net neutrality and the "best of the web"

An image I recently found while using StumbleUpon:



First of all, this isn't an actual service being provided by any company; it's a satire of sorts.

This is probably the most important image in all of the Net Neutrality debate (please click to enlarge). It captures what advocates of Net Neutrality fear of the day when telecommunication companies are allowed to regulate which websites get to be on a higher "tier." Take note of the small print at the bottom.

There is nothing on the books right now that prevents a company from offering a "Best of the Web."

So what's the big deal about a "Best of the Web" plan anyway? If a company wants to offer this service, and if you only use about 45 of the biggest web sites on a monthly basis, what's the big deal? That's the free market at work!

The problem is this: If one company does it and finds it profitable, then another company will do it too. Then others will follow suite. Soon after, full internet access will seem silly to everyone when only the "best" web sites get fast access because those have the highest demand and need the bandwidth. The smaller websites will still be out there on the "full" internet, but crippled on a bandwidth level.

Right now, you experience the free internet, otherwise known as a "neutral" internet. No company, to our knowledge, shapes traffic based on how much a web site can pay. Customers get the speed they pay for, be in 56k modems, DSL, cable, or any other level of speed. When we start hearing about telco companies giving any sort of preferential treatment to some web sites in any way, we will then know that legislation to maintain the free internet is necessary.

buffet and the inheritance tax

From AlterNet.com:.

Billionaire Warren Buffett testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.

Buffett invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, established in 1916 during the Gilded Age to put a brake on anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power. "Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."

Buffet gets it. This taxation is needed as a means of preventing the rich from passing their throne down to their children, and then their grandchildren, and then their great grandchildren. In the past our culture knew of the risks of allowing too much private economic power to accumulate in the hands of the few; so many of us have lost that lesson.

Republican Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, complained that "the death tax" was "fundamentally wrong." Buffett responded that use of the phase "death tax" was "intellectually dishonest" and "clever, Orwellian and dead wrong."

Has Buffet been reading Lakoff? The theory is that the phrase "death tax" cuts out the reality of this taxation by putting the emphasis on taxation following death instad of taxation preceding inheritance.

who did cookie really call?

From ThinkProgress:

Last week, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that he will hold a hearing after Thanksgiving recess to investigate discrepancies between statements on Blackwater by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard and those of his brother. Howard Krongard’s lawyer has now written to Waxman and asked him to cancel the hearing. “There is no legitimate purpose to be gained by publicly pitting two brothers against each other,” Barbara Van Gelder wrote.

This is clearly just an early effort by Krongard's lawyer to put a spin of irrelevency on Waxman's investigation. If there is a discrepency where two individuals of such close ties are seen as possibly coordinating activities between private and public institutions for personal gain, there's simply no way it should be left uninvestigated.

Of course, assuming Waxman does the work of the people and invetsigates these clowns, we can expect that they're going to plead to plausible deniability. I'm willing to bet that if we looked into Howard "Cookie" Krongard's phone records, we'd find out that the call he made during a break in a congressional hearing was not to his brother, it was to his lawyer, and he was seeking pre-emptive advice on how to avoid go to prison.

olbermann on nbc

MediaBistro.com reports that Countdown with Keith Olbermann will be getting a tryout on NBC before a preseason Eagles vs. Steelers game. I can't wait for this and hope Olbermann does one of his infamous Special Comments to really set the tone for what people can expect on his show. There's so much for him to choose from as a topic-- everything from killing health care initiatives for kids to broad spying programs. The show with air on August 26 at 7 p.m.

e. coli conservatism in the news again

From the New York Times:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

So much for state rights. This is also a sign that the right wingers in the White House are going to do everything it can to prevent the expansion of healthcare, even as Americans demand it. It should be an interesting in '08, since every Democratic candidate is going to be talking about healthcare.

(h/t to C&L)

democrat[ic] party

As someone who believes language is central to winning political campaigns, I'm dismayed that the phrase "Democrat Party" is now becoming more common in the mainstream media. This phrase has been commonplace for conservative talk radio for years, but its now being pushed heavily into mainstream, and if the Democratic party wants to maintain its identity, it would counter this tactic.

What the language shift does is rob democrats of their entire platform: that they stand for democratic principles; it's an effort by the right wing to lay claim to the one thing democrats all over the world stand for: democracy. We've heard countless political speeches by the right about creating democracy in the Middle East (when we all know they're probably going to be closer to corporate fascist states, but that's besides the point) and the destruction of the term democratic to describe the Democratic Party. Conservatives are now trying to claim they're the party of democracy.

I've begun tracking the proliferation of the term "Democrat Party" along with "America" by searching for it on google. As of today, there are about 897,000 entries. Watch for this number to go up if the left doesn't counter the "Democrat Party" shite. I'll update this number some time in the future.

the institution of torture

I just got done reading most of the RAWSTORY interview with a former detainee of Guantanamo bay. I can't really say that anything in the account shocked me. We've known about all of this for literally years now.

But whenever I think about things like torture and anything with government or political implications, I try to find an conservative point of view to examine what I'm reading and have it make better sense from their perspective. I know there are people out there who know every bit of information that I know about the torture and abuse of American detainees, and that they still approve of it.

There has to be a reasonable justification for supporting torture. Are conservatives so afraid of being attacked again that they approve of anything that makes them feel powerful enough to bear the burdon of the realisation that America will most likely be attacked one day? Are these things that make them feel better about their position in the world completely arbitrary when considered along with the larger picture, the entire worldview?

I believe conservatives simply feel good about torturing detainees. It raises sentiments of security in knowing that people different than them are feeling pain and suffering, and it doesn't go much deeper than that. They justify their blind hatred and bigotry with stories about bombs in city squares, and how torture is the only way we can find those bombs; this gives their bigotry cover.

Torture has become an institution for the right wing of American politics. It's a right wing tradition, reborn. They want pain and suffering of their perceived enemies (even though this status is questionable among many American detainees) just like how older regimes wanted to see criminals drawn and quartered in public. If you stop torturing detainees, it would be like taking a security blanket away from right wingers.

One day we can only hope torture supporters will see their bloodlust not as the reaction of a rational reaction to an enemy, but for what it really is. The civilised among us will have to excuse them for their additude... they simply got caught up in their fear, their bloodlust, and their emotional and irrational attachment to the institution of torture.

"Why is it that when marriage or sex comes up, the Republicans always bring up sex with animals? Normal people do not think about sex with animals this often."

-JoshA on a RAWSTORY comments section.

What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?

I just found this excellent essay from a student or perhaps a teacher at UCLA...

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

It even gets into how conservatism works, and how conservatism can be defeated. Frigging well worth the lengthy read, which I haven't done yet in its entirity.. I'll pull out more exerpts as I have time.

ExxonMobil chair, CEO to NBC: No 'help' is on the way

I recently read this article on RAW STORY. An interview with the Exxon/Mobile chair and CEO Rex Tillerson, where the guy says exactly what people have needed to hear for a long time:

"We work for the shareholder," Tillerson told the anchor. "And the investors who own our stock are over 2 million individual Americans and a lot of pension plans, a lot of teacher retirement plans. And our job is to go out and make the most money for those people so that their pensions are secure, so that they see the benefits of our work."

That pretty much sums it up, folks. That's a right wing corporatist ideology being explained in its purest form. Corporations, and their corporatists pals in Washington on both sides of the aisle, cannot and will not do anything that takes away from profit.

In fact, I don't want a corporation that I'm invested in to act as a social player. It isn't what it's there for, and I acknowledge that. I may sometimes sound like I'm 100% anti-corporate, but I'm not. The corporation exists primarily to make me and other investors money, and that's all it should be expected to do.

The concept of a corporation sounds great in theory. A bunch of people get together and decide they want to make money with their money, and they want it to be with limited liability for any negative actions that occur. It's a beautiful thing, really. I can invest my money, and the only thing that I'll ever have to worry about is losing that money. Compare that to investing in say, the mob, where if someone I know owes money, and dies, I can have a horse head put into my bed until I pay back the money that someone I know owes.

So I don't hate a corporation simply for making money; that's not the point.

What we, as human beings, have to do is make sure those corporations don't go hog-wild trying to make money for us. I may be happy about the money I'm raking in from Corporation-X, but if Corp-X is doing things that are harmful to me or the environment I live in, that's a fucking issue isn't it? All things end up coming back to you in the end, and you have to live with the repercussions of the actions that your preferred corporations take in persuit of your personal gain.

Oversight and regulation is a requirement.

I don't care how it gets done, just as long as it gets done. If you're one of those goofballs that thinks the worse way to do it is to have a centralized government take care of this for us, then show me a better way. Personally, I like the accountability of government regulation. Like this situation we're seeing right here with the high gas prices. There's great concern all over the country that these prices are being achieved by these companies through price gouging, meaning these companies are collaborating (albeit extremely loosely, I can only assume..) and driving up the cost of gasoline.

Now, I don't know if it's really happening. But you're seeing some people in congress calling for investigations into the matter. I'm cynical enough to say that it's only happening on the right side of the aisle because of election year pressures, but that's my point entirely. Since gas prices are hitting people so hard, and people don't want to be screwed over so heavily for such an essensial resource, we look to those we've elected to make sure we're not being screwed. And if they aren't going to act in our interest, then we make sure we find someone that will.

And if you're about to e-mail me and tell me that I'm some big government liberal type, just save yourself some time and effort and simply write "BIG GOVERNMENT LIBERALS SUCK" in the topic of the e-mail and send it with no body whatsoever. I've heard your argument a million times before, and it never, ever impresses me.