I try not to write much about Michelle Obama because her preening mendacity hits me like Laurence Olivier torturing Dustin Hoffman with a dental drill in The Marathon Man, but worse, because Obama expects applause for it.
But her latest viral video provides such perfect context to discuss Barack Obama's corruption that we have to give her at least a brief mention. My PJ Media colleague Matt Margolis has the full report on Michelle — Michelle Obama Said Something Really Racist Again — but I saw less racism and more of that progressive lecture-pandering she's so famous for.
The clip is just Mrs. Obama giving a "be mindful" lecture to three nodding gal-pals about buying their high-priced couture from designers of color, about favoring black-owned businesses. "If I hear of someone whose fashion I like and I know they're a person of color, I try to make it a point," she said. "I think we can all do some work to think about that balance in our wardrobe."
"I think if you have the money to buy from Chanel, then you have the money to buy everybody."
Um... phrasing!
But we're here to talk about Barack, because there's money and then there's money, and it's vital to understand how the Obamas got the lucre to "buy everybody." Because let me tell you this much before we get into the filthy details: It was not from a black-owned business Michelle insists she buys from.
One of Barack Obama's pet projects was a little something called Net Neutrality, and when Trump ended it early during his first term, it literally murdered everybody who had miraculously survived his tax cuts.
But the point is that, starting with House of Cards, a little non-black-owned firm called Netflix was poised for explosive growth. Without going too deep into the woods on an old issue, from 2013 (House of Cards launch) to 2015, the 11–15% of Americans streaming Netflix sucked down 30–37% of peak-hour bandwidth — while paying the same flat rate as everyone else.
One solution might be that internet service providers (ISPs) could charge Netflix extra during peak hours. I like that solution, because it incentivizes ISPs to build more bandwidth. Netflix could either eat the charges or pass it along to their customers who were using all that bandwidth. Or ISPs could throttle Netflix's streaming quality — and here's where things got tricky — without throttling the quality of the streamers they operated, like Comcast-owned NBCUniversal.
When a politician like Barack Obama sees a situation like that, he sees opportunity. But stick a pin in that thought for a moment.
What ended up happening was a bit of both. Netflix got throttled, but then paid out a few tens of millions to the ISPs to build out more bandwidth.
The company called the costs "immaterial" to its bottom line, but they were anything but. Those fees created the bandwidth that kept Netflix's streaming quality at levels consumers would pay for in ever-increasing numbers.
However, Netflix founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings — a big-money Obama donor and frequent White House visitor — continued his extremely vocal support for Net Neutrality, which eventually forbid deals like that one. "Bits are bits," and under Net Neutrality, ISPs couldn't charge more for this bit (Netflix's) than they did for that bit (Nana's latest LOLcat post on Facebook). Even though Netflix was using trillions more bits.
Now, I'm old-school internet (the first few months I was on the internet, I didn't even know it was called that), so the idea of net neutrality appeals to the nostalgic purist in me. The internet was created to treat all bits equally, and "bits are bits" is baked into my online DNA since the '80s.
But times changed. Net Neutrality might have been a tenable position in 2007, when Obama first got behind it — although I'd argue it was also unneeded — but by the time video streaming entered its explosive growth phase, neutrality was no longer possible.
Yet Obama remained a yuge proponent of Net Neutrality going into his second term, railing against "gatekeepers deciding which sites you get to access." But it was never about Comcast blocking you from visiting VeryNaughtySite.com. It was about Netflix and Netflix subscribers getting a free ride — and how to locate the grift.
Net Neutrality allowed Netflix to accelerate subscriber growth even faster, at zero cost to Netflix, Netflix shareholders, or Netflix subscribers.
Nice work if you can get it, and Netflix got it courtesy of Barack Obama.
If the Obama administration had suggested an anti-trust or regulatory fix to the bandwidth problem — for example, not allowing ISPs to operate streaming services — that, I could have gotten behind. But that isn't what Obama did.
Those interconnection fees helped build the bandwidth Netflix needed to dominate. Yet Hastings kept cheerleading Net Neutrality anyway. Funny how that works when you're the one using all the bits, and how nice it is when you have a friend in the White House staffing the FCC with people like Chairman Tom Wheeler, who favored (and eventually imposed) Net Neutrality by bureaucratic fiat.
Net Neutrality ended in 2017, but the world didn't — the internet apocalypse never arrived, and Netflix kept streaming in 4K bliss.
In 2018, safely out of office, the Obamas landed a multi-year Netflix production deal reportedly worth at least $50 million (according to various sources like the New York Post), through Higher Ground Productions, churning out award bait nobody streams.
This was one of the most visible examples of post-office windfall politics in modern history, and hardly anyone blinked.
I mean, look at the virtually unwatched content Higher Ground Productions made:
- American Factory (2019 Oscar-winning documentary)
- Crip Camp (2020 Oscar nominee)
- Becoming (2020 Michelle Obama documentary)
- Exit West (upcoming scripted series)
- Rustin (2023 film on civil rights leader Bayard Rustin)
- Leave the World Behind (2023 apocalyptic thriller)
If you hadn't heard of those, you aren't alone — neither had I, and I'm paid to follow this stuff. But the Obamas certainly took home enough Netflix money to "buy everyone."
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