Category Archives: Politicos

People, places, and news about politics.

Ralph Nader on our Corporatist state

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On December 28, 2006, one week before Nancy Pelosi duties began as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Ralph Nader addressed an audience at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District on what’s wrong with the country, focusing chiefly on civic apathy and corporate power.

He points out the position of power Pelosi holds, saying that many progressive Democrats in Congress are waiting for Pelosi to show some progressive leadership. He also takes voters to task for “rationalizing their own futility” and instructed them to organize to overcome corporate power. The recording wraps up with his advocacy for a Constitutional amendment to subordinate corporations to people.

The talk was broadcast on Time of Useful Consciousness Radio. Thanks to TUC Radio for their recording.

Chris Hedges on Ralph Nader

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Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” has written an essay on Ralph Nader, subject of the new documentary “An Unreasonable Man”. He addresses the 2000 election for which some still blame Nader for somehow “spoiling” and causing Bush to become president:

There is a fascinating rage””and rage is the right word””expressed by many on the left in this fine film about Nader. Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman and Michael Moore, along with a host of former Nader’s Raiders, spit out venomous insults toward Nader, a man they profess to have once admired, the most common charge being that Nader is a victim of his oversized ego.

This anger is the anger of the betrayed. But they were not betrayed by Nader. They betrayed themselves. They allowed themselves to buy into the facile argument of “the least worse” and ignore the deeper, subterranean assault on our democracy that Nader has always addressed.

It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party, that threw the 2000 election to Bush, not Ralph Nader. Nader received only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000 and got less than one-half of 1 percent in 2004. All of the third-party candidates who ran in 2000 in Florida””there were about half a dozen of them””got more votes than the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore. Why not go after the other third-party candidates? And what about the 10 million Democrats who voted in 2000 for Bush? What about Gore, whose campaign was so timid and empty””he never mentioned global warming””that he could not carry his home state of Tennessee? And what about the 2004 cartoon-like candidate, John Kerry, who got up like a Boy Scout and told us he was reporting for duty and would bring us “victory” in Iraq?

Interesting to hear what people have to say about it now that that race is behind us and the emotions can somewhat more easily be put aside. Interesting also how people who see nothing to like in the media-favorite Democrats (the ones selected for us to pay attention to) can more calmly assess the candidacy of any third party or independent candidate.

But I remain wary of the fickle “Left”: I see no end to the self-defeating argument of a “viable” candidate; I remember them championing a corporate Democrat just three years ago; I wonder why the big marches against the war aren’t scheduled to conflict with campaigning; I miss the strident demand for all representatives to do everything in their power to end the war in Iraq, bring the troops and corporations home, and discontinue US incursions into Iran (which, Seymour Hirsch says have already begun).

You can hear Hedges’ argument about the Christian right””what Hedges calls “the most dangerous mass movement in American history”””and its links to corporate America in his recent interview on Democracy Now! (audio, video, transcript). Also there you can see a recent interview with Ralph Nader and Henriette Mantel, one of the two filmmakers behind “An Unreasonable Man” (audio, video, transcript).

Slide, glide, slippety-slide; when your rights are at stake, you’ve got to fight.

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TheCopyright silences analysis and dissent Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Kyle Machulis who is being sued by Richard Silver. The EFF explains:

EFF’s client, Kyle Machulis, shot [a] video at a concert last month. In one ten-second segment, a group of fans in the audience attempts to dance part of the Electric Slide. Machulis later uploaded the video to YouTube. Within just a few days, Richard Silver, owner of www.the-electricslidedance.com, filed a takedown demand under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Silver claimed he owned the copyright to the Electric Slide and that Machulis’ video infringed his rights. The removal appears to be part of a broad campaign by Silver to misuse copyright allegations to prevent dancers from performing the dance “incorrectly.”

The EFF will argue that even if Silver has a copyright on the dance (which is doubtful), Machulis’ video would constitute fair use, not infringement. Thus, Machulis is well within his right to make and distribute the work (even commercially). Whether the dance is being performed “incorrectly” simply doesn’t enter into the situation.

Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage to defending your fair use rights.

[Press release, complaint]

Update (2007-05-22): Richard Silver settled with Kyle Machulis out of court. Part of that settlement requires Silver to license the dance under a Creative Commons license which allows everyone to perform, display, reproduce or distribute any recorded performance of the dance in any medium for non-commercial purposes. Silver’s DMCA threat against Machulis is no longer valid.

Why are C-SPAN’s recordings copyrighted?

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Carl Malamud wrote an interesting letter to C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb about use of C-SPAN congressional footage (local copy). Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi posted a snippet of C-SPAN footage to her blog and C-SPAN cried copyright infringement. Sadly, Speaker Pelosi didn’t challenge this claim (even on fair use grounds, where she had a good case).

Lamb told the New York Times

What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is. If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.

But the pertinent question is: should this footage be copyrightable in the first place? The question of who pays doesn’t address this more important issue and that question is fairly easily dispensed with: Americans cover C-SPAN’s expenses. American cable subscribers and taxpayers pay for C-SPAN, so when Americans use this footage as they wish, they’re using something they’re paying for. Furthermore, C-SPAN covers people in government talking in their official capacity and therefore, as Lawrence Lessig argued about the President on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in Wired magazine, the public interest value is so great nobody should be able to restrict anyone else from having or using the footage. Malamud would seem to concur, although his argument doesn’t focus on the legalities:

C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs.

BoingBoing.net has more commentary on this issue.

Give a corporation a commons, and watch the commons go away.

Michael Geist takes US copyright lobby to task

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The BBC news website carries Michael Geist’s critique of American publisher’s copyright demands on the majority of the rest of the world.

There is a fair bit of propaganda language involved there:

which should prompt you to ask the timeless question “Who benefits?”. Hint: it’s not you. As the GNU Project points out, framing copyright issues with these terms means encouraging identification “with the owner and publisher who benefit from copyright, rather than with the users who are restricted by it”.

PDA board member Cindy Sheehan wants Bush impeached now

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Cindy Sheehan, board member of the Progressive Democrats of AmericaCindy Sheehan, board member of the Progressive Democrats of America, a group which tries to bring progressives into the Democratic party fold, recently challenged Democrats to impeach the President (3m5s of audio; a transcript follows). Thanks to Fred Nguyen and WBAI for the audio. Today’s Democracy Now! mentioned Sheehan’s statement, but did not play the audio.

In case you don’t believe me that she’s a PDA board member, check out the head shot on this blog entry. That head shot comes from Sheehan’s entry on the PDA’s website. So as long as the picture works, she’s probably still on the board. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is also on the board there. If they have board meetings maybe Sheehan can convince Conyers to support impeachment now rather than another round of the Democrat delaying tactic (the same one used around election time by Democrats and their supporters which says progressives should delay their criticism until after the Democrats are elected into office. This ensures that criticism does little good).

One wonders what’s more effective at getting results progressives say they want: serving on the board of the PDA (and the commensurate connections to people in power), or speaking truth to power openly in public and on the record?

Here’s a transcript of the audio:
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Will ISPs grease the skids for RIAA litigation against their customers?

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The RIAA wants to avoid court and get the accused to agree to settlements. To that end, the RIAA has sent a letter to ISPs asking for information and offering a possible discount (“opportunity for an early decreased settlement amount”) to would-be defendants (“targeted users”).

In a letter (which has the recipient information blacked out) the RIAA says that if ISPs hand over at least 180 days of logs, customer names and addresses, and pass along a fill-in-the-blank RIAA letter directly to the customer accused of copyright infringement, the accused may receive a $1,000 or more discount off a pre-litigation settlement price. Ray Beckerman hasn’t had time to examine the letter in detail, but offers this short list of some of the letter’s claims:

  • creation of a new “Pre-Doe settlement option”;
  • it will only make the “Pre-Doe settlement option” available to customers of ISP’s who agree to preserve their logs for 180 days;
  • the “Pre-Doe” option will supposedly allow settlement at a reduced amount, with a discount of $1000 or more, if they settle before a John Doe lawsuit is brought;
  • the RIAA will be launching a web site for “early settlements”, www.p2plawsuits.com;
  • the letter asks the ISP’s to notify the RIAA if they have previously “misidentified a subscriber account in response to a subpoena” or became aware of “technical information… that causes you to question the information that you provided in response to our clients’ subpoena”;
  • it requires ISP’s to notify the RIAA “as early as possible” as to whether they will enter the 180 day/”pre-Doe” plan;
  • it mentioned that there has been confusion over how ISP’s should respond to the RIAA’s subpoenas;
  • it noted that ISP’s have identified “John Does” who were not even subscribers of the ISP at the time of the infringement; and
  • it requested that ISP’s furnish their underlying log files as well as just the names and addresses.

BoingBoing.net asks:

At what point do we just abandon any pretense of making peace with these gangsters? When will it be time to declare war on them, to engage in file-sharing not because we love music, but because we hate the record companies?

EFF wins against Eli Lilly’s attempt to stop publication of leaked documents.

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Congratulations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation which just won an important judgement against drug giant Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly Zyprexa Whistleblowertried to stop a number of websites from publishing leaked documents about Zyprexa, Eli Lilly’s top-selling drug. The judgement is available and the zyprexa.pbwiki.com wiki which challenges Eli Lilly is still online.

From EFF’s press release on their victory:

The Zyprexa documents were leaked from an ongoing product liability lawsuit against Eli Lilly. The internal documents allegedly show that Eli Lilly intentionally downplayed the drug’s side effects, including weight gain, high blood sugar, and diabetes, and marketed the drug for “off-label” uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The documents were the basis for a front-page story in the New York Times in December of last year, and electronic copies are readily available from a variety of Internet sources. EFF’s client posted links to one set of copies on a wiki devoted to the controversy that were part of extensive, in-depth analysis from a number of citizen journalists.

More on Zyprexa case from the EFF.

Is the anti-war movement shooting itself in the foot?

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John Walsh on who was left out of the recent anti-war demonstration:

What is the matter with Democratic politicians, you may say. Nothing, as such. And the politicians speaking at the rally were among the best that the timid Dems have to offer – Maxine Waters, John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich, for example. But these Democrats do not represent the Democratic Party; they are an idealistic few on its fringe. To have only Democrats and no others is to create the false impression that the Democratic Party is a vehicle for peace. And it creates false hopes about what the Dems will do without mighty pressure.

I remember when the anti-war movement in the US went on hold to stump for pro-war Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) because he was the “viable” candidate to get Pres. Bush out of office. Some of the most vocal anti-war speakers are, after all, advocates for the Democratic Party. Walsh mentions the “Progressive” Democrats of America which I’ve written about in the past.

Walsh’s essay also reminds me of the debates on NOW (2 2-candidate debates) in that both the essay and the NOW show focused on messengers left out of something more widely watched. It was clear then as it is now that the Democrats need to be pressured to oppose the war.

I’ve been told that the Democrats went along with the pro-war message because they were in the minority and that (somehow) meant they had no choice. I didn’t believe it then because I knew a more convincing reason: the Democrats get their money from the same place the Republicans do, and those funders (whether wealthy individuals or corporations) benefit from the war. Now that the Democrats have some weight to throw around in Congress, it’s important to pressure them to throw that weight in the right direction.

Britons: Your BBC could sell you out with DRM.

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It looks like the BBC is gearing up to distribute their work with DRM using a player that only runs on Microsoft Windows. Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.net has more.

If you pay for the BBC or if you want to see how viewer-funded public television can turn on the audience it is supposed to serve, check out what the BBC is up to and help them avoid giving in to digital restrictions management (DRM). Doctorow’s post is, like all the posts at BoingBoing.net, licensed under the Creative Commons By-NonCommercial license. The BBC recording comes courtesy of backstage.bbc.co.uk, under the Creative Commons attribution license.

If you pay for BBC programming, they’ll probably listen to you. You can help make the BBC the beacon of DRM-free, platform-agnostic programming it can be.

BBC techies talk DRM

Glyn sez, The first ever BBC Backstage podcast kicked off in fine style talking about the BBC and its position on DRM and copyright. You can download and remix the MPeg3 file or the Ogg Vorbis file. Both are licensed under creative commons attribution. So as long as you credit backstage.bbc.co.uk, [you’re] good to go. In the next few days the BBC will make available a broadcast quality audio file and a video file for those who want to see the debate in action.

The podcast is both heartening and frustrating. The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham — the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.

For a minute there, the BBC seemed like it would enable a creative nation. Now it’s joining the jerks in Hollywood who think that media exists to be passively swallowed by a legion of glassy eyed zombie audience members.

You can hear the disappointment in the visionaries at the BBC, the betrayal at being sold out by management. The BBC is forcing Britons to buy an American operating system — Windows — in order to watch British programming, made in Britain. The free and open GNU/Linux — whose kernel is maintained in Britain — can’t be used for British TV, because of DRM.

The BBC claims it will find an “open standard” for DRM, but of course such a thing is totally, utterly, categorically impossible.

An open standard is one that anyone can implement. Anyone can improve on it, innovate on it, add features to it. The whole point of DRM is that it has to be implemented in a very specific way, to cripple certain features that users otherwise want. All DRMs have “Hook IP” — something you have to license in order to implement them. A condition of the license is inevitably that you can’t make the product user-modifiable. That means that it can’t be open. It can only be implemented in crippled, restricted form.

The BBC claims that it can’t clear its archives, but that is only to say that it can’t do this without legislative assistance. One way to achieve that is to prospectively clear everything in its production pipeline, something that could have been done five years ago — and that evidently isn’t happening now.

The fact is that Britons are already downloading tons of TV from UKNova and elsewhere. They’re risking criminal and civil penalties to get access to the programming that they are required to fund, that is being made on their behalf.

We’ve trained people to watch TV. You can’t turn around after 70 years and say, you have to stop using the best new technology to get the best TV experience. The point of the BBC is to create compelling programming that educates, informs and entertains. At the end of the day, it’s the same shows. Why should how you watch it make a difference?

The BBC exists to win this kind of fight in Britain. They exist to go where the private sector won’t. For the BBC to throw its hands up and say, “We can’t win this fight, we surrender, here we are, DRM forever, go buy some Microsoft,” is nothing short of a betrayal. The BBC is dooming the Brits who fund it to being criminals. It’s a bloody shame.

Update (2007-03-05): More analysis on the BBC’s announced plans from David Woodhouse.

Other problems with the recorded discussion follow:
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