I haven’t posted for over a month. I’ve posted articles in other places, but nothing here on Fluid Imagination. Part of the reason had to do with my job. During the last month, I wrote, built, and launched a new website for my school, and before that, I spent most of my free time developing the second-quarter schedule for all of our staff and students. You see, along with teaching, I’m also an administrator and marketing person, so things can get a little busy.
But a lot of things have been happening over the last month: sexual predators facing the music, President Trump’s administration circling the drain, Congressional Republicans stealing trillions of dollars from the future, the potential loss of Internet freedom, and so much more. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve missed.
First and foremost is the continued outing of powerful sexual predators, assaulters, and harassers. While we can all applaud the takedown of powerful sleaze bags, in my own life, I’ve seen the #metoo movement help individuals come out against their not-so-famous assaulters. Several months ago, a person I know had fallen victim to a sexual predator, but with all of the shame around the issue, they had not gone to the police about it. Following the publicity around these other cases though, and the way the predators have actually seen some consequences from their actions, the person I know gained the confidence to press charges against her perpetrator. What we’ve seen on the news is just a drop in the bucket, but if the (apparently) changing perceptions of assault victims continues towards belief rather than doubt, the world might actually improve a little bit.
Next, of course, is the way Comrade Trump’s administration continues to flounder in light of the Russia investigation. Without a doubt, the best explainer of all this stuff has been the Twitter feed of a professor of law and journalism at the University of New Hampshire, Seth Abramson.
America needs to understand what Flynn's December negotiations with the Russians *were*:
Flynn—Trump's top national security advisor—was negotiating whether the Kremlin would be REWARDED or PUNISHED for violating U.S. national security by trying to steal the election for Trump. pic.twitter.com/5tRRhgaXHJ
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) December 3, 2017
If you’re not following Abramson on Twitter, get on it. The guy deserves a Pulitzer for the work he’s been doing.
Then, of course, there’s the incredible distribution of wealth from the 99% to the 1%, also known as H.R. 1: Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, which according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office will increase the deficit by $1.437 trillion over the next 10 years. The Senate snuck this thing through in the most ridiculous and cynical manner possible, and every relatively moderate Republican ought to be ashamed of themselves (the other Republicans are long past the ability to actually feel shame).
Along with reporting on that increase in the deficit, the CBO reports that “it is not practicable for a macroeconomic analysis to incorporate the full effects of all of the provisions in the bill…within the very short time available between completion of the bill and the filing of the committee report.” In other words, this bill is not only messed up from a content perspective, but from a process perspective too. By now, you’ve heard that this 400+ page bill was passed before anyone had the time to read it, and that the bill itself still contained handwritten amendments since they wouldn’t take the time to print out the changes.
Next, there’s the announcement from the chairman of the FCC that they’d like to repeal the rules that protect net neutrality. This is an incredibly colossal mistake, putting the freedom of the Internet into the corrupt and greedy hands of Comcast, Verizon, and others.
One member of the FCC, who posted in Op-Ed in the LA Times under the headline, “I’m on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality,” writes, “There is something not right about a few unelected FCC officials making such vast determinations about the future of the internet…Before my fellow FCC members vote to dismantle net neutrality, they need to get out from behind their desks and computers and speak to the public directly…When they do this, they will likely find that, outside of a cadre of high-paid lobbyists and lawyers in Washington, there isn’t a constituency that likes this proposal.”
Nobody but the telecoms want this bill. No real human being has complained about having an open internet that allows low-income individuals to access the same websites as high-income individuals, and mom-and-pop and startup organizations to access the same audience as multinational corporations such as Microsoft and Google.
No one wants this policy change. But because the FCC is run by a former Verizon employee, the policy change is going forward. And that sucks.
So…that should bring us up today. Hopefully, my next post won’t be another month from now.
