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Net Neutrality: Lobbyist McCurry Raises Ire
BBCWatcher writes "Mike McCurry, former Clinton Administration Press Secretary turned telecommunications industry lobbyist, reacts to his many new critics in the battle over Net Neutrality: "There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations," he said, "and I think every time we bash corporations, we just turn off people who are in the middle of the political spectrum." Among others, top political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga responded swiftly to McCurry's latest assertions: "What a dishonest piece of sh[..] McCurry has become. This is an anti-corporatist jihad, is it? Is that why we are aligned with Microsoft, Google, and eBay? And when did the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America join the 'left'? What a pathetic attempt to marginalize those of us working for net neutrality....McCurry is now a sad, sad, pathetic man.""
Plenty of democrats are paid by corporations. But the unions continue to contribute a heck of a lot, as well as other groups who aren't great fans of corporate power. There's no reason for democrats to shy away from criticising corporations just because corporations fund some Dems, and some middle-of-the-roaders aren't opposed to corporation-bashing. OTOH, the reflexive bash-the-corporation responses that some Dems exhibit (and Republicans too - espc over oil prices, where "price gouging" - aka charging what the market will bear - gets screamed each time the gas price rises due to exogenous factors) do not make them seem very credible. It's hard to trust people who have routine scapegoats; it suggests they don't think enough.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
"There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations,"
Yup, by his definition they are "good".. By the rest of us they are paid off hooligans trading personal wealth and power for our freedoms and rights, and our freedoms and rights are a no cost giveaway for these guys.
Good is a relative term and it has been proven for thousands of years that those in power have a very different view of good and evil than the rest of the population.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Kox piece has useful, good info in it. Give it a read. W quotes Jesus; that doesn't make him (W) God, though.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
No comrade the Dailykos is a counterrevolutionary reactionary blog. Clearly his allignment with politically recidivist elements shows he is nothing but a tool of control for the masses. Clearly you should be modded flamebait for making a statement so devoid of observable evidence.
#1. Yes, DailyKos is a Democratic site. But at the same time, the DKos community is pretty much committed to lessening the influence of a whole wide variety of interest groups from the political process and increasing the power that the individual citizen has, on both sides of the aisle. From Unions straight through to Corporations.
#2. Generally speaking, wider "left" political blogsophere supports net neutrality very strongly. And the reason for that, is actually a traditionally centrist viewpoint, namely in order to maximize the effect and forces of a free and open market. Eliminating net neutrality is a great threat to putting a full stop to innovation in business and technology on the internet. It stops new players and technologies from taking those first baby steps out.
You have one area of business with high barriers to entry and a few companies, and you have another area of business with much lower barriers to entry and new companies forming every day?
Which is the important one to protect here?
I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that quotes like "What a dishonest piece of sh[..] McCurry has become." do nothing but make you look like your foaming at the mouth. If you read the rest of that bloggers post (another slashdot member posted it above) you'll really see my point. Argument is good, but uncontrolled and uncensored anger will never be taken seriously in politics.
Of course I agree with this blogger, but I don't think he is doing our cause any good by spouting off like this. On Slashdot we always poke fun at corporate bigwigs with anger issues(look at Steve Balmer), why should bloggers be any different. That said, I of course agree with net neutrality like anybody in their right mind would... unless of course they work for said corporations.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Article text via bugmenot:
WASHINGTON -- Former White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry is no stranger to well-aimed political attacks. After all, he held down the briefing room podium for Bill Clinton during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a task he compared to being a "human pinata."
He was called "a stonewalling administration mouthpiece" who "perfected a plethora of dodges" and "was a master at speaking with charm, wit, self-deprecation and ease -- yet saying nothing."
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But even McCurry admitted surprise at the verbal shellacking he's received on the Internet lately. More shocking to McCurry is the end of the political spectrum doing most of the name calling: his traditionally supportive left.
It's all because of his latest job working for AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp. and some other communications companies to shape public opinion on perhaps the most controversial aspect of telecom legislation moving through Congress.
"I've faced far worse in the past," McCurry said of the criticism. "Although the bad names I got called were from the other side."
McCurry is co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, a group arguing against so-called Net neutrality rules -- federal regulations preventing phone and cable companies from charging extra to zip some high-bandwidth services through their wires faster than others.
The group is squarely in the middle of a brewing battle over the issue against big Internet companies, such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. With many congressional Democrats and liberal bloggers supporting Net neutrality, McCurry finds himself opposing his historical allies.
In a highly charged election year, McCurry has been branded a turncoat, a Democratic Jedi lost to the dark side at a time of looming crisis across the Internet.
The intense and personal flogging -- partly provoked by McCurry's sharp responses -- shows how contentious Net neutrality has become for some Internet users.
He's been called a "sellout" and "stooge," a purveyor of "dishonest hackery" and "classic flack misdirection," and an "industry sock puppet."
"I think people are reacting not just to the issue but to their disdain for a top-tier Democrat shilling in such an overt way for big-money interests," said David Sirota, a liberal political blogger and author of "Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government -- and How We Take It Back."
McCurry said the response to his new job demonstrated the "constant jihad" of 21st century politics and the ongoing struggle between the liberal and centrist wings of the Democratic Party.
"There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations," he said, "and I think every time we bash corporations, we just turn off people who are in the middle of the political spectrum."
McCurry is one of those Democrats.
After leaving the White House in 1998, McCurry became a partner at Public Strategies Group in Washington, developing communications strategies for corporate and nonprofit clients.
He signed on earlier this year with a coalition of telecommunications companies battling an effort by large Internet companies to get Congress to pass rules that would outlaw any preferential treatment of data over the Internet.
Some phone company executives want to charge extra to guarantee fast and reliable delivery of video and other data-heavy applications.
As word spread of McCurry's role, bloggers started ripping him.
Last month, McCurry ripped back.
"On Net neutrality, I feel like screaming 'puh-leeeze,' " he wrote on the Huffington Post, where he sometimes blogs. "The Internet is not a free public good. It is a bunch of wires and switches and connections and pipes and it is creaky."
He slammed his critics for "worshipping" Vint Cerf, a co-founder of the Internet and now a Google executive who has testified to Congress about the need for Net neutrality rules. McCurry said Cerf had "a clear
Seems to me that Daily Kos is a website that's brought up quite frequently in Slashdot (political) stories these days, many times for an opinionated view. Why is this the case and not with, let's say - Redstate? I know that Kos is a reader of Slashdot, but I don't think that has anything to do with it.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
C'mon, folks: the words "press secretary" are simply code for "weasel." Anyone who thinks otherwie -- and mind you, this is totally regardless of party affiliation -- is being silly. The one and only press secretary for whom I hold any respect is Reagen's, one Jim Brady. During the assassination attempt, he was shot in the head, with substantial brain damange. The work he's done to control the unfettered access to handguns is nothing short of remarkable; he and his wife are to be commended. All other press secreteries are simply PR figureheads, who never -- not ever -- present their own views, if, indeed, they even have any. (A fine and juicy movie that deals with similar people is Thank You for Smoking. See it.)
One of the big mistakes of the Net Neutrality discussion is that is has boiled down to a Legislation v No Legislation battle.
If you take away the legislation part of this discussion I'm not sure that the lefties and free market guys wouldn't swap positions on Net Neutrality.
The push for legislation has steered this discussion more than the issue itself.
Past Hundred years ???
Clintons surplus was non existent (see counting social security taxes as income and not counting the debt). The last real surplus was under Eisenhower and had a Republican congress.
National unemployment rate at 4.7 percent or full employment, gotta enjoy that decline.
Sir despite the above I will concede you the debate for I am crippled in that I argue from facts.
Who the hell modded this insightful? Anyone who uses the phrase "liberal left," and then calls Slashdot a "party," is anything but insightful. This doesn't rise above an ideological thumbing of the nose, with all the insights that entails.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
A lot of the network neutrality supporters don't even understand the issue at all. Take this for example, where the NYT and a lot of bloggers think of this as an attack on the web, as though telecoms really want to block off websites instead of regulate bandwidth to things that are going to consume terabytes or more of bandwidth like hi-def video services.
The approach that would work best for assuaging free speech concerns is to beef up common carrier laws. Extend common carrier status laws to the point that any ISP or telecom that blocks legal speech in the United States loses all common carrier protection through every service it provides. Yes, make it a legal corporate death penalty statute so that the MPAA and RIAA can literally sue Verizon into irrecoverable bankrupcy through the DMCA if they start playing speech king-maker.
And here's the funny thing about the "democracy" angle. When domain names were "democratically" controlled, they were much more expensive than they are today. Democracy sucks ass at allocating resources compared to a competitive free market. I'll take my chances with the market over protections for either side, thank you.
What a dishonest piece of shit McCurry has become....McCurry is now a sad, sad, pathetic man. Completely stripped of all goodwill he had built over the years....McCurry, lying sack of shit that he has become....
Don't hold back on the character assassination there Markos. However, if you read through his blog post it seems to be pretty well deserved. McCurry does seem to have run out of arguments on the issue in question and is now resorting to "Well, these people must just be anti-corporation lefties", somewhat ignorant of the fact that many corporations are seriously against all this. It would be hugely detrimental to Google
"The internet has always had rules. One of those rules is that even if you own a pipe, you're not allowed to tell people what they can put through that pipe. You can't block web sites, you can't say 'don't stream video', and you can't dictate what people and can't say. You do have to pay for the pipe you use; Google pays millions a month on one end, and millions of consumers pay smaller amounts ($20-$60) a month on the other. But no one can tell you what you can do with those pipes. It's very much the opposite of cable TV. There are no gatekeepers, and that's by design. This has created a highly competitive marketplace."
This is the way the internet works, and even if the Telcos get what they want the internet will definitely not work like this. There is simply no other way. It will simply collapse and people will bypass the telcos and go their own way, or the internet in the US certainly would be non-existant for most ordinary citizens while other countries surge ahead. Anyway, one can see why the telcos are reacting badly because in the long-run they are simply on a hiding to nothing, but it really doesn't matter one bit how much they spend. The only certainty in life and in business is change.
What youre saying is correct but wrong. Youre proposals would increase a sites availibility on the network in general but it does nothing if the end of the pipe decides to shake you down for your lunch money.
Well that was news
According to Congressional Budget Office (reported by Reuters in 2004, you can probably find the graph if you search for it), the only president that has had any significant budget surplus since 1963 was Bill Clinton. And if you want to argue that Clinton's budget surplus wasn't real, then the figures for the Republican presidents are even more disastrous than they were reported to be.
The Republican pattern of fiscal irresponsibility and anti-growth policies is also illustrated at the state level: there is a huge net flow of funds from Democratic states to Republican states.
Republicans like to talk a lot about growth and fiscal responsibility, but in reality, what Republicans primarily deliver is handouts to the rich, bloated government, and restrictions on personal freedoms.
It would be nice to have true conservative government: government that is frugal, government that respects traditional liberties, and government that limits its own size and scope; unfortunately, Republicans are the antithesis of that. The problem with Republican rhetoric isn't even that their criticism of Democrats is wrong, it's that they themselves are even worse.
Really? Did we need more proof of how corrupt our government is, do our politicians actually have to stand up and flat out say they are corrupt now and act proud of the fact that they are all in the pay of various corporate interests and not doing squat in the interests of the People?
"There are millions and millions of good Democrats who get paid by corporations," he said, "and I think every time we bash corporations, we just turn off people who are in the middle of the political spectrum."
Oh, speaking as a Demcorat, I can agree that it's a bad thing to "bash" corporations, provided that by "bash" you mean "persecute in an arbitrary and unreasonable manner."
However,it's profoundly against what it means to be a Democrat to call it "bashing" just because you aren't doing what an individual corporation or cartel would like. What it means to be a Demcorat is to belive that the government is the custodian of the public good, as measured by the effect on the welfare and freedom on a typical person. Sometimes this means standing in the way of private companies, sometimes this means stepping aside, and sometimes this means encouraging them. In the end the significance of the corporation's welfare is, in itself, zero. If a policy is good for the public and good for a corporation, that's nice. But if a policy is good for the public and bad for an individual corporation, or even corporations as a whole, it's still a good policy.
That's what distinguishes us from the Republicans, who think this is very nearly a logical contradiction. You don't have to be anti-corporate to be a Democrat. You can still be a Demcorat an think that 99.9% of the time favoring corporations as a whole favors the public. You just can't think that favoring corporations and favoring people is the same thing.
You can be a Democrat and make an argument against net neutrality -- it's an uphill battle, but it can be done. You just have to show a quid pro quo in which the public gives up the right to unfettered competition in Internet content, but gains something more valuable in return. It's hard to imagine what this would be though. With cable and the end of rules limiting ownership of broadcast outlets and newspapers, we're seeing the end of the traditional media as a marketplace of ideas, even if economic competition continues unabated. What will happen when corporations can favor their own Internet media as well?
"The Internet is not a free public good. It is a bunch of wires and switches and connections and pipes and it is creaky."
This is also completely wrong.
The Internet is not a bunch of wires and switches. It's a shared consensus on how to interconnect networks and computers. Granted consumers connect to the Internet over and individual vendor's equipment; in fact when you plug your computer into the network your computer becomes, technically speaking, part of the Internet. This doesn't mean you own part of the Internet. It means your equipment is participating in it.
It follows that no cartel of vendors should be allowed to sieze control of the Internet by aquiring control strategic pieces of it. That was what the medieval barons, who were really no than brigands, used to do. They'd build a castle on a river or at a mountain pass and bled the commerce that went through it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.