HBO's John Oliver Blows It Conflating JFK Assassination With Kooky COVID Conspiracies

John Oliver- left- analogized John Hinckley's  1981 attempted assassination of Reagan with the 1963 Kennedy assassination on his show 'Last Week Tonight'.  Alex Jones (center) is the epitome of the low grade morons who create conspiracy codswallop- like his Sandy Hook false flag bunkum. Meanwhile, Mark Lane (left)  has all the attributes of a professional assassination researcher, see e.g.http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/05/rip-mark-lane-one-of-earliest-jfk.html

"How do we know that our own rational rejections of conspiracy theories are not themselves infected with beliefs so strong that they are, in effect, conspiracy theories too?" - Matt Ridley in 'Maybe We're All Conspiracy Theorists', The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10-11, 2011

"Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"-

Michael Parenti in 'The Dirty Truths', p. 174

John Oliver, usually a bright guy, fell into the usual doo-doo trap of conflating unrelated conspiracy phenomena on his July 19th edition of 'Last Week Tonight'. What did he do?   In a whole segment headed 'Conspiracy Theories'- which included the cockeyed ideations about Covid -19 such as spun by  Judy Mikovits in her mockumentary 'Plandemic'-  he included the JFK assassination.   He cited it under the error of what he called "proportionality bias" or the erroneous belief that "big events must have big causes or actors".  

Hence,  Covid 19 has been rendered a huge event (by the media) because  Bill Gates wants to use it as an excuse to mount a vaccination scheme to inject microchips into an unsuspecting population to control them.  By the same token, "the JFK assassination caused such havoc and global shock that people could not believe one lone gunman did it" - so had to confect a much grander conspiracy.   

 Prompted by this misconstrued meme he goes on to compare the Kennedy assassination to the John Hinckley -attempted 1981 assassination of Ronald Reagan.  He plays a clip from a Barnard College "academic psychologist" named Rob Brotherton,  author of the book 'Suspicious Minds' e.g.

 who says:

  "The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was a similar event in all regards except the president survived.  It was a smaller event in terms of its outcome so therefore we're satisfied with smaller expectations.  And so there have been almost no conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan either then or subsequently."

Of course there were no conspiracy theories  after Hinckley's attempt on Reagan. Why would there be?  It's a 'chalk and cheese' difference  which Brotherton would know if he'd done the least bit of serious research into the JFK assassination, instead of making facile assumptions. First, the  two events are not the same in any respect, contrary to Brotherton's bollocks.  In the Reagan attempt it was one lone punk trying to fire a handgun at his target.  In the Kennedy assassination three teams of snipers had taken positions in Deaely Plaza for a triangulated crossfire to take him out.   The chances of success were  essentially 100 percent.

Sketch of Dealey Plaza and 3 of the 6  shots  fired at JFK (from Robert Grodin's 'Killing of a President')

The above  sketch shows the trajectories of 3 of the 6 shots fired at JFK.  Another reason comparing this hit to the attempted assassination of Reagan is imbecilic. Again, just because a person is a professor doesn't mean he can't also be an imbecile.  Certainly in matters of deep politics which requires vastly more familiarity than 'shoot from the hip' takes from dime store psychology.

Let's also note the rifles which fired that day in Dallas featured bullets with full metal jackets.  According to one 2001 echo correlation analysis (by D.B. Thomas) published in the journal Science and Justice (Vol. 41, p. 21), no fewer than 6 rounds had been fired at JFK including the fatal head shot that blew his brains backwards and which exposed the back of his skull -  missing on a Parkland table:

This photo appeared in the David Lifton book, 'Best Evidence', and was supported by Parkland surgeon Charles Crenshaw who attended to Kennedy's wounds.  See the Preface of  his book 'Conspiracy of Silence', a pdf version of which is given below.  

http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Conspiracy_Of_Silence.pdf

Excerpt from Preface:

'Through the years, there have been a thousand instances when I have wanted to shout to the world that the wounds to Kennedy's head and throat that I examined were caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as the public has been led to believe. Instinctively, I have reached for the telephone many times to call a television station to set the, story straight when I heard someone confidently claim that Oswald was the lone gunman from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book De­pository, only to restrain myself-until now."

So no, with the high powered weapons arrayed against JFK he never had a chance.  With  the lone handgun pointed at Reagan, at least he did.  But I doubt either Brotherton or Oliver ever read a page of Lifton's book, or Dr. Crenshaw's. Why would they if they consider it on a par or spectrum with the piffle churned out by QAnon or the batshit crazy Covid quacks and deniers like Judy Mikovits?

Further, let's note the difference in enemies. Reagan was a hero of the military -industrial complex (MIC) as he proposed to spend trillions for new weaponry.  He did and by the end of his 8-year reign had run up a $2.7 trillion deficit. JFK was regarded as a traitor by the MIC  especially given his plans to pull out of Vietnam by calendar year 1965 under National Security Memorandum 263.

Add to that  his earlier rejection of Gen. Curtis Lemay's demand to bomb and invade Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Lemay compared him to Neville Chamberlain.  As per the source article in The Baltimore Sun ('Bomb Cuba! Lemay Urged JFK',   based on the declassified tapes, where we read:

"Blasting Kennedy's cautious approach, the Air Force Chief, Gen. Curtis LeMay, told the President at a White House meeting on Oct. 19, 1962, ‘This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich…"

Kennedy also did something Reagan would never have done, i.e. to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev (in August, 1963)  which prohibited even anti-missile systems.  The Right wing and the military - national security complex went bonkers.   Finally, the coup de grace had to be JFK's effort at a secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro in the spring of 1963.  Key to this was ABC reporter Lisa Howard:

Who had  offered herself as an intermediary for the first bilateral talks between U.S. and Cuban officials in April, 1963.  (This was soon after doing a fairly sympathetic TV special with Castro earlier in the month. )   Further, Ms. Howard offered her 5th Avenue New York apartment as a venue for meeting with the Cuban ambassador to the UN.  This was already accepted as a report by the UK Guardian notes, e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/26/cuba.julianborger

Wherein we learn:

"The administration gave a nod to Ms Howard, who set up a chance meeting between Mr Attwood and the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga, at a cocktail party in her Park Avenue apartment.

The apartment then became a communications centre between Mr Attwood and the Castro regime. Castro's aide, Dr Rene Vallejo, called at pre-arranged times to talk to Mr Attwood, and in the autumn of 1963 suggested that Mr Attwood fly to Mexico from where he would be picked up by a plane sent by Castro."

Does anyone believe Reagan would have allowed anything analogous? Say secret meets with Libya's Muammar Ghaddafi? Give me a break. Yet Brotherton is dumb enough to believe the attempted hit on Reagan and the JFK assassination are "similar in all regards" without remotely processing why JFK's enemies were ten orders of magnitude more formidable than the lovesick little loser who tried to kill Ronnie Raygun.  And, of course, given all this, no one would have expected to see thousands of 'WANTED for Treason' posters, e.g.


As JFK faced in Big D the day he was killed.

But John Oliver is so mesmerized by Brotherton's balderdash, i.e. that the two events are similar except in one there was failure, that he responds: 

"Exactly! That kind of makes sense. So one man suddenly changing the world is inconceivable.  But one man failing miserably is not the least surprising."

But again, "one man" didn't change the world.  A coalition of conspirators did, including CIA  assets who had a bundle of reasons (including the firing of Allen Dulles).  For the extensive backstory read:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/ike-jfk-also-hostage-to-national.html

 As I note, what most infuriated the CIA was Kennedy's willingness - after the Bay of Pigs debacle -  to exclude them from critical roles, assignments as well as reorganizing the agency, e.g. 

"Kennedy went further, creating a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him, and soon mandating all overflights of Cuba be done by the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. He also defined a list of directives on what the CIA could and could not, do. By the end of 1961, JFK's 'Special Group' had no less than 17 recommendations for the "reorganization and redirection of the CIA"."

Oliver's lack of preparation for his 5 minute blitz spot with Brotherton discloses a sad unwillingness to plow just a little into the background of the assassination, including the existence of Oswald's intel  (e.g. 201) files and connections.  Hence,  his arguing Hinckley  was  just "another lone gunman" but in an unsuccessful attempt, while Oswald (coincidentally)  happened to be successful.  Except one minor problem: Oswald never killed JFK.  No way in hell - not with the pathetic excuse for a WWII edition Italian carbine (Mannlicher-Carcano)  he was purportedly using, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/frequently-asked-questions-on-fhe-jfk.html

John Oliver's egregious assumptions  to do with 'proportionality bias' applying to the JFK hit include not only this conflation but trying to put Oswald into the same 'lone nut' mold as Hinckley.  (Who had fantasies of offing Reagan to please his imagined paramour, actress Jodie Foster)  In this way, Oliver also succumbed to what I call  the "A useless nobody kills big shot in random world" meme.  This trope is not new but has been peddled in various forms for nearly 55 years now.  For example, mathematician John Allan Paulos fell for it when he wrote in his book Irreligion,(p. 6):

"Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill-suited for the job of Giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators."

But again, in this (JFK)  case there were  'significant perpetrators'  - but not Oswald.  Further we now have all the files available (which we didn't in 1964-65 when the Warren Commission Report came out), to at least know the Kennedy assassination was based on a coherent conspiracy - and also that Lee Oswald was not part of it, e.g.

A Hard Fact: All Necessary JFK Files HAVE Been Rel...

 Problem is the mainstream media was muzzled on presenting the details. (Likely on account of the CIA's 'Operation Mockingbird nexus). As author Michael Parenti opens eyes in his book, The Dirty Truths, Lee Oswald was no John Hinckley:

“Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lone drifter but directly linked to the U.S. intelligence community. All of his IQ tests show that he was above average in intelligence and a quick learner. At the age of eighteen in the U.S. Marines he had secret security clearance and was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Air Force Base in Japan, a top secret location from which the CIA launched U2 flights and performed other kinds of covert operations in China. The next year he was assigned to El Toro Air Station in California with security clearance to work radar. “

Parenti 's claims of an intelligence connection all emerged in John Newman's book, Oswald and the CIA - which I will bet neither John Paulos or John Oliver ever read. Though they feel themselves qualified to speak or write of Oswald:  a) being involved in the first place (other than a patsy) , and b) as a "nobody".   Indeed, examination of Oswald's CI/SIG file showed he had access to:

“The locations of all bases on the west coast, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, strength of all squadrons, the number and type of aircraft in each, names of commanding officers, and authentic codes of entering and exiting all ADIZ radar ranges.”

If then Oswald was as lame as claimed by the likes of Paulos, Oliver  and also  CBS anchor Eric Sevareid  in a special 55 years ago, i.e.

"Who could believe power and majesty can be wiped out in an instant by a skinny, weak-chinned little character".

Then he'd not have been entrusted with the critical material and information noted above.  Here, of course, Sevareid can perhaps be excused for his unprofessional belittling of Oswald's import because the JFK Records Act was still some 25 years away when Sevareid made that remark. But the  two Johns -- Oliver and Paulos -  ought to have known better and at least should have done some minimal serious research before either writing Oswald off as a nobody, or comparing him to the loser John Hinckley or worse, imputing the assassination to him at all. 

Lee Oswald then was no kook but a bona fide intel operative. Most researchers who've delved into this in much more depth than superficial 'buffs' come away with the conviction Oswald was set up as part of ZR/Rifle. A classic decoy.  However,  with the plot now turned against Kennedy. Oswald was likely used as the dupe or decoy so the actual perps (likely Cuban exiles, and trained assassins - from the Army's Ft. Benning Assassin school) could escape .   We also know these assigned mechanics would have used the CIA Assassinations Handbook, available since Operation PBSuccess in 1954, see e.g.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

As noted in Document 1:

"The idea of forming assassination teams ('K' groups) apparently originated with Castillo Arenas in 1952.  Adopting Castillo Arenas' concept the [  ] chief routinely included two assassination specialists in his training plans.  CIA training for sabotage teams in early 1954 also included creating a 'K' group trained to perform assassinations."

There is no doubt such a 'K' group was set to target Castro under ZR/Rifle (in 1962), but could easily be redirected to target Kennedy in late 1963.  The proof in the pudding was the letter ‘D’ – on the cover sheet of Oswald’s 201 file – indicating a  CIA Staff D  SIGINT or signals intelligence operation run in concert with the National Security Agency or NSA. As pointed out by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics Quarterly, Jan. 1994): 

“In 1961, when William Harvey headed Staff D, he was assigned the task of developing the CIA Assassinations Project, ZR/Rifle.”

When ZR/Rifle was turned from targeting Castro to JFK- probably in late 1962 or mid 1963, it was all over except for the triangulation of gunfire that took the 35th president out.  Far from being a case of 'Oh the JFK conspiracy theorists just couldn't handle a nobody taking out Kennedy' - it was instead a case of  'My God! What have we come to as a nation when a sitting president can be dispatched in a veritable coup d'etat?'  The latter was based on intelligent, energized researchers having the guts and will to dig deep into those earlier assassination templates and files. As opposed to taking the easy way out,  say by erroneously invoking a "proportionality bias" like John Oliver did.  

As Michael Parenti aptly put it (op. cit., p. 156):

“To know the truth about the assassination of John Kennedy is to call into question the state security system and the entire politico-economic order it protects. This is why for over thirty years the corporate-owned press and numerous political leaders have suppressed or attacked the many revelations about the murder unearthed by independent investigators like Mark Lane, Peter Dale Scott, Carl Oglesby, Harold Weisberg, Anthony Summers."

On the face of it, and in hindsight, Oliver would have done better in his main story on CTs to leave the JFK assassination totally out of his examples, and focus instead on the real nutso Covid crap like 'Plandemic'  etc.  

 The end result was that, while trying to focus on how the Covid conspiracy ideations are wreaking havoc on our pandemic response, the interjection of the JFK assassination needlessly muddied the waters via a useless conflation of real and unreal conspiracies.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee.html

And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-pre-assassination-framing-of-lee_1807.html

And:

Government

The Pro-Trump CIA Man: QAnon Madness and Upward Failure

2/3 Of Americans Yearn For The Political Middle - A Case Of Moral Cowardice?

Find a 'middle' with this asshole and his cult followers? Get real!

"The only things in the middle of the road are dead skunks and yellow lines."  - Progressive columnist Jim Hightower

In the interest of full disclosure let me come right out and admit I have no use or tolerance for the American political "middle". Hence, see no remote purpose in complying with the oft heard plaintive plea (from clueless pundits) that  we need to somehow find civility and "meet in the middle".  Why? As Tafari Jones writes in his TIME essay ('The Myth of the Moral Middle',  November 5, p. 56):

"I find myself annoyed by the hand wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how we might 'meet in the middle' as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space.  But this American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse. 

The middle is a point equidistant from two poles. That's it. There is nothing inherently virtuous about being neither here nor there.  Buried in this is a false equivalency of ideas, what you might call the 'good people on both sides' phenomenon. But when we revisit our shameful past ask yourself, 'where was the middle?"

He has a salient point and there are numerous examples. For example, when Native Americans were being wiped out by the U.S. Cavalry in the 1870s- 80s and their tribal lands seized where was the "middle"?  Was it to kill all the braves and leave the women and children? Was it to make fake treaties to grab Indian lands - and then ship the victims (like Geronimo and the Apache) off to reservations where they withered and died- but not kill them?

What about slavery? Where was the middle there?  If we reject the basest extremes of chattel slavery, i.e. as portrayed in '12 Years A Slave' - where if Massah wanted some entertainment he'd use some excuse to take out his whip and flog one or more of the slaves while banjo music played- where was the middle?   Would it have been a softer 'indentured servitude' - which actually ensued during Reconstruction when "freed" slaves were allowed to remain on plantations and work the land- but only for a pittance-  and it was never enough to be truly free, and own the land?

In terms of Dotard's immigration policy, where is the middle? Is it only to separate migrant families but not to cage the  toddlers or infants?

Transferring the concept of the threat of  'the other'  to Nazi Germany, where was the middle? Was it to inter the Jews by the millions in the concentration camps - but not to gas them in the Holocaust?

In the end, the embrace of the middle is the position of the moral coward. Or as Jones puts it (p.57):

"The search for the middle is rooted in conflict avoidance and denial."

Going on to note that for too many Americans it is "painful" to accept there are actually racist and sexist knuckle draggers, homophobes and xenophobes in our midst.   Hence:

"Perhaps there is some way to look at this, some view from the middle - that would allow to communicate and realize a national identity is the tie that will bind us comfortably.. ."

Which is arrant twaddle because it suggests that "the fact we can't all get along is more significant than the issues over which we are sparring".  Thus, it will never ever come to being that I will "get along" with a climate denier because our views are 180 degrees opposite, and I believe the climate issue is one of national emergency, hell, global emergency..   I will also never get along with a racist, a white nationalist or Trumpie. No, I can't say I hate them like vermin rats- like wifey does -  but let's say I deplore them intensely.   There ain't no way I'd invite any of them to the Thanksgiving table.

All this is relevant after a recent NY Times op-ed in which we learn millions of Americans in the middle are now "tired of politics" - especially after the tumult of the midterms, and are tuning out.  We learn, for example:

"Most  Americans do not see their lives through a political lens, and when they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes."

This confirms what I've always suspected about the middle: they are simply not as well informed precisely because they are non-ideological and hence less politically engaged. Hence, they typify the kind of voter who'd cast a ballot for a presidential candidate  he "could have a beer with".  In other words, the bottom basement sort of decision framework.

Rather than being "rigid" the ideological, non-Middle voter has an orientation and vision.    It is ideology that gives one’s world and perceptions context and color. If you lack an ideology, as an old logic teacher once put it to me, then you will find yourself cast adrift and swayed by any and every meme, blabber or blowhard that might try to influence you. Of course, one always checks his ideology against reality, this is important! But one needs a central POV to make any sense of the world. This is  precisely the quality that those embracing the middle lack.

Anyway, the Times' piece cites a  study by a nonpartisan organization, More in Common,  that paints a picture of a society that is far more disengaged — and despairing over divisions — than it is divided.  The study itself was ostensibly conducted in an effort to understand the forces that drive political polarization, and surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans.

Of course, no formal study was needed to grasp the forces driving polarization and division, only common sense and logic.  Thus, if you believe babies from immigrants need to be grabbed and caged while I do not, then we instantly  have opposition - hence, division. There is no amount of modulation that will dilute or remove it.   Spread it over a large enough population - with separate segments holding these opposite views - and we have "polarization".  But that is a GOOD thing because: a) we don't want every manjack in the country believing infants ought to be caged and separated, and b) it isn't morally right - and can never be!

This also applies to a host of other "divisive' issues from climate change, to taxes, to voter suppression (such as recently happened to Stacy Abrams' voters in GA) and the nonsense claim of "voter fraud" by the Right. . In other words, there must be division and yes, polarization,  if a pronounced segment of the population embraces regressive  policies and comes into political power- Then it must be checked, lest that power metastasize, and we get an authoritarian state where the Constitution becomes just a piece of paper.. Similar to what happened in Germany in the 1930s  when all the "good Germans" grew dumb and numb as the Nazis took control over their nation.

Then, predictably, we read in the Times' piece:

"At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political middle that feels forgotten in the vitriol, as if the country has gone on without it. It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that represented two-thirds of the survey".

But these poor little exhausted folks seem to forget - or never processed- that political combat in the present circumstances is needed. Is "vitriol" necessary? Perhaps not, but let's say that it currently goes with the territory given how Dotard Trump is setting the direction and odious example for much of  it.  And as I've written before, so long as he's around and his lying, outrageous comments - and actions- are evident,  there will be hostile reaction from many of us and that will indeed become vitriolic on occasion.  Hey look, at least I don't depict Trump hanging by his orange neck in all my posts attacking him.   The article then quotes a 36-year-old home health care worker in Topeka, Kan., (Jamie McDaniel)  one of several people in the study  who was interviewed for this article:

“It feels very lonely out here,  Everybody is so right or left, and you’re just kind of standing there in the middle saying, “What happened?’”

What happened, in case you missed it, is that a Russian stooge traitor took over this country in the 2016 mis-election, and is driving this nation toward destruction with his violation of the Constitution and embrace of authoritarianism.  Now, we could all make nicey- nicey and sing kumbaya - but then we'd be like the good Germans who allowed the Nazis and Hitler to take over Germany. This we cannot allow, so we fight against the minority faction in our midst and their dictator -Fuhrer,   Herr Trump, aka Drumpf.   If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. Deal with it but don't stand there scratching your butt wondering 'what happened?' - that only confirms my belief of cluelessnness and ignorance.

McDaniel, sad to say, embodies the problem with too many Americans, as I've often observed:   that they are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics .  This is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". The 'Middle Mind' is a safe mental space where all the old verities are true. These are the tropes trotted out endlessly by our shameful politicos and news media to manipulate our consciousness, i.e.. we inhabit  the "land of the free" - never mind we have more people incarcerated than all the other nations together.  And we are the "land of opportunity"  never mind upward mobility has fallen steadily the past 3 decades leading to unbelievable levels of inequality."

Meanwhile, the media white washers seek to enshrine in the American people the political and historical memory of gnats. This is why politicos can play them over and over again, and why the targets never advance their insights as to what is happening to them and why. It is also why author Gore Vidal once referred to our nation as the "United States of Amnesia".   This is now evident in the "More in common" survey which conceivably could see more than half of Americans checking out for the crucial 2020 election - where we have the chance to finally ditch Trump in a legal fashion.  As 'Last Week Tonight' host John Oliver put it last night in reference to Trump and authoritarianism:

"The world is dabbling with something very dangerous right now, and America needs to be careful. Look, I know democracy can be often by design frustrating.  Checks and balances can be irritating and slow...but removing them opens the door to something much worse."

As for Tafari Jones, for him - as well as me - the choice is stark and never clearer:

Is the search for a misplaced "national unity" more important than our core values and  principles?   I.e. "is it more important we understand the motives of white nationalists or that we prevent them from terrorizing communities?"

At least for the people directly affected by the terror of white nationalists there is the sober recognition of no safety found in the "in between".  The rest of us need to grasp that too. 

See also:

Trump and American Authoritarianism

Winners And Losers After Net Neutrality Has Been Trashed

I've always maintained that net neutrality ought to be on the radar screen of any blogger or ordinary person that uses the net frequently. The reason is that its existence is crucial to sustaining quality of communication and also free speech.  If I was unable to get my blog up in an expeditious and timely manner, despite a particular topic (say quantum statistics) that may only be read by 10 people - believe me I wouldn't be doing this much longer. The headaches simply wouldn't be worth it. I do it now because I don't have to pay higher than normal costs to get my material published - whether educational or political opinion..

This elicits the question of why there would be those who seek to abolish net neutrality. Well, as with most arenas in our declining land, the major  Neoliberal moguls detest little guys having any say equal to their own- so hope to buy their way to faster internet speeds at the expense of the rest of us. Or to put it more bluntly, to perhaps eliminate the rest of us.

Who can forget the stirring and robust defense of net neutrality - as well as its explication - by John Oliver some months ago? The  segment can still be seen it at this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

Oliver argued the net in its current form was not broken, while noting the FCC was
pushing for a 'two tier' system.  Killing net neutrality would allow private companies to go into the fast lane leaving everyone else in the slow line. To get your streaming movies or shows then might take twice as long as it does now, while higher paying corporate entities and ISPs  like Comcast - could either afford to go into the fast lane or (in the case of ISPs) charge more to average Joes to use it.

.To refresh memories, the Obama FCC - to preserve net neutrality - ceased treating the internet as an unregulated information service- instead reclassifying it as a "telecommunications service". Thereby the FCC could assert authority to regulate the net as a utility under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Oliver was so energized at the prospect of the new FCC chairman (Ajit Pai) overturning the Obama FCC rules that he provided viewers with a rapid link to enter comments at the FCC - supposedly seeking them for 120 days: www.gofccyourself.com. 

Last week, the unthinkable transpired and Pai represented the tiebreaking vote to enable this travesty to pass. It behooves us then to look at winners and losers and also what the 3-2 decision means for free speech.

Led by Trump  toady Ajit Pai, the FCC is now set to spend the  coming months drafting new rules that, if implemented, will slow down the net considerably for any who use DL'ing, including streaming of videos (including for Netflix and Amazon services).  Pai, like other Trump -appointed hacks (Tom Price at HHS, out to destroy Medicare, Scott Pruitt at EPA, out to destroy that agency or weaken it to the point of uselessness) is convinced the Obama era rules adopted in 2015 have "harmed the internet" by retarding investment in broad band infrastructure. 

In other words net neutrality is a no-no because it represents the continuation of "heavy handed regulation which will chill investment in a service increasingly critical to life in American society".

According to Pai, mastering the lingo of Wall Street speak (WSJ, May 20, p. A11), the small ISPs are being left out of the market because they can't compete with the big boys. Pai claimed he "heard from 19 small, government -owned, municipal broadband providers" who insisted that Title II regs stood in the way of their further investment. In effect, depriving hundreds of thousands living in those municipalities of accessing new services and the small ISPs from deepening their networks.

In Pai's mind,  the basic error of too many on the left is thinking "there is a dichotomy between the consumer and the market". No, there isn't, given consumers help to define the market - but the market so formed has to be fair: not playing favorites. After all, the bible mantra of the capitalists is that the market works best when consumer choice is maximized. But it can't be if my net speed is only 1/4 as fast as that slobby looking Wyatt Koch - son of billionaire Bill Koch, eg.

Should that rich slob, just because he's rolling in inherited money,  have more right to higher web speeds (to sell his stupid rich man shirts)  because he can pay for them? Hell no!

 According to Pai (ibid.):

"To me, markets and market -oriented policies have delivered far more value to the consumer than pre-emptive regulation ever has."

If Pai's arguments were really sound why not first do all he and the FCC can to make all net speeds much higher as opposed to "comparable to Estonia" as John Oliver joked in his piece.  The reason is that Pai and his cronies want to slow net speeds down even more for the rest of us so that private entities, that can pay a lot more, get preferential treatment in the form of much greater speed, efficiency.

What about winners and losers in the coming debacle?

After the FCC released its plan in late November, well-known telecom and media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in a note to investors that the FCC plan dismantles “virtually all of the important tenets of net neutrality itself.”

That could result in phone and cable companies forcing people to pay more to do what they want online. The technology community, meanwhile, fears that additional online tolls could hurt startups who can’t afford to pay them — and, over the long term, diminish innovation.

Losers then will almost certainly include most millennials who consume their sports, news, entertainment via online streaming. They can expect speeds to slow to a snail's pace unless they pay more. Also affected will be those who do frequent youtube spots. With no net neutrality they will be relegated to the slow lane and take hours to upload even a five or ten minute video.   In 2007, for example, the Associated Press found Comcast was blocking or throttling some file-sharing. AT&T blocked Skype and other internet calling services on the iPhone until 2009. They also aren’t backing away from subtler forms of discrimination that favor their own services.

Of course, the deep pockets of Google, Netflix, Amazon may well be sufficient - provided their share prices remain high - to pay off ISPs to make sure consumers can access our service.

A far more likely target for loss is free speech.With this FCC ruling, corporations will have control over what content citizens can access on the internet. It could be as simple as Comcast blocking websites with negative comments on their service. Or it could be as sinister as an ISP blocking access to political content, news and writing that it opposes. Just think of it! Much of the content on this blog is highly controversial, for example the strong anti-Trump stance, and also to a degree the anti-conservative stance.

If you are a proponent of every American’s right to free speech, this should be frightening to the core. No company or corporation should be able to control what information we can consume, with a few exceptions, e.g. bomb- making manuals put out by terrorists. But no interested reader should be denied anti-Trump material such as often appears on this blog.

ISPs like Comcast have said they would never take it this far. But why do they even need the option? When Comcast is your only choice, what prevents them from extracting every penny possible from you and the online businesses that constantly inundate our lives?

This is exactly why many of us inveighed against the 1996 Telecommunications Act.  Writing in his book, The Problem of the Media, Robert McChesney had this to say (p. 51);

"The corruption in media policy making culminated in the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, arguably one of the most important pieces of U.S. legislation. The law rewrote the regulatory regime for radio, television, cable television, and satellite communication - indeed, all of electronic communication including the internet.

The operating premise of the law was that the new communications technologies - combined with increased appreciation for the genius of the market- rendered the traditional regulatory market moot.

The solution therefore was to lift regulations and ownership restrictions from commercial media and communication companies, and allow competition in the marketplace to develop, and reduce the government's role to that of protecting private property.

There was virtually no dissent whatsoever to this legislation from either party, the law sailed through both houses of congress, and was signed by a jubilant President Clinton in February, 1996. Corporate CEOs regarded it as their "Magna Carta"."

The preceding  lesson from McChesney ought to be a no-brainer for us now: not to be fooled again by the "deregulation is good for ya" banter. Fool us once, shame on them, fool us twice, shame on US.

So far, there have been hundreds of public protests against Pai’s plan and more than 1 million calls to Congress through a pro-net neutrality coalition’s site. Smaller tech websites such as Reddit, Kickstarter and Mozilla put dramatic overlays on their sites Tuesday in support of net neutrality. Twitter on Wednesday was promoting #NetNeutrality as a trending topic. Other big tech companies were more muted in their support.

Public-interest groups Free Press and Public Knowledge are already promising to go after Pai’s rules in the courts. There may also be attempts to legislate net neutrality rules, which the telecom industry supports. Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, on Tuesday called for “bipartisan legislation” on net neutrality that would “enshrine protections for consumers with the backing of law.”

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-morris/76842/to-save-the-internet-we-must-own-the-networks

Excerpt:

"Pai is dead wrong that this flurry of activity has been done to advance the public interest. Indeed, as one might expect from a man who once worked for telecom giant Verizon, Pai has directed an unprecedented abdication by the FCC of its responsibility to protect the public welfare. ...The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the oldest organization defending civil liberties in a digital age, warns that allowing ISPs to monitor and manipulate data makes the web more vulnerable to attacks....

Adding insult to injury, Pai’s FCC also halted enforcement of a rule demanding Internet providers “take reasonable measures to protect customer (personal information) from unauthorized use, disclosure or access."

And:

 http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/jacob-sugarman/76774/is-fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-a-closeted-alt-right-sympathizer