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Broadband Prices: Bernie Sanders and His Gang of Four Are Out of Touch

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Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Back in 1992, US president George HW Bush stumbled over a grocery store price scanner on his way to re-election. Touring a grocers’ convention, Bush gazed in “wonder,” according to the New York Times, at technology well-known to everyone else. Bush went down in history as “out of touch”  with the real America — and as a one-term president.

How much more out of touch than that do you have to be to assert that “just 37 percent of Americans have more than one option for high-speed broadband providers?”

That’s what US Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Al Franken (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Edward Markey (D-MA) claim in a letter to Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The Senators want Wheeler to investigate what they consider unduly high prices in the cable industry for both television and Internet services.

Their sketchy statistical claim results from concentrating solely on local cable monopolies (which are indeed a bad thing) to the exclusion of satellite TV and Internet companies, DSL and television services offered by phone companies, and cellular Internet.

If the Senators answered their own doors and phones and emptied their own mailboxes now and then, they might understand the situation better.

I live in a suburban area, verging into rural. Fortunately, cable reaches my home, and based on my own needs (my family uses LOTS of bandwidth), I chose the local cable monopoly (Cox) for television, Internet and phone services. But my recycling bin overflows with junk mail begging me to switch  to AT&T U-Verse, Dish Network, DirecTV, a local satellite TV/Internet outfit, or one of several cellular providers. Not to mention the telemarketing calls and door knocks.

I have choices coming out my ears (in addition to all those listed, I can carry my laptop to nearly any business district and suck down all the free Wi-Fi I want). Based on a quick review of coverage maps, I’m confident that nearly 100% of my fellow Americans do as well. Some providers offer more or less. Some charge more or less. Which is cool, since people’s needs vary.

Why the sudden crocodile tears over cable Internet pricing? And  why from these four, of all people?

A few weeks ago, Sanders blamed child hunger in America on the availability of too many brands of deodorant. Now he’s concerned over too few brands of TV and Internet access.

All four Senators volubly supported increasing Internet access prices for “the little people” when they backed the FCC’s recent Title II “net neutrality” power grab. Bandwidth infrastructure costs. Since providers can’t charge bandwidth hogs like YouTube and Netflix a la carte to cover those costs, every end user (including your grandmother, who checks her email once a day and looks at a few funny pictures of cats) is going to end up paying more.

The Gang of Four didn’t care about the little people’s Internet bills then. Why should we believe they do now? To put it bluntly, I don’t.  Neither should you.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In Praise of Sanctuary Cities

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English: A sign at the international boundary ...
A sign at the international boundary between Canada and the United States in Point Roberts, Washington (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Politicians can’t resist the opportunity to pile on to a juicy news story for a quick bit of campaign face time.  The bloodier the better, so in the wake of Kate Steinle’s murder in San Francisco, allegedly at the hands of an “illegal immigrant,” it’s no surprise to see the usual suspects getting their knickers in a public twist over “sanctuary cities.”

A prominent anti-immigration propaganda mill, the Center for Immigration Studies, classifies more than 200  US cities, counties and states as “sanctuary cities.” These political subdivisions, as a matter of public policy, ignore and/or decline to cooperate with the federal government’s immigration regulation schemes.

Those of us who are more concerned with the truth than with exploiting a woman’s death for cheap political gain should support sanctuary cities as an unmitigated good.

Even setting aside several inconvenient facts — the fact that “the borders of the United States” command no more moral significance than the turf lines of any other street gang; the fact that the US Constitution forbids the federal government to regulate immigration; the fact that “illegal immigration” statistically reduces rather than increases violent crime; and the fact that “illegal immigration” keeps the US economy afloat by holding down labor costs and therefore the price of everything from produce to poultry to home construction — sanctuary cities are, quite simply, a bulwark against federal law enforcement overreach which represents a danger to all our freedoms.

FBI agents don’t go around handing out speeding tickets on the streets of Peoria. Policing local traffic isn’t the federal government’s job.

Florida and California don’t have their own navies or customs inspectors. Conducting foreign wars and policing international commerce aren’t duties of the state governments.

Nor is it the duty of any city, county or state government to enforce US immigration law. Each level of government has its own duties and functions. Sanctuary cities are federalism in action.

Every dollar or minute that a police officer in Boston or Boise spends doing Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s job is a dollar or minute that police officer can’t spend doing his or her own job.

To put it a different way, local resources spent enforcing federal immigration law are local resources no longer available to spend on investigating rapes, robberies, murders and thefts. Sanctuary cities have their priorities straight. Opponents of sanctuary cities don’t.

In truth, nothing less than a police state along the lines of the former East Germany could even make a dent in “illegal immigration.” Every dollar spent on that evil and impossible task at ANY level of government is a waste at best and a threat to the public’s freedom and safety at worst. Sanctuary cities guard everyone’s liberty.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Trump: A Joker in the GOP’s Presidential Deck

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English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Some people,” as Barry Switzer famously declared (rather oddly for a football coach),  “are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” And then there’s Donald Trump.

Inheriting a $250 million fortune built by his father on government loans and housing contracts, Trump fell close to the family’s corporate welfare tree. He now claims a net worth in the billions and cultivates the myth that he is a “self-made man.”

His version of the story doesn’t mention the government subsidies, the “too big to fail” debt (continually restructured by bankers who feared going down with him if he defaulted) or the multiple business bankruptcies.

So there stands The Donald on third base, hamming it up for the cameras and periodically awarding himself MVP trophies. Home plate, he’s now decided, is the White House.

I have to hand it to the guy. Anyone who can go bust four times running casinos — casinos, for the love of Pete! — then suggest, with a straight face, that he’s the man to bring fiscal responsibility and business acumen to Washington, deserves credit for sheer chutzpah.

Perhaps his descent into xenophobic rant is an attempt distract attention from the weak “self-made man” narrative. Or maybe he’s a Democratic mole. Either way, he’s bad news for Republican prospects in 2016 and beyond.

Trump’s claim that a disproportionate percentage of Mexican immigrants are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” seems custom crafted to cost the Republican ticket double digit vote percentages.

The first problem with his assertion is that it’s flatly false.  As syndicated columnist Steve Chapman points out in Reason magazine, Mexican immigrant populations in the US correlate to lower, not higher, violent crime rates.  “If Trump wants to avoid rapists, here’s some advice: Head for areas with lots of residents who were born in Mexico.”

The second problem is that he’s throwing a bomb, fuse lit and hissing, into the GOP’s attempt to solve its voter demographic problem. White males (the party’s “base”) are a shrinking proportion of the electorate. Hispanic voters, on the other hand, are growing in number.

Smart Republicans understand this. At least three candidates  — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush — hope to move in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on the strength of significant Hispanic support.

There’s a tightrope between the GOP’s opportunistic devolution into Know-Nothingism since the days of Reagan and George HW Bush (who competed in 1980 for the title of “most open borders candidate”) and an appeal to immigrant voters and their families.

And there’s Trump, doing unicycle stunts on the tightrope, jostling the other performers’ elbows, forcing the PR choice between supporting him, slamming him or trying to ignore him. It’s a long way down and the ground below is very hard. Choose carefully.

The Republican Party has two possible political futures: In one,  it gets libertarian on immigration. In the other it gives up its hopes for the White House not just in 2016, but for the foreseeable future.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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