Conservatives Don’t Understand Net Neutrality

Everyone’s favorite crazyperson (Glenn Beck) has been really shockingly ill informed (and, therefore, ill informative) on Net Neutrality in his televised rants lately. Let’s just clear this up, shall we?
Beck, Limbaugh, et al have been running around spouting about how Net Neutrality is basically the Fairness Doctrine, but for the internet. It’s not. It’s nothing like that. It has nothing to do with politics whatsoever. The “neutrality” in question is absolutely, positively superfluous to any questions of what content can and can’t go on the internet. “Net Neutrality” means service providers (Comcast, Time Warner, etc.) can’t fuss about with what content gets to you, the consumer. It means that all content, no matter what it is, must be provided equally (or neutrally, as the case may be) to the consumer, so Time Warner can’t charge you for a “premium service plan” under which you get Netflix and Youtube faster than you otherwise would. It’s about making sure that the internet doesn’t wind up like TV with network (NBC, CBS, ABC), basic cable (FOX, MSNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, UPN, whatever), and premium cable (HBO, Showtime) offered at different rates.

Under Net Neutrality (which, for my money, should be implemented unequivocally), the internet will get to continue to be what it has always been and what it should always be: a completely open content market free from corporate judgment or favoritism. No one is trying to put The Huffington Post on foxnews.com. We just want to keep the internet the wild wild west of ideas it always has been. But this idea might get in the way of maximizing Comcast’s profits, so I guess that makes it bad, huh?

Update:  Here’s a nifty online primer on the issue, simple and visualized.

http://www.theopeninter.net/

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid Democrats

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to ask: Why, in the name of God and all that is holy, are the Democrats refusing to even hold a vote on the middle class Bush tax cuts? I can see not a single political or policy advantage to punting on this issue. Coming hot on the heels of failing to get "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" repealed and/or passing the DREAM Act (which, as a reminder, would offer citizenship to young illegals who serve in the military or complete two years of college), this latest display of curling into the fetal position and crossing their fingers in hopes that the Republicans stop kicking them in the face (it’s a party tradition!) is just one more way that the Democrats are alienating their base and ceding the rhetorical (and electoral) ground to the GOP.

First, a little background: If you open your hymnals to page 2001, you will remember that President Bush, freshly elected with a big fat budget surplus on his hands, decided to give the American people a big fat tax cut. Now, because the GOP didn’t have the 60 seats necessary to break the inevitable Democratic filibuster, they passed it through Reconciliation. Those of you playing along at home may recall that the GOP spend the better part of the Winter/Spring of 2010 hollering about how Reconciliation, which was used to pass an amendment package to the Affordable Care Act (you might know it as "Obamacare" or "Teh Deth Panulz!!!!!" or whatever), was literally a threat to the very fabric of Democracy, but back in 2001 it was all kosher with them. As a provision of that process, those tax cuts, which were across-the-board drops in income tax rates, were set to expire after ten years.

Well, my friends, the day has come: the Bush Tax Cuts are about to expire, and income tax rates are set to rise automatically. More precisely, the day is coming and will be here on January 1, 2011. Now, it’s generally both bad politics and policy to let rates go up in the middle of a down economy, so Republicans and Democrats have both jumped on the bandwagon of making the cuts permanent. Well, at least they both have as far as the middle-class portions of the cut are concerned, which affect 98% of the American people. The conflict, as it usually does, comes over the remaining 2%, specifically earners making over $250,000 a year. President Obama and the Democrats want to let the marginal tax rate on those earners go from 36% to the Clinton era 39%, which would still be lower than rates on that bracket for any year of the Reagan Administration. Extending these cuts would grow the deficit by $700B (oh yes, B) over the next 10 years, but Republicans, who typically spend their time hollering about the ballooning deficit, seem to either not notice or not care.

The Republican argument is that raising taxes on ANY Americans (nevermind that it is not an increase but an expected expiration of a temporary cut) in a down economy is a bad idea, especially the wealthier among us, because they are in positions to hire and spend lots and lots of money, thereby keeping our economic engine running. From my standpoint, this logic isn’t applicable to the situation. First of all, wealthy Americans tend not to spend that money; they save or invest it. Moreover, we’re talking about personal income, not corporate income. If you are making millions of dollars a year and don’t want to give $30K to some guy down in sales, that isn’t Barack Obama’s fault. It is certainly your prerogative to do so, but you can’t blame that on a perfectly reasonable tax rate. Let me boil that down further: extending the Bush Tax Cut on the top 2% of earners will NOT put money into the economy, it will NOT encourage hiring, and it will significantly increase the deficit.

The winning strategy for Dems would be to hold a vote on just the middle class tax cuts. It leaves the top 2% out of the picture for the time being and puts forth a bill that’s tough for Republicans to vote against (good luck explaining that one to your constituents), and it sets them up to handle the top tax rates separately where they can be more effectively handled. But that’s not what they’re doing. For some reason, they’re punting the issue, refusing to even bring those up for a vote. It’s as if they think that neglecting to do what Republicans tell them not to do will inspire the GOP to stop bludgeoning them. Now if (aw, screw it, "when") the GOP takes back the House (but probably not the Senate, thanks to the Crazy Delaware Anti-Masturbation Witch, aka Christine O’Donnell), they’re going to pass ALL of the tax cut extensions, say "the Democrats didn’t try to extend the cuts for anyone, but oh look, we did it for everyone," and then President Obama is going to find this bill sitting on his desk ready to throw some more deficit fuel on the fire for a tax cut that won’t stimulate , and there is no way in hell he’s going to be able to justify busting out his veto pen.

This is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Can the Democrats give us, oh, what’s the phrase . . . ah, yes: a reason to vote for them?

Kicking Back into Gear

Well, ladies and gents, it’s been awhile since this blog has been used. It’s time to change that. As we all here in NYC continue summering and overdosing on LCD Soundsystem albums (ain’t they great?), it’s also time to get ready for my next major project. I will confirm what it is next week when I can secure the rights and proper funding structure, but in the mean time, mark your calendars for the week of the Midterm Elections in November. This one is going to be a doozy . . .

Deficits and Taxes

Why is it that "fiscal conservatives" tend to have no good actual fiscal policies? Our national budgetary problems are significant, to be sure, but the people screaming the loudest about it also have the poorest proposals for rectifying the situation.

Principle 1: Just a reminder of the obvious, there are two sides to the deficit equation, namely revenues and expenditures. In order to balance the budget, you need to raise one and lower the other. A third-grader can figure this out.

Principle 2: Tax cuts decrease revenues. Period. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t cut taxes; far from it, when the economy is a mess, that’s the time when government should spend a whole bunch of money in order to prevent the social safety net from collapsing, i.e. tax credits for hiring new employees, etc. High unemployment leads to a drop in revenues from income taxes and an increase in expenditures for unemployment benefits and the like.

Given these, it is important for us as a nation to take a look at our fiscal situation and adopt a long-term policy that will put us in the clear ten years out, battling the defecit when we have the ability to do so without cutting programs that are preventing our economy from slipping into a true depression.

Let’s talk about Obama’s proposed spending freeze on non-military discresionary spending. Let’s assume that, given the Republicans’ behavior when the Democracts proposed trimming $500 billion from Medicare’s useless bloat (not the services themselves), it will be politically impossible for Obama to take a much-needed scalpel to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without being accused of trying to murder our seniors. Taking those three programs and military spending off the table (especially in the middle of two wars), that leaves a ridiculously small portion of the pie left to freeze in the first place. It’s a stunt, and an unfortunate one.

Furthermore, the same people howling about the deficit are the same ones who implemented 2 wars, a massive tax cut, and an expensive prescription drugs bill without paying for a dime of any of it. Obama took office when the deficit was $1.3 trillion. It is now somewhere in the $1.6 trillion range. How is it that Republicans are getting away with claiming the mantle of fiscal responsibility?

Unless deficit scolds starts sacking up and proposing corresponding tax increases to go with their spending cuts (a terrible idea right now) and/or carefully dissecting bloated social programs with an eye toward political honesty (a good, but unlikely, idea), then they need to go back to their caves and never come out until they produce a thoughtful, practical set of policies. This ranting about Obama bankrupting the nation is just nonsense.

Massachusetts

On Monday, Jon Stewart asked the same question he’s been asking quite frequently in recent days: why is it that George W. Bush with 50 Republican votes in the Senate can do pretty much whatever he wants, but the Democrats with 60 votes (a majority Republicans haven’t seen since the 1920’s) seem completely incapable of getting anything done? Speaking as a moderate liberal, it’s heartbreaking.

Yes, the Massachusetts vote sends a strong signal. A large swath of the American people are displeased with how things are going these days. That being said, if we let healthcare reform die now, it’ll be another 15 years before there’s even another possible opening. We haven’t come this far to let a nude Cosmo model derail the whole thing.

The Village Voice ran a biting headline today:Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate

That headline is so true it hurts. Badly. It raises extreme doubts about the Democrats’ ability to govern. For my conservative friends, I can’t express how much it hurts to have a party that you agree with on policy proposals but are constantly frustrated by when it comes time to actually put those proposals into law. The GOP line is that Barack Obama is "too liberal", but it’s not like he hasn’t done anything that he didn’t campaign on and win in a sweep. I still support his style of pragmatic government, but with an incompetent majority and an amoral minority bent on his destruction, I wonder just how, exactly, we can progress from here.

We all know that the Democrats have a communication problem. When they’re talking about "bending the cost curve" while the opposition is accusing them of fascism, socialism, and death panels, it’s no surprise that their message failed to resonate. In the face of such shameless, baldfaced, dishonest talking points from the Republicans, it’s no surprise that sober discussion of which tax policy would best support the abolition of policy denial based on pre-existing conditions and the individual mandate failed to catch the public interest.

Needless to say, I’m infuriated. I’m positively infuriated. It seems that many Democrats are getting skittish and thinking that voting against the bill at this point will save them, come November, which is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. If healthcare doesn’t pass now (by which I mean the House passing the Senate bill, however imperfect), not only will conservatives still line up to slaughter them, but liberals of both the moderate and progressive persuasion will be so demoralized that their chances will, in fact, be lessened even further. And they’d deserve it.

It’s time for them to get their act together.

Facebook is a Mess

Over Christmas 2009, I sat down with my mother to explain to her what Facebook is and how it works. This turned out to be an uphill battle, and it lead to a few important realizations about Facebook and the speed at which social media is evolving.

The first question that everyone new to Facebook or Twitter asks when informed that they can post all their stuff publicly is "Who cares?" It’s a valid question, to be sure. I tried to explain the use of being constantly plugged into your social stream or marketing and self-promotion, as well as the concept that in a world where social media is such an omnipresent thing, quantity has generally replaced quality as the yardstick for your output. This is not to say that a constant stream of inanities will help you out, but nevertheless, the point of 140 character messages and the like is to send many small pieces out into the cloud and hope that the important ones get picked up. Effective use of social media depends on finding the right channels of distribution for your outgoing content and the right filters for your incoming content.

The major thing that I realized while teaching Facebook to a Baby Boomer is that it is a complete mess of design. I didn’t realize this until trying to explain it to a newcomer. This wasn’t always the case; when it was first launched for college students (and I was young enough to be on the ground floor for this), it was a simply a profile page, a wall where people could write things, photos, groups, and events. Minus a couple of odds and ends, the system had a finite number of clearly defined components, and it was easy for us to use. Then, as the system started to expand, so, too, did the applications, functions, and features. Most attempts to revitalize the system to incorporate the exploding mess of content were met with strong pushback from the user community (how many invites to a "We Hate the New Facebook" group did you get back in the day?). Therefore, the model of, say, operating systems (large steps forward with tiny tweaks along the way), which Facebook once kind of followed, has been replaced by an endless stream of updates and tweaks, modifications and minor changes. Each one has been small enough for the acclimated user community to quickly adjust, but for new users, they are now stepping into a complete frankenstein of a system with a pretty hefty learning curve for the uninitiated.

It is this kind of content overload that has made Twitter viable in the first place. Many people, when hearing the concept, say something along the lines of "but that’s just Facebook status". True, to a degree, but think of it this way: When you visit yahoo.com, you are greeted by a messy smattering of groups, email, news, programs, shopping, etc., and, oh yeah, there’s a search bar around there somewhere. When you visit google.com, you are greeted by a bar and a button. It’s the simple functionality that makes it what it is, and this is why Twitter, although lame in many cases, is successful and only growing. Quality and structure has given way to quantity and brevity.

Right, the Undiebomber is Totally Obama’s Fault

Seriously? Are conservatives so focussed on scoring points that they’re resorting to this trash?

Claim: The undiebomber got as close to blowing up a plane as he did because of Obama’s lax foreign policy.

Are you kidding me? If this is the case, then conservatives need to revise the whole "Bush kept us safe after 9/11" hypothesis, seeing as how the Richard Reid Shoebomber incident has a near direct parallel with this, both in event and in aftermath. Consistency is all I ask.

Claim: Trying the undiebomber in a civilian court demonstrates a lack of commitment to the war on terror.

Again, I point to Richard Reid, as does every other sane person writing about this. Same thing. We tried him in a civilian court and he’s rightly rotting in jail. Why should this be any different, other than to score political points?

The cynicism of the Republicans these days continues to absolutely boggle my mind.

As the healthcare battle and so many others have demonstrated, the Republicans are being obstructionist for its own sake, and it’s destructive to our legislative process, which requires a minority party acting in good faith. It’s especially frustrating to someone like me, who agrees with a decent amount of their policy proposals when they don’t behave like lunatics, because that stuff won’t get done either. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, Republicans don’t favor limitted government so much as they favor government limitted to Republicans.

New Year’s Resolutions

Zen Habits pointed me in the direction of this handy blog focussed on building habits, particularly within the context of New Year’s resolutions. The "6 Changes Method" described here looks very handy indeed, and I want to state here and publicly that I intend to use it for the year of 2010. Since a part of the process is public accountability, I’ll be announcing resolutions in the near future. In the mean time, I’d like to wish everyone a happy New Year and an excellent 2010!

The Artist’s Paradox

I was watching "Slings and Arrows" the other day (which, for the record, is easily the best and most accurate representation of theatre life I’ve ever seen on tv/film), and one of the characters, a board member and investor of the regional theatre where the show takes place, made an interesting comment. To paraphrase: "You artists all have the same problem. You can’t figure out whether you’re a business or a charity. If you’re a business, make a product, and market it. If you’re a charity, go ask the government for money. You have to make a choice." This got me to thinking about that great battle between commerce and art and how artists react when forced to engage in commerce.

Some would argue that the line between the two is not as clear as many would present it, and there is merit to this idea. There have been many strong pieces of art that have also succeeded in the commercial marketplace. That being said, when art errs too much on the side of commerce, it becomes exclusively entertainment. Likewise, when a piece is the brainchild of an artist with a clear and strong vision with no eye toward popular taste, it becomes exclusively art. This is not to say that art is not entertaining, or vice versa. The two can keep company, and they often do, but one does not necessarily follow the other: "Transformers"? Entertainment. "The Seventh Seal"? Art. "The Dark Knight"? Both.

This cultural separation of art and commerce as ideas and concepts is a tough nut to crack, particularly in the United States. Compared to most other developed nations, our public support for the arts is meager. Our culture has strong roots in free market principles (in theory, if not always in practice), and that cultural emphasis certainly extends to the arts in ways that would be foreign to many other nations. Of course, on the other hand, a lot of British taxpayers were understandably annoyed when their money went into the National Theatre’s production of "Jerry Springer: The Opera" (delicious though it may be).

There are growing schools of thought that companies should place their focus squarely on the problems in their marketplace as determined by potential buyers, rather than existing customers or whatever the engineering department think is cool. This approach, while commercially valuable, is paradoxical to the mindset of most artists. Artists do not do what they do in order to make money. Despite rare stories of insane success and fame, everyone knows those to be impractical exceptions. As the saying goes, "you can’t make a living in the arts, but you can make a killing". The point is that art is by nature of limitted commercial concern. I know few artists who would think it a valuable use of their time and talents to ask potential audience members "what kind of plays would you like to see?" and creating based on those interviews. Artists typically look at their work as a form of personal expression, not as a commodity to be sold. It is personal, it is emotional, and it is presented from the standpoint of a transmitter, ultimately not caring whether or not the message conveyed has commercial value to the receiver.

Paradoxically, people have to eat. Producers present shows that they despise because they know them to be crowd pleasers and will allow them to put food on the table, pay their employees, and fund future projects. Actors, directors, composers, etc. all willingly work on trash from time to time because the beast must be fed. That being said, their eyes are always on that post-apocalyptic production of "The Tempest" that’s been rattling around inside their heads.

Commerce is usually a difficult proposition for artists because artists are, by definition, not commercially concerned. This is why we can’t figure out if we’re a bunch of businesses or charities: we’re neither. We’re artists.

Thought Leadership in Indie Theatre

In most industries in the United States, there is a pool of publications and thought leaders that serve as go-to destinations for industry folk, and organizations try to display their own thought leadership by getting their work seen in these publications. I have noticed that in the world of independent theatre, the dynamic seems to be different and becoming moreso every day.

There is a general cultural drift away from traditional news and publications and towards the more egalitarian, accessible modes of communication of blogs, Twitter, etc. In few places is this demonstrated more clearly than in the theatre industry. While asking a contractor what publications he reads, you’re likely to get something along the lines of "New York Construciton News" and the "Subcontractors Trade Association" quarterly paper, among others. For theatre folk, you are far more likely to get a list of bloggers. Moreover, many of these blogs tend not to display business or artistic advice, but rather raw data of who’s doing what, when, and where, and reviews of that work. Despite there being a ridiculous overload of independent theatre companies in New York, the community itself remains fairly self-contained, collegial, and well-connected. Therefore, the primary information sources in this community are other members of the community.

The old guard of theatrical publications (Playbill, American Theater, etc.) generally have their eyes focussed more on tourist markets and Off-Broadway and Broadway industy types. Moreover, any attempt to run a publication focussed on matters of "how you should run your theatre company" would no doubt find itself getting a lot of pushback from the very people it would be trying to reach. For better or for worse, independent theatre companies are mostly trying to solve the same problem: There is too much bad theatre going on. Their approaches and processes are personal, individual, and generally resistant to the more structured startup methods seen in other industries.

In the theatrical community, thought leadership, in the traditional sense, is not divorcable from the people practicing the art. With the exception of blog-based theatrical critics (and this only applies to those who aren’t also playwrights/actors/directors/producers/etc.), almost everyone demonstrating thought leadership is participating in the industry directly. Their leadership is demonstrated in the art they produce.