powers to invade the privacy of American citizens and monitor their finances and financial activity at a level never before allowed by the federal government.

The OFR is a companion entity to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which is also proposed in the legislation (section 1001, page 1030).

Under the bill’s current language, according the Senate Banking Committee sources, the OFR under the new federal law would be allowed to collect any financial data it chooses, whether from individual citizens or businesses. Under the language of the bill, the data center can collect and maintain “all data necessary” to monitor the financial system. Wall Street executives are also concerned, because of the kind of “competitive intelligence” such an entity could collect.

Informed Americans who liked living in a free country have been scared out of their minds since November 2008.

Perhaps more chilling, the data collected by these new entities would not be protected or necessarily confidential. Rather, Senate staff believe in reading the bill introduced and negotiated by Sen. Chris Dodd, data collected by the offices could be shared with other government agencies, including executive branch agencies such as the IRS.

That’s right, the infamously corrupt Chris Dodd will be helping himself to your financial data. But you can trust him; he’s from the government, and he’s here to help.

The New American observes:

Czarist Russia is looking better and better. Once a byword for bureaucratic absolutism, the apparatchiks of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and their endless rule-making seem positively enlightened beside some of the pieces of aptly named omnibus legislation emanating from Capitol Hill these days.

Nobody will be unaffected by this latest foray into federal micromanagement of the private lives of Americans. Among other things, the new bill will give vast new powers to the Federal Reserve, the secretive central bank that, more than any other single entity, has been responsible both for modern asset bubbles and the recessions and depressions that have followed them. Yet instead of being held to account for its role in creating the ongoing crisis, the Fed will now be responsible for overseeing large, interconnected financial concerns deemed large enough to pose a significant threat to the financial system should they fail. It will be the task of a separate 10-person council of regulators led by the Treasury Secretary to identify such concerns on behalf of the Fed.

Tellingly, the bill has nothing to say about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-government agencies deeply complicit in the subprime fiasco. The market meltdown has been consistently portrayed by Washington insiders as a failure of the free markets, not of government. It is therefore freedom, not government, that is erroneously held to account by Dodd-Frank.

Financial “reform” bill passes, despite alarming privacy infringements

Financial Reform’s Empty Promises

Finance bill favors interests of unions, activists

New Financial Reform Bill is Unconstitutional

As Finance Bill Passes, GOP Calls for Repeal

Another Big Government “fix” for a problem that isn’t.   The motto with this administration seems to be, “if it ain’t broke, fix it until it is!”   Want to hazard a guess how long it’ll be “voluntary”?

From TG Daily:

US Cybersecurity Czar Howard Schmidt has proposed the creation of an online “identity ecosystem” to secure financial transactions in cyberspace.


The ecosystem – which was outlined in the Obama administration’s (draft) National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) – also envisions the “voluntary” use of smart identity cards for authentication purposes.

“[The] Identity Ecosystem [would allow] individuals and organizations to complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on,” Schmidt explained in an official blog post.

“No longer [will] individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services.”

According to Schmidt, the identity ecosystem would “enable a future” where individuals “voluntarily” choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) to authenticate themselves for various types of online transactions.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Have an Online ID

Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Approved By Senate Homeland Security Committee

Bill Would Grant President Unprecedented Cyber-security Powers

Senate Proposal Gives President Authority Over Internet

Discover the Networks has a dossier on several of these groups, but it’s amazing how many of them spring up like cockroaches to work in the shadows, once the radicalism of one of their organizations is exposed.

The leftist organization Free Press, sensing that it is losing the political and policy battle at the Federal Communications Commission over “net neutrality,” organized a letter from about 150 nonprofit and charitable organizations in support of federal government regulation of the Internet, or “net neutrality.”

Free Press is the astroturf and political organization founded by Marxist and Obama supporter, Robert McChesney. The group has advocated for government regulation of the Internet and taxpayer-supported media, among other issues. It is an organization that has refused to divulge its funding sources, but of late, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations have admitted to giving millions to the organization, and sources with knowledge of the group claim that Free Press also receives funds from the Tides Foundation and such labor organizations as the SEIU.

The Tides is a leftist nonprofit that accepts funds from other leftist foundations and donors and pools the funds and disperses them to groups. In this way, the true sources of the funds are obscured.

Well-known leftists like Bill Moyers, among others, have profited from entities that support the Tides, and they in turn have also supported Free Press.

But the letter sent on Wednesday morning to the FCC is notable because it reveals a number of small, local entities with ties to Free Press and its benefactors, such as the Tides, and indicates just how widespread the network of leftist groups is. For example, the Women Donors Network, which signed on to the letter, is an organization that receives Tides funding. As well, such signatories as
Color of Change; UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc.; National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture; the Center for Media Justice; Community Technology; Participatory Culture Foundation; Media Alliance; Center for Community Technology Services; Center for Resilient Cities; Coastal Community Foundation; Community Frontiers; Healthy Families San Angelo; Room to Roam; Smart People Foundation; Social Actions; among others, all have ties to Tides donors and Free Press. A number of the organizations based in San Francisco have ties to disgraced Obama Administration aide Van Jones, who worked extensively with Free Press before being hired as a White House staffer last year.

“Hillary Clinton talked about the vast right-wing conspiracy? This letter kind of lays out the vast left-wing conspiracy,” says a House staffer for a Blue Dog Democrat. “It’s like a satire of left-wing and community activists networks. There is no way my boss could possibly get on board something like this.”

In fact, it appears Free Press and its minions understood how toxic their organization’s positions have become, because several nonprofits that signed on to the letter claimed they had not understood the nature of the letter before their organization’s names were added to the list.

Read more at the American Spectator

Stop a Washington takeover of the Internet