Get this: according to Mike McCurry, shill of the telco companies, the net neutrality fight is now a "leftists" versus "centrists"
battle.
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."
What a dishonest piece of shit 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.
You see, from K Street (and its environs), anyone who dare oppose the exhalted lobbyist class must be anti-corporation. The riff raff from the hinterlands (i.e. outside the Beltway) must bow to the wisdom of those writing the million dollar lobbying checks.
McCurry is now a sad, sad, pathetic man. Completely stripped of all goodwill he had built over the years. Relegated to peddling lies like this one:
With no major problems of Internet discrimination yet, the government should stay out, he said. It's a classic, centrist Democrat position straight from the Clinton era.
"We don't always have to be in favor of government regulation," he said.
As Matt Stoller has countered, time and time again, that is pure bullshit.
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.
Through a series of regulatory decisions from 2002-2005, the FCC stripped these protections for broadband pipes. Now telecom companies can do whatever they want, and they have basically announced business models that depend on their ability to turn the internet into a more cable-like service. This new playground for them is tenous, because the FCC could at any point reverse themselves. To firm this up, the telecom companies want to legislate a change in the rules, stripping authority from the FCC to hold ISPs accountable for degrading service.
So that's what this is all about.
McCurry, lying sack of shit that he has become, continues to claim that he's fighting for the Clinton-era status quo. But that is what we demand, and what a growing bipartisan army of allies in Congress are working toward. We want the Clinton-era rules. Not McCurry. He and his allies are working to gut those regulations to allow the telcos to run roughshod over a free internet.
And now, ever more brazen in his dishonesty, he wants to make this a "left" versus "centrist" battle?
It's all just par for the course for the new, bought-and-paid-for McCurry. The millions his clients have spent on this issue are being sucked down the drain by genuine people-power (not the astroturf his company specializes in creating), so he must marginalize and lie about the opposition. SOP for the K-Street Gang.
The reality, of course, is much different. McCurry is enabling an extremist, out-of-the-mainstream effort by a few obscenely powerful telcos to hijack one of the most successful creations in human history.
He really shouldn't be talking about "centrism" in this context. He obviously will, because the modern-day Mike McCurry will lie for a buck. But he really shouldn't.
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