The FCC's Trolls: Making money by chopping you up for sale.

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Kevin Martin is a name you should get to know. He looks harmless, even as a troll. But he isn't. He is going to cost you huge chunks of money and significant portions of your freedom. Kevin Martin is the Bush Troll presently overseeing the sale of stolen property at the Federal Communications Commission.

Perhaps you are too young to remember when television came only over the airways. Starting in the 50s you received programs on the set you bought and placed prominently in the living room. After all, you wanted people to know you could afford it. Programming was innovative; television ads were blatant but you wanted those, too, because programming did not last that many hours a day.

Costs: The Set (It probably sat in a glossy wooden box. It might even coordinate with your furniture. Sort of.) and the electric power. Everyone knew that the airways belonged to the people, held in trust by the Federal Communications Commission.

How things have changed. And how they are going to change. You can't even imagine.

That television your parents bought in the 50s is more sophisticated today. It is also more expensive and probably connects to programming via a cable service for which you pay amounts of money ranging from around $40.00 a month up into a couple of hundred. This will vary, depending on what extras you decide you can't do without.

Did you ever ask yourself why you can't just climb up on the roof and put up an antenna? Of course, you may live in one of those new postage stamp housing developments that do not allow anything so completely déclassé. That story belongs in another article. See ?. But getting the cable turned on today is just like getting the electricity and water. Now, that should give you pause. Look for other stories on the Bush Trolls.

Television started as analogue. In 2010 you, and all of us, will be forced to move over to digital technology. The premise under which this is taking place is solemn opinings on the quality and efficiency of digital over analogue. That is true. But that does not translate into the transferral of this God-given resource into the grasping, sweaty hands of corporations who intend to charge you for what was once free, paid for by advertising. They call if privatization but that is bogus. To privatize would be to bring something back into the control of ordinary individuals. This is corporatization masquerading as something that was once respectable. If you reconsider the word, “privatization,' you will see this redefinition has been going on for a long time. This interpretation is more pirate the private.

Here is their business model: Subscribe to what should be free so the Grid Corporations can make trillions. The Bushes will doubtless get a percentage. They call this blood money. Any Senator of Congressman who supports this must be removed from office. Target them for removal and then for accountability. Wireless mobility alliance.

You are being urged to buy, buy, buy the new technologies. They sound sexy and exciting. This will be a whole new infrastructure. High definition, plasma, wireless, interlaced, and the gadgets to go with them. You pay and then you will never stop paying.


Today significant amounts of the content come cost free to those who provide the programming you pay for. Much of that comes from your tax dollars – but they still insert advertising, giving them yet another profit center.

No one invented the air ways. They exist not through any human agency but, like us, through the complex nature of the universe. The idea writing law, The Communications Act of 1934, passed by Congress, was to regulate the use of this resource and ensure it was forever guaranteed for the use of the people. Today the airways are being auctioned off and someone, not you or me, rest assured, is making an enormous profit and creating the means for ensuring a perpetual stream of income. We don't get any of that, either.

The development of the technology that is being applied to make the airways usable was, in part, developed privately. Gugliellmo Marconi changed the world we live in at 12:30 pm December 12th 1901. The message was in Morse code click – click click or ‘S.’ The transmission was picked up by Marconi and George Kemp at a receiver station at signal hill on the Newfoundland coast.

The original analogue technology would be in large part privately funded. But the digital technology that is replacing it came from tax dollars. We own it and it is far better.

Analogue is a light bulb. Digital is a laser pointer. Analogue causes interference and feed back. It catches harmonics and wanders into other channels. Digital is pure, crisp and right on the money. In the worst case you can get ten times the number of channels with digital. But in the best case you get 100. It is worth trillions of dollars in potential income if you can pull off the transfer of wealth, taking what belongs to all of us and selling it for a few shekels to the hungry maw of greedy grid corporations. The Bush people can only sell it as long as they control the government so that has to happen now.

That answers the question of why is this administration is working so fast to sell a resource that belongs to all of us. Remember those pallets of money that disappeared on their way to Iraq? Remember Silverado and Neal Bush? This is how the Bush family makes a living. But they can't do all the stealing themselves; too much like work. So they get trolls like Kevin to do it for them.

They are setting us up, forcing us to subscribe to what is free. They are licensing their buddies to impose a business model to make trillions. The Bushes have doubtless ensured they will get a percentage. Check out those in Congress, too. Any Senator of Congressman who supports this must be removed from office. The need to be targeted for removal and then for accountability.

Take another look at Chairman Troll Martin. Now that you understand what he is really doing he doesn't look so harmless, does he?

We can remove them all. We can take our country back. We can assert accountability. Then the Gang of Trolls and Bush can get jobs at MacDonalds. Jail is too good for them.
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Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is the grand-daughter of Arthur C. Pillsbury Home. AC, as the family calls him, invented the first circuit panorama camera as his senior project at Stanford in 1896 while majoring in Mechanical Engineering. His highly credentialed senior advisor told him not to bother to try building it. Such an approach was impossible. AC built it. It worked. He left college and went to the Yukon, using the camera to record the opening of the mining fields. In 1906 he used the camera to take this photo of the San Francisco and Fire. That disaster, less serious than the one now facing Americans, moved AC to begin a life long work of creating the means for individuals to see the world as it really is. In 1912 he built the first lapse-time camera to save the wildflowers in Yosemite. In 1927 he built the first microscopic motion picture camera to show scientists and all of us the dynamic, living world beyond their scope of vision. That was following in 1929 by the X-ray motion picture camera and the underwater motion picture camera.


She has been studying the market and economics through the filter of politics and anthropology for twenty years. She began her studies because it became clear to her that those in positions of power were much like her grandfather's senior advisor.

Her political blog is at How the NeoCons Stole Freedom.

She is presently working on a book titled, "Climbing Off the Grids to Freedom in One Easy Lesson."