On March 25, 2010 famous documentarian Michael Moore appeared on Democracy Now! (video, audio, transcript) and spoke about how disappointed he was in President Obama’s health care reform (which he got largely right: pushing people into buying health care insurance from HMOs is a strong victory for capitalism; I’d have also pointed out the bailout aspect of it and how insurance is the wrong model for delivering health care because it’s not something we rarely need like fire or flood insurance but I’m not finding fault with what Moore said here) and how the US sorely needs universal single-payer (Moore has backed HR676—Medicare for all—in the past).

But when Amy Goodman asked him about his appearance on Bill Maher’s program where he got on his knee to beg Ralph Nader not to run for President, he did not justify anything he leveled at Ralph Nader:

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, do you still feel the same way? You and Ralph Nader pretty much agree on a lot of things.

MICHAEL MOORE: I have this basic position about Ralph. I’ve known him for many, many years. He has done so much good for this country. People are alive as a result of the things that he worked on over the years. I also believe that he doesn’t really have a handle on what the proper strategy is to get this country in our hands. And, you know, unlike Ralph, I guess maybe I’m not in this for just to say it so I can hear myself talk or to be some””or to take some poser position. And I hope that doesn’t sound too harsh, but I don’t see him ever working with the grassroots or with the people or being in touch with the people in any way, shape or form.

And so, I just””I think that””I mean, what I’ve proposed for the last few years is that if we really want to try and get this power in our hands, in the people’s hands, in the hands of the working people of this country, then we should, on a very grassroots level, from the bottom up, be doing things to””whether it’s running for local office, taking over the local Democratic Party. The game is rigged in America when it comes to third parties. There’s no way that that’s ever going to work. And so, then how””instead of letting the game, I guess, rig us, what can we do to the game itself? And if the game is, well, we have these two political parties which are really very much like one party, why don’t we make sure that one of those parties actually is a second party and start locally and do that? And that’s what I encourage people to do. That’s my approach.

Ralph’s approach is, put his name on the ballot and run for office. Where are we as a result of that? I don’t””you know, I don’t see us anywhere other than in the same pitiful state we’ve been in for some time.

I don’t take his criticism about Nader not working with the people seriously because Moore doesn’t explain how he arrived at this conclusion and because Nader’s policies sound like people-focused policies to me: end the two major occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, pass single-payer universal healthcare, and stop invading other countries to name a few. I’d like to hear Moore explain exactly how running for US President is an improper strategy for increasing public participation in power. Shouldn’t we fault Democrats for doing exactly that?

I’m currently reading “Grand Illusion” by Theresa Amato, Nader’s former campaign manager (at least twice in 2000 and 2004), where she gives a remarkably detailed accounting of the challenges third parties and independent candidates face just to be heard alongside the colluding Democrats and Republicans. She writes very clearly and critiques the situation facing the nation from the position of fairness and what’s in the best interest of the citizen. She details the vindictive litigation, the double standards, and all the other barriers the two major parties use against Nader’s campaign, schemes which adversely affect anyone else’s chances to run and be taken on their merits. I guess I had become used to such explication when I heard Moore on DN! and expected better from him.

There ought to be room for more than one “approach” and more than two candidates from more than two parties (whom even Moore seems to admit are too similar). I’m not disappointed in Obama because I didn’t expect better from him. The way the corporate media kept talking about him told me that he had been vetted by the major donor corporations and come out favorably—Obama’s campaign was a sound investment that would return many times its worth in money, opportunity, and power. I expected that Moore, while caving to the Democratic Party which helps rig elections against third parties and independents, would at least recognize that Nader’s candidacies give Nader supporters someone with an enviable political record to vote for (as opposed to not voting for president at all). Joining one’s oppressor is not how one fights. Clear, continuing, and repeated opposition is how one fights.

Moore really is a Democrat who takes on all of that party’s values on election fairness—”The game is rigged in America when it comes to third parties. There’s no way that that’s ever going to work.” is encouraging capituation. We know how the Democrats will marginalize someone who isn’t a proper corporatist. Look how they treat Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). He ran for President twice and both times made Medicare for All his health care plan. He gets shafted in so-called “debate” time and his fight for single-payer universal health care goes either unmentioned or ridiculed, despite that the country has long supported it (even if it means paying more in taxes in a country that already pays more per capita for healthcare than any other country and doesn’t cover everyone). Corporate rule is how Obama became “electable”.

At least I know I’m not the only one to react against Moore’s unjustified screed.

I happened to see the 2010-02-18 Rachel Maddow show and the 2010-02-25 Democracy Now!. Both discussed Andrew Joseph Stack III, the man who flew his plane into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas which killed Stack and IRS manager Vernon Hunter. Stack left a suicide note (local copy) published on his website. These shows covered Stack in a remarkably different way which is telling about the power to frame an issue.
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How good can a president be when he continues the hated acts of his predecessor? How valuable can that president’s support be when they challenge the predecessor’s wrongdoing but remain virtually silent about continuing the same bad policies?

Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyer’s Journal in a web exclusive (video, transcript) had this to say about President Obama’s continuation of rounding up people around the world and locking them up for as long as we like.

[O]ne of the principle controversies of the Bush Administration, one of the defining aspects of their radicalism, was the idea that we can take human beings who we don’t capture on a battlefield, who we simply abduct and pick up, who we suspect of engaging in terrorism and put them into cages for years or decades without having to charge them with any crime.

That — simply based on executive authority — the ability to point to someone and say, “This is a terrorist,” then justifies the elimination of all due process and putting them into prison forever. Obama, several months ago, said that he not only believes in that power, but wanted Congress to enact a statute that would permanently enshrine this theory of law into Presidential power.

He gave up on that because there was going to be difficulty in terms of getting the bill that he wanted passed through the Congress. So, instead what he did was he embraced the Bush/Cheney justification as to why the President can do that, which is that the Congress implicitly authorized it.

And so, we’re continuing our scheme of indefinite lawless detention, free of due process, free of any charges of any kind. Where we can pick up people anywhere around the world and put them into cages. He’s actively defending that power in Afghanistan, by saying that people who we abduct far away from the battlefield, far away from Afghanistan, and then ship to Afghanistan and imprison at Bagram have no rights even to habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court said at least that Guantanamo detainees have.

And so, that’s just one example where for years liberals yelled and screamed vehemently that Bush was subverting the Constitution and degrading the American culture, political culture, by asserting this power. And yet, here you have Barack Obama not just refusing or taking his time undoing it, but himself actively defending and advocating it. And there’s very little outcry. And that repeats itself in terms of the state secrets privilege. And the effort to block accountability for torture victims. And a whole variety of other powers that Bush and Cheney asserted to great controversy.

Glenn Greenwald

The Left has profoundly mischaracterized Obama’s campaign promise to end the use of Guantanamo Bay: during the campaign this was widely celebrated as a reason to vote for Obama. But even if that prison is destroyed and never to be used again, the US maintains a system of prisons around the world (some unknown to us, I can only guess). It’s reasonable to believe that in those other prisons the US tortures (whether directly or by proxy hardly matters) and detains people indefinitely. Shifting the site of illegal unethical behavior is not the same as ceasing that behavior.

Obama’s support for your civil liberties is profoundly lacking. You’ll recall his administrations support of the telecommunications corporations’ illegal wiretapping which surpassed the Bush administration.

I hope that by the time Obama’s first term is over we can look at his presidency and name a dozen seriously beneficial things he has done for the US (ideally, 12 things John McCain would have been unlikely to do). Not being Bush isn’t good enough.

President Obama is the latest beneficiary of corporate stenographers to power known as the American mainstream press. The range of allowable debate makes room for NBC’s recent puff pieces on Obama’s White House while excluding issues of substance such as questioning the war in Afghanistan, examining the implications of fighting wars with mercenaries instead of troops, examining the ethical implications of robot warfare, examining the role of media, and critiquing our loss of civil liberties.

• Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers’ Journal (transcript) from 2009-06-05.

  Scahill explains how Obama gets so little critique about the mercenary increase in Iraq and Afghanistan resulting in killing more civilians indiscriminately and increasing the chances of another 9/11 attack—”[I]t’s time to take off the Obama t-shirts. This is a man who’s in charge of the most powerful country on earth. The media in this country, we have an obligation to treat him the way we treated Bush in terms of being critical of him. And, yet, I feel like many Democrats have had their spines surgically removed these days, as have a lot of journalists. The fact is that this man is governing over a policy that is killing a tremendous number of civilians.”

  This is a far cry from the almost blinders-on Obama’s Egypt speech analysis I saw on Rachel Maddow’s 2009-06-04 MSNBC show. She identified 8 points where she was obviously quite excited about how much Obama was willing to “grab the third rail” and mention things politicians don’t typically discuss. But she did not discuss the difference between Obama’s words and the reality on the ground, nor did she bother to talk to some civilians affected by American foreign policy. When America gives uncounted billions to Israel which is used to help kill and oppress Palestinians, when the Obama plan has long been to ramp up the occupation of Afghanistan including killing civilians with robot drones (which is underway now), when the US puts in unaccountable mercenaries to do its killing (as now outnumber US troops in each of Iraq and Afghanistan), it’s cold comfort for civilian living friends and family to hear Pres. Obama go on about condemning Israeli settlements, how “resistance through violence does not succeed”, or that “moral authority is not claimed” by blowing people up. Sure, Obama is willing to acknowledge the torture we all knew was going on from day 1, but when will the torture end? Moving prisoners from Guantanamo to another prison doesn’t necessarily mean ending torture. The news about America’s disrespect of democratically elected leaders is how few of America’s coups Obama is willing to publicly cop to. It takes too little to get in some people’s good graces. Matters of life and death should not be so easily brushed away or forgotten.

I’ll come back to this and add more as time permits.

Senator Obama flip-flopped on civil liberties and privacy during his presidential campaign landing on supporting telco immunity. Now President Obama continues the assault on our civil liberties by siding with former President Bush and going beyond: Obama extends immunity to protect government officials, something not surprising but exactly what Democrats said was the saving grace of Bush telco policy. Glenn Greenwald has more with plenty of details you should read for yourself.

[…T]he Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and — even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal — you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned.

[…]

This is the Obama DOJ’s work and only its work, and it is equal to, and in some senses surpasses, the radical secrecy and immunity claims of the Bush administration.

Glenn Greenwald

If you ever made the mistake of believing that your civil liberties are better off under Republicans or Democrats, please stop believing that. Corporations don’t care which of these parties wins because they fund both of them. I know it’s asking a lot, but try to remember this when voting time comes around again and don’t fall for the lame scare tactics aimed at supporting the least-worst. Least-worst politics means, unlike corporations, you’ll always lose.

James Boyle, law professor and author of “The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind“, recently wrote about his mixed feelings concerning the release of his book for the Amazon Kindle, a portable proprietary electronic device for reading texts.

His points concerning DRM (which I prefer to call “digital restrictions management” because that acronym expansion clearly states what DRM is all about for the user) and the subsequent posts thereafter are interesting reading and I recommend reading them. I’d like to put a finer point on the issues that compel me to arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion: DRM is always dangerous for the reader, the tradeoffs are uniformly disadvantageous, and DRM should be avoided.

• Anything you want to do with an e-book happens because the publisher allows it—sharing, copying passages, even reading all happen because the publisher allows it not because you paid for the privilege of reading the book. In the case of the Major League Baseball digital restrictions management (DRM), subscribers had already paid for access to the game recordings and had their access taken away from them. Warning or not, the only reason you get to do anything with DRM-encumbered media is because the DRM controller allows you to do that. Publishers, who often control the DRM, like this arrangement and this is the major reason why they pursue devices like the Amazon Kindle at all.
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits useful backups of media you can’t crack—Boyle points out in a follow-up response that the DMCA would probably prohibit reverse-engineering the Kindle book files even if Amazon was out of business and all you wanted to do was preserve your investment in Kindle files so you could continue to read the e-books you paid for. This should be a showstopper for anyone considering DRM-encumbered media of any kind. If you can’t make useful backups (media you can read anywhere at any time) then you are trapped to live by the publisher’s rules.
• DRM limitations can be imposed on you for any reason—if the device you use to read/play DRM-encumbered media has a communication device on it (a wireless Internet radio, a GPS unit, a Bluetooth radio for short-distance communication) the device can be tracked. Tracking information could be a means of restricting access to the media: this book can only be read inside of these global coordinates, or a movie that can only be played when the player is in the vicinity of a particular Bluetooth device, for instance. Even a clock can be used to restrict: the book can only be read during certain times. The point is that unlike traditional media where you have full control when and where you can enjoy the media, DRM means you don’t have that control. The particular restrictions for DRM-encumbered media can vary as per the whim of the publisher, so there need not be any consistency or system to the restrictions. Only the regularity the publisher chooses by its technical choices.
• DRM means those rules can change at any time—DRM means that the publisher can set the terms of control. If your media is played/viewed with a device that can be updated (such as most computers can), the DRM can behave differently any time the publisher chooses. If the publisher wants to give or take features, there’s nothing you can do to stop the change except not getting the DRM-encumbered media in the first place. For instance, Apple’s iTunes program has been updated many times and some of the updates were downgrades in functionality: in 2005 the number of times you can burn a playlist to a disc was reduced from 10 to 7. You can work around this particular restriction but the point is should you have to? What if you can’t work around a DRM limitation? Publishers can even condition use of new media on your acceptance of the new software which restricts you in new ways. No doubt, publishers would do this as an enticement to get reluctant users to take on new limitations.

Ostensibly publishers would have you lose your fair use rights, forgo treating friends like friends by loaning them your stuff, in exchange for a little technological convenience like being able to read an electronic screen in direct sunlight. A portable connection to the Internet using a clear screen is convenient and valuable, but it’s not worth trading away your rights.

Around this time of year or around Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, people cite King’s speeches. Most don’t cite “Beyond Vietnam” which sharply and rightly criticizes American foreign policy including calling the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon point out, this speech wasn’t ignored in 1967. The speech was criticized. That criticism looks foolish today like anyone contending the Earth is flat. Unfortunately some of that criticism is wrongly attributed which I learned when I went to read the entire articles from which various people cite quotes.

Here’s the text of a letter I sent to Democracy Now!. Judging by how many leftist blogs, forums, and webpages of all kinds have apparently blindly repeated this error, the issue could just as well apply to them:

Since at least January 15, 2002 either Amy Goodman or Juan Gonzalez has introduced a replay of King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech and said, “Time magazine [later] called the speech ‘demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.'”.

You are probably referring to Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon’s article from 1995, “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV” which features that line.

In the online version of that article Cohen and Solomon acknowledge that they misattributed a Life magazine quote to Time magazine (“Corrected version: An earlier version of this column mistakenly attributed a quote from Life to Time magazine.”).

You shouldn’t continue to repeat Cohen and Solomon’s error.

Today is Buy Nothing Day, a day when many around the world encourage you to understand how restrictive it is to be a consumer. A consumer-driven economy weakens people by reducing us to purchasing machines that earn money in order to spend it mostly on things we don’t need. We become defined by what we buy; business spends billions telling us to get on the fashion treadmill by buying things so we remain relevant in the eyes of our fashion-observing neighbors. In this mode there’s no room for being politically active citizens who care about the world in which we live. Citizenship encourages caring about the community, the environment, and ourselves. Such thinking is likely to get you to reach the conclusions Annie Leonard reached some time ago—all the steps of a consumerist life are killing us and none of these steps are sustainable. Even if you get a little happiness from purchasing stuff that joy is short-lived, so on its own terms consumerism is not sustainable. In the long run you discard most of the stuff you buy. The ethical arguments against treating people as we do (sending children into mines for some of the raw goods to make more computers, for instance) are powerful on their own. Clearly we need a better way to live.