Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?

Something for the end of net neutrality to stomp out

Free market solves another problem

Text messaging is wildly overpriced relative to its negligible cost to providers. Nonetheless, their oligopolistic pricing goes up in lock-step. Why hasn't this so-called free market opened the door to a price-cutting entrepreneur?

The real problem that markets such as this intend to solve is how to remove money from your wallet and transfer it to the executives. (You thought the shareholders mattered? Ha.) And this market is vigorously solving that constant problem!

One reason that phone companies are against net neutrality is that they've been there before. It would be much easier for a provider like MCI from the early days (say, 1978) to piggyback on existing networks and undercut prices. As they say in economics, there would be much lower barriers to entry and thus to a return to competition, however briefly.

Obama, pro-person - McCain, pro-corporation

Have a look at their technology-related policy positions. In practically every case where Obama and McCain differ, McCain takes the pro-corporation position, and Obama takes the pro-person position:

• Net neutrality? Obama's for; McCain's against.
• H1-B visas? Obama says enough; McCain wants more.
• Outsourcing? Obama wants to end tax breaks that reward it; McCain doesn't.
• Renewable energy? Obama wants to research it; McCain at best pays lip service to it.

Update (10/23): Didn't I tell you this right here two days ago! I like my headline better. Skip that synecdoche.