Nothing so far beats HR676 for US health care

Posted on by

No health care proposal so far beats Rep. John Conyers’ (D-MI) HR676 for providing universal health care to Americans. HR676 is a single-payer health care plan also known as “Medicare for All”. HR676 has been Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) health care plan for both of his campaigns for president. Physicians for a National Health Program have endorsed HR676 for some years now.

The Democrats talk about health care in their debates but none of the most covered candidates offer a health care plan that covers everyone, makes it illegal to compete with the government-provided plan (thus removing HMOs from health care delivery), and is described in a bill you can tell your congressional representatives to co-sponsor today (sample letters 1 and 2 to inspire you to write your own).

Senators Edwards, Clinton, and Obama offer health care plans that all keep HMOs intact and in charge. This alone tells you not to take their health care plans seriously.

Today’s Democracy Now! (transcripts, audio, video) featured Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” and some advocacy for a universal health care plan, although nobody mentioned HR676 by name.

Update (2007-06-18): Michael Moore discussed single-payer universal health care for the hour on today’s Democracy Now! (transcript, audio, video) and mentioned Kucinich’s health care plan with a mild approbation.

Continue reading →

Twenty things you should know about corporate crime

Posted on by

The Corporate Crime Reporter‘s Russell Mokhiber gave a talk at the Taming the Giant Corporation conference in Washington, D.C., June 9, 2007. I have reformatted the transcript for clarity and added reference points so you can jump to a particular item (#1, #2, #3, etc.).

Twenty years ago, Corporate Crime Reporter, a weekly print newsletter, was launched.From the beginning, the most popular feature of Corporate Crime Reporter has been a question/answer format interview.

Over the years, we’ve interviewed hundreds of prosecutors, defense attorneys, law school professors, reporters, and activists.

Our first interview, which appeared in Volume One, Number One on April 13, 1987 was with the premier corporate crime prosecutor of his day.

That was Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York.

At the time, he was prosecuting the likes of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Marc Rich.

President Clinton later pardoned Marc Rich.

Apparently Marc Rich’s wife was dumping big cash into the Clinton library.

Rudy is now solidly in the hands of the corporate crime lobby. He prosecuted corporate crime as a way to achieve higher office. Then he learned one of the key lessons of corporate crime prosecution.

You can achieve higher office by prosecuting corporate crime. But as you move up the ladder, you have to make nice with the corporate powers that be. And so you turn your attention and rhetoric to various forms of street crime.

Now, Rudy is ready to be President.

So, corporate crime lesson number one ”“ prosecute corporate crime to achieve higher office, then prosecute street crime to protect your political position.

Or to simplify it, corporate crime is all about power politics.

Continue reading →

Democrats will stop taking you for granted when you stop supporting them.

Posted on by

Laura Flanders, host of Radio Nation, asks, “When will Democratic leaders stop dissing their base?”

When Progressive voters stop blindly supporting the Democrats and start holding Democrats to the same standards to which they would hold Republicans, third parties, and independents. If you keep giving them what they want and asking nothing in exchange, they have no reason to do what you want.

There’s a difference between being pissed off and holding people accountable (whether through impeachment and electing a competitor). Which is why I keep asking if Progressives who are pissed off now will remember why they’re pissed off come election time. Will you withhold campaign support of any kind and instead endorse another candidate (perhaps from a competiing party, perhaps an independent) based on their campaign funding, political history, and stated goals?

Continue reading →

Software patents getting mainstream news critique

Posted on by

It’s nice to see software patents getting mainstream criticism. You as a computer user, regardless of what you do with the computer, are adversely affected by software patents—patents on algorithms used in computer software. The op-ed rightly points out the solution: end software patents. We don’t need them and they chiefly serve to give control over computer software to the largest patent holders (invariably a few multinational corporations such as IBM).

A relatively minor issue I have with the op-ed is objecting to software patents on the basis of “innovation”. I find the “innovation” argument not entirely convincing because I think it gives way to debating how many should be allowed to innovate rather than framing the issue around ensuring everyone has the freedom to make their computer do as they wish. Once we frame the debate on the basis of “innovation” our software freedom can be marginalized away. I would not like to give ground to any argument that says if 50% more corporations or wealthy individuals had permission to express themselves freely on the computer, that would be “enough innovation” and we could get on with making minor tweaks to the patent system to make this happen. The patent system is fundamentally broken when it comes to computer software because it directly interferes with people making their computers do what they want. The call for increased innovation doesn’t strongly enough emphasize that you deserve freedom to make your computer do as you wish.

Continue reading →

It’s hard to retrofit freedom on to a non-freedom movement

Posted on by

Luis Villa writes that one should not “be afraid to embrace freedom”.

don’t be afraid to embrace freedom: open source businesses tend to be allergic to the word ”˜free’. That is a mistake. Say ”˜freedom’ a lot. Love freedom. Embrace freedom. Your community likes freedom. It differentiates you from the proprietary competition, and if you embrace it wholeheartedly (not just this weak ”˜openness’ stuff) it will differentiate you from most of your open source competition too.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with calling attention to software freedom—the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify one’s software at any time for any reason—but there are reasons why the open source movement proponents don’t do this. Instead they champion a development methodology which claims that inexpensive software development results in fewer bugs. Theirs is not a persuasive claim because it’s so often not true and it speaks to so few; open source software has its share of bugs and most people aren’t software developers. That movement offers non-programmers no reason to care about unpowerful buggy software. The persuasive argument comes from the older free software movement, the movement where software freedom is front and center.

Continue reading →

More attention finally paid to coltan wars

Posted on by

Coltan is a metallic ore which is refined into a power that is used in computers. Coltan production doesn’t get much public attention, just the things it helps make possible. John Perkins touched on the subject in his interview on today’s Democracy Now! (losslessly compressed audio, audio, video, transcript). Here’s an excerpt of what Perkins said about the Congo and coltan miner exploitation.

The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a devastating and sad one. And it’s the hidden story, really. We in the United States don’t even talk about Africa. We don’t think about Africa. You know, Congo has something called coltan, which probably most of your listeners may not have even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and all of us in the G8 countries demand low — or at least we want to see our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. And, of course, the companies that make these sell them on that basis, that “Oh, here, mine’s $200 less than the other company.” But in order to do that, these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners, the people mining coltan, they’re being killed. There’s these vast wars going on to provide us with cheap coltan.

And I have to say, you know, if we want to live in a safe world, we need to be — we must be willing, and, in fact, we must demand that we pay higher prices for things like laptop computers and cell phones and that a good share of that money go back to the people who are mining the coltan. And that’s true of oil. It’s true of so many resources that we are not paying the true cost, and there’s millions of people around the world suffering from that. Roughly 50,000 people die every single day from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they don’t get the medicines for, simply because they’re part of a system that demands that they put in long hours, and they get very, very low pay, so we can have things cheaper in this country. And the Congo is an incredibly potent example of that.

It’s unusual for DN! to discuss topics of direct relevance to computer users, but any ethical computer movement will be compelled to more closely examine where we get the inexpensive computers we enjoy today and work to make sure the prices remain higher and the money goes to the workers.

Time to silence anti-war voices…again.

Posted on by

In 2003, John Nichols cited The Nation’s figures when he wrote about CNN’s televised debate between 9 Democratic Party contenders:

And those who were actually right about the war remain off radar.

That was obvious last week, during CNN’s televised debate featuring the nine Democratic presidential candidates. Moderator Judy Woodruff put the candidates into a ridiculous situation where they essentially had to beg to be called on to answer questions.

Then she refused to call on the one candidate who has most consistently and effectively challenged the president’s war-making: Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chair Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio.

This is National Journal’s breakdown of how much time each of the candidates was permitted to speak during Thursday’s debate:

Howard Dean – 14 minutes, 7 seconds.

John Kerry – 12 minutes, 31 seconds.

Wesley Clark – 10 minutes, 36 seconds.

Richard Gephardt – 10 minutes, 2 seconds.

Joe Lieberman – 9 minutes, 26 seconds.

Carol Moseley Braun – 8 minutes, 39 seconds.

Al Sharpton – 8 minutes, 28 seconds.

John Edwards – 8 minutes, 0 seconds.

Kucinich – 5 minutes, 9 seconds.

Regarding last night’s Democratic Party debate, Democracy Now! reports: (emphasis mine)

Former Senator Mike Gravel said the Democrats are complicit in the Iraq war as well. Congressman Denis Kucinich said Congress has the power to end the war now by simply cutting off the funding. After the debate Senator Chris Dodd criticized CNN for giving far more time to Senators Obama and Clinton. Obama spoke for 16 minutes. Dodd, Kucinich, Gravel and Senator Joe Biden were each given less than nine minutes.

Single-payer universal health care was given short shrift. The allowed ends of debate kept for-profit HMOs intact and tried to work with employers to improve employee health care (as if one can’t deliver health care without employers doing it and as if people don’t deserve health care when they’re unemployed). Single-payer health care that makes private competing plans illegal (see HR676) went undiscussed in subsequent corporate news analysis and moderator Wolf Blitzer didn’t pick up on the point to get the other candidates to address it head-on. The horse race of campaign funding is still the sole focus for corporate news.

How’s your proprietor treating you?: Apple’s latest downgrade.

Posted on by

There’s more to the Apple-EMI deal than the mainstream press cares to tell.

Background

EMI is a record label. Apple Computer, a nascent audio distributor, wants to compete in EMI’s market via the iPod, iTunes music program, and iTunes Music Service (iTMS). iTMS only works with the iPod. EMI recently agreed to distribute tracks via iTMS without Digital Restrictions Management—technological restrictions that keep users from doing things they want to do with their legally-obtained tracks. Users don’t want digital restrictions, so EMI and Apple are offering DRM-free tracks at a 30% higher price than the same track with DRM. With Apple’s Digital Restrictions Management users had to work around the restrictions. One popular method was to burn their iTMS tracks to an audio CD then copy (or “rip”) those tracks back to the computer in some form that offered no encumbrance (MP3 was a popular choice for this). Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been busy:

News

  • The latest version of the iTunes program breaks the ability to convert the music you’ve bought — even “DRM-free” songs sold at a 30 percent premium — into MP3s that will play on your iPod.—when you rip the CD with iTunes (as opposed to some other audio CD ripper program), EFF says that iTunes 7.2 breaks “the “buy-burn-rip-to-MP3″ workaround has been the primary way to start with a 99 cent iTunes download and end up with an unrestricted MP3 that will play” anywhere. Anyone using the proprietary iTunes program to manage their music will probably be bitten by this “upgrade” soon because Apple makes it easy to switch to the latest version of their software. If iTunes were free software—software that respects a user’s freedom to share and modify the program—there would be a community eagerly hacking an improved version of iTunes that didn’t have these restrictions. This community would allow even non-technical users to switch to using a version of the program that allowed copying music to their iPods as they like.
  • Boing Boing tells us that “EFF’s technologists have found a hidden block of data in the new iTunes tracks”—it holds customer data. When you transfer an iTunes Music Service track, legally or illegally, you’re also distributing someone’s name and address. This didn’t happen with other forms of audio media: people who bought wax cylinders, vinyl records, audio tapes, or mass-produced audio CDs could get the audio without worrying about inadvertently passing along copies of someone’s personal information (possibly their own) when they leveraged their right of first sale. This right is the backbone of everyday events like garage sales, used CD stores, and library sales. But Apple probably has you covered: as George Hotelling learned the hard way, it’s needlessly difficult to sell an iTMS track without divulging personal info.

More reading: EFF’s essay on the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management “The Customer is Always Wrong”.

Cindy Sheehan’s leave from protesting: a well-earned break.

Posted on by

Cindy Sheehan announced she is stepping down from her peace movement work and in so doing the US is losing a leading anti-war voice. We will be worse off for her departure. Sheehan spoke with Amy Goodman on today’s Democracy Now! (low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwdith audio, video, transcript). I am sympathetic to her reasons for leaving, but I was not aware that the political left helped lead her to her decision. I think it is another sad point on an unbroken line of bad advocacy. Despite sharing (what I thought were) points of agreement with the political left, I don’t agree that supporting corporatists is the way out.

[W]hen I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used.

In 2004 Sen. John Kerry (D-NH) offered to manage the war better than President George W. Bush. The political left rallied around Kerry, forgoing all anti-war alternatives. Today, the political left dutifully follows the corporate media which leads them to champion Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) despite both candidates’ late-to-the-table approach on major issues of the day (for example their lacking health care ideas which began as a cynical virtual non-showing at a recent union event and has now grown into a means to keep private HMOs intact). We’re not supposed to discuss Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) H.R. 676, the only single-payer health care plan offered in this election. Like Congresswoman Pelosi’s stance on impeachment, universal health care is off the table.

On Iraq and Iran, Obama has made many speeches with little substance but some things are clear: he doesn’t want the US (military or corporations) to leave Iraq now and he stands by what he told the Chicago Tribune—he’s okay with sending rockets into Iran. Clinton won’t clearly identify her support for the invasion of Iraq as a mistake. She stands with AIPAC against Iran. What leads people to think highly of these two “frontrunners”? A dearth of media coverage of Democratic party alternatives combined with people’s unwillingness to do the research and find out where candidates get their campaign money, what their voting record reveals, and what they say about themselves; behavior that would compel them to seriously question their party loyalty.
Continue reading →

Collaboratively responding to a call for infinite copyright term

Posted on by

I was working on my own response to the recent Mark Helprin op-ed in the New York Times when I learned that Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and blogger, maintains a wiki where a response is being edited. There are some uniquely American aspects to this discussion (such as the unconstitutionality of an infinite term of copyright) but the access to culture and the promise to be able to build on culture are not uniquely American. Ironically, while Helprin gives no value to the public domain, another supporter of his argument draws great value from the public domain: the Disney corporation, a chief supporter of increase copyright term, makes a great deal of money by making movies out of stories in the public domain. This doesn’t draw too sharp a line between Disney and their proponents because Disney can afford to pay for any license that company wants.

If you’re looking for more discussion on why the term of copyright should not be extended I direct your attention to the Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s talk and the subsequent discussion. Like many such discussions, this one came about in part because corporate copyright holders (this time record labels and popular wealthy artists) are pressuring government (this time British) for more copyright power. In time, these same people and organizations will pressure American government for “harmony” in the term of copyright (a scam that is brought out to increase copyright power). They play countries off each other because it has a history of working, despite growing opposition including an increasingly media-aware public that knows they’re getting a raw deal.

Making copyright last forever can be thought of as a huge increase in the term of copyright, so the discussions about increasing the term of copyright are apropos. Copyright already lasts too long and one can argue it’s already infinite in term through repeated exploitation of the “limited Times” language in the US Constitution. Helprin celebrates exploiting renewable retrospective copyright extension and Justice Breyer’s dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft points out that “The present extension will produce a copyright period of protection that, even under conservative assumptions, is worth more than 99.8% of protection in perpetuity (more than 99.99% for a songwriter like Irving Berlin and a song like Alexander’s Ragtime Band).”). Giving copyright holders more exclusion power is neither necessary nor a good idea.