Political Irony

In January, a federal court struck down net neutrality requirements that had been put in place by the FCC in 2010. That was strike one.

Then, just a few weeks ago, the FCC announced their intent to allow companies to buy preferred (faster, more responsive) access to the internet. Strike two.

This started a huge argument. On one side were companies like Verizon and Comcast who stand to profit greatly from the death of net neutrality, and who naturally claim that net neutrality is just an innovation-killing government regulation. On the other side are companies and individuals who benefit from a free and open internet, and who claim that net neutrality is important to preserve the internet we know and depend on.

So MIT looked into it and issued a report, and what they found was frightening to say the least. They talked to venture capital firms to see how the new regulations might affect them. Ironically even though these new regulations have not yet gone into effect, VC firms said that they have already stopped funding startup internet firms because if the new regulations go into effect they will significantly impact the potential profitability of many internet startups.

It is bad when strike three happens even before the pitcher throws the ball.

UPDATE: Over 150 major internet companies have sent a letter to the FCC asking that they protect net neutrality rules.

UPDATE2: An Internet Hosting Provider takes the maxim that turnabout is fair play, and throttles FCC access to their sites to the speed of a dial-up connection. They point out that while this sounds outrageous, this is exactly what the FCC is proposing. Naturally, if the FCC wants to pay them for faster access, they will gladly provide it to them.

© WHUR

What do Republicans have to say about this? Benghazi!

I believe the US Constitution guarantees the right to own guns, but it definitely does not guarantee the right to incite violence. And that is the problem with the pro-gun industry in this country. They are using fear and lies to satisfy their own greed.

The NRA used to be about hunting, but their original market started shrinking. Just fifteen years ago, 46% of gun owners said that they owned a gun in order to hunt, but this number has dropped to 32%. So the gun sellers found a new market to expand into, and they worked hard to make it bigger. Their efforts have paid off. In the same fifteen years, the number of gun owners who own a gun for “protection” has almost doubled from 26% to 48%. That’s a very tidy profit.

The irony of this is that in the same time, crime rates have been falling dramatically. So what can the gun industry do to sell more and more guns? The answer is found in NRA spokesperson Wayne LaPierre’s speech at the recent 2014 NRA national convention:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

Hypocritically, at the same convention where LaPierre was warning people about rapists, the NRA held a book signing for admitted serial statutory rapist Ted Nugent.

But it gets worse. Five years ago NRA board member and US Congressman Don Young (R-AK) stood with militia leader Schaeffer Cox in a video and signed the following declaration written by Cox:

Let it be known that we, the people of Alaska, stand in recognition of the true principle that whenever a government abandons the purpose for which we have created it and even becomes hostile towards that which it was once a defender of, it is no longer a fit steward of the political power that is inherent in the people and lent to this government with strict conditions. These conditions are clearly defined in the United States Constitution and understood by the common man.

Furthermore, to the extent that our government violates these conditions, they nullify their own authority, at which point it is our right and duty, not as subjects but as sovereign Americans, to entrust this power to new stewards who will not depart from the laws we have given them.

This being the case, let it be known that should our government seek to further tax, restrict or register firearms or otherwise impose on the right that shall not be infringed, thus impairing our ability to exercise the God-given right to self-defense which precedes all human legislation and is superior to it, that the duty of us good and faithful people will not be to obey them but to alter or abolish them and institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to us shall seem most likely to effect our safety and happiness.

Two years later, Cox was convicted of plotting to kill Alaska state troopers and a judge.

My problem is not with people owning guns. That is their right. My problem is with an industry that spews violent rhetoric and then uses the crime it incites in order to make money by selling “protection”. It is a racket, and a criminal and perhaps even treasonous one. Don’t believe me? As Cliff Schecter points out, just imagine what would happen if president Barack Obama had signed a declaration similar to the one above, which had been written by a radical Muslim.

© Scott Bateman

Anyone who thinks that our society (or even individual people) is beyond racism is deluding themselves. I would be willing to bet that every one of us has done racist things in their lives. Racism is not something that magically goes away (like, if we suddenly elect a black president), it is something we have to always guard against.

And I do mean everyone, regardless of race. Including me.

“When the rate of return of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which which democratic societies are based.” – quote from the book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by economist Thomas Piketty.

Even though the book is 700 pages long and is translated from the original French, it has hit #1 on the Amazon best sellers list. Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman calls it a “magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality” that “melds grand historical sweep with painstaking data analysis”. The book uses pioneering statistical techniques to track the history of income inequality, back as far as the late 18th century in some cases.

And what he found was that the income going to the 1% is now back to where it was a century ago. Even worse, our income inequality is not based on merit (as some would claim), but is once again being passed down through family dynasties.

Which sounds awfully like the situation we were in just before the great depression.

© Matt Bors

Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed a small victory to the Obama administration, ruling 6 to 2 to uphold the EPA’s authority to regulate coal pollution that crosses state lines.

The two dissenting votes were from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. They are not the brightest jurists on the court, but in their dissenting opinion, they made what some legal scholars are calling “hugely embarrassing”, “epic”, a “cringeworthy blunder”, and a “mind-blowing misstatement of a basic fact”.

In the dissent, Scalia wrote “This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA’s contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards].”

There is just one problem. The 2001 case they reference was exactly the opposite. The EPA refused to consider costs against health benefits, while the trucking industry was trying to force them to do just that. The Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in favor of the EPA.

Now here’s the ironic part. The author of that 2001 ruling was Scalia. He not only completely mischaracterized a Supreme Court decision (a bad mistake in itself), it was a unanimous decision that Scalia himself wrote.

I know it is the “highest court in the land”, but what drugs was he on?

[Note that on Wednesday, the Supreme Court updated and corrected Scalia’s opinion. But with one of his main arguments against the case gone, why did he still feel the need to dissent?]