When Abraham Lincoln referred to “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” how many of those people was he talking about? Perhaps the top 1%?<\/p>\n
By the ethical standards of today’s Congress, that would practically make our 16th President a Communist. After all, given our nation’s current population, the top 1% is an awful lot of people — about 3.26 million. Asking the government to care about such a huge number of the unwashed masses would be crazy. Although admittedly those 3.26 million one-percenters are slightly better washed than the other 99%.<\/p>\n
So maybe Lincoln meant the top 1% of the top 1%. But that too seems wildly generous. We’re still talking about 32600 people. I mean, has anyone in Congress even met<\/i> 32600 people?<\/p>\n
If you’re going to talk about legislation that benefits a meaningful group of U.S. citizens, you need to tone it down. Our nation’s laws should benefit at most a few hundred people, right? After all, that’s a manageable number — roughly the number of individuals who own significantly large shares of stock in our nation’s Telecom companies.<\/p>\n
Yesterday our Congress passed a bill to honor Lincoln’s famous statement, with suitable adjustments.<\/p>\n
Until one day ago, you legally owned your personal digital data. As soon as our current president signs this bill (which he strongly supports), you won’t. Somebody else will.<\/p>\n
What used to be the digital portion of your personal wealth — which can translate into potential earning power — will now pretty much be owned by just a few hundred people. In particular, your data will mainly be owned by the small group of individuals who have significantly large ownership shares in Telecom stock.<\/p>\n
What about the other roughly 325,870,000 people who currently reside in these United States? I think the message from the Congressional majority was extremely clear on that point: We can all go fuck ourselves.<\/p>\n
By the way, I am typing this in a Tor Browser<\/a>, which I switched to this morning. It stops a Telecom provider from being able to collect and then sell all of my browsing data.<\/p>\n Tor is a free download which works on all computers, and I highly recommend it. Such privacy-protecting browsers are still legal, but who knows how long the Congressional majority (and their extremely wealthy and generous donors) will tolerate that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Abraham Lincoln referred to “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” how many of those people was he talking about? Perhaps the top 1%? By the ethical standards of today’s Congress, that would practically make our 16th President a Communist. After all, given our nation’s current population, the top 1% is … Continue reading “The top 0.0001%”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18567"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18587,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18567\/revisions\/18587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}