BY RICHARD WILSON, The Washington Inquisitor
Rep. Zoe Lofgren is one of the most powerful members of Congress — and she finds herself at the center of the most explosive sex scandal in American history. In the view of many in elite Washington circles, Lofgren is quickly becoming known as the woman who decided to sell America’s children to internet predators. She took huge sums of money from the industry, and she has dutifully thwarted any attempt to regulate it in ways that protect children.
More than any other member of Congress, the global sex trafficking epidemic is a result of Lofgren’s unwillingness to regulate the industry. As the ranking member of the Science and Technology Committee and the second most senior member of the Judiciary Committee, it’s squarely Lofgren’s responsibility to oversee the tech industry’s abuses. In fact, Lofgen is the Chair of both the Internet Subcommittee and the Antitrust Subcommittee. She is the crux of Big Tech’s strategy to prevent the enforcement of antitrust laws, in defense of the monopoly positions that they enjoy in their respective markets.
But as the Chair of the Courts Subcommittee, Chair of the Refugee Subcommittee, and Chair of the Border Security Subcommittee, Lofgren’s culpability for the explosive growth of sex trafficking.
In recent years, junior members of the House have been trying to protect children from rising rates of bullying, depression, and youth suicide that have been badly exacerbated by the emergence of social media products that are proliferating — and being marketed primarily to children. For decades, grieving parents have been calling on Congress to protect children from social media platforms, but those cries have fallen on deaf ears, until recently.
An energetic and idealistic Tribal Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the people aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay Area, is challenging Lofgren in California’s federal primary on March 5th — and she hasn’t been shy to draw contrasts with the 30-year incumbent.
On the campaign trail, Charlene Concepción Nijmeh has been urgently calling on Congress to protect children on the internet and reign in the tech industry’s exploitation of children. More than $2 billion of Meta’s revenue each year is derived from advertising that targets children under the age of 11.
Nijmeh has been rallying parents around a slew of legislative objectives, like requiring all internet pornography to be paywalled, so that it is not readily and freely available to minors. The ban on free pornography would, ironically, also benefit adult performers who would be able to more easily unionize and demand workforce protections.
Other legislative objectives are more controversial. Nijmeh wants to require parental consent for minors to download any social media applications on smartphones and user-friendly parental controls that allow parents constant surveillance access to their children’s social media accounts.
Parents have responded positively, even earnestly, to Nijmeh’s policy proposals. Perhaps the most well-received is a ban on the marketing of tech products to minors unless they have been tested and received the approval of a consumer protection agency modeled on the Food and Drug Administration. Nijmeh has likened Big Tech’s exploitation of children to that of Big Tobacco.
Lofgren’s culpability has stunned her constituents, who are still grappling with the troubling revelations, many of which have become evident only recently — as the prospect of Lofgren’s reelection has deeply unsettled parents of young children.
If the Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives, Lofgren will become the Chairwoman of the Science, Technology, and Space Committee, which regulates the powerful Silicon Valley tech titans who lavish campaign contributions on her. She has taken more money from Big Tech than anyone else in Congress. Making optics worse, her daughter — Sheila Zoe Lofgren Collins — keeps landing wildly lucrative positions with tech giants who, perhaps coincidentally, are also her mother’s largest campaign contributors.
“Lofgren’s daughter should publicly disclose the full range of her compensation, benefits, and perks that she receives from Google and other Big Tech industry sources that her mother regulates as Ranking Member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee,” insists Carlos Ramirez, a 32-year-old homeless man living in Coyote Creek until recent rains.
In 2011, Lofgren voted against the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act, despite being on the floor of the House during the vote. That legislation passed overwhelmingly, with the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The victims of sex trafficking have not been a priority for Lofgren, who voted against the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (2/27/17).
Because Lofgren takes so much money from the tech industry and has been in elected office for 44 years, critics say that she has grown numb to the suffering caused by her corruption. In her view, she is merely supporting the local industry and will defend their profits for obvious regional economic motives — the consequences to America’s children be damned.
Lofgren is so beholden to the tech industry that she voted to reverse a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to protect the privacy of customers of broadband and other telecommunications services. She is a big part of the reason that Americans pay the highest prices for cable and internet in the world. She voted against the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act.
Critics in the district have been calling on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to probe Lofgren’s ties to those job offers, and legal billings that greatly benefited the firm of John Collins, Lofgren’s husband.
Human trafficking is the fastest-growing organized crime activity in the United States. An estimated 250,000 children per year are victims of sex trafficking. Most older children are trafficked while still going to school and living at home. According to The International Labour Organization, there are approximately 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally. That’s well over the size of California’s population. Of these millions of victims, 25% are children, 75% are female, and 81% are trapped in some form of forced labor.
The 24.9 million people exploited for forced labor include those caught in one of the most common forms of trafficking: sex trafficking. Women and girls are overwhelmingly affected by exploitation of this sort, making up 99% of victims in the commercial sex industry. While human trafficking affects victims of all ages, children are especially vulnerable. About one out of seven endangered runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2017 were likely child sex trafficking victims.
editor@washingtoninquisitor.com
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