Big Patterns

Blog has moved.

2006-06-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

My blog has moved.

Check out the new address and find the old entries there too. I've closed comments here and made that blog ready to take comments.

Thanks for reading this blog.

Switching masters isn't freedom.

2006-06-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

Lie's criticism is odd and hypocritical—he notices that Microsoft's "core fonts" are not free software fonts

The fonts are still available for anyone to use, but not to change. It is illegal to add support for more non-Western scripts.

Contrary to what some might read into Lie's wording here, the Microsoft fonts have never been free to modify (they did not undergo some relicensing where they were once free to modify but are immutable now; users have always been forbidden to modify the font or distribute modified versions to others). Lie didn't use the term "free software", but this part of his critique is quite comparable to what a free software advocate would notice.

Yet the fonts Lie recommends (Larabie's "Goodfish" family) are also not free software fonts, they're merely available at no price (gratis). There are scripts which have no representation in either the Microsoft fonts or the Goodfish fonts. If either were free software fonts (like the Bitstream Vera font family is), this could be corrected by the users as this has been in derivatives of the Bitstream Vera family. Furthermore, only 1-5 users are licensed to use the Goodfish fonts from myfonts.com (the officially sanctioned Larabie font distribution site). This means your distribution freedom is limited and thus the fonts are available gratis and users are denied crucial freedoms. It's rather ironic that this site claims "Because MyFonts.com’s products are all downloadable, our customers often find that they need to return at a later date to download their fonts again." which is supposed to justify making site users register before they can get fonts. The irony is that if the fonts were licensed as free software, users could make copies and distribute them to others so they could go to their friends, neighbors, or some other site without these registration hurdles.

So it's odd that Lie would bother to use this criterion for judging the fonts and then suggest a font family that suffers from the same restrictions as what he's complaining about.

Furthermore, the hypocrisy of the last part of the essay cannot be overstated: all proprietary software distributors are monopolists. When you get the proprietary Opera browser, you can't fix the bugs in it, improve it, or share your improved copy with others. If you want any changes, you have to go to the proprietor—the monopolist—for those changes. There is no other place to go because everybody else is prohibited from helping. Opera won't distribute to you a copy of the Opera browser source code under a free software license to allow any of this activity.

Yet here's a monopolist decrying the state of affairs for fonts.

I appreciate the bad position the user is in with fonts on the web, but the way out is not to build a dependence on fonts you can't use, inspect, share, and modify anywhere you want for any purpose. The way out is to find free software fonts (they exist, I'm using some now and I've named one such family) or make them, build on them to improve them, use them, and distribute the font so the community benefits. You can find free fonts for a variety of languages, even projects working on fonts that will work with multiple languages. Use your favorite search engine and look for "free software fonts".

A response to another blogger's post.

2006-06-14T13:51:00.000-05:00

A response to what's building on this thread

Free software and commercial software are not opposites. Many business distribute free software as part of business activity, hence commercial software includes free software. Free software doesn't deny anyone "the freedom to conduct commerce". Proprietary software (which is what you probably meant to say instead of "commercial software") denies users the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program whenever they want for whatever purpose due to the way in which the program is licensed to the user. These freedoms are more important than profit and do not in any way stop one's business from making profit. Most proprietors discover that they can't run their business like Microsoft does because they can't muscle the world's governments to stop enforcing the law like Microsoft can.

Yes, RMS is joking with Saint EMACS. It's a widely recognized bit of humor in an otherwise serious speech. I've seen him deliver that bit before and the audiences get it as humorous.

RMS is not a part of "open source" anything--he's made it very clear that he is a member of the older and (frankly, more principled) free software community. He even wrote an essay on the differences between the two movements. He isn't advocating for only GPL-covered software. He's advocating for all published software to be free software which, by the way, is as it used to be (we didn't have the free software movement then because we didn't need it, it was our way of everyday computing life and didn't seem to be threatened until rather recently). Non-copylefted free software licenses give their users freedom and power--the power to deny other users software freedom for derivative works and even verbatim copies. That's why copyleft is so important--all computer users deserve freedom, not just the ones that get their software from those who choose to distribute free software.

Finally, GNU/Linux is a good name because it gives a share of the credit to GNU and can even spur people to inquire about what GNU is, thus presenting an opportunity to help others better understand software freedom. Linus Torvalds doesn't advocate for software freedom, he eschews it. He's in line with open source methodology sometimes and other times just out for his own education. This is fine, he can be a member of whatever movement he wishes and espouse his own ideas on what is valuable. But that should not be the only ideas people come in contact with and it should not represent the GNU Project which has different goals than he does. Whatever objection you have to giving GNU a share of the credit, I'm pretty sure the GNU/Linux naming FAQ has a response for you.

Stop accepting crappy licensing.

2006-06-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

Red Hat, distributors of a popular GNU/Linux system, recently held a summit in Nashville. They recorded the talks and are releasing copies of them online. But you're prohibited from distributing copies of the talks to your friends, even non-commercially and verbatim without hassle.

Three Fedora Core GNU/Linux fans (Bob Lord, Christopher Blizzard, and Mark McLoughlin) are chatting these talks up online, in particular one from Prof. Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation. Prof. Moglen himself directed me to his Wikipedia page noting in an impressed way that it was far more up to date on his work than his own site.

I posted the following to McLoughlin's blog. I reproduce it here because people tend to edit out uncomfortable posts from their blogs (I don't, not even the ones that point out mistakes in my posts). This is one of the shortcomings of blogs supplanting netnews as a viable democratic communication medium (there are other limitations in this transition as well).

McLoughlin notes that Moglen's speech is worth hearing, so much so that you can skip to any part of it and hear something pithy. To which I replied:

The more laudatory the speech, the more of a shame it is that the movies are licensed to prohibit sharing by default:

All materials on this program are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, or otherwise published without the prior written permission of Red Hat, Inc. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice. However, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein, you may download the video (one machine readable copy) for your personal, non-commercial use only.

So, in other words, enjoy the freedoms of free software but don't you dare spread this movie file around to tell other people about it.

Not everyone who needs to hear these things has net access, a computer, or an interest in sitting in front of a computer. I host a radio program where I play free software-related talks and discuss free software-related issues. I'd love to play Prof. Moglen's talk, but I can't because either I have to go through a hell of a lot of hassle to share it or I'd play something my listeners are prohibited from sharing further.

When Red Hat takes this material off the Internet, people will just have to settle for explaining this not half as well as Eben Moglen did. Even verbatim non-commercial sharing is prohibited by default unless you ask the copyright holder each and every time you want to share. Did some video post-production house slap that silly restrictive license there without understanding who their audience was?

Red Hat should relicense these to at least allow non-commercial verbatim sharing in any medium so long as a simple license sentence is copied with the work, and re-edit the movies to edit out that text I quoted above. I have a hard time believing that any of the speakers would object to this (in particular Eben Moglen, chief counsel for the FSF). If the music copyright holders don't like it, excise the music (it's not the music we're interested in hearing anyhow) or find more amenably licensed music (perhaps a CC track).

I would have posted this on Chris Blizzard's blog as well, but he turned off comments to his blog.

Bob Lord wants to to share copies of the keynote talks with friends, but Red Hat won't let him or you -- at least not without considerable hassle.

I'm grateful that the talks are in a format one can play with free software: copies of the talks so far are in Ogg Vorbis+Theora. However, it's ironic that Lord points out the talks concern "ideas like freedom, culture, innovation, and the well-being of children on the other side of the planet" while the licensing of the recordings of these talks exemplify the opposite consideration.

Phil Zimmermann: how the tables have turned.

2006-05-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

Phil Zimmermann, initial programmer of "PGP"—Pretty Good Privacy—brought strong encryption to the masses. For three years ending in 1996, Zimmermann was under criminal investigation for violating export restrictions on strong encryption due to his work on PGP. Furthermore, PGP was not free software for everyone, only for those in non-profit organizations. Eventually GPG—the GNU Privacy Guard—was written by a completely different group of hackers and we no longer had to do without strong encryption or choose between giving up valuable freedoms in exchange for enjoying strong encryption.

Now Zimmermann has distributed Zfone, a program much like the PGPfone program years ago: encrypted voice communication in real time over the Internet. But there's a huge catch: you give up a lot to get the software or (according to what the license tries to assert) use it. I only followed the registration procedure long enough to read the license, portions of which I quote below.

The Zfone software can only be copied "a reasonable number" (section 1a) of times, one is not allowed to make the software do what the user needs it to do (section 2a disallows modifications not specified in section 1), and one is disallowed from copying the software beyond what is described in section 1 (section 2b). Sections 2d and 2f prohibit sharing copies of the source code except in one circumstance.

Section 2e of Zfone's license tries to set restrictions for merely running the compiled program (something the FSF once said couldn't be done under American copyright law outside of a license manager or an encryption manager).

Section 3 of Zfone's license tries to prohibit users from discussing "any security-related bug, problem, deficiency, or weakness in the Zfone software on any web site or other public forum, or otherwise disclose or provide any such information to anyone else" without Zimmermann's permission.

Unlike PGP which at one time was considered semi-free software because it didn't convey the freedoms to use, copy, distribute, and modify the program to all of its users, this program's license tries to curtail one's freedom of speech in addition to taking away one's software freedom. Ironic that this should come from the man who was once under criminal investigation by the US Government (a time he refers to as "government persecution" on his website) in which he probably felt the loss of his civil liberties. I very much doubt that Zfone's software would qualify as semi-free software. Zfone should be avoided. Instead it would be better to enhance free software VOIP (such as Ekiga) to do the job of sending and receiving strongly encrypted data, and making free software VOIP programs compatible with Zfone so that interoperability is possible without giving up valuable freedoms.

He stole the show.

2006-04-22T01:09:00.000-05:00

Eben Moglen's talk at the 2006 Free Software Foundation Associate Membership meeting stole the show. I am glad I was there. I am glad there's a high-quality recording available (of all of the talks) in a free format under a license that allows redistribution in any form so long as a simple verbatim license accompanies the work.

My father and I went and we both agreed that Prof. Moglen stole the show. He was well worth the price of admission.

This is well worth listening to. I'm going to spend some time writing a transcript because I think this is worth close inspection and analysis.

Cockburn, Nader, and Frank, and a movie recommendation.

2006-04-12T23:43:00.000-05:00

Cockburn, Nader, and Frank hitting the nail on the head. Again.

A movie to see: "Why We Fight". If you enjoy informative documentaries, you'll like "Why We Fight". I paid to see both in a local small theater, and I hope a portion of my ticket price went to the filmmakers. They earned it.

Same song, different verse: Will you still love these words at election time?

2006-03-23T12:35:00.000-06:00

Molly Ivins' latest essay on what's wrong with the DLC Democrats is right on, strongly-worded, strident, and she names names (and I don't say any of that to connote something bad, I wish more people would say what they mean in clear unadulterated language free of business-friendly doublespeak).

But only time will tell if she backs this stuff come election time.

Remember that plenty of self-styled progressives can write strongly-worded, strident essays which name names. But they can also cower behind the Democrats when it's time to make a vote (need I remind you of how many people "Voted to Stop Bush" in 2004?). These folks have said they'd vote for war-mongering, anti-universal health care, anti-public financing
Democrats (it hardly matters who the Democrats are, John Kerry or Barack Obama will do). In short, plenty of progressives will vote against all of the things Ivins favors in the aforementioned article which is currently Common Dreams' most forwarded article of the week.

So get your left-wing belly-aching out now while it's easy to do so. There's no test in sight, so few will remember what you said come election time. But in 2008, I'll be curious to see how many of you cave into fear because you've got just enough where you have something you fear losing, and you're not willing to risk it to push for something you need more (like health care for almost 50 million of you Americans, or an end to the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, and never starting a war in Iran).

How to raise the stakes too far with copyright and patent law.

2006-03-19T15:21:00.000-06:00

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and their friends (undoubtedly including the big book publishers and their representative associations), have found a new way to push the argument of copy control too far.

Freedom to Tinker has the story and its well worth reading.

On a related note, Michael Crichton has a very interesting essay on the power of patent law. As more people see the unchecked power the multinational corporations have been able to acquire with copyright and patent law, I hope more people will inform their friends and become more interested in efforts to reform these systems, if not seriously consider the effects of abolishing them (in the US, neither are Constitutionally required, both are Constitutionally allowed).

Thanks to Dawn for the tip on the Crichton article.

Why FLOSS hackers use non-free codecs

2006-02-24T20:56:00.000-06:00

This blog post asks an interesting question:

We in the Free and Open Source software community spend a great deal of time talking about free codecs and supporting those codecs, at least in words. So why on Planet Gnome do I see three different examples of people demoing cool new things with non-free codecs/tools?

I think it's because FLOSS hackers are taught to value convenience and popularity more than software freedom. As a result, it's acceptable to make "screencasts" which require Flash (which is currently unplayable with Free Software), movies encoded with non-free codecs, and audio shows distributed exclusively in the patent-encumbered MP3 format (which is only Free Software for some users).

There are perfectly viable Free Software alternatives—Ogg Theora movies and Ogg Vorbis audio files. Animated uncompressed GIFs can be made with Free Software and work perfectly fine to illustrate someone using a program; this approach also works across every platform in many programs (including every graphical web browser), not just those platforms that have a specific non-free player. I understand that Fluendo's Cortado player is a Java-based player which allows people to merely point someone to a webpage and let them see an Ogg Theora+Vorbis movie. York Student TV uses this today as another means of seeing their broadcast (they also point to the feed itself so you can play it in your preferred player). Perhaps this will work on the Free Software Java runtime and give people a "no install" player they can use anywhere there's a web browser that has Java. Short of that, VideoLan Client is Free Software (in some areas you might need to get a build without the MP3 software), and there is a Free Software decoder for Microsoft Internet Player.

In his discussion of the difference between the Free Software and Open Source movements Richard Stallman had something to say about switching to Free Software and switching back to non-Free Software:

Fear of Freedom

The main argument for the term ``open source software'' is that ``free software'' makes some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.

Years ago, free software developers noticed this discomfort reaction, and some started exploring an approach for avoiding it. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to ``sell'' the software more effectively to certain users, especially business. The term ``open source'' is offered as a way of doing more of this--a way to be ``more acceptable to business.'' The views and values of the Open Source movement stem from this decision.

This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be ``more acceptable to business.'' Software distributors especially show this pattern. Some GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.

That essay is worth reading in its entirety.

Why Microsoft Windows Vista users will leave Firefox

2006-01-19T23:41:00.000-06:00

I read that in an upcoming version of Firefox, the increasingly popular free software web browser, there will be an "Exit Survey". Ben Goodger, a Firefox developer, writes in his blog:

We'd like to know why people leave Firefox. A survey on uninstall would help us find ways to make the software better in future versions.

This is interesting because I believe that a significant number of users will have no reason to run Firefox in Microsoft Windows Vista because that version of Windows will run Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7. MSIE 7 will have tabbed browsing and increased support for web standards, two of the reasons most popularly given for running Firefox.

Neither of these reasons is why I recommend one run a free software web browser, such as Firefox.

I recommend users run it because it respects the user's freedoms to share and modify the browser (hence the "free" in "free software"). But this is not a view shared by the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is a supporter of the Open Source movement which eschews software freedom and promotes a development methodology that says businesses ought to license their programs under an "Open Source" license because then the program will be developed faster, with fewer bugs, and all at remarkably little additional cost to the business.

Unpaid labor is certainly attractive to many businesses, but something that ought not appeal much to users (neither on the order of treating a business like a charity, nor because most computer users aren't running businesses). Also, this is a set of claims which is easily disproven. There are plenty of so-called "Open Source" programs with bugs, or programs which are developed quite slowly compared to their proprietary counterparts.

The Mozilla Foundation talks about browser choice. The claim is one I've laid out here before, but it basically goes like this. Users deserve a choice in what browsers to use so that no one organization can dictate how things work on the WWW.

This would be okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far and it isn't really true. Mozilla (the project producing the software we know today) didn't offer users a choice in browsers. One only needs two alternatives to be said to have a choice, and therefore we can say that Microsoft and Opera offered WWW users a choice. And there's nothing about a "choice" that requires software freedom. Netscape Navigator, MSIE, and Opera (once the most popular web browsers) are all proprietary programs. So there's your choice, pick your master. This isn't surprising, the Open Source movement only complains about proprietary software in that it is less efficiently developed than the software development model they advocate; there's nothing there about how people ought to treat one another, how to build a better society by eschewing a dog-eat-dog society, and why we ought to value freedom for its own sake.

So long as the Mozilla Foundation remains silent on software freedom, they are ignoring the best reason to use Firefox instead of a non-free browser, and in so doing giving users no reason to stay with free software. Users have to learn to value software freedom for its own sake to have a reason to continue to use free software instead of a proprietary alternative.

Freedom falls with celebration.

2006-01-19T22:20:00.000-06:00

For those of you who don't know:

MP3 is patent-encumbered. The algorithms used to make or play MP3s are patented and (in some countries, like the US) must be licensed before they can be used legally (glossing over some details here in the interest of brevity). The license structure is incompatible with free software.

Fluendo, a multimedia organization that has made free software multimedia programs for free software systems, recently purchased an MP3 license and distributes MP3 player (decoder) software.

There is a way of doing the same job MP3 does without the patent hassle, and which (according to all the blind tests I have read over the past few years) sounds at least as good as MP3 at comparable compression levels (but quite likely better than MP3 in higher quality settings), and has better tagging facilities than MP3. This codec is called Ogg Vorbis.

The fight to popularize Ogg Vorbis is right in line with the fight to popularize free software because Ogg Vorbis is an unencumbered codec.

Listen to http://x2a.org/pub/events/gplv3/moglen-comments.ogg (which is actually a Speex file, Speex being like Ogg Vorbis but aimed at compressing human speech very tightly) around 56 minutes 10 seconds into the recording to hear RMS' response to Fluendo's recent purchase of an MP3 license. RMS mentioned this during the explanation of the "Liberty or Death" article in the first draft of GPLv3, the introduction of the most popular free software license the GNU General Public License version 3. You can download a better sounding copy of the same audio with a video track from the official Bittorrent or a direct download.

The need for this provision was underlined by a recent article talking about a GStreamer plugin which includes source code distributed under an X11 license, or so it says. But then when you read further you see, in fact, that that's not the whole of the license; there's a patent license involved also, and that, in fact, it's not free software at all! And this was presented as a way of making things better for our community. So you believe that a non-free program can make things better for people, that it's a step forward, as the author of the article I read did, then you might think what they did was great. But if your goal is to make sure—is to defend user's freedom, to establish a community of freedom, to spread the idea that freedom is important, than you cannot accept the idea that such a thing is a positive step. It's a surrender, not an amelioration. And so the "Liberty or Death" article of the GPL is just as important as it ever was.

Putting this in my own words: Now that I think about this more along the lines of who is affected by it and what this patent license purchase allows me to do, I see that Fluendo's purchase of an MP3 license and their MP3 player software is not really a gift at all, it's just another non-free codec to tempt us away from freedom.

Measured from the perspective of who is affected by Fluendo's purchase of an MP3 patent license: the codec changes nothing for most everyone on the planet. For those who don't live in software patent-encumbered countries, this is yet another free software MP3 encoder, something this audience has had access to for years now. For those who live in software patent-encumbered countries, the MIT X11 license is a ruse because that license does absolutely nothing to protect licensees from the adverse effects of software patents. The Fluendo MP3 software is non-free.

Measured from the perspective of what this lets me do: lose interest in fighting for a free codec that is also a better quality codec. Using non-free software would not be a win for freedom, that's a win for those who want more people to give into non-free media.

Hubert Figuiere thanks Fluendo for the "gift". But who is really getting something that they didn't have before? Lots of people have non-free MP3 players including anyone who is comfortable violating patent law.

Another threat to freedom comes from the Mozilla Foundation in the form of a recommendation to run non-free software. Recently, the Mozilla Foundation is now recommending that MacOS 9 users switch from using Mozilla Suite 1.2.1 for MacOS 9 (the last build to run on that OS) to a proprietary web browser. And at least one Mozilla Foundation employee supports the recommendation. A portion of what RMS said—"So you believe that a non-free program can make things better for people [...] It's a surrender, not an amelioration."—is applicable to this situation too, although he wasn't speaking with regard to this situation.

Update: Fedora Core GNU/Linux will include Mono, an implementation of a portion of .net. For a long time, Redhat has not included Mono or any Mono apps. Redhat has not released any substantive report as to their apparent change of mind. Ubuntu GNU/Linux and Novell's GNU/Linux distribution has included Mono and Mono-dependant apps for some time now. Is this a huge mistake, essentially a way for users to become liable for patent infringement lawsuits? The decision gets little substantive analysis from the supporters; just glowing words of support.

Update: Novell is trying the same strategy as Fluendo and undoubtedly there will be Novell promoters coming along shortly to tell us what a "gift" this new non-free MP3 player program "Banshee" is.

The US will have to wait.

2006-01-01T15:52:00.000-06:00

I was browsing my public library in late October and I jotted down something I forgot to bring up here. I read this on page 23 of the October 28, 2005 Chicago Reader in a full-page ad:

There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into "leaders" who tell us to seek common ground with fascists is provind every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.

You can read this text in a number of The World Can't Wait's PDF fliers (1, 2, 3).

A strong sentiment, but long-time readers of this blog know that I'll wait to be convinced until election time when organizations like these endorse candidates. Will they join so many on the Left and frame the debate around the Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates (two ways to fight the war are offered, ending the war and occupation is left off the table), or will they stand behind an anti-war candidate, even if that candidate is unpopular and not often discussed in the mainstream media?

In short, will folks like these vote in line with the sentiment they express 3 years out of every 4 or will they cave into whatever the Democrats are offering? Will the Democrat offer a progressive platform, reject corporate funding, and earn their votes?

Not only is it not true, the question is useless.

2005-12-04T01:49:00.000-06:00

John Nichols' latest article applauds Al Franken and asks this question:

"Some might chuckle at Franken's line: "Bush is lucky that he had a Republican Congress, or he almost certainly would have been impeached and imprisoned." But does anyone seriously question, after all the revelations regarding the doctoring of intelligence and the deliberate deception of Congress and the American people by the president and his cronies, that an independent Congress would now be reviewing impeachment resolutions?"

I would because the Democrats are so good at going along to get along. A majority of them supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq (including three of their most visible members, Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama). This illegal and unethical invasion and occupation is what George W. Bush's presidency will be known best for. Hillary Clinton dismissed universal health care at least twice (once in 1993, another time in 2004) as millions more go without health insurance, and up-and-coming member, Barak Obama, goes along and supports Bush's position on the war[1] and confirms Gonzales and (correction, thanks to an anonymous poster—Obama voted against Gonzales' confirmation) Rice. How about how the Republicans and Democrats working together to marginalize third-party and independent competition right off of the TV "debates" (really just rehearsed readings) through dirty tricks? Or how Democrats take corporate money for their campaigns, assuring that they don't really listen to the public. There is plenty to not like about the Democrats.

Franken's question is useless as framed. What would have happened if a Democrat-majority Congress were elected is simply not as important as what is happening now and what the Democrats could do to convince the country that they have a message worth hearing. They could drop their corporate funding and get their money from the people; then we'll know they're listening to us. They could work toward hearing political competitors and real TV debates so that the public gets to hear about issues the two corporate parties haven't addressed adequately (or, in some cases, at all). They could stand for government-funded national health insurance. According to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, 2/3rds of Americans would back this, but this was back in 1992 when Americans were more financially flush.

It's too bad that none of this will happen. It will take an organized effort by the people to challenge the government to require adequate coverage of things people stand for.

And as for Al Franken, I'm hardly surprised. He's a Democratic Party stooge.

[1] Shortly before his DLC speech, Obama was quoted as saying

"On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago."

and,

"There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute.".

As recently as late September 2005, Sen. Obama told an audience in Champaign, Illinois that he remains steady on his course to support Pres. Bush's position on the war—Sen. Obama hoped that US troops "could begin to leave Iraq next year, [but] removing the troops now would result in a massive bloodbath for both countries.". Check the link for a list of other charges against Sen. Obama including the lame reason given for voting against Gonzales.

Madam, what you are is clear...

2005-11-27T20:36:00.000-06:00

One of the weak points of the argument against corporate media is the framing of media as being too homogenized—too few corporations running too much media. This was recently repeated by Ralph Nader in his latest essay (Counterpunch mirror):

The debate between progressives and corporatists over the state of the mass media goes like this-the former say fewer and fewer giant media conglomerates control more of the print and electronic outlets while the latter respond by saying there has never been more choices for listeners (radio), viewers (television) and readers (magazines, newsletters and newspapers combined).

Progressives add that half a dozen big companies, which control so many media, lead to a sameness of entertainment, news and advertisement overload. Corporatists counter by saying that there are more and more specialized media available for just about every taste in the audience.

What he's saying is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough to really get to the heart of the issue. One might read the entire essay and come away thinking that progressive argument on this can be shut down by putting more corporations in charge of various forms of media. So instead of half a dozen giant media conglomerates we would have 10 or 20 giant media conglomerates in charge.

After all, this argument is being framed like the old joke where the punch line is "Madam, what you are is clear, we are merely haggling over price.".

As for C-SPAN, I'm not so rah-rah on C-SPAN either:

We, the most powerful, technologically-equipped nation on Earth are left with C-SPAN and the suggestion that we an always start our own blog.

C-SPAN is remarkably pro-corporate. Sure, their preferred mode of coverage is to point a camera and a mic at something and offer no commentary, just running footage. This method I appreciate from a viewing standpoint and I prefer it. However, I've seen very heavy coverage of the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO organization, and a string of corporate news reporters on interview segments, and I'm tired of it. Nader dare not point this out in so many words because C-SPAN is one of the few television networks where he gets any coverage even if it is rare and during odd hours.

I find Nader's article interesting, his points compelling, but I take issue with his unchallenged repetition of the progressive line that too few corporations run the media. That way of structuring the debate says that more corporations at the wheel would be preferable. Instead, what we need is to charge broadcasters rent (as Nader points out), and mandate independant media appearance on TV and radio, and federally mandate at least 1 hour of uninterrupted prime-time commercial-free coverage of ballot-qualified candidates for all elections (simply point a camera and mic at them for an hour in a studio and let them speak without interruption or delay for one hour). That alone would have put Nader's campaign issues in front of millions more people in 2000 and 2004 and could have helped him and his vice presidential running mate overcome being kept out of the presidential so-called "debates". And that is why these things will not happen without a huge persistant public outcry.

Joshua Frank on Rep. Murtha and Jeff Chester on Hillary Clinton

2005-11-24T22:55:00.000-06:00

Joshua Frank on Rep. John Murtha's call for troop "redeploy[ment] at the earliest predictable date" is worth reading in multiple respects:

Murtha's language has plenty of wiggle room but is misinterpreted by many (even those who favored not invading & occupying Iraq in the first place, and who want to get out of Iraq now). Murtha is not calling for "out of Iraq now". What's to prevent "the earliest predictable date" from being 130 years from now?

From Frank's essay: "Senator John Kerry and even Donald Rumsfeld are calling for a reduction of US troops after December. But the troops they both want to bring home are the ones they sent over to monitor Iraq elections in the first place. Pulling them out afterward was the plan all along.". It should be clear to anyone now that Kerry's would-be presidency wouldn't have changed anything of substance in the illegal and unethical occupation of Iraq.

Frank's article is archived in numerous places online in case you need to refer back to it before election day. You might want to refresh a friend's memory on why the Democrats don't deserve your vote.

For reference, here is the complete text of Murtha's non-binding resolution which received a 403-3 vote against:

Whereas Congress and the American People have not been shown clear, measurable progress toward establishment of stable and improving security in Iraq or of a stable and improving economy in Iraq, both of which are essential to "promote the emergence of a democratic government";

Whereas additional stabilization in Iraq by U.S. military forces cannot be achieved without the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional U.S. troops, which in turn cannot be achieved without a military draft;

Whereas more than $277 billion has been appropriated by the United States Congress to prosecute U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan;

Whereas, as of the drafting of this resolution, 2,079 U.S. troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom;

Whereas U.S. forces have become the target of the insurgency,

Whereas, according to recent polls, over 80% of the Iraqi people want U.S. forces out of Iraq;

Whereas polls also indicate that 45% of the Iraqi people feel that the attacks on U.S. forces are justified;

Whereas, due to the foregoing, Congress finds it evident that continuing U.S. military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the people of Iraq, or the Persian Gulf Region, which were cited in Public Law 107-243 as justification for undertaking such action;

Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That:

Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

The Duncan Hunter (R-CA) resolution offered in response read

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

Also, check out Jeff Chester's response to Sen. Hillary Clinton's fundraising request and ask yourself if any of your anti-war buddies would have the guts to not vote for a pro-war candidate. "But she's a woman!" and "But she's a Democrat!" will start in earnest if she runs for President and if the Republicans don't have a woman candidate too (Condoleeza Rice would give us a real race to the bottom). Who will have the guts to oppose a woman's run for office and point out that they're not being misogynistic, but staying true to their anti-war, pro-universal health care, anti-NAFTA, anti-CAFTA politics?

It's perfectly fine to not vote for a woman if that woman is a poor candidate. If we're compelled to vote for women or minorities in the name of diversity, then we're really screwed because it's so easy to find women and/or minorities who will work for all the things that aren't in the public's best interest.

Good summaries are hard to find.

2005-11-09T21:25:00.000-06:00

If you're feeling giddy because the Democrats won a few seats during the mid-term elections, read this and ready yourself for the next major election. You don't often come across a concrete and succinct summary of why the national Democrats do not deserve your vote. Reza Fiyouzat doesn't let you forget what happened these past few years, who helped make it happen, and how it ties into an unbroken line of using power to keep the voters away, "stay the course" in wars, and gut their base to satisfy their corporate paymasters. We've still got two business parties and they still work together to simulate opposition, giving you the impression you have a real choice.

Not much distance between Progressives and Liberals, then.

2005-10-21T02:19:00.000-05:00

David Sirota's latest essay neglects to mention that many Progressives also voted for a pro-war, pro-CAFTA, pro-NAFTA, pro-corporate campaign funding John Kerry in 2004. Progressives "are not fully comfortable with progressivism" and have fully behaved in such a way that it is clear they "are simply not comfortable taking a more confrontational posture towards large economic institutions" when many of these institutions fund Democratic Party campaigns.

I will continue to not take progressivism seriously so long as they buckle every 4 years for a series of candidates that collude with Republicans to keep competition out of their simultaneous press conferences masquerading as "debates".

The Democrats in Congress right now can agree with the pro-war Republicans because it will cost them nothing. They know that they have no real challengers awaiting them either in the form of alternative candidates (who are easily dispatched because they're either from a third party or are independent and can't raise the funds to compete) or organized opposition to, as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) put it, "a flexible timetable not a drop-dead date, not a deadline, not cut and run" in which the US can leisurely "finish the mission, achieve our goals and bring the troops home". These are not the words or the sentiment which places tough demands on the pro-war Republicans like demanding to bring the troops home now. Yet these are the representatives that get votes in gerrymandered Democrat districts. Just look at the eminently disappointing junior senator from Illinois—Sen. Barack Obama.

A good interview with Robert Fisk.

2005-10-20T17:05:00.000-05:00

Today's Democracy Now! features a recording of an interview with reporter Robert Fisk (transcript). As per usual, Fisk has great insights to offer. His experienced retelling of what happens on the ground make up the majority of his talk. But one red meat line in this interview raises a question: (emphasis mine)

"If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat, it is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it. It is about the total failure of the human spirit. We don't show that because we don't want to. And in this sense journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow to you have more wars because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn't allow any more wars."

If the last part is true, how did millions organized in the streets against the invasion of Iraq in the US, England, and around the world, fail to stop the Iraq war before it began? Perhaps, given the answer to the last question, Fisk doesn't believe the public really has this power:

Amy Goodman: [Y]ou've covered the Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf war, wars in Algeria, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the invasion and occupation of Iraq—

Robert Fisk: Enough, enough, enough.

Amy Goodman: What gives you hope? What gives you hope?

Robert Fisk: Nothing. I’m sorry. Nothing. I’m sorry. Nothing at the moment. Ordinary people, I guess. Ordinary people who speak out. People in the Arab world as well. But in terms of governments, nothing much. I may be wrong. I may be too much of a pessimist because I've seen too much.

Playing identity politics to stifle same.

2005-10-17T11:22:00.000-05:00

Good to read Cindy Sheehan rejecting Sen. Hillary Clinton if Clinton runs for President because she's saying something that would be dismissed as sexism if it came from any anti-war man:

"I will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won't support a pro-war Republican."

Most Progressives and most of the Left don't have the guts to stand behind this statement when it counts—at the polls. They will vote for whatever Democrat comes along.

If a man rejects voting for Sen. Clinton the immediate reaction will be a charge of sexism. But, and this is my main objection to Sheehan's criticism of Sen. Clinton's possible Presidential campaign, there are plenty of reasons for Progressives to reject her: she's pro-Iraq war, pro-NAFTA, pro-CAFTA, her political history includes caving into HMOs when she managed the health care reform under President Clinton and recently rejecting universal health care out of hand, and Sen. Clinton supported many Republican nominees who had lied to help bring us the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Where will you stand if she's the Democratic Party nominee for President in 2008? If you're in her district now, will you re-elect her to the Senate?

You'll choose the foolish option again.

2005-10-13T01:09:00.000-05:00

An unnamed "politically active producer" allegedly told Arianna Huffington:

"The old 'say one thing and do another' bit isn't going to fly this time," a politically active producer told me. "We're not ready to go through another experience where we back a candidate not ready to speak the truth. We kept our mouths shut and fell behind Kerry but, to quote the Who, 'We won't get fooled again.'"

First, unnamed sources aren't convincing. So, until it's clear who said what, I'll just take this to be someone fictional Huffington is telling a story through.

Second, consider the similarity of this message to Hillary Clinton's message about universal single-payer health care (it isn't "politically viable", according to Sen. Clinton):

"One major party donor, who is supporting Hillary even though he is against the war, told me that Clinton had assured him that she, too, was "against the war" but believed that there was no way a woman could ever be elected president while being against the war. "She is convinced," the donor told me, "that she'd be attacked as soft on defense and unable to deal with national security and the war on terror. And I think she's right. I'd rather she be anti-war, but I can't argue with her reasoning."

I can and do argue with her reasoning and the reasoning of this anonymous character, but not along the thin lines Huffington defends. Political viability is circular reasoning. Arguing viability in this way is just a matter of perception without acknowleding the will of the electorate, not a deep investigation of what actually happened (illegal and unethical invasion and occupation based on lies), who's responsible (most Democrats and Republicans), and what we can do now (get out of Iraq immediately). Good speechwriters understand the mechanics of manufacturing opinion: say that "reasonable people" believe this or that and you'll simultaneously create the opinion you want to support while placing that belief in the mouths of people who seem credible to the lazyminded. The Democrats are largely pro-war not because they're secretly anti-war and think anti-war talk has no traction, nor are they (as Huffington later says) just saying pro-war things "for the yokels"; Democrats are largely pro-war because they know that their corporate backers are pro-war. As the country expresses increasing sentiment against the war in Iraq, talking pro-war "for the yokels" makes no sense; these "yokels" aren't for the war.

The businesses that back political campaigns are organizations that lobby 24-7 and expect something in return for their financial support. They have the guts to withdraw support that isn't working. People aren't spoken to by the Left in such a way that encourages similar lobbying and return on their support. The Left loves to bring up big issues that individuals can't hope to do anything about alone, issues that even large groups can barely adequately address (like millions in the streets being unable to stop the invasion and occupation of Iraq). And most coverage of these big issues leaves the audience with no practical message—here's 5 things you can do in the next week to help end the occupation of Iraq, 3 bills you can write your Congressional representatives about, and so on. But I digress.

Getting back to Huffington's article: since when is Al Gore anti-war? Let me remind you that Clinton/Gore oversaw US military action against Iraq that was far more lethal than this occupation has been so far: 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of those sanctions. The bombings+sanctions killed over a million Iraqis. The Clinton/Gore regime bombed water treatment plants and medicine manufacturing facilities, further harming the people who depended on those facilities. The lack of chlorine to clean the water caused lethal disentary and diahrrea.

Al Gore is no anti-war candidate. I can still remember watching President of the Senate Al Gore gavel black Congressional representatives off the podium for daring to mention that there was a problem in the election that needed to be addressed immediately. Gore, or his former running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman, could have provided the signature needed to allow those representatives to be heard, but neither signed. Where was anything on this in Huffington's essay?

So, yes, proper Leftists across the country will vote Democrat even though there's plenty of reason not to. It won't really matter what the Democrats stand for, and we'll again be thrust into the argument of "At least they're not Republicans!". Least-worst strikes again, saddling us with a diminishing duopoly.

If Gore is what the Democrats offer up, it will further confirm that the Democrats are no opposition party and that they need to be replaced with an individual or party that truly supports what the public wants (which polls consistently show is not what either business party offers). But this won't happen if a real contender shows up because the Democrats and Republicans will again collude to make sure that this opponent doesn't get anywhere near the ballot. The two major business parties get along when they see a mutual threat even if that means one party helping out the other just like Microsoft helping Apple during Microsoft's antitrust case. An opponent you can control is very valuable.

Another pro-war Democrat asks for your vote. Will you remember what he backs at election time?

2005-09-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

On today's Democracy Now!, Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) was interviewed and he is up for re-election. Contrary to what Amy Goodman says repeatedly on her show, transcripts of DN! segments are not always available online (some, like this interview, are only partially there and some are missing entirely). I've transcribed the following from the audio recording available on archive.org.

Gov. Richardson won't criticize the invasion in any substantive way, and he supports the Iraqi sanctions that killed millions of Iraqis; he joins former Secretary Madeleine Albright that the death of half a million children was "worth it":

Leslie Stahl: We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.

Gov. Richardson's interview starting at 47 minutes 32 seconds into the show:

Amy Goodman: Cindy Sheehan has been going around the country speaking out, she lost her son Casey in the war. You are the first Governor to have your state, New Mexico, provide life insurance for national guardsmen on active duty. But I didn't want to ask about that. I wanted to ask: as she travels leading up to the big anti-war protest that will take place in Washington D.C. on Saturday, on the 24th, she came through New York. And there she was fiercely critical of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her authorization of war, standing with the President to authorize the invasion. What are your thoughts about that? She's saying Democrats enabled this as well as Republicans, it was not just President Bush.

Gov. Bill Richardson: Well, look, I believe that Senator Clinton has a sound policy on Iraq, I believe that she is calling for an exit strategy, for a sensible policy. You know, I want to tell you that in those days when there was information about weapons of mass destruction, when there was information about Saddam Hussein and his very tortuous activities with his own people, I could have seen a senator taking the vote that he or she did. Right now, there is no link to Al-Qaida, there are no weapons of mass destruction, so in retrospect I believe that those votes taken but without the proper information may have not been the correct votes. I believe that the President should have met with Cindy Sheehan. She is somebody that lost a child, lost a son. This is why I provided health insurance—$250,000—because the death benefit was shameful. It's $11,000. And I said our state is gonna step up and we're gonna do $250,000 life insurance for every one of the New Mexico national guardsmen. But again, in retrospect, when you had bad intelligence, I can see how those senators voted the way they did.

Amy Goodman: But many say that although President Bush led this invasion, that President Clinton laid the groundwork with the sanctions and with the previous bombing of Iraq. You were President Clinton's U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Gov. Richardson: Well, I stand behind that. I think the strikes that we made, the efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein, there were weapons of mass destruction, the sanctions were the correct policy. Was the correct policy to invade? That's probably another question. But to think that Saddam Hussein was benevolent dictator in the best thing to do would be to ignore him, I think that would have been very very bad foreign policy because what we have in the area is potential threats to Israel, we've got Saddam Hussein who acknowledged that one of his objectives was to threaten not just U.S. interests but the surrounding countries. He went to war with Iran, he greviously violated human rights of thousands of people.

Amy Goodman: But the U.N. sanctions, for example, the sanctions led to the deaths of more than a half a million children, not to mention more a million of Iraqis.

Gov. Richardson: Well, I stand behind the sanctions. I believe that they successfully contained Saddam Hussein. I believe the sanctions were an instrument of our policy.

Amy Goodman: To ask a question that was asked of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright: Do you think the price was worth it? 500,000 children dead?

Gov. Richardson Well, I believe our policy was correct. Yes.

A critique of one confused view of free software.

2005-09-19T00:31:00.000-05:00

From its first paragraph, the article fails to describe reality:

"The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support. Instead, there are communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind. Unsullied by the sordid world of commerce, the code that they produce is somehow purer and more ethical than proprietary software."

Actually, the thinly veiled reference to Microsoft is wrong. Microsoft has long distributed software which is licensed by OSI-approved licenses. Microsoft's Services for Unix package has long included GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection which is licensed under the GNU GPL, a free software license which is also approved of by the OSI.

Commerce is very much a part of this software, many FLOSS programs are developed for business and/or distributed for a fee. In fact, the "open source" term was coined in part because the OSI founders wanted a term that would not convey the idea that the software must only be distributed gratis (despite that the GNU Project was using the word "free" to convey freedoms users have with the software, not a price one must pay to get a copy of the software). The ethics of the situation are not considered by the open source movement; that movement does not say that some licenses respect your freedom to share and modify and other licenses trample those freedoms and are wrong. The open source movement's philosophy centers on a practical developmental methodology and is chiefly aimed at a business audience. That anyone would conflate ethics as a part of the open source movement's message is a tip that Stephen J Marshall doesn't clearly understand the differences between the philosophies he's talking about. We see this more clearly when Marshall argues that:

This utopian vision of technology is championed by high-profile pressure groups such as the Free Software Foundation [...]

The FSF does not argue anything in terms of "OSS" or "Open Source Software". They explicitly disclaim such points in their essay "Why Free Software is better than Open Source":

"We are not against the Open Source movement, but we don't want to be lumped in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to avoid using the word ``open'' to describe free software, or its contrary, ``closed'', in talking about non-free software."

To put a fine point on this, consider a hypothetical situation Richard Stallman laid out in a recent interview with the newly renamed GNU/Linux Show where the user is faced with a proprietary program that works well and a free software program that is unreliable (about 44 minutes and 54 seconds into the program). The open source philosophy advocates for high-quality technical achievement, and thus is likely to endorse the former program despite its license having no chance of being OSI-approved. Free software advocates, on the other hand, would endorse the latter program pointing out that the technical quality of a program can be improved, while the proprietary program's license is probably very hard to change. No free software advocate will complain about having a reliable program. But they will complain and work to reimplement non-free software. Free software advocates won't push aside their freedom to share and modify software for immediate practical gains.

Marshall writes:

"Despite the overt counterculture and anti-globalization agendas displayed by certain sections of the open source movement, many governments are now also turning towards OSS in their quest for an information society for every citizen."

Don't confuse the philosophy of the movement with some of its participants. Stallman holds political views which don't express the opinion of the GNU Project or the FSF. Neither the GNU Project nor the FSF have opinions on corporate globalization except where this intersects with computer software, as Stallman pointed out in a 2003 interview where he explains that: (starting at 3 minutes 17 seconds)

"Free software shows how globalization can be a good thing. The free software movement has been global since the Eighties when we had developers and users on four continents, and now it's six continents I believe. Free software doesn't tend to concentrate wealth, it provides ways for some people to make a living, so we can see the contrast between globalization of power versus globalization of voluntary cooperation."

Both the free and open source software movements are pro-business; neither has a problem with the software they endorse being used for business purposes. The FSF tells people to distribute free software for a fee and get as much money as one can doing so, and to alter free software for a fee. Some people take this message to heart: Brad Kuhn, the FSF's former executive director (now Chief Technology Officer of the Software Freedom Law Center) has gone on record talking about the high hourly fees commercial GCC hackers charge and the long waiting lists these firms have.

On the categorized complaints Marshall raises, his complaint about so-called "IP" (intellectual property) is that many employees of various organizations are under contract such that "[a]ny software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer" and therefore much of the software they wrote and distributed is not actually theirs to license, but instead their employers'. No specific examples are presented to support this claim and Marshall does not approach this topic from the perspective of recommending to workers that they closely examine their employment contracts so that they will not fall into the trap of giving everything they do to their employer, even if what they're working on is completely unconnected to their job. Thus this claim comes off as unhelpful as well as unsupported. Marshall's conclusion that "[a]nyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer's IP." takes the term "intellectual property" at face value without ever critiquing it (which is, ironically, something that members of both the free and open source software movements are likely to do). One of the reasons the term "intellectual property" is so problematic is because it is prejudicial. We are left to believe that copyright, trademark, patent, and other disparate laws ought to be thought of as property; not that framing these issues as property is unnatural and merely one choice of many. Spirited debate of this issue is so much a part of the free and open source movements, it is appalling that any examination of how the free software community works would leave out this debate.

"Conceptual integrity" is Marshall's call for adhering to "good design and tight specifications to minimize bugs" and that community development doesn't achieve this. This is a developmental methodology and does not address the more important issue of software freedom and how people ought to treat one another, but one can see significant counterexamples. The GNU Project, started in 1984, is one such community-based project that has come up with a lot of useful software that many individuals and organizations rely on (directly by running the programs or indirectly by hiring the services of an Internet service provider which directly runs the programs). The Mozilla programs offer another set of counterexamples, as more people discover how well Firefox and Thunderbird work. It seems like a number of developers choose the Bugzilla bug-tracking software to use in their own projects. I think Marshall reveals the most in his call for "professionalism" where he essentially chastises "bedroom programmers" for being insufficiently professional. I wonder how the judgement is being made without actually hiring someone to do work under contract, as a professional would.

Innovation is the last of Marshall's bulletted points and here he claims that "[t]he open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.". Marshall's example here, the GNU/Linux operating system, inaccurately referred to as "Linux", fails to acknowledge certain other factors involved here:

"Killer apps" are hard to come up with which explains why non-free software developers don't often come up with them either.

Some "killer apps" were free software first but go unacknowledged as such. Internet email that we use today (as opposed to email systems used chiefly on BBSes and email systems that require use of a certain client program) and the World Wide Web were free software and are still two big reasons that people want to get on the Internet. Beagle predates Apple's Spotlight desktop search program, but since most reviewers are biased in favor of reviewing non-free software, they have no idea Beagle exists. Beagle is, for all its faults, more trustworthy than Spotlight or the Google desktop search software for Microsoft Windows because Beagle can be free software and the others are not. Thus, if you are concerned about what Beagle does—perhaps you suspect that your index data or your search queries are being distributed without your approval—you can inspect Beagle and change it to meet your needs, or you can hire someone to do this work for you. These are simply not options for non-free programs because the only people who have the source code and the legal permission to share and modify the improved software are the organizations you shouldn't trust by default in the first place.

Innovation is commonly overvalued, even to the point of giving up freedom in exchange for innovation. I don't believe that most people need programs that are radically new. I believe that most people use a computer for just a few things and they need those programs to work well. I don't need an innovative email client, I need one that is easy to set up and use for my most frequently used functions. I use a web browser to see content published by someone else. Most of what I would like to see are ways of doing the right thing by default, not giving me a lot of options to do things I'll rarely want to do: automatically configuring a reasonable setup so that I don't have to spend time configuring things myself, updates that never leave my computer in an unusable state, an easy way to do recommended things like making periodic backups, encrypting email, storing only encrypted data on my media, and seeing what services are available to me on my network. And I want to do all of this without giving up my software freedom. I believe that these are non-trivial requests which require a great deal of coordination, but I doubt users will widely refer to them as something akin to "killer applications".

The natural questions from reading "In theory, an OSS license doesn't actually prevent anyone from selling the software but in practice no one will buy it if the source code is freely available, unless the seller is also providing some kind of added value." goes unasked: why is it our job to support bad business models? Why are business concerns so prominent? Why can't they switch to a consulting model and try to get work? Also, one notices how many failed businesses distribute proprietary software at no fee, allowing people to use the program, but disallowing users from understanding or changing what the program does. But it's clear in Marshall's essay that tending to user's individual needs is not considered "innovative" and probably won't be until it becomes the mainstay of large multinational corporations that get a lot of press attention (like Microsoft). IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and others doing this apparently aren't interesting. Exclusivity is not needed when the business is based on talented and attentive consulting, in fact one should be glad that this is not exclusive to anyone or any organization in case one consultant doesn't work out.

But what's more important is the effect on society, not framing every question in terms of how it will affect business. As RMS explains in the aforementioned GNU/Linux Show interview: (about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the show)

"Businesses should have free software just as every computer user should have free software. But we [at the FSF] don't focus our concerns on business. And that's a matter of a basic philosophical decision: we don't want to make business the measure of all things. The world is plagued today by a philosophy which is called businessism. Just as humanism meant measuring things in human terms, businessism measures everything in business terms. I'm not a businessist. When I think about how to promote free software, I don't think "above all: business", I think "above all: schools". Schools must switch to free software because they should not be teaching their students to be addicts to proprietary software; to develop a dependency that will be hard for them to get out of."

KPFA and identity politics.

2005-09-14T16:27:00.000-05:00

On KPFA's coverage of the Judge Roberts confirmation hearings, host Larry Bensky identified Senator Chuck Schumer's second round questioning as "filibustering". This is an interesting choice of words for a reason Bensky showed no sign of being aware of—Schumer might want to come off as asking tough questions but by filibustering he is actually keeping Judge Roberts from answering the questions Schumer posed or responding to the points Schumer raised, thus helping Roberts.

Throughout the KPFA coverage yesterday and today, you can hear Bensky, Deepa Fernandez, and their co-hosts point out how there's only one woman on the Judiciary Committee and how there are no African-Americans on the Committee. This is essentially asking for more African-American people and more women on the Judiciary Committee. The problem here is the problem of identity politics—assuming that more women or more blacks would ask different or better questions on issues of importance that have gone unaddressed. There's an underlying assumption that women and blacks will naturally ask the questions the Left would like to hear asked.

But such a request is easily trumped. What would happen if someone with Condoleezza Rice's sentiments or political leanings were on the Commmittee? She's a black woman, therefore she fills KPFA's implicit request yet it's reasonable to assume that she would not ask the tough questions the Left long to hear.

With such low criteria for what the Left would rather see or hear, it's easy to get past the request in a way that maintains the imbalance of power. Better to admit that one's request is problematic (stuffing the Court with like-minded Justices?) and get around to asking for questions on particular matters of interest and analyzing in terms of the questions posed, not the skin color or sex of the questioner.

Reconsider making a video show. Really.

2005-09-13T03:22:00.000-05:00

A number of early filmmakers don't justify their use of the visual medium. Some of these gratis downloadable shows are like this (only some of these are available in formats one can watch with free software. I hope you'll join me in writing to the others to make their shows available in free software formats like Ogg Vorbis+Theora; if they raise the problem of hosting more files, introduce them to The Internet Archive which will host their files gratis. They've already done the tough part—obtaining a website and domain name).

Watching a talking head is dull TV. The money put into shooting and editing video could have been put into recording and editing audio instead, with considerable money left over (audio productions are considerably easier to edit and significantly cheaper). The show becomes an obvious commercial or personal advertisement when unnecessary video is included.

I recently saw "Smartest Men in the Room", a documentary about the rise and fall of Enron, and it too fell into this trap. The subject matter is compelling and people should realize how Enron bilked so many out of their paychecks, investments, and retirement funds. But the story simply isn't one that lends itself to a visual medium. On a smaller scale, a movie that is probably more familiar to a /. audience, "Revolution OS", was similar in that it too didn't lend itself to be told in pictures. But that movie had so many more things wrong with it (technical and in accurately conveying a cohesive point), that this almost pales in comparison.

Democracy Now! is similar because the vast majority of what is interesting and important about the show is not visually compelling. The vast majority of the video program involves watching Amy Goodman and her guests talk to one another. Try listening to the radio show and notice how little you actually need the images. DN! features well-spoken informative people with much to tell. Many people find the show interesting to listen to on a daily basis. But I doubt people would miss the show if it wasn't on TV in their area. DN! makes a better radio show than a TV show.

In all of these instances, the money spent on video production for the show would be better spent doing a radio show for a longer period of time per episode or doing more episodes.

For a movie that works the other way, consider "The Corporation". This movie uses visual elements and pictures to great effect, including discussion of material that is inherently visual (seeing a picture of a child working in a sweatshop, hobbling because of the ill effects of multinational chemical corporations, or born without eyes because of exposure to a Du Pont chemical, and all of the apropos public domain footage from Prelinger's collection at The Internet Archive.). Seeing people's gestures as they are interviewed is important work which can only be properly conveyed visually.

How the Democrats work against the anti-war movement—two articles

2005-09-02T01:19:00.000-05:00

Dave Lindorff and John Walsh have interesting articles in Counterpunch on how the Democrats work against the anti-war movement. Interesting, but ultimately compatible, disagreement on Democratic Party cowardice as well.

Interesting reading

2005-08-29T16:50:00.000-05:00

Freedom is not having to ask permission by Dave Neary.

Getting it? Yes, he gets it.

2005-08-27T22:33:00.000-05:00

Jeff Waugh asks if RMS "gets it"—presumably, that Waugh believes asking for GNU to receive a share of the credit "seems rather to distract attention from freedom", as RMS said about the Linux trademark naming issues being dealt with now. I can only presume what Waugh is referring to since Waugh doesn't describe his exact meaning in his blog. RMS' take on the issue, on the other hand, is quite clear: the trademark issue doesn't rise to the level of a problem for software freedom, hence it doesn't receive much attention from RMS. On the other hand, calling the work in GNU "Linux" instead means giving more credit to a man who is profoundly disinterested in software freedom. Linus Torvalds' reaction against Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell's work on a Bitkeeper-compatible program during the recent Bitkeeper episode is another major step along the path of paying more attention to immediate desires than ethical examination.

If you would like to learn why RMS and the GNU Project ask for people to give GNU a share of the credit for the GNU/Linux operating system, read the FSF's GNU/Linux naming FAQ. It covers a lot of questions people have about this issue.

People are working on the HURD (GNU's official kernel replacement). And, like the Linux kernel in the early days, the HURD is not yet ready for wide use. Some argue that GNU/Linux isn't ready for wide use either, but the point is that programs of this complexity take time to write and debug. Unlike Linux, HURD takes an unusual approach to doing the jobs a kernel does. It is more complex to debug than a monolithic kernel and its design will theoretically grant some interesting advantages for program development and ordinary use.

Update: I have yet to find an interview with Linus Torvalds that is this generous in sharing credit for notable achievements toward Richard Stallman (or the GNU Project) as this Stallman interview is with regards to Torvalds. Typically, Torvalds lets interviewers give him more credit than he deserves by allowing them to come away thinking he wrote an entire OS.

Is the kind of punishment important?

2005-08-16T13:56:00.000-05:00

On Democracy Now! today (33 minutes 12 seconds into the show), Kathy Kelley, founder of the anti-war group Voices in the Wilderness, spoke on why her organization won't pay the US$20,000 fine they have been ordered to pay by Judge John Bates in a Washington, D.C. Federal Court (transcript). But any member of the organization would be willing to go to prison, if that were ordered: (emphasis mine)

"[...] it was interesting that Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C. Federal Court concluded a 17-page opinion by quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. And he quoted from King's letter from a Birmingham jail in which Dr. King said, “Those who break an unjust law should do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” And what we want to say to Judge Bates and to the United States government is that if Judge Bates were to choose to put any one of us in jail, then we would go openly and lovingly, but we won't pay one penny, not one dime, to these war criminals to continue putting U.S. productivity into attacks against Iraq's people or into the imperial designs to seize Iraq's oil revenue. It's something that, relying on Dr. King's teachings, we in conscience cannot do."

It's worth noting that Voices is (in other sections of this interview and in their own statements) quite clear that the corporations which also violated the Iraq sanctions have not paid any penalty for their illegal acts; no fines, no higher-ups or decision-makers have been sent to prison, etc.

With that, is Voices making a distinction between kinds of punishment here—imprisonment is okay, fines are not—even though inaction against corporations virtually gives them the green light to illicitly trade against sanctions?

Couldn't Voices raise the argument that corporations can't be imprisoned (as corporations have "no soul to save and no body to incarcerate", as one of the Barons Thurlow warned), and since none of their leaders have been imprisoned, imprisonment is also unfair?

Peter Jennings on the Iraq War & Why we need national health care in the US

2005-08-09T13:04:00.000-05:00

Two articles to read:

Peter Jennings on the Iraq War—summaries of articles written by his detractors (supporters of the invasion and occupation of Iraq).

Why we need universal health care in the US—"The argument over a national health program is no longer whether it amounts to "socialized" medicine in the capitalist U.S. It's now whether our refusal to enact a national system - Medicare, for example, for all - is going to wind up devastating our economy.".

Corporate parties won't help political minorities on these issues.

2005-08-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

Two issues of importance to large groups of Americans with little political power—Blacks and Latinos—have come up in the Leftist press lately and for good reason:

The Death Penalty—Justice Stevens condems the Death Penalty. I've written about this before, including the racial bias in who is executed by the state, and the situation is only getting worse—" According to the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center, more than three dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since 2000.". Kent Scheidegger, advocate for the Death Penalty, claims that there is no systemic flaw in the Death Penalty: "I wouldn't say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system.".

Voting Rights—Today's Democracy Now! has a number of segments of interest to those who want to preserve their voting rights. We must keep in mind that neither major corporate party cares about insuring the right to vote for non-Whites and the poor (which includes some Whites). In 2000 in Florida, some poor Whites but chiefly Blacks and Latinos were "scrubbed" from the voting rolls because their names coincided with the name of a convict, not because these people were convicts (which is a problem in itself, ex-convicts ought to have their rights restored or else one is arguing for perpetual punishment). The Democrats and Republicans were both able to run a series of campaigns for various offices and not raise the issue of restoring voting rights to those who never should have lost them. In 2006 many of those adversely affected still can't vote. Not renewing the portions of the Voting Rights Act up for renewal in 2007 means setting up the entire country up for the kind of mistreatment those Floridians have suffered. This should be intolerable.

Jimmy Carter plays the anti-war side now.

2005-08-03T21:44:00.000-05:00

During the 2004 US Presidential election, former US President Jimmy Carter was happy to wail about Ralph Nader's campaign and endorse a pro-war Sen. Kerry.

But now, according to the AP, former US President Jimmy Carter claims the war in Iraq is "unnecessary and unjust":

"I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false."

Whatever rationale he brings to support this assertion should be weighed in terms of whether it was true in 2004 in addition to whether it is true today.

Ralph Nader was one of the few candidates you were allowed to hear from every once in a while who took then and maintains now a firm anti-Iraq-war position (I'm not sure where he stands on war in general or on the war in Afghanistan). But, and I hope you're sitting down, apparently Carter's partisan views mean more than standing up for the right principles, even when he has nothing to lose by taking positions the DLC doesn't like.

Keep this in mind the next time he opens his mouth to tell you why you should vote for the upcoming Democrat in 2008. Someone who will probably be another pro-war candidate (perhaps Sen. Hillary Clinton).

And the beat goes on...

2005-08-03T17:00:00.000-05:00

With no apologies to Sonny & Cher (the ever-persistent defenders of an infinite term of copyright, damn the public domain and all that they have gained from an unrewarded commons of African-Americans who seeded what is now known as rock music), we get another dose of Democratic party wisdom: pro-war candidate Paul "Hack" Hackett.

Update: Paul Hackett was interviewed about his loss on Democracy Now!. Hackett mentions his military service as if that gives him special privilege to escape the accusations of being murderous thugs, accusations that Progressives call higher-ups in power. For a fuller examination of the electoral picture in that special election, the Counterpunch article linked to above does a better job of illuminating salient concerns.

One can convey a much stronger anti-war message by not joining a war or endorsing others join war. One should not criticize on the basis of being a "chickenhawk" or "mismanaging" the war (as Hackett does in his DN! interview) without mentioning the real problem at hand—should we have invaded and occupied Iraq in the first place and is war & occupation an ethical response.

Hackett sees military recruitment as a "choice that you have made", with no mention of economic disenfranchisement or economic coercion; it's no secret that the poor are targeted for military recruitment. Hackett also raises the false spectre of Iraqi civil war as a reason to stay in Iraq. Apparently he doesn't acknowledge the consequences of what he sees as a losing battle turning into civil war due to our presence (Iraq is "in a terrible condition today as a result of the insurgency phasing into civil war"). "Phasing into civil war" is proof that our presence did not forstall civil war and it further highlights the insanity of continuing our occupation of Iraq another instant.

Another issue involving Hackett's campaign: the election results. Interesting suspicions on Whiskey Bar. Thanks to Carl Estabrook for the link.

How easy it is to delude: GNN on Al Gore's new TV channel.

2005-08-03T14:48:00.000-05:00

Al Gore is starting a new TV channel called "Current".

Anthony Lappé of the Guerilla News Network wrote about what he saw on Current. Right now, Current's format is a series of shows (called "pods") which are, ostensibly, what young people shot and edited.

"I’m looking forward to watching more “pods” from young people about what they think is important, not some jaded 50-year-old network hack."—What reason is there to believe that these "hacks" aren't in the editor seat? Or vetting what "pods" make it to air? There's a lot of power in the editor seat and in merely selecting pre-fabricated clips to show.

"Current [...] is best decribed as a participatory (mostly) apolitical youth-targeted short documentary network."—Even if that's a fair description of how it is now (which I doubt), networks often start with something very different than how they end up. TV networks use an audience (often minorities of some kind) to build an audience and name recognition and switch to serve the elite later. ABC, FOX, and UPN are examples of this pattern: FOX and UPN started by having shows featuring predominantly Blacks. FOX gained an audience and then switched to feature predominantly Whites. UPN started well after FOX and failed with its first attempt to feature primarily Whites, but will switch back when they get better ratings numbers.

"On election night 2000, Gore explained, Bush’s cousin was in the control room at Fox News talking on the phone to the candidate and his brother Jeb."—But what's more important is that:
- Gore's policies were virtually indistinguishable from those of Bush giving the public no reason to care about Gore or Bush (in fact roughly half of the eligible voters didn't vote in that election);
- the Florida scrub lists had gone unmentioned in the US despite Greg Palast talking about them in detail to reporters. CBS news bosses actually went to Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris to confirm what Palast had to say, but CBS accepted a simple blanket denial from Bush & Harris, and summarily dropped the story;
- even Ralph Nader acknowledges that Gore actually won the election. This doesn't stop Gore from despising Nader for daring to leverage his right to run, nor does it inspire Gore to push for a ranked voting system (like instant-run off voting or some Condorcet vote counting system) where so-called "spoilers" are eliminated.
and nothing Gore wants to talk about addresses any of these far more salient points. Gore's maligning of the corporate media comes off as whining because the Democrats are pursuing the same pro-corporate strategy that the Republicans are. But right now the Republicans are doing the work of legislating and the Democrats are following along, challenging very little of what the Republicans offer up.

Lappé does mention a host of important issues, none of which Gore addresses:

"We live in a time of unprecedented global crisis. Nearly one billion people on Earth live on one dollar a day. Each day, 40,000 children die of hunger or hunger-related diseases. The ice caps are melting. Over the last 50 years, nearly 50% of the oceans species have disappeared. The oil is running is out and we haven’t come close to figuring out what to do about it. The U.S. is fighting a multi-front war around the world. Yet few Americans seem overly worried about any of it, thanks in large part to a news media that devotes hour after hour to missing blondes, celebrity hijinks and partisan bickering."

and Lappé links to Paul Jay's attempt to get Independent World Television going but then chides IWT for "[being] overly populated with the usual suspects from the academic left". So Phyllis Bennis, Salih Booker, Jeff Cohen, Laura Flanders, Linda Foley, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Bob McChesney, and Joanne St. Louis (who are all part of a video distributed by IWT on their homepage) are to be criticized because they're commonly featured together in leftist works? This sounds to me like someone who isn't terribly interested in what these people have to say (what should be the basis of criticism).

This should not get lost in the shuffle of Fahrenheit 9/11 Bush criticism.

2005-08-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

From today's Democracy Now!, a point worth hearing because it gets lost when people see Fahrenheit 9/11 which exclusively focuses on Bush family ties to Saudi Arabia. The following passage is from the transcript of the third segment, 29 minutes 31 seconds into the show.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to As’ad AbuKhalil, Professor at California State University, Stanislaus. Can you talk about the Bush family and their relationship with Fahd and the whole family in Saudi Arabia?

AS’AD ABUKHALIL: You see, this is one area where I am in dissent to some of the left wing coverage here in America about the Bush and the El-Saud family, as in Michael Moore's movie. I take the view that it is well beyond the Bush family. This is not a family connection. This is a connection between this oppressive family in Saudi Arabia and successive U.S. administrations since the days of F.D.R. Why should we single out the Bush family, for example, and not the self-designated human rights president, like Jimmy Carter, who was as fawning around King Fahd as was any other president.

This is something that is beyond familial connection. It is one that entails a relationship that covered not only coordination about the pricing and the production of oil, but we should also remember so many covert operations that now we realize were so foolish and so deadly and dangerous to world peace and security. When we speak about the legacy of this man, we have to say that he was without a doubt quite close at some point to the bin Laden family and to Osama bin Laden, like everybody else in the senior members of the Royal Family, met with him, coordinated with him, and they cultivated ties with the kind of fanatical groups in Afghanistan that produced the likes of Zarqawi and al Qaeda. And they did so, we should always remember, with close association with the United States.

But there is something also being left here. This is a man that is also responsible for the menace of Saddam Hussein. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, this guy, King Fahd himself, was somebody who sputtered something in Saddam Hussein and arranged for a very wide Arab governmental financial support in order to arm and finance the adventures of Saddam Hussein and his deadly invasion of Iran back in 1980. Because he miscalculated assuming that he was going to take over the entire Iranian state and end the export of revolution, so to speak, and the result, he was the one who financed this cultivation of the personality cult of Saddam, which was responsible for the kind of Napoleonic complexes that triggered all these adventures and even invasion of Kuwait later on.

The cost of our war.

2005-08-01T17:51:00.000-05:00

IraqBodyCount.net has an important analysis of civilian deaths in Iraq which is very much worth reading.

Of course, be sure to keep up with the death count itself. Unfortunately, there is no fallback in place if you visit the site without Javascript turned on.

As I write this, IraqBodyCount.net says there are between 23,140 and 26,189 deaths. These deaths are on our hands.

Also worth hearing is this week's Counterspin which features an informative interview with IraqBodyCount.net and the latest on how corporate-funded "news" harms you (both in headlines and the segment after the IraqBodyCount.net segment). Sadly, this archive only hosts copies in the patent-encumbered MP3 and the proprietary RealAudio formats. For those of you who run free software systems in countries which are saddled with software patents, perhaps a friend of yours would help you transcode the MP3 into a format you can play on your free software system. I remain hopeful that FAIR will host copies in Ogg Vorbis or upload copies of shows to The Internet Archive so that FAIR doesn't bear the burden of paying for the bandwidth bill.

Democrats give Bush CAFTA by 1 vote.

2005-07-28T10:50:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe quotes Nancy Pelosi:

"It is a step backward for workers," Pelosi said. "If the president wins this vote, he will have expended enormous resources to do so. He has all the power of the presidency, and all we have on the House Democratic side is the fact that we are right."

CAFTA, like NAFTA, is a step backwards for workers in all the countries covered by CAFTA—no worker will come out of this deal earning a living wage.

But all it would have taken is for one Democrat to vote in opposition for the Democrats to have stuck by their words and possibly to have blocked CAFTA from passing. But again we see how corporate owned and operated this "opposition" party is.

Progressives hate CAFTA. Will progressives remember this when election time rolls around?

Update: There is some controversy about the CAFTA vote (skip to 47m38s into the show), but Democracy Now! did a particularly poor job of explaining why the 15 Democrats should not be held to their line about standing with the workers. Instead, the interview focused on a few Republicans whose votes were not counted properly or who were not able to reach the floor for the vote. The self-satisfied interviewee, Lori Wallach, Director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, spent no time describing how these 15 Democrats sold out the public image of their party (note, the image of their party, not the reality which is right in line with multinational corporate interests to exploit the cheapest labor the world has to offer).

Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, had an interestingly self-destructive quote which DN! failed to explain:

"The Republicans turned the floor of the House of the Representatives into a "Let's Make a Deal" set that was reminiscent of what happened at the time of the medicare prescription drug legislation that evening and again this time they kept the vote open a long time. But many of the overtures that were made to members was made before even going to the floor. So this is about again an abuse of power, an unethical way of passing legislation and depending on what members decide to do, may require further attention."

This vote was reminiscent of a previous contentious vote. This vote's "overtures" were made prior to going to the floor. So, why, exactly, didn't the Democrats see this coming? Why didn't they complain about this behavior last time it occurred?

Again, I have to wonder if this really considered to be important by the Left. Given the discussion the Left is making of this bill, will they vote in line with their stated ethics? Or will this be yet-another-issue to blow over come election time?

Do find the time to read Liza Grandia's summary of congressional debate on CAFTA.

Two interesting articles.

2005-07-27T11:36:00.000-05:00

A couple of interesting articles:

David Sirota on the Democratic Leadership Council's support of corporate policy and sponsorship of Democratic Party campaigns and how this hurts the Democratic Party and thus provides no real opposition to the Republicans.

Ralph Nader echoes Rose Ann DeMoro's "Top 10 Problems with the Current Debate in the Labor Movement"

And again: But you supported exactly the opposite!

2005-07-27T02:59:00.000-05:00

Tim Robbins is quoted as using sexist and strong language to denounce the Democrats and Sen. Kerry (D-MA) in particular in this Winnipeg Sun article:

"For Embedded [Robbins' new DVD], he sat down for an hour one-on-one to talk about a citizen's responsibility, the pressure on celebrities, what he perceives are the evils of the Bush government and his disillusionment with "the pussies" in the Democrat Party, including John Kerry, who refused to oppose Bush over Iraq."

Before the election, Robbins lent his support to the Vote2StopBush.org campaign which sought to get former Nader supporters to rally votes for Kerry instead. Unfortunately for their audience, the Vote2StopBush.org supporters chose to give Kerry support without demanding anything of Kerry or explaining why Nader was inadequate in 2004 given that the major parties had offered the US two pro-war choices. The Vote2StopBush.org crowd failed to explain the confusing position of lending one's support to a candidate one "strongly disagree[s] with [...] on Iraq and other issues".

Look for a similar tactic in 2008: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) versus some Republican (perhaps Jeb Bush, governor of Florida). Progressives will support the Democrat even though she, like her Republican counterpart, supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Democrats have a history of squelching progressive policies.

Keeping the Karl Rove scandal in perspective

2005-07-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

On a recent Democracy Now! (transcript) about 26m04s into the show, Norman Solomon, co-founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and Vote2StopBush.org signatory and, therefore, squelcher of presidential competition in 2004, helps keep the Karl Rove scandal in perspective:

"It would be a big mistake for social movements to pin their hopes and their futures on what a court or prosecutor does. I think it's also important for us to remember that the news media themselves, as major institutions, are framing this. They are themselves participating in the spin, and a lot of what we are getting now is this notion that there's nothing more crucial for U.S. national security than protecting the identity of a C.I.A. agent. And hat's a perspective, I think, that's rather warped. National security involves, among other things, making sure that the United States government does not create enemies around the world by dropping bombs on innocent people. It also involves as national security, broadly defined, making sure that we don't continue with the decimation of communities around this country, where we have schools and clinics, and social services being damaged severely. So I think what we're seeing here, while it's very interesting palace intrigue and certainly has great historical and political importance, the kind of recasting of what is on the front burner, and ironically, public concern about Iraq itself and the implications of the U.S. war there, are to some degree being shunted aside by this controversy which, in fact, has its roots in the lies about this war."

An interesting discussion, if only to watch Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, squirm as he tries to avoid admitting that the Democrats are a party of collaborators in "tap-dancing while the blood continues to run" (as Solomon put it) in this "madness of militarism" (Solomon said, citing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). Regardless of whether the Democrats are in power now or not, nothing prevents them from taking the right stance and speaking truth to power. The Democrats are simply more loyal to their corporate campaign funding sources than they are to what the majority of the country in their own constituencies want.

Don't debate using arguments your opponent can best you with.

2005-07-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

I read that the GNOME hackers are starting up an effort to market GNOME to teenagers. The GNOME Wiki has a section for this work.

But Seb Payne, who announced the effort, says:

"Many young people are stuck on Windows 98 and Office 2000. Why? Microsoft software is just too damm expensive."

And thus falls into a common trap which the open source movement pushes in order to steer the conversation away from software freedom: talk about price, not about freedom.

When the discussion centers on price the discussion will turn to how many people can get proprietary software at no fee (either legally or illegally). This ignores the limitations to be good neighbors and recognize that you're better off when you don't have to beg a monopoly for support.

People see this problem when it comes to their car, their house, and a variety of other services; they don't want to be tied down to getting the work done by only one source. Some people even want to do the work themselves, even in small measure (like changing one's own lightbulbs, or mowing one's own lawn). Thus, they need the information to do the work and they need the legal freedom to get the job done.

Free software is quite comparable -- free software is free as in the freedom to share and modify. Free software gives you the freedom to work on things yourself, hire others to do work, and share the work with others (including charging for copies of the software). For the free software movement, proprietary software is an intolerable lack of freedom, to be avoided entirely except for writing a free software replacement.

The open source movement pitches practical solutions such as faster development, cheaper development, less buggy code, which are fine things to have but don't go far enough to ensure that you the user of the software have what you need to be a good neighbor, build a business, or tend to your own needs. The open source movement was formed to dismiss software freedom and adopt a framing of the debate that would attract businesses. For the open source movement, proprietary software is merely less technically efficient at reaching business goals than "open source" software.

Payne continues:

"Most of them suffer with security problems - usually spyware or viruses."

While true, this (again) is just a technical matter of writing software that doesn't have these holes to be exploited by viruses, trojan horses, and such. Some proprietors accomplish this task, and thus is another poor argument if one is trying to frame the debate in terms of software freedom. Spyware, software that tracks what you do and reports the findings usually via a network, is a different issue entirely and has to do with running proprietary software. If you don't want spyware, you shouldn't run proprietary software.

Hence, I'm not an open source proponent. I'm a free software proponent.

Update: More no-freedom-talk recommendations from Christine Spang in "Free Software Without the Beer and the Politics". She's apparently trying to gain popularity for a message she refuses to give voice to.

Ten Senate Democrats tip the scales for CAFTA to pass

2005-07-01T12:32:00.000-05:00

See how many Leftists remember this at the next election. The Senate vote was 54-45 in favor of passing CAFTA legislation. The Miami Herald has an illuminating paragraph on this vote:

"Winning CAFTA is a top priority for Bush, who's looking for some victories in Congress to give his domestic agenda some momentum. But the Senate vote was one of the closest trade votes in years. Voting in favor were 43 Republicans, 10 Democrats and one Independent. Voting against were 12 Republicans and 33 Democrats, signaling wariness over the benefits of international commerce and globalization."

We know now what damage NAFTA caused by watching jobs flee the US while the corporations get to stay in the US and do business in the US. We know now, as we knew then, that NAFTA's promises are a myth. The reality is that sub-living wage workers will not earn enough to buy the products they make.

In other words, had those 10 Democrats voted in favor of the workers instead of the corporations, CAFTA legislation would not have passed the Senate; CAFTA would have lost by one vote. The Democrats had power here and they blew it.

Update: John Nichols wrote about this for the Tuesday, July 5, 2005 Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin.

Democrats on the War in Iraq: It's how the war is being waged that bothers us.

2005-06-23T14:18:00.000-05:00

I just heard Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) spout on about the continuing occupation of Iraq. I don't recall him calling it that, but that's what it is.

For Kennedy, and the majority of other Democrats, the war is not to be questioned on the basis of its beginning: was it ethical, was it legal, is it right to give the President war-making power that trumps Congress? The war is to be questioned as a management issue: it's not being fought properly.

In other words, there's no disagreement that the war was a good idea, how it is being fought is the key issue. If the Republicans were to somehow turn the occupation around and make progress building infrastructure, supplying potable water and electricity to a majority of Iraqis, much of Kennedy's speech would be a moot point. If the Republicans took down Saddam Hussein's anti-organized labor laws and let Iraqis work to rebuild their own country, another huge segment of Democratic Party objection would fall away. As more Democratic Party bitching disappears, it is made even more plain how much the Democrats are not an anti-war party.

The Democrats remain, deservedly, a minority party who are not an opposition party.

This is an important issue because of who benefits from this "debate"—the businesses who keep war going (Bechtel, Halliburton, GE, Northrup Grummon, etc.). Two major national parties compete for their dollars while not seeing that elections are lost over these issues and more people don't care to vote because they're fed up with the process.

Why "open source" is a route to placating software proprietors.

2005-06-12T10:50:00.000-05:00

Background

For some time now, Firefox advocates have been discussing this web browser in terms of its popularity. Many have cited how Microsoft Internet Explorer's usage shrinks because Firefox's usage grows. One of the most recent of such arguments comes from Asa Dotzler, Firefox and Thunderbird product release manager.

I have no objection to the Firefox web browser, in fact I use it as my primary web browser and have for some time now. Before that, for many years, I used the Mozilla suite (a combination of web browser, email client, chat program, and webpage editor). However, the argument with which one is ostensibly convinced to use Firefox is particularly weak and has been repeated for so long those who espouse it are unlikely to closely examine why it fails to convince.

Here's the theme, from the best essay I've seen on the philosophical differences between the free software movement and the open source movement (emphasis mine):

"Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be ``more acceptable to business.''"

The next major release of Microsoft Windows will come with a new version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, a version which is already being tested in public and many users have had time to try it out. Like Firefox, this new MSIE features tabs, a speedy webpage renderer, and an interface to run extensions. But MSIE is proprietary software. How it works is a secret, so that you can't easily learn what is happening to your data. Experts are equally stymied as the secret is kept from them too. The software may not be shared, so even if you discover that MSIE is doing something you don't want it to do and you somehow figure out a way to change how MSIE behaves you cannot share that improved version. Being a good neighbor or a good friend is prohibited with proprietary software, thus proprietary software is an anti-social trap.

Free software is the exact opposite of this: free software is software that respects the user's freedom to share and modify the program to help themselves, help their neighbors, and help their community. Everyone has the right to inspect, share, and modify the software for whatever purpose at any time so that they can make the computer behave as they want it to behave.

The problem with Firefox and MSIE debates from many Firefox advocates and corporate media

Sadly, the debate involving Firefox and MSIE is being framed in terms of features (or on the equally poor argument of "choice") instead of software freedom. Particularly with well-financed, well-advertised proprietary software with the power to bundle something with the OS, proprietors can maintain a strong popular lead. The argument Firefox proponents offer doesn't take any time to teach users to value their software freedom, thus these users have no reason to reject the next version of MSIE. Hence, popularity is both (1) a minor concern that (2) has yet to really be tested at all.

Choice is often an effective way to railroad someone out of something they value. In US presidential elections, narrowing one's choices is a way to railroad most voters into voting for the interests of the wealthy (Bush versus Kerry). In the context of web browsing, choice meant railroading users out of their software freedom. Mozilla suite and Firefox are not needed to provide choice. At one time, well before the current Mozilla project was a part of our lives, the three most popular graphical web browsers were Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. Since there were at least two browsers in the set, choice was satisfied. But software freedom was not satisified at all because none of the browsers in that set were free software browsers. Hence, Mozilla suite and Firefox don't give one "choice", one had choices before these browsers came along. But one did not have software freedom.

Software freedom is something Microsoft chooses not to supply to its users. Software freedom serves the needs of the users and proprietary software is untrustworthy by default. Hence, the debate should be focused on technical concerns and features after one has whittled away the competition by asking which program respects the user's freedoms to share and modify the software.

Why not discuss software freedom

The Mozilla Foundation and Firefox proponents often don't discuss software freedom because they are advocates for the open source movement. This movement started over a decade after the free software movement. The open source movement was formed to be more business-friendly. To accomplish this, this movement's founders decided that they could more effectively talk to businesses by touting practical benefits of so-called "open source" software—that software is developed faster, cheaper, and with fewer bugs when more people can have a hand in writing the software—while pushing aside any freedom talk. User's freedom to control how their computers work is not a cause the open source movement fights for. Effectively, the open source movement is a call to value an efficient development methodology by getting businesses to leverage the talented hackers of the world to work for them at no charge.

This blog on elections in a nutshell.

2005-06-11T22:28:00.000-05:00

'nuf said.

The harm of the least-worst in Bolivia?

2005-06-10T13:56:00.000-05:00

When you hear or read about what goes on in other countries fighting for water or land rights, it is rarely made clear that this is what will happen to more Americans. More Americans will learn that water will be priced out of reach of most people, water fountains will be replaced with commercial soda dispensers (the soda made with water that was hoarded or taken away from the public as Coca-Cola does in India), the land made uninhabitable (through nuclear or biochemical "accidents") or unaffordable to the vast majority of the population. We don't see how privatization of natural resources and collectively owned public resources can harm us. We also don't see who pushes for these moves to privatize — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Along these lines, today's Democracy Now! has an interesting message for Americans with regard to voting for people versus voting for policies from Marcela Olivera, Bolivian researcher and activist who works at the Democracy Center in Cochabamba. She was a member of the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life that organized a popular uprising against the privatization of the Cochabamba water system by Bechtel and the World Bank. Last year she worked with Public Citizen in Washington to develop an Interamerican water activist network. A rough transcript of part of her interview follows (starting at 31m19s, emphasis mine):

"Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada is a very symbolic person for us because he represents all the policies that were coming to my country from the World Bank and the IMF, you know, he's the guy who sold, for us, all our companies, all the state companies, who sold all the natural resources, who killed people in the streets without any feeling about that. So this guy represents, for us, the model that [husband?] posed in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

I think when people kicked him out from our country we were feeling that we were kicking out all these policies too. But at the same time, you know, even thinking that this guy is a symbolic guy for us, I don't think that the angriness of the people are focused on just one person. I think it's all the political parties in our country that were doing — doesn't matter who is in power, who political power is running the country, you know, the political policies that come from them are exactly the same. The names change, but the policies are exactly the same. So it's all these political parties that belong to these old [?] in Bolivia and all the angriness of the people are against them, it's not just one person or one political party in singular, it's all of them and I think that was perfectly reflected on the streets in Bolivia."

Perhaps it is time we recognized that it is not the candidate's personality that matters, or how they look on camera, but what policies they endorse, how they want to implement those policies, where their campaign funds come from, and what their political history is.

Is the Democrat support machine revving up this early?

2005-06-06T12:55:00.000-05:00

Cynthia Bogard claims that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is "still our last best hope for saving the nation".

Bogard doesn't fully come to terms with the reality that Sen. Kerry worked along side the other Democrats to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during Pres. Clinton's terms, or that Kerry and a majority of the Democrats supported Pres. Bush's power to supersede Congressional oversight to make war anywhere (before the 2004 election, Kerry told the AP that he thought this power was proper for the President to have; I suspect he said this because he knows what a pain it can be to convince the public that war is a good idea). Instead Bogard calls Kerry's support for the Iraq war "equivocation"—the use of ambiguous or uncertain language. No, he wasn't hedging, he liked the invasion of Iraq and he should be identified as such.

Bogard says that "We are thrilled that you have decided to raise the Downing Street Memo with your colleagues in the Senate.". Who is this "we"? I see the actions described in the memo as an unbroken line of aggression against Iraq. Apparently I'm not alone. Jeremy Scahill touches on this argument on today's Democracy Now! (transcript). To have a Democrat now point out Bush's foibles on this means that we have to be willing to put aside a huge bombing campaign and the Iraqi sanctions which killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Complaints coming from proponents of these acts are hard to interpret as a principaled condemnation of Bush. Bush does deserve impeachment and to be imprisoned, but so other US Presidents.

Apple is a problem for the progressive Left.

2005-05-20T17:52:00.000-05:00

Apple computer software is somewhat popular and widely known for being easy to use, easier to use than other equally unethical competition from other organizations including IBM, HP, an uncountable number of smaller software development houses, and Microsoft. When faced with paying the price premium Apple computers and Apple software costs, some defend Apple's ease of use. They argue that the price is worth it because Apple's computers are so easy to use.

But is that really the best argument the Left can offer? Consider this one instead:

Apple harms us when they:

Stump for software patents—Apple's patent on font rendering, for example, stands in the way of free software hackers and all computer users who want to render their fonts in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Distribute proprietary software—MacOS X is a combination of free software (the underlying Darwin software) and proprietary software (Quartz, QuickTime, etc.). This leaves all of Apple's customers unable to inspect, share, or modify the software they have copies of. Increasingly Apple is leveraging their power here to restrict what their iTunes customers can do with legally obtained audio tracks (visit Boing Boing for many Cory Doctorow stories on this; Doctorow is an avid MacOS user).

So why is this a problem for the progressive Left?

Because many Leftists purchase MacOS X machines and continue to upgrade them whenever Apple tells them they should.

The Left will, quite rightly, be the first to tell you about why you shouldn't do business with Wal-Mart or Nike. Wal-Mart is losing lawsuit after lawsuit which point out how shabbily Wal-Mart treats their workers (forcing floor workers to punch out early and keep working afterwards, locking employees in the store, managerial sexism, etc.). Most Wal-Mart workers are paid so little they can't afford the Wal-Mart health care plan. Nike goods are manufactured by underpaid workers in oppressive working conditions (see "The Corporation", either the movie or the book on which the movie is based, for first-hand accounts and documentary evidence of this pulled from Nike's trash).

The Left sees how the workers are treated and concludes that it's not ethically justifiable to do business with these organizations.

But Apple's software patents adversely affect all computer users; for example, nobody can legally distribute or use software that renders smooth fonts in an obvious way because that method is encumbered by Apple's patents. Software to implement this idea is in FreeType, but by default it is not compiled when FreeType is used. For more information on how software patents are harmful and why it is important to work to eradicate them, listen to Richard Stallman's speech or read the transcript of that speech on "The Danger of Software Patents".

Proprietary software adversely affects the users by restricting what the user is allowed to learn about what their computer is doing with their data. Nobody can legally help their neighbors by sharing copies of Apple's non-free software, nobody can legally inspect the software to see what it is really doing, nobody can fix the software if it breaks or improve the software to do something that they want done.

Are we supposed to only look narrowly at who is adversely affected here? If Apple's workers are treated unethically, we can rally against their products but otherwise we must learn to swallow what they're distributing? I don't think that is ethically defensible.

But you supported exactly the opposite!

2005-04-27T17:34:00.000-05:00

Today's DN! (34m04s into the show) features an interview with Howard Zinn, famed historian, civil rights activist, author of the excellent "A People's History of the United States" and the companion book "Voices of a People’s History of the United States", also worth reading (and probably more accessible to a casual read). I was given copies of both of them by two thoughtful relatives (thanks N&L), so I know first-hand that they are worth reading.

Late in the interview, you can hear Zinn say (54m03s):

AMY GOODMAN: Were your surprised by the election of President Bush, November 2004?

HOWARD ZINN: A little. A little. That is, I thought that maybe by then, perhaps there would be enough understanding about the deception, the hypocrisy of the US government, just enough to dethrone Bush, but I say only a little surprised, because on the other hand, I knew that John Kerry was not the candidate to represent the feelings of the American people. By then, by the time of the election, at least half of the American people were already against the war. Now they faced an election where 100% of the candidates were for the war. So, they had nobody to vote for. [...]

But Zinn had signed a letter which aimed to discourage people from voting for one such candidate, Ralph Nader, and may have helped to disincentivize people from even discussing his campaign with like-minded people on the Progressive Left.

[...] And so I -- with nobody to vote for, with no real alternative, of course, 40% of the voting population did not vote. And people ought to remember this. You know, Bush did not win overwhelmingly. You know, he won by one or two percentage points. And if you consider how many people voted for him against the voting population, you know, he got, you know, maybe 30% of the voting population. But it was a commentary on the pitiful showing of the Democratic Party, its failure to be a true opposition party in this country, and I think maybe a wake-up call to Americans to try to create a new political alternative to a political system that is really a one-party system, and it is quite corrupt.

Who has been saying this for the past three terms, at least? Ralph Nader, former Green party candidate and independent candidate for US President, and virtually every other so-called third party presidential candidate. They've been saying it for years, probably decades if one goes back far enough. I'm glad to hear more people recognize the effect of our first-past-the-post election system, debate lockouts, and years of corporate funding of both major parties.

But this would ring more true coming from someone who hadn't spent the last election pushing people away from one candidate who shares these views.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see that movement developing now? Outside of the two parties?

HOWARD ZINN: I hope so.

AMY GOODMAN: Or within one of the parties?

HOWARD ZINN: Well, there is some movement within the Democratic Party. And I think it will take work within and work without. That is, it will take people in the Democratic Party to demand a change in the Democratic Party. I notice that the Democratic Party in California has just had a convention in which they voted for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. And this is a good sign, and if Democratic Party groups around the country would demand that the National Democratic Party call for an end to this war and an end to the occupation, that would be a sign that the Democratic Party is changing and moving in the right direction. But it will not do that, I think, unless there are groups outside of the Democratic Party that create a movement that puts pressure on the Democratic Party.

Within the Democratic Party, there is no such movement in this direction that I know of. I only know of the "National Security Democrats" who are, among other things, helping to try and eradicate all anti-war sentiment from the Democratic Party so they can more efficiently pursue their corporate masters' interests.

Outside the Democratic Party, Nader is one candidate who has consistently been applying pressure specifically aimed at the Democratic Party, pointing out their foibles (and they are numerous and important). The Socialists too have been doing this work, and they get far too little recognition even from sympathetic leftists.

I hope that Zinn can remember talk like this come election time when it will count for something most people can appreciate in their own lives. If voting is most Americans' most overtly political act, it matters who they vote for or if they don't vote at all. We should care more about the quality of the choices and we should care why so many Americans don't vote. If people can be motivated to divorce themselves from the political process by not voting, can they be motivated to give their vote to someone who could use it to help justify political moves to the left?

And I hope Amy Goodman can bring some challenging questions to leftists during the time in between elections so that we're reminded how self-defeatingly inconsistent (or is that "diverse"?) the Progressive Left is. The cycle of settling for the least worst is self-perpetuating; it always produces choices which are so bad that some will get caught in the trap of seeing the worst without noticing how the trend tends toward what most Americans don't want. If anyone can appreciate the value of recalling history to avoid repeating it, it's a historian.

Elizabeth Schulte examines the Democratic Party sitting on the right

2005-04-24T17:19:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Schulte writes about the Democrats on the right and the progressives who championed the Democratic Party's cause during the most recent election.

It will happen again in 2007 during the run-up to the 2008 election. The Democrats are starting early, telling anti-war advocates to be silent, but the progressives will join them when the pressure is put on them.

I think the time has come where I'll have to add the Socialist Worker to my short list of things I read regularly.

Getting mad about the lack of an opposition party...for now.

2005-04-16T05:53:00.000-05:00

Common Dreams is pretty worked up about the recent bankruptcy bill and about the "73 Democrats Who Sold Out Consumers".

Please don't forget to chastise Common Dreams when the Democrats are running for office and Common Dreams carries article after article on how we should let the Democrats run without asking them any tough questions or taking them to task for their voting record or campaign funding.

The Democrats are trying to bring in anti-abortion supporters, get the anti-war supporters to either shut up or leave, and somehow they think they'll win elections? Or is it that it really doesn't matter if they win elections because they can just wait for voters to become pissed off at Republicans and vote Democrat out of spite?

The real solution: let third parties and independents run, get on the ballot, and debate in real debates with their corporate-funded duopolistic competitors. Also, we need to get a ranked voting system (feel free to haggle over which method is appropriate: instant run-off, some Condorcet method, etc.) so we can get away from "a vote for X is a for for Y" (where X and Y are candidates of the Democrats and Republicans in the same race). The goal is to shift focus from personalities and on to policies.

Tridge trumps Torvalds: film at 10

2005-04-12T23:48:00.000-05:00

Timothy R. Butler, editor-in-chief of "Open for Business" offers his take on businesses running proprietary software starting with how Linus Torvalds blew it when picking a proprietary program (BitKeeper) to manage the source code for his fork of the Linux kernel. RMS, the founder of the free software movement, and virtually everyone else in the free software movement saw this coming years ago when they first learned of Torvalds' decision. But Torvalds' hypocrisy has gone unmentioned and it's important that it be challenged because Torvalds is looked to as a hero of the free software movement.

Background

For those not in the know, in 1992 Torvalds decided to BitKeeper to track the various files that constitute the Linux kernel (roughly, a part of an operating system that manages hardware resources and allows programs to use them harmoniously). BitKeeper offers attractive technical features Torvalds couldn't get elsewhere. Instead of improving a comparable extant program, or asking the community to improve something for him (he has the celebrity and the following to be able to get some things he wants by asking), his poor example essentially asked fellow kernel hackers to also install and run BitKeeper. Some time later, BitMover (BitKeeper's copyright holder) distributed a proprietary but zero-cost version of BitKeeper that was limited in its capabilities, but enough to tempt some hackers into buying a BitKeeper license.

BitMover learned that Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, one of the authors of Samba (a program which lets Microsoft Windows and free software OSes share printers and files), was reverse-engineering BitKeeper's network protocols to make a drop-in free software replacement for BitKeeper. Larry McVoy (head of BitMover) knew that the Samba team had the skill needed to get this job done because much of the work in Samba had been done the same way by examining how Microsoft Windows systems interacted when authenticating, sharing files, and printing. McVoy decided to not sell Torvalds or anyone else at OSDN any more BitKeeper licenses. OSDN's current BitMover licenses are now void and McVoy doesn't even want them running the program any more (although how McVoy will enforce this, I don't know).

More recently

McVoy claims that Torvalds tried to get Tridgell to stop development and that he and Torvalds think the same way on this issue:

Larry [McVoy] is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement. He's told me so, and I believe him, because I actually do believe that he has a strong moral back-bone.

What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did.

Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: "You can compete with me, but you can't do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don't compete by looking at my solution."

And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: "Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader". And I can't really argue against that.

But that's not what the BitKeeper license says because copyright law doesn't let them have that power. Also, Torvalds didn't mention the part of the BitKeeper license that says the licensee isn't allowed to use it to develop competitive programs. Compatibility and software freedom be damned, if you do something like what BitKeeper does, don't think it's okay to allow BitKeeper users to move to something they can inspect, share, and modify!

If the free software movement held Torvalds' ridiculous opinion, Torvalds' own desire for popularity would be squelched. A GNU/Linux system is currently the most popular way to run Samba or OpenOffice.org, both programs built on reverse engineering proprietary protocols and file formats. Nobody would care about a GNU/Linux system if it had absolutely no compatibility with what is already in use. As you'll see if you read the next link, doing one better than UNIX systems was a design decision for GNU which RMS two decades ago. GNU programs are widely known for doing the same jobs UNIX programs do but handling junk data better than they do. Should we look at RMS' effort and persuade him to stop because it might draw sales away from proprietary UNIX systems?

I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering the software to achieve freedom. Even the Free Software Foundation says they would run the non-free software to achieve this end, then when the free program was far enough along, they would stop running the non-free program and delete it from their system.

Retaining your software freedom matters.

2005-03-30T03:49:00.000-06:00

As the New York Times recently reported, Brazil is asking for free software. What's not clear is that Brazil, like Peru, is not asking for open source. The headline and the quote inside the NYT article get it right. Seeing "open source" language is an attempt to horn in on the popularity of software freedom but without actually consistently delivering software freedom or pitching a message based on software freedom. This has happened before. A few years ago, Peruvian Congressman Villanueva was being lobbied by Microsoft about a free software in government bill the congressman was pushing in Congress. The congressman took a the Microsoft rep down a peg when the MS rep wanted to reframe the argument to focusing on "open source"; Villanueva corrected him and insisted on debating the issue around software freedom.

Microsoft wants to challenge "open source" because they know they can't compete with software freedom. Microsoft is a proprietor and what they sell caters to people focusing on price and features -- two values that matter a great deal to the open source movement. The open source movement was built to deny software freedom in exchange for values Open Source Initiative founders believed that their target audience—business—would respond to. So, goodbye software freedom, hello leveraging an unpaid workforce to help write software in exchange for a slightly more amenable license.

Soon, OpenOffice.org v2.0 will come out (beta versions are available now), but there's a catch: some of its functionality is based on a Java runtime engine which is non-free software (Sun Microsystem's JRE). This means that some of OO.org's functionality is written in a programming language (Java) for which there is no free software replacement yet. Therefore, in order to run some parts of OO.org v2.0, users will need to install Sun's non-free JRE or do without the functionality. Fortunately for most users, the bulk of OO.org's most popular functions (word processing, drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, and equation editor) are not adversely affected.

But the message is clear: this is what happens when you stop caring about software freedom. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software community, warned us about this. He said that such a program would be "free but shackled" to a non-free program, and thus not useful in the free world where users run nothing but free software.

Frank Schönheit is a Sun employee cited in a Newsforge article on OO.o 2.0. He is quoted as saying that "functionality is what matters", and he's not lying. For software proprietors and for the audience the open source movement speaks to, adopting proprietary software in order to get some job done is a perfectly amenable thing to do. For free software advocates, writing a free software replacement is far more attractive.

Kevin Zeese, laying it on the line.

2005-03-29T02:14:00.000-06:00

Kevin Zeese offers a must-read (Counterpunch mirror) for any self-respecting progressive who is not just a Democratic Party hack pretending to be anti-war. Here's a sample:

"Hopefully the peace movement also learned a lesson: Democrats need to be opposed for engaging in war just as pro-war Republicans need to be opposed. The anti-Vietnam War movement removed LBJ from office because of his support for the Vietnam War. Today, pro-war Democrats should be removed from office for supporting the Iraq War. We need to stand firm on our principles especially when it comes to the illegal war in Iraq that is destroying or damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killing or maiming tens of thousands of Americans, torturing prisoners by rendition or in Guantanemo Bay, Afghanistan or Iraq, isolating the U.S. from the world and making us less safe from terrorism.

The anti-war movement is only one example. Labor, civil rights, civil liberties, anti-corporate globalization, fair taxes, women's rights -- indeed every progressive movement is taken for granted by the Democrats. Why? Because progressives let them."

The question is whether progressives have the guts to stand up for their principles at election time, when it counts.

The Nation: Interesting during the non-election years, full of crap around election time.

2005-03-26T03:17:00.000-06:00

Election 2004: The Nation joins the Democratic Party sycophants and tells people to shun Nader's campaign. Everyone knew his campaign wouldn't get the votes he got in 2000 and would likely be a non-entity insofar as being an effective so-called "spoiler" (even without getting into the prejudice of the term "spoiler"). But many billable hours were spent trying to keep Nader off the ballot even in gerrymandered states that would have gone Democrat no matter what (like Illinois).

Now: The Nation is telling us curious things like:

"Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we've initiated a biweekly "Minority/Majority" feature that identifies—by name—Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who've helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don't define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come."

Perhaps being shamed publicly about their lack of support for genuinely progressive candidates will get the Nation to support such candidates when they run. If Democrats can be "ineffective [...] for a long time to come" something is wrong with the system. They shouldn't have so much power that they can stick around for "a long time" and remain "ineffective" yet stop other candidates with far more impressive public service records from being heard.

The "anti-war" movement holds a teach-in and teaches nothing practical.

2005-03-26T01:51:00.000-06:00

You can still catch reruns of the recent teach-in on C-SPAN. The teach-in was organized by some of the self-described anti-war groups. The teach-in dates back to the Vietnam war. There, the anti-war movement taught anyone who wanted to come in and learn effective strategies for opposing the Vietnam war. You'd find stimulating discussion which encouraged the audience to participate by contributing challenging questions and statements, the entire group was free to argue productively, and learn why the US went to Vietnam at all.

Very little of this has apparently survived to the current day.

I watched the teach-in live on C-SPAN Thursday night. I saw nobody ask challenging questions. I saw very little input from the audience, it was mostly a staged affair for the speakers. Nobody who spoke had anything to say about voting pro-war for Kerry (let alone distinguishing between those who could vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office and those who should have voted their consciences instead). Naomi Klein said that she blamed Kerry for his weak stance—not opposing the war—but where were the anti-war movement demands for Kerry? How can anyone blame Kerry for not taking the anti-war supporters seriously if they ask for nothing of him?

Nobody asked about practical recommendations for what one could do in the next day, during the next week, or during the next month to oppose the continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't know what recommendations those would be, but I'm not up there leading a teach-in either. Nobody challenged the lack of marches for so many months that the anti-war movement had made itself even more invisible in the eyes of the general public.

Nobody questioned the validity of the fervor to get the troops home by asking how to get the troops home. It was more like a meeting to agree to meet again in the indeterminate future. A lot of vague philosophy was shared, which can be okay so long as it is paired with something you can use.

It was also very civil, which seemed oddly inappropriate to me. I expected a heated (and thus, educational as well as interesting) exchange of views from a variety of positions within the anti-war movement. Instead, I got the anti-war movement version of the US presidential debates. Stilted, long-running, and little real input from anyone not on the panel.

Will members of the anti-war movement behave in line with their alleged ethics (by voting for anti-war candidates)? When the time comes for them to vote will they cave and vote Democratic Party instead? Will anti-war participants do what they can to dismiss voting as not a big deal (now they can afford to play this game because any election they care about is over a year away)?

Speaking of ignored elections, we've got one coming up. Ironically, people have more power during these elections because so few people vote in them. Will anyone from the anti-war movement champion voting for anti-war candidates? I doubt it. I'm betting that they'll either ignore the election or cave and vote for pro-war Democrats.

Lance Selfa describes how the Democratic Party corrals political support.

2005-03-26T01:43:00.000-06:00

Lance Selfa of the Socialist Worker writes another insightful piece on how "grassroots" organizations that support Democrats end up having their agenda handed to them by the Democratic Party. There are two places to get the article.

"United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther, who once confessed that the UAW could have taken over the Michigan Democratic Party, but refrained from doing so because it wanted to keep the party's middle-class and business supporters. So for years, labor remained the Democrats' most loyal backers, but got little of its agenda—from national health care to repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act—considered.

No one can realistically compare today's PDA with the CIO of the 1930s and '40s. But that's precisely the point. If the most powerful working-class movement in U.S. history couldn't transform the Democratic Party, how can a few thousand liberal activists—whose preferred 2004 presidential candidates (Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean) couldn't win a Democratic primary—hope to?"

Where are we going with longer terms of copyright?

2005-03-24T23:00:00.000-06:00

Some commercially distributed films are preserved. Studios that see no potential for profit in doing this work will (and have) let films disappear, rot never to be seen again. Copyright law protects their efforts—as long as the movie is under copyright, nobody may duplicate the movie without the permission of the copyright holder.

Interest in some movie stars is rejuvenated due to long-lasting movies. The revival of Louise Brooks' professional movie career came from viewing and screening movies that had not been screened for 30 years. Some of her earlier movies were lost before preservation work could help save them.

How many more Louise Brooks movies might be enjoyed today if people had been free to make copies and preserve the work?

Much of what Hollywood studios argue for in copyright law is done in the name of supporting the actors. The Screen Actors Guild 90+% unemployment rate tells another story. And from a copyright perspective, how many other actors' work would be saved if we had a more permissive copyright regime, one which allowed verbatim non-commercial copying and distribution of all published works?

Is it possible to assess how much damage is being done to our culture people by the heads of the MPAA?

The MPAA will soon make another round of lectures at colleges and film festivals as the upcoming "P2P" US Supreme Court case goes on and they're sure to bring on the publicity as the time for another copyright term extension comes around. I encourage you to be there so that you can challenge copyright terms that conflict with what copyright is there to do and how long the term of copyright ought to be.

Freedom talk is good and we need more of it.

2005-03-23T04:29:00.000-06:00

Gervase Markham asks "wouldn't that be a great slogan for Firefox? "Firefox. Socially responsible browsing." and Josh Aas, a Camino developer, responds that introducing some Free Software talk is something they "need to do a better job of".

It would be a nice slogan for Firefox. But if the Mozilla Foundation has something to say about it, it won't happen. The Mozilla Foundation is committed to the open source movement. The Open Source Initiative tries very hard to frame the debate in a way that pushes aside software freedom. I recommend reading the most insightful and respectful essay I've read on the difference between the two movements and why the differences matter.

I think it would be wonderful to see more programmers and more projects actively promote paying attention to software freedom and write some freedom talk. But instead I see many programmers become proponents of a message crafted to speak chiefly to business, a development methodology. The watered-down message of the open source movement is more widely circulated in the business press because it was built to be attractive to them—we can get hackers around the world working on our programs without paying them?

Faster development, fewer bugs, doing good development work for less money: these goals don't address important ethical matters and they don't necessarily give me the freedom to share and modify software. I have no problem with less buggy software which is developed faster and I want poor hackers to be able to hack and earn a living wage for it. There's nothing wrong with running a business hacking software either, but the root problems for software development involve giving users rights, not catering to business all the time.

Protests went well, coverage was absent (again).

2005-03-21T18:51:00.000-06:00

This past weekend, the second anniversary of the British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq, anti-war protests around the world went well. There was lots of participation and much discussion about the war but not in the corporate media which is hardly surprising (this lack of coverage being another instance of an unbroken line of remarkable misreporting or non-coverage of anti-war activities—coverage typically overstates violence or the there is no coverage at all). I am glad to see the marches and gatherings go on because they were sorely needed (there is widespread agreement that the anti-war movement had died or needed some kind of restart). But I'm not so sure that all the questions which needed to be asked were asked, and I would hate to see the same short-sighted disingenuous introspection that recently plagued the Democrats (after which Donna Brazile, Democratic Party organizer, declared in a forum broadcast by C-SPAN, that "the time for introspection is over") will plague the anti-war movement as well. The anti-war movement should not be yet another front for the Democratic Party.

But if all the questions aren't asked, education suffers. When debate is stifled, education suffers. One of the main functions of the anti-war movement ought to be to teach others how to value dissent and value working to dissolve the structural reinforcements which corporations in power over citizens (which inherently requires critiquing one's own society).

Along that line, I think one question that needs to be asked is what the anti-war movement learned from backing a pro-war candidate for US president. Follow-up questions include: What was gained and what was lost? What were the expectations if Kerry had taken the presidency? Were they realistic? How did Kerry come to be the anti-war movement's choice? Is it reasonable to prejudice the debate over the US presidency by framing one candidate as "viable" (thus inferring, if not outright stating, that his opponents are not viable)? Does this actually work to get you the kind of vibrant social debate you want?

I return to these questions often and with interest because Americans don't participate in political matters except for presidential elections. During a presidential election, Americans are most likely to find ordinary people engaging in political discussion. Other times, not so much. This is sad and, to some degree, self-imposed because the midterm elections and local elections are quite important, yet we see little participation at the ballot box (far less than half of registered voters in the US vote in mid-term elections).

Then there's the anti-war movement's debate regarding when to bring soldiers home, despite the latest Harris poll indicating 59% of the US who want to bring the US soldiers home immediately. Why has the anti-war movement shifted away from their previous message (which was basically, "support the troops—bring them home now")?

A friend of mine (who will soon get a blog) dismisses the interest as though there are other more compelling questions to ask instead, but I think he will be shown wrong when we return to these issues again in about a year and a half.

This is the time when it is most comfortable for those who did not get what they wanted from the 2004 US presidential election to recognize a flawed strategy for what it is. Relish this time, it will go away soon.

The one-party state.

2005-03-21T00:55:00.000-06:00

More recommended reading from Counterpunch: Alexander Cockburn's article on how the Democrats and Republicans work together to further disenfranchise the entire country. Illinois residents and Democratic party supporters will want to take note of another vote Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made:

"Near the end of February many Democrats in the House okayed a Republican bill to transfer large class action suits from state to federal courts. It's the state courts that have awarded the big settlements against the tobacco and asbestos companies. Federal judges have consistently cut back the big awards. Transfer of the suits is a huge victory for the business lobby. Earlier in February the Senate passed the same bill 72 to 26. Among Democrats voting for a bill written by the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were such supposed bright hopes as Obama of Illinois, Salazar of Colorado, Bayh of Indiana, along with possible aspirants for the 2008 nomination as Dodd of Connecticut."

John Walsh hits the nail on the head.

2005-03-18T12:33:00.000-06:00

John Walsh on the "progressives" backing Democrats hits many issues the Left needs to discuss (but won't). To this, I'd only add that the "anti-war" movement has a lot to answer for: No justification of voting pro-war (particularly for the majority who didn't need to—I've expounded on this many times before), no marches of any national significance in many months, no criticism of same allowed in discussions (what Walsh describes with MoveOn.org is rampant amongst self-identified anti-war proponents). Sometimes you have to draw the line between those that support the agenda they claim and those that are just Democratic party partisan hacks.

Norman Solomon has a good point in showing how the anti-war message needs to be clearly championed among those that want to truly oppose this president. But Solomon has not consistently supported that message even in recent months. He too was one of the signatories of the Vote2StopBush.org campaign which meant supporting a pro-war candidate, not challenging his take on any issue, and not acknowledging that some people simply cannot vote to "stop Bush" due to the way votes are counted in the US electoral vote system. Given this, I'm not convinced that if Kerry had become US President that we'd see a much different war stance than we're seeing right now. As you read Solomon's article, and I hope you will, keep in mind what he put his name to when it counted.

How surprising is it, really?

2005-03-03T17:47:00.000-06:00

Arianna Huffington tells us that "Andy Stern, the groundbreaking president of the Service Employees International Union" is the next great progressive hope. She pitches for him mightily and compares him to the Democratic Party who she is currently displeased with:

"Compare that with the pale rhetoric and feeble resistance being offered by Democratic leaders in Washington these days. Sure, they've landed some heavy blows playing defense on the president's proposal to overhaul Social Security. But is this the only issue they are able to wrap their minds around? Are they just too exhausted to use their political muscle and imagination for anything else--including what should be the great political debate of our time, Iraq and the war on terror?"

But how surprising is this? The Democrats favored the invasion of Iraq, the Presidential power to supersede Congress when deciding whether to go to war (and where to go to war), and the Democrats have no problem adopting the "can't cut and run" line when the topic comes around to getting out of Iraq. This all happened before the November 2004 election. So it seems a bit disingenuous to complain about that behavior now as though it is not just an unbroken line of behaving in a way which is eminently compatible with the corporatists in the Republican party.

I won't be surprised to learn that a majority of Democrats agree with Illinois Senator Barack Obama and favor bombing Iran. The darling of the progressives and the Democratic party knows that he's got to go along to get along with the warriors. There's nothing but silence from progressives as he makes one bad high office appointment after another.

And there's considerable support for these stances from the populace when it comes down to brass tacks: a lot of Illinois voters voted for Kerry even though they didn't have to, a lot of Illinois voters voted for Obama even though they didn't have to. The progressives applied a half-baked logic to the 2004 US election and urged progressives to vote for Kerry to oust Bush in the gerrymandered ("safe") states. It's as if the progressives don't see how this damages their anti-war credentials. Perhaps there will simply be enough of them to shout down anyone who questions whether the safe-state Kerry voters are genuinely interested in taking opportunities to advocate against war. I look forward to seeing this debate happen, should there be another anti-war march of significance (which looks less likely with each passing month).

I realize that almost half of those who could vote in US national elections don't and local elections have lower participation rates. But those who don't vote are too ambiguous for me to read something into clearly and definitively. They could dislike the fake dichotomy of Bush v. Kerry, they could dislike being railroaded into supporting Obama, they could be too busy working a sub-living wage job to take the time to vote and stand in long waiting lines. It could be something else entirely.

I want to take progressives more seriously on these life and death issues because I think there is a fake debate going on where no progressive voices are heard (particularly in mass media which goes out of their way to find inarticulate progressives to champion their views at protests and never invites in progressive leaders into the studio to talk). I'd like the debate to include someone who could point out what standing up against recent US invasions and occupations (not just Iraq) really means. And it bothers me when people set up a good argument with bad actions like voting contrary to one's politics when one has a choice to vote one's conscience.

Why not remember what the Leftists did too?

2005-02-24T09:52:00.000-06:00

Today, on Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation magazine. There was not one question about vanden Heuvel's blind support of Kerry's pro-war candidacy (even in heavily-gerrymandered states, like Illinois, where entire counties could have voted anti-war and not changed the ultimate recipient of Illinois' electoral votes).

Ironically, vanden Heuvel covered "nuclear terrorism, Washington's stance on Iran" (citing DN!'s website), Iran being the apparent next target of American wrath.

Perhaps liberals & progressives have a long memory for the political missteps of their opponents, like talking about who stumped for Bush during the 2004 election, but they take a considered silence when talking about who stumped for Kerry when they didn't need to, who unquestioningly supported Barack Obama (calling his election #4 of the "Good Things in Bad Times"), and who chides Nader for running (#7).

In order to prevent settling for the least-worst, you have to analyze the record of your candidates and make demands on them. Kerry's campaign ran with no demands from the Left. Obama's Senate record is horrible, supporting candidates for high office that he should know better not to support, but the Left is silent.

On a similar note, I had to miss Medea Benjamin's visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this past Tuesday because I was preparing for my radio show Digital Citizen (which I plan to set up a website for so you can hear archived episodes of the show). Benjamin was one of the people who endorsed the letter denouncing Nader's run for office; the same letter that made no demands of Kerry and said nothing of who to support in the so-called "safe" states. There were plenty of candidates to recommend for one's consideration: the Green, Socialist, Constitution, and Libertarian parties all had candidates who were against the war. I'm guessing that the friendly audiences she speaks in front of weren't so impertinant as to remind her that Nader's candidacy was far more progressive than Kerry's, would have cost progressive safe-state voters nothing to support, and was expected to not be as popular nationally as he was in 2000 (yet that didn't stop Democrats and progressives from spending much time and money trying to keep him down) so even by ridiculous support-Democrats-in-the-clutch logic, voting anti-war would have done nothing to adversely affect Kerry's campaign.

We're going to repeat this in 2 and a half years or so. And meanwhile, the anti-war crowd is making a mockery of themselves by holding no major marches in recent memory and not explaining how many of them can vote pro-war from safe states and consider themselves bonafide advocates against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Update: Sharon Smith's article in Counterpunch is well worth reading, particularly Smith's take on a quote from Medea Benjamin. Speaking of Medea Benjamin, a few years ago DN! played a clip of her at an anti-war march saying something to the effect of "I've got a message for the women in the audience" and then going on about how the world's leaders (the vast majority of whom are men) were (exact quote) "testosterone poisoned". Nobody on DN! remarked how sexist that comment was and how no man could get away with saying how women are 'estrogen poisoned'. Benjamin said this during an anti-war march in Washington or New York, I'll try to find a recording of the clip so you can hear it for yourself (I once had a clip of it, excerpted from a DN! episode but that CD has been scratched and become unreadable). archive.org has a copy of the DN! show but that particular episode is unavailable right now. I'll update this blog entry when I get a copy of the show.

Scott Ritter: Iran bombing in June and Iraqi elections were manipulated.

2005-02-23T01:00:00.000-06:00

According to United for Peace of Pierce County:

"On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. -- Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq...."

If the anti-war marches will rev up again over this, the question must be asked: how many of them voted for a pro-war candidate from a safe state? What explanation will they provide to clarify the obvious confusion resulting from that mixed message?

And what will you do about it when you can vote?

2005-02-14T16:47:00.000-06:00

Nicole Colson writes about the Democrats taking a less-than-pro-choice stance on abortion. Take her article at face value and accept its defense of a Democratic Party slide at first blush. Then, ask yourself, why is this happening?

I figure it happens because Democratic Party supporters have no where else to go. They've alienated the Greens, and Nader's progressive independent campaign—both campaigns that might have taken their concerns seriously and worked with them. They ignore the Socialists, and other alternative parties don't support their pro-choice stance on abortion (Constitution Party, for instance). So, they've pinned themselves into a corner.

When one pledges undying loyalty to a political party, one is giving that party permission to work against those values which ostensibly drove one to support the party in the first place. Two and a half years from now, we all know that pro-choice supporters will vote Democrat. Thus, the Democrats can afford to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the lies that go with that, running poor people out of personal welfare (AFDC) but continuing billions of dollars in corporate welfare, champion the death penalty (which also adversely affects the poor more than the rich), support stopping universal single-payer health care, and a host of other corporate-friendly ideas the Democrats back. The Democrats can afford to test the waters and see how much further they can distance themselves from a pro-choice abortion stance.

A comparable pickle exists for some of these voters right now: I hear that the so-called "anti-war" crowd is organizing another national march somewhere in the US. It's bad enough that there have been no such marches in recent memory—the last big one was well before the election and their thunder has almost entirely been forgotten. I figure that a majority of the marchers voted from what are called "safe" states—states which have heavily gerrymandered districts making it possible to know how their electoral votes will be cast before the election. The majority of voters vote from "safe" states. Voting from a "safe" state gives one freedom to vote one's conscience; anti-war safe state voters had no excuse to vote for Bush or Kerry (virtually every alternative party candidate was anti-war, so there's plenty of room to be compatible with one's economic sentiments and still vote against the war).

Given all this freedom to vote one's values, what are we to make of a majority of anti-war marchers who voted for a pro-war candidate (either Bush or Kerry)? I look forward to the excuses which will attempt to explain how one's anti-war sentiment can be put on the shelf when one goes to vote and then picked up again when one is comfortably away from the election.

Update: Ralph Nader takes progressive columnists to task for comparable reasons in this essay.

Improving the frame of debate: IBM's patent pledge.

2005-02-01T18:24:00.000-06:00

Earlier, I discussed IBM's patent pledge and I encouraged you to be careful of what you're giving up in exchange for your continued access to the 500 patents IBM promises not to sue you for infringing. IBM is not offering you a gift. You are not getting something for nothing. Using the language of the pledge, and describing the pledge in the best possible situation, you are getting increased access to 500 patents in exchange for not defending your "intellectual property" rights against "Open Source Software". As you can see, the exact terms of the bargain are unknown because IBM expresses them in overgeneral and prejudicial language. It is to their benefit to do this so that they can discontinue the pledge against anyone they wish at almost any time.

I have improved upon my framing of this issue, a frame which I haven't seen anyone else pose, and which concisely states my rationale for why this promise isn't nearly as important as the mainstream tech press says it is.

IBM holds more patents than any other patent holder. In 2004, IBM was awarded 3,248 patents; the most of any patent holder for the twelfth consecutive year. In order to practically assess IBM's pledge, I would like to know how much less risk I face of losing a patent infringement lawsuit as a result of this pledge. What program(s) might I deal in which (1) implement patented ideas listed in the set of 500 patents included in IBM's pledge, and (2) do not implement ideas covered by other active IBM patents?

The answer to the question will describe a set of programs. The size of the set is directly proportional to the utility of IBM's pledge—the more programs in the set, the more useful the pledge.

If the set has no programs in it, IBM's pledge is useless. There is no sense in trading away anything in exchange for nothing.

If the set has just a few programs in it, IBM's pledge is useful, but not very useful. It is unlikely that trading away enforcement of one's rights will be rewarded by dealing in the 500 patents.

If the set has a lot of programs in it, IBM's pledge is quite useful. In this case, it may be a good idea to trade away enforcing one's rights to gain access to these patented ideas. Whether trading away one's rights is worthwhile depends on the value of the rights one is asked to trade away (which implies learning exactly which rights one is asked to trade away, talking about "intellectual property" rights won't cut it), and for how long one is asked to suppress defending these rights (ostensibly, for the duration of the 500 patents).

If we don't assess the value of the patent pledge, we can't know if it is good. If we don't know the pledge's value, we have no business recommending its use to anyone or celebrating its existence. I understand how oppressive it is to live with software patents (also called "software idea patents" which might be a more useful phrase because it reminds the listener that what is covered are ideas, a much broader scope than covering computer software programs), but we can't afford to look at IBM's pledge as a favor until we understand the strings attached to this promise.

Too little, too late.

2005-02-01T13:38:00.000-06:00

"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote."

—Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), in an interview on Meet the Press

He wasn't talking about the recent American "elections" where roughly half of the country doesn't vote, a major chunk of those who are ostensibly registered to vote cannot vote, and the rest are gerrymandered into a false dichotomy. He was talking about the Iraqi "elections" which are differently horrible.

How bad is gerrymandering in US congressional races?

2005-01-29T23:49:00.000-06:00

TimesCommunity.com reports on Prof. Colleen Shogun's research:

It used to be that having 50 competitive races in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives was low, but that number has now fallen into the low teens, noted Colleen Shogun, associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

Under the current system, incumbents are likely to face a real challenge only from within their own party, according to Shogun, and most likely by someone with an even more extreme political view than their own.

"What you get are not only incumbents who sit on their seats but more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans because where these races are won and lost is at the primaries. And who comes out for the primaries? The hard-core partisans," Shogun said during an interview last week with Times editors and reporters.

What are some of the prospects for change? Not good, says Professors Shogun and Rozell:

Mark Rozell, a fellow professor of public policy at GMU, suggested that states adopt a more independent process of redrawing the districts every 10 years following the census. But he and Shogun acknowledged change is not likely to happen when there is no incentive for politicians to do it.

"You'd have to have a suicidal politician,” Shogun said. "Anyone who pushes for this risks alienating their own party, and they may get what they ask for with a bad reallocation."

What advice does Shogun offer for the Democrats?

Shogun said that, for Democrats to be competitive in future presidential races, the party is either going to have to turn its back on its liberal heritage in a ploy to reach out to Southern voters or shift its focus to the Midwest and Southwest where wins in states like Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada can overcome losses in Florida and Ohio.

You don't need to be Carnac the Magnificent to know which strategy will look appealing to the Democrats in three years. Or sooner.

What could a corporate death penalty look like?

2005-01-29T01:31:00.000-06:00

Karyn Strickler proposes a corporate death penalty (or read a copy with more links) which kills people, but leaves the corporation intact: (emphasis mine)

"The Corporate Death Penalty Act could provide that every member of the Board of Directors and executives of a corporation who knew, or should have known about the likelihood of their product or services to cause death, will be subject to the death penalty if their product or service results in the death of an individual or group of individuals."

I'm sympathetic to her claims and to the general rationale that as corporations gain the kinds of power usually reserved for people, corporations must also take on the responsibilities and penalties people endure.

However, it is disheartening that in an effort to reign in corporate power, the country would resort to state-sponsored killing (or public executions which Timothy G. Hermach, President of the Native Forest Council, endorses as part of a corporate death penalty). Both of these acts are roundly criticized by progressives for good reasons. I think this recommendation is a consequence of buying into the "bad apple" defense which seeks to direct attention toward the individuals which behave badly and away from a system built to allow the bad behavior. It was used quite widely in the most recent spate of corporate crime, fraud, and abuse highlighted in mainstream news media for a few weeks last year.

Strickler quickly dismisses the current death penalty as "badly administered" yet wants us to expand this system instead of shutting it down. Consider some of the reasons why the current death penalty is bad policy, and consider how a corporate board would behave:

Individuals don't see others being killed by the state in the way that death penalty proponents would like. The Death Penalty Information Center tells us that the death penalty doesn't deter people from murdering. Why should we believe that a board room of people will be less likely to kill?

How many disempowered people in the corporation will we accidentally kill? The current death penalty has been used to kill people without adequately pursuing their guilt. US states that still have the death penalty will undoutedly repeat this mistake again. Some people on death row are acquitted before they are killed. We know this yet we allow states to continue to sentence people to death. This system is completely intolerant of mistakes. This alone is sufficient to bring fair-minded death penalty supporters to question, if not move to end, the death penalty.

How will we avoid bias favoring certain corporations over others? The current death penalty is racist; An African-American man is more likely to receive a death sentence ("[...] in Philadelphia [...] the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black"). The decision makers are overwhelmingly white men ("the key decision makers in death cases around the country are almost exclusively white men. Of the chief District Attorneys in counties using the death penalty in the United States, nearly 98% are white and only 1% are African-American."). These patterns of bias in the system makes the death penalty unfair and unjust.

What lessons are we teaching about the power the state ought to wield? Is it wise to raise more generations of Americans with the idea that the state ought to have the power to execute its people? Will killing more people engender less behavior of the kind that results in this non-educational punishment (dead people can't learn)?

Have we exhausted all avenues for rehabilitation? Strickler's remarks about corporate power are compelling and they clearly justify doing something to prevent any organization from acquiring that amount of power. But corporate power was not always so great. In the early days of incorporation, one corporation could not buy another. Corporations were held to their charters—descriptions of what they would do—charters were reasonably specific and they laid out a plan that had an end. This is described quite well in the opening scenes of "The Corporation" (either in the book or, more succinctly, in the movie). This is not to say that the past were the halcyon days of corporate activity—there was a clear need for a living wage where equal work was paid equally, a clean, egalitarian, and safe working environment, to name a few improvements.

So, taken together, I'm not convinced that killing people is wise, necessary, or going to solve our current problems. A more progressive framing for the debate over corporate power is needed. For example, corporations should be subordinate to the people. We should only give corporations as much power as we're willing to trade away. We must be able to give a corporation a power and, if we don't like how that power is being used, recall it. We should have the ability to stop giving corporations additional power after the people find that it cuts too close to the bone (or that what we gain in exchange is less important than what we give up). Let the businesses complain and threaten to leave. They'll either be replaced (we got along without Wal-Mart, currently the US' largest employer) or we'll find that there's plenty for the remaining businesses to do while earning a reasonable profit.

We could decide that lifeforms are not subject for patent power. This would put a significant dent in the plans of the largest agribusiness giants like Cargill and Monsanto (which recently acquired another seed company which held many patents, undoubtedly a major reason for the purchase). The patent office would issue no more patents which are useful for stifling biological organisms and seed saving, and as a bargaining chip, we could let the biological patents which have already been issued expire. We could either slow the progress of finding new ways to grow more food (instead investing time and money in ways to distribute the food we can grow to the people who need it most), or pay researchers to do comparable R&D work with government money (money either raised in taxes or cut from military spending which currently takes over 50 cents of every government dollar). When we pay for the result, we have every right to demand its free and unencumbered use.

We could repeal the Taft-Hartley Act in the effort to allow workers to more easily organize.

We could institute a national living wage.

We could give every American publicly-financed, privately-delivered health care instead of paying outrageously high sums for unevenly distributed health care. This would be one less thing to negotiate in labor contracts.

We could tell the corporations what goods and services to provide and list tighter constraints on how to provide desired goods and services. Innovation would be needed to make the business work within these constraints. If, for example, there aren't enough available trees to turn into paper, we need ways to live with reduced dependence on paper goods.

If we need a corporate death penalty, we could confirm progressive ideas instead of fighting for bargain-basement equality (where everyone is equal because we all ostensibly live at the edge of the state's knife). I'd have to think more about all of the specific terms of such a deal, but here are some of the broad strokes I'd look for in a more progressive policy concerning curbing corporate power:

Place financial liability in the hands of those who run the corporation (typically the board and the top executives) so that they are liable for their mistakes in a way that will make them pay attention. Incorporation is chosen, in part, to free oneself from fiscal responsibility for bad business decisions. Perhaps Coca-Cola executives would be less eager to take water from Indians to make soda, or perhaps executives would be more responsive to the people if they had to pay for their most profound mistakes. Innovation might not happen at these organizations as much as it did, but I'm not convinced that we should trade away so many of our rights for innovation. And I'm not convinced that the largest corporations (which are the worst offenders) are innovating to build things we don't want and have no opportunity to reject (does anyone need a word processor that locks them into a program they can't inspect, share, or modify? What was so profoundly bad about corn without built-in herbicide that compelled us to eat so much unlabeled genetically modified food?).

Don't grant corporate power to charters that don't deserve it. Thus, we avoid granting corporate power (no matter how broad that power is) before that organization grows to become a social menace. Holding corporations to their charters seems like a fine idea to me as well.

Proceedings must include freezing the corporation's assets to prevent corporate leaders from getting rid of everything valuable if they learn that their corporation is on the chopping block. There has to be something to recompense victims of crime, fraud, and abuse, or distribute to the public.

Forcible disincorporation must be possible for more than not paying taxes. In an interview with Jennifer Abbott, one of the directors of "The Corporation", Abbott said that revoking incorporation happens frequently but it happens most often for not paying taxes. The needs of people need to rank higher and qualify for forced disincorporation. In late 1984, the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal leaked methyl isocyanate gas killing around 3,800 people, and disabling almost 3,000 more. Union Carbide claims that what happened was sabotage—"An independent investigation by the engineering consulting firm Arthur D. Little determined that the water could only have been introduced into the tank deliberately, since safety systems were in place and operational that would have prevented water from entering the tank by accident.". Union Carbide's chairman, Warren Anderson, is sought by the government of India, which has asked the US for extradition, but Anderson remains a free man in the US today. This lethal incident did not stop Dow Chemical from making Union Carbide a subsidiary in February 2001, so now Dow Chemical has more money to draw upon to fight the bad PR and pay any future fines. Dow Chemical says that they spent US$470 million in a settlement with the Indian government, but one has to wonder if there is any point at which complete dissolution of the corporation would be an adequate remedy. The money taken from Union Carbide could have been doled out to victims families, start hospitals, and fund grants without Union Carbide's assistance. If so, one has to wonder why this has not happened and what could be done to bring it about. Killing more people is not the answer.

Why can't the Democrats fight when it counts?

2005-01-27T01:59:00.000-06:00

What are the Democrats waiting for? How does supporting a liar to retain her high office credentials help convince the country that the Democrats care about telling the truth?

A majority of Democrats voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice. If all the Democrats had voted not to confirm her, it would not have changed the outcome of the confirmation vote. However, by supporting her, the Democrats threw away a chance for a signal vote, a chance to tell the country that they care about telling the truth and that they deserve to send a member of their party to the White House in 2008.

I understand a few of the Democrats' votes:

Sen. Joseph "I never met a weapons contract I didn't like" Lieberman (D-CT) has shown unwavering support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Objecting to (now Secretary of State) Rice would have meant "flip-flopping" and possibly making friends with a few anti-Iraq-war people, or anyone who knew that the evidence used to support the war was bogus (this would be millions of people around the world and in the US, probably a lot in his home state of Connecticut).

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is treating this Senate gig as a stepping stone to becoming President. And the Democratic Party fans don't seem to care that he's in favor of economic sanctions against Iran (again, I remind you, dear reader, that the economic sanctions against Iraq during Clinton's administration killed an order of magnitude more children than civilians that have been killed in the Iraq war so far). Then, after the sanctions have killed Iranians, he would, however reluctantly, be willing to fire missiles against Iran. Sen. Obama will do whatever he can get away with, and so far that seems like a lot (right Oprah?). He was shamed by Sen. Dick Durbin, Illinois' other senator ("In the end, I could not excuse Dr. Rice's repeated misstatements.").

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) who was critical of the lies from media organizations when the FCC media deregulation issue went before the Senate committee, somehow found the strength to give a pass to Rice for her lies.

I love the unintentional punch line from the AP in the above linked article ("In addition to mending fences among Democrats on Capitol Hill [...]").

It's confirmation votes like these that make one wonder what the Democrats are really doing and whether they deserve to continue to be in office. An "opposition" party that doesn't oppose much of anything can't be that useful to the people. It reminds me of the hearings where Antonin Scalia was unanimously sent to the US Supreme Court. Back then, the Democrats knew much of what they know now: that they wanted to be seen as the pro-choice party and that Scalia was adamantly not pro-choice. Regardless of your thoughts on the issue of abortion, look at this from the perspective of how well the Democrats are supporting their own goals.

Criminal corporations—still a bumper crop.

2005-01-24T23:47:00.000-06:00

It seems that death, taxes, and criminal corporations are three things you can count on. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman released another of their annual top 10 criminal corporations lists this year covering just some of the 2004 lot.

It appears that Coca-Cola is killing, abducting, and torturing workers and their families in the Colombian bottling plant for threatening to organize. Unethical behavior is not new to Coca-Cola: they did business in Germany during World War II. As Coca-Cola sold the famous red-labeled sodas in the US with the then-familiar advertising featuring the patriotic image of a soldier enjoying a refreshing beverage, Coca-Cola made money overseas with Fanta. The syrup to make Coca-Cola was difficult to transport to Germany and the ingredients to make the syrup locally weren't available. Enter Max Keith, who headed up the successful German Coca-Cola bottling plant. Keith invented a way to make a new beverage from the byproducts of locally-made goods including whey from cheese. Fanta was born. Fanta provided Coca-Cola with money during a time when doing business with Germany would have been considered a huge PR disaster. But most American Coca-Cola drinkers had no idea that the corporation leveraging patriotism at home was also profiting from doing business with a country the US was fighting abroad.

It's not surprising to learn that multinational corporations don't mind repressive regimes because repressive regimes drive down the price of labor.

IBM's early computer business focused on selling Hollerith cards (punchcards) and custom-programming services for their card-sorting computers to the Nazis through IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag. In the hands of the Third Reich, these machines were used to efficiently process data concerning Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other "undesirables" captured by the Nazis. The goal was to learn which individuals were good for work or better off dead in the eyes of the Nazis. The bluntness of how the cards are arranged and the results gained from processing the cards really are that stark. You can read "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black for details about this; even if you believe that the Holocaust would have been possible without these early computers, there's no denying that the machinery and related services made the job of killing much easier. See "The Corporation" for a summary of Black's work on this subject and be sure to watch for a still of Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Adolf Hitler at the same table while the voiceover of an IBM representative explains how Watson allegedly never knew Hitler. IBM says that they didn't control Dehomag starting from the beginning of WWII (the Nazis took over Dehomag in 1939). However, Watson knew what was going on, he profited from the venture, and he was indifferent to the Holocaust victim's suffering he had helped to expedite.

Volkswagen employed about 7,000 Holocaust victims as slave laborers between 1941 and 1945. These workers made mines, V-1 missiles, and anti-tank rocket launchers. As the BBC reported in February 1999, "many of the workers died in the appalling conditions in hidden military complexes.". Only recently did Volkswagen admit this and pay some former Holocaust slave laborers an undisclosed amount. Volkswagen says they will participate in a Holocaust slave laborer fund, but they and the other companies participating in the fund want the lawsuits against them to be dropped in exchange for their participation. This behavior may not rise to the level of criminal offense today, but it does make one think about how many other businesses got to where they are by leveraging slave labor. I co-own a 2001 Volkswagen GTI 1.8L Turbo 2-door. In other areas of my life, I take pains to try and do the right thing. Apparently I did not succeed here: If I knew then what I know now, I would like to believe that I would not have agreed to purchase this car. There are plenty of other cars to choose from, many made by organizations without a history of building value on slave labor.

Update [2005-01-29]: Ironically, Volkswagen claims to be upset about the bomber ad where a man wearing a bomb drives a Volkswagen car up to an outdoor café and blows himself up from inside the car. The explosion shakes the car slightly but never goes outside the car, thus nobody else is hurt. The closing frames of the ad show the Volkswagen logo and that the car is "small but tough". Volkswagen, predictably, would like to distance themselves from the ad, but is it really so hard to believe that a company that would leverage slave labor would employ ads (even so-called "viral" marketing campaigns where ads are passed from person to person) depicting this?

At home and abroad, the US promotes anti-worker policy to maintain an impoverished working force:

Wal-Mart benefits from the underpaid laborers they employ in the US and the underpaid laborers abroad who make the products sold by the local floor employees. Wal-Mart is currently losing a number of the class action lawsuits against them which allege worker mistreatment and illegal wage discrimination. As these cases show, there's a reason why prices are always dropping at Wal-Mart—so are wages, and the taxpayer is left to pick up the slack. Locking employees into the store, making employees work after punching out, denying employees break time, and paying most employees so little they can't afford the Wal-Mart health care plan is just a sample of what Wal-Mart does to the local townspeople who have to work at Wal-Mart because their "low low" prices have driven local stores out of business. The costs of Wal-Mart stores are borne by the local taxpayer: "A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, tabulated some of those costs. The report estimated that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in a cost to federal taxpayers of $420,750 per year — about $2,103 per employee. These public costs include free and reduced lunches for just 50 qualifying Wal-Mart families, Section 8 housing assistance, federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, and federal contributions to health insurance programs for low-income children.". Keep this in mind the next time you think you see an inexpensive good on Wal-Mart's shelves.

Nike is famous for employing Indonesian and Mexican sweat shop labor to manufacture its famous sporting goods which are sold at exhorbitant profits. Nike pays by the fraction of a second, according to documents recovered from one of their trash bins by an anti-sweatshop labor organization interviewed in "The Corporation". The US "free trade" zones are made through treaties including NAFTA, CAFTA, and with the help of organizations including the WTO which were formed for promoting anti-worker trade. These treaties open poor countries up for multinational corporations to economically compel people there to work for sub-living wages.

None of this is an accident. It takes considerable planning and long-term oppressive thinking to put together the strategy for making sure the world's poor never earn enough money or control enough political power to threaten the rich.

Shifting baselines indeed.

2005-01-23T19:19:00.000-06:00

According to their press release, Media Matters for America says there is "No Room for Progressives on Cable News Inauguration Coverage". They list the few "Democrats or Progressive Commentators" who appeared on TV to cover Pres. Bush's second inauguration.

This is similar to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) survey which concluded that during two weeks of coverage (1/30/03-2/12/03) surrounding then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation at the U.N. (where he lied about the presence of illicit WMD in Iraq—a major justification for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq):

"More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources-- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.)-- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war. Even this was couched in vague terms: "Once we get in there how are we going to get out, what’s the loss for American troops are going to be, how long we're going to be stationed there, what’s the cost is going to be," said Kennedy on NBC Nightly News (2/5/03)."

It is with this framing of the issue that I read Media Matters' press release. I understood the issue they're raising and I also cringed at what they had revealed—They lumped together Democrats and progressives as opponents to Republicans and conservatives on the inaugural coverage. This is odd to me because one of the most major issues in the election was the war against Iraq and there is significant agreement amongst the majority of Democrats, progressives, and Republicans that goes uncovered:

Democrats supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq and, overwhelmingly, still do.

Democrats supported giving Pres. Bush the unexpiring unilateral power to make war on foreign countries, skipping Congressional oversight. I see no evidence that the Democrats have changed their view on this. To the contrary, recently Sen. Kerry (D-MA) said he thought this authority was appropriate for the US President to have. Of course, he said that back when some believed he had a chance to win the presidency. He knows what a hassle it can be to convince Congress to go along with something and he'd like to skip that hassle himself.

Many people who consider themselves progressive on the issues voted in gerrymandered states, including Illinois and New York. In these states, a majority of states, progressives had an opportunity to vote for an anti-war candidate and a majority of them instead chose to support Sen. Kerry who clearly backed the war.

In three years, you'll see these same progressives echoing the Democratic Party line on the war ("Can't cut and run", "...delivering democracy to Iraqis...", "People of good conscience can disagree on the war...", etc.) even though there is no way we can ethically justify this invasion or occupation (certainly not on the basis the US Government sold the war to us).

So, Democrats and progressives aren't looking too starkly dissimilar from the Republican and conservative commentators which Media Matters uses as points of dichotomy. I'm sure one can find conservatives and progressives who have consistently disagreed with the war and the war-making power the president now has, but such people are in the minority on TV.

I'm reminded of a public service announcement I saw on local TV some time ago (called the "Ocean symphony PSA"); you might have seen it, it's a national PSA. It has a number of celebrities holding symphonic instruments, playing them poorly, while Jack Black gestures as an over excited conductor might. The narrator tells us that if we let our standards slip, the noise these non-musicians produce will become the norm and we'll come to believe this is a proper performance. So it goes with the sea—as the sea becomes more polluted, if we don't remember what the sea used to look like, we'll never notice how bad things have become. We run the risk of accepting a certain amount of industrial pollution as the norm. This organization calls this phenomenon "Shifting Baselines".

When we leave out people with serious objections to the war, we shift the entire discussion to those who agree at some level that the war was justified. They disagree on the particulars (how many bombs to drop, how many killed civilians constitute an unacceptable number, etc.) and fill the airwaves bickering over the trivia on how best to kill Iraqis. Even the name "anti-war" is not quite right, as many people who are against this war thought other wars were acceptable (like the war against Afghanistan which started before the invasion of Iraq).

Obama disappoints...again?

2005-01-19T01:37:00.000-06:00

Today, newly-elected Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) voted to endorse the nomination of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State. The darling of the Democratic Party cast his vote after it was clear the 'yeas' (pronounced "yays") would have it (and after a couple of 'yea by proxy' votes). The final vote from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee was 16-2, Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Boxer (D-CA) against.

Speaking of Sen. Kerry, where was Kerry's moxy on the campaign trail where it would have mattered?

Massachusetts considers "open formats", but are they asking the right questions?

2005-01-18T22:34:00.000-06:00

Groklaw.net says that "Eric Kriss, Secretary for the Executive Office of the Administration of Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has kindly given us permission to share with you audio of his recent speech on Open Formats [...]". I'm glad to see a warm reception for OpenOffice.org's work on OASIS (their upcoming portable and freely implementable file format) and their software. I appreciate how hard it is to speak extemporaneously and be as precise as Kriss said he wanted to be. I host a radio show on my local community radio station, WEFT 90.1 FM, called Digital Citizen where I talk about these issues live on the air, taking phone callers as well, every other Wednesday night from 8-10p. (I'm working on putting together a website where you can download past episodes of the show.)

What Kriss wants to accomplish is difficult. I think the lack of conditions on the aforementioned audio file distribution permission (the file was originally distributed as an MP3) show just how tricky it is to accomplish what he and his team set out to do.

Consider Kriss' definition of an "open format": (emphasis mine)

"Open Formats, as we're thinking about them, and we're trying to be precise with the language, because people use different English words for different technical terms, in our definition, "Open Formats" are specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."

The free software community can see the irony of distributing an MP3 copy of the recording ostensibly meant to be attractive to the free software community, but I was curious if MP3 qualifies as an "open format" according to this definition?

MP3 is covered by patents. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, through Thomson, distributes licenses under uniform per-unit terms or as a one-time flat fee. Per-unit terms are incompatible with free software because it is impossible to know exactly how many copies of the ostensibly free software MP3 program are distributed (free software allows you to share and modify the software, hence the use of the word "free" not as a reference to price but to freedom). To my knowledge, nobody has paid the alternative $50,000 one-time license fee because nobody developing what would be a free software MP3 program can afford it. Therefore, in countries that have software patents (such as the US), there is no free software MP3 encoder or decoder.

This situation drove the creation of Ogg Vorbis which, functionally, is a complete replacement for MP3, albeit an incompatible replacement—Ogg Vorbis files and MP3 files are not the same format and the methods to make the files are different. Vorbis is also considered a superior codec for its intended use. As far as I know, neither the Ogg encapsulation format nor the Vorbis lossy audio compression codec are covered by patents. The specification for Ogg Vorbis is in the public domain and free software reference encoders and decoders are available. These are other reasons why Ogg Vorbis is a superior choice to MP3.

Reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing (also known as "RAND" licensing) can discriminate against free software implementations of the patented idea. The FSF reminds us, "that makes [RAND] unreasonable". MP3 licenses are available on so-called RAND terms, terms which are probably better described by the replacement term the FSF suggests: UFO for "uniform fee only". MP3 licensing is uniform for a particular use according to the terms described on their licensing page.

So, has anyone asked Kriss or his organization if they considered the problem of RAND licensing?

IBM's non-agression patent pledge: what are you gaining? What are you giving up?

2005-01-18T22:00:00.000-06:00

IBM recently made a pledge to what they call "open source software" developers. If you're new to this concept (or if you think you understand what the term "open source" means), I strongly encourage you to read about the differences between the open source and free software movements. Fellow blogger featherston has commented on the IBM patent pledge as well.

What's the catch?

Read the final paragraph of the patent pledge and consider how many rights you have to agree to not prosecute over before you take IBM up on their promise.

Warning: knowingly infringing upon a patent carries a higher penalty than unknowingly infringing upon a patent. You might not want to read the original document (which lists the 500 patents covered in IBM's pledge) but instead read only the revocation clause on the last page of the pledge. I've quoted the last paragraph of the pledge below for just this reason. All spelling and punctuation is in context. Emphasis is mine.

"IBM's Legally Binding Commitment Not To Assert the 500 Named Patents Against OSS The pledge will benefit any Open Source Software. Open Source Software is any computer software program whose source code is published and available for inspection and use by anyone, and is made available under a license agreement that permits recipients to copy, modify and distribute the program's source code without payment of fees or royalties. All licenses certified by opensource.org and listed on their website as of 01/11/2005 are Open Source Software licenses for the purpose of this pledge.. Subject to the exception provided below, and with the intent that developers, users and distributors of Open Source Software rely on our promise, IBM hereby commits not to assert any of the 500 U.S. patents listed above, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software. In order to foster innovation and avoid the possibility that a party will take advantage of this pledge and then assert patents or other intellectual property rights of its own against Open Source Software, thereby limiting the freedom of IBM or any other Open Source Software developer to create innovative software programs, or the freedom of others to distribute and use Open Source Software, the commitment not to assert any of these 500 U.S. patents and all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries is irrevocable except that IBM reserves the right to terminate this patent pledge and commitment only with regard to any party who files a lawsuit asserting patents or other intellectual property rights against Open Source Software"

Typically, you want to keep the power to assert your rights under law. This is not something you should trade away without serious consideration. Asserting your "intellectual property" rights is no different.

To remain in IBM's good graces, you would have to give up asserting your rights against another "open source software" developer. Perhaps some other "open source software" developer is distributing copies of your blog in a way that you haven't licensed them to do. Maybe someone is building on a program, photo, or essay you have written but they're doing so without your permission.

It's quite easy to gain a copyright (commonly viewed as one of the so-called "intellectual property" rights) on something. All you have to do in most countries is write something in a fixed form (saving your document on your computer's hard drive, writing a letter on paper, writing your digital photo to a storage medium, etc.). Since the ratification of the Berne Treaty, copyright assignment is automatic, even if you haven't placed a copyright notice on the work. It's quite easy for others to infringe upon your copyright. By default, copyright says "no": no copying, no distribution, no preparation of a derivative work, no public performance. Your license is what grants others these things (and perhaps you are granting permission conditionally).

Are you willing to let "open source software" developers infringe in exchange for not opening yourself up to an IBM patent infringement lawsuit concerning any of the 500 patents in IBM's non-aggression pledge?

What about the threat from IBM's many other patents? IBM has tens of thousands of patents (I'd estimate over 90,000 patents)—they hold more patents than any other patent holder. In 2004 IBM gained over 3,200 patents. IBM says they have no plans to change their patent acquisition policy. 500 of IBM's patents are listed in IBM's non-aggression pledge. Are you ready to give up enforcing all of your "intellectual property" rights against "open source software" developers in exchange for access to less than 1% of IBM's patents? Are you aware that you could lose a lawsuit over any of the other 89,500 or so patents?

What do patents have to do with me? I just run the programs.

You say you only run computer programs, you don't develop them? That doesn't matter. In the US, patents are 20-year government-granted monopolies. All patents cover ideas. Software patents cover ideas used in the production of computer software. It doesn't matter that you only play MP3s, you probably owe Fraunhofer (or Thomson, Fraunhofer's patent licensing partner) a fee. Perhaps you paid the fee when you bought the software that plays the MP3s, perhaps the fee was paid for you, perhaps nobody paid the fee. If Fraunhofer/Thomson says you haven't paid, it's your job to show otherwise. Not too long ago, Paul Heckel held patents which he claimed were implemented in Apple's Hypercard. Apple didn't negotiate a license for Heckel's patents until Heckel threatened Apple's users. Apple knew that Heckel could get money from the users (or at the least put them through a legal wringer) and Apple didn't want to be known as the company that introduces its users to losing patent lawsuits, so Apple paid Heckel off.

Isn't IBM's pledge worth anything?

I don't want to paint IBM's promise as worthless, it is 500 more patents than you probably had access to before, but how valuable is it to the free software community? How much does it really change what free software users have to deal with? It's not a patent license you negotiated for. It's a revokable pledge to not sue under conditions where you give up your ability to enforce your rights—effectively the same as taking away those rights—for a certain audience for the duration of the patents' lifetime.

Please don't go into this blind; don't forget to consider what you're giving up.

Care about your health care?

2005-01-18T19:17:00.000-06:00

Read the Socialist Worker's interesting article on health care in the US—U.S. health care in Critical condition.

Some money quotes:

"Real health care reform—not more corporate welfare for the insurance and drug industries—is possible. The evidence lies in the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, a key legacy of the civil rights movement--or Canada's dismantling of the private insurance industry in the early 1970s to establish a universal, government-administered program."

and later: (links are added)

"Winning this kind of reform won't happen by writing to our representatives in Congress, as [Dr. Marcia] Angell recommends at the end of The Truth About the Drug Companies. Republicans and Democrats alike are the architects and beneficiaries of the current system--from Republican Bill Frist, who became a millionaire thanks to his father's for-profit hospital chain; to Democrats Birch Bayh and Henry Waxman, who co-authored the major legislation creating huge public subsidies and near-monopoly rights for the big pharmaceutical companies.

Democrats as much as Republicans are beholden to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries that reward them with generous campaign contributions--and that money has been on the rise. In the 2004 election, for example, the health care industry gave nearly four times more in donations to candidates than it did in 1990. And 44 percent of total contributions went to candidates of the Democratic Party.

No wonder, then, that when he geared up to "reform" health care, Bill Clinton didn't look to the proposals of, say, Physicians for a National Health Program. Instead, he turned to the insurance industry-funded Jackson Hole Group, with its plan for rationing care and boosting profits. "Clinton didn't try and fail," say Harvard Medical School's Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein. "He refused to try."

The PNHP endorses H.R. 676.

Senator Kennedy might get it, but can you take him at his word?

2005-01-13T15:20:00.000-06:00

In a speech to the National Press Club, Sen. Kennedy said

"We cannot become Republican clones. If we do, we will lose again, and deserve to lose."

Coverage from Democracy Now! (listen to Amy Goodman read the headline), and CNN.

At first, this seems hopeful, as though at least one Democrat gets what progressives have been asking for for a long time. I remain reluctant to believe this message will stick around for another 3 years because I'm not sure he really means it now.

But it is interesting to see how the Democrats adopt Nader's reasoning without giving Nader credit; Democrats losing because they become just like Republicans—how many Leftists were quick to chide Nader for citing this just a few months ago, essentially hiding behind the lame over-literal argument that the Democrats are not exactly like Republicans? Democrats don't need to be duplicates to be offensively similar.

Around election time, the Democrats pay more attention to campaign funders and they march to the corporate right. And for some reason I don't completely understand, corporations in the US aren't clamoring to outsource the cost of health care to the American taxpayer in the form of a universal single-payer national health care program.

Kennedy went on (in the words of the DN! headline):

"He called on Medicare to be gradually expanded to cover all citizens [...]"

Maybe the weasel word is "gradually", but Kennedy had a chance to take a step in the right direction and I don't see any evidence that he did.

During President George W. Bush's first term, Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced H.R. 676—a single-payer universal health care plan that expands Medicare to cover all Americans. It was called "United States National Health Insurance Act" (or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act). USNHI covered all medically necessary health care and served as Rep. Kucinich's health care plan for his presidential campaign (although for some reason he was reluctant to list the details of the bill number on his speaking tours and in debates). Kennedy did not support the bill in any speech or remark I can find.

The Democratic Party ValuSlide™: Buying the conclusion of a failed process

2005-01-11T14:20:00.000-06:00

Dave Silver sets things straight on the handful of Democrats who questioned the Ohio election process:

"Without exception all of those representatives that made an electoral challenge, including John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Stephanie Tubbs Jones and yes Senator Boxer were quick to remind folks that they are not contesting the election outcome, that they accept the validity of the "recount" in Ohio but are unhappy about the glitches that took place on election day; Provisional ballots, long waiting lines, flawed machines and no paper trail. Legitimate objections for a not too fair election where every vote counts.
The call was for "election reform" and to get rid of the bad procedure, but never questioning the validity of the 2004 results."

And Sen. Barack Obama, supported by people who largely don't know what he does in office, will continue to coast into a job he'll have to work to get to rid of. Sen. Obama didn't even join this meager and illogical questioning of the Ohio election process.

Clearly the Democrats are not serving the values the progressive Left claim to stand for. My question is why so few progressives question the Democrats. You know just as well as I do that in 3 years the drums of conformancy and forgetfulness will be sounded and we will be encouraged to push aside what happened just in that time. When will voting for the least-worst bite the voters enough so that they'll start supporting candidates who support their values?

2005-01-18 Update: Lance Selfa of the Socialist Worker has an interesting article in Counterpunch on the Democratic Party's performance—largely standing with the Republicans on the Ohio vote or choosing not to be there to vote at all.

Will the Democrats vote to appoint Alberto Gonzales?

2005-01-10T13:45:00.000-06:00

Torture and voting are two serious issues the Democrats have fallen down on. Dick Meyer lists other serious issues the Democrats have "rolled over" on as well as summarizing why Gonzales is raising such interest (also, listen to the Friday, January 7, 2005 Democracy Now! for more including clips of Gonzales' Senate confirmation hearing, and read Gonzales' Wikipedia entry). Gonzales has said that the Geneva accords are "quaint" and he gave evasive virtual non-answers to the Senate last week when responding to serious allegations of supporting torture.

The Democrats are in the minority, but they have an opportunity to send a signal vote here.

Sen. Obama (D-IL) fails his first test.

2005-01-08T10:06:00.000-06:00

Senator Barack Obama, coronated after largely having no competition who stuck around long enough to give him any problems, had his first major failure in the Senate not even a week into his new job.

If you recall, the only senator to challenge the 2004 Ohio presidential election results was Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). This sends a clear message that the vast majority of the Democratic Party doesn't care about voting rights, even if they have the perfect opportunity to send a signal vote—they may not win, but they had the chance to tell the public that they care deeply about the alleged transgressions and want to see an investigation.

Obama has gotten a lot of favorable press from leftists and progressives because of his speech given at the Democratic Party convention to nominate Sen. John Kerry. Perhaps these same people would be willing to spend some time examining his unfolding record.

Moore advises selling the sizzle not the steak.

2005-01-07T02:56:00.000-06:00

Katrina vanden Heuvel talks with Michael Moore and we learn that Moore thinks it's okay to have a smooth spokesperson. Moore never gets around to examining what the would-be Democratic Party front is saying—what policies are being sold here—it's all about image. So, to try to make his friends look better, Moore holds the bar low (an insulting prospect if one thinks about it from the perspective of the voter—how intelligent do these people think voters are if they mainly talk about who should make the pitch?):

"Or Obama? What got me thinking about Obama was at one of my holiday gatherings, a relative who's never said the words civil rights, if you know what I mean, suddenly said 'I liked the story Obama told.'"

Maybe if Obama told the part of the story where he votes to bomb Iran, Moore's cousin wouldn't have been so complimentary because bomb runs aren't cheap and people like it when their families get to live.

"What was Kerry's story? (Several people shout from various tables--"I'm better than a Bush, I'm not an asshole.') Yea, that was about it. So we got 57 million votes on a tagline--and not a very good one. Amazing we did as well as we did. We shouldn't feel defeated. Bush doesn't have a mandate. Seventy million people didn't even vote and they're the poor and the working class and we should spend the next four years giving them reason to vote next time. [...]"

Kerry's story was just like Bush's where it counted: two Bonesmen who very much like the authority to supersede or not bother consulting with Congress in order to start war, and neither of them have any real connection to poverty or a compelling vision of health care for the US because they're both so busy taking corporate campaign cash. It's not that hard to see why so many registered voters chose to divorce themselves from the process instead of sending Bush or Kerry the message that their policies were worth a damn.

This election was Kerry's to lose and he did a fine job of it. After an early concession, he still couldn't find the time to do the right thing and challenge the election results in a key state. Reminds one of how Lieberman treated the Congressional Black Caucus letter (which questioned the Florida vote) after the 2000 election.

"Think back to Roosevelt. He had the Capras, Sturges, Steinbecks and they moved millions, the nation, with their art. That brought popular support to a radical agenda. Don't need to make polemical documentaries."

The point of the documentary was to get Bush out of power and that didn't happen in large part because the man Moore backed was too weak to stand up for his own ostensible run for office (yet another reason why I remain convinced that the Democrats are there to "good cop" the country into corporate hands).

"There's nothing wrong with running someone who is our Arnold. It doesn't need to be a professional actor. Let's start looking for our Arnold, and stop listening to pundits who say Americans hate Hollywood."

No, what the Democrats need is a set of policies that will resonate with the public and convince them that you're not a bunch of go-along-to-get-along doormats. Here's a start:

Drop the corporate campaign funding. Since you're so convinced your messages resonate with the people (how many times has Moore said what he stands for are majoritarian values?) then get your money from the people and show up the Republicans.

Drop the TV debate lock-out strategy. This is a huge issue because it's impossible to take Democrats seriously when we know the "debates" are really staged PR events. Take competition seriously and squarely by allowing competitive parties and independent campaigns to get on the debates (drop the ridiculously high entry level criteria, purposefully set high so there is plausible deniability). But the Democrats are too much in cahoots with the Republicans to let any other party or independant campaign put real issues on the table and make Democrats talk about things without scripts or previewed questions read by audience members from cue cards.

Stand for nothing less than universal single-payer health care. Your country deserves no less. Do you realize that European countries gave themselves universal health care coming out of a world war? But no, the country that can apparently afford to waste billions in a war based on lies (which Moore implicitly buys into by supporting Kerry and voting for Kerry even though New York is a "safe" state), can't deliver that to ourselves.

Stop treating your most progressive candidates like crap. Dennis Kucinich was dismissed out of hand by Michael Moore in his talks (broadcast by Democracy Now!, I'll see if I can dig up links from archive.org). In fact, in one of the talks Moore admitted he had no problem with Kucinich. Then he went on to endorse an apparently less-than-competant General and Kerry. Hardly anyone stood up for Kucinich when Kucinich got a third of the time Howard Dean got at the CNN so-called "debate" between 9 (nine) Democrats (so don't tell me there would be too many candidates to have a real debate involving more than Democrats and Republicans). Sure, Kucinich ultimately realized where his bread is buttered and folded stumping for Kerry and swallowing a weak official Democratic Party message on the war. But for a while there during the primary, he was speaking truth to power with a sensible health care plan, and the Democratic Party wasn't too keen on talking with him.

You've already got the lock-out TV strategy going (where you keep all the other competition out), people already know the name "Democrat" and some will vote straight-ticket Democrat regardless of your record. Ah, perhaps that is why this plan will never take hold, no matter how many times you lose.

Maybe I should just feel lucky that people like Ralph Nader still run campaigns, even losing campaigns, against the national Democratic Party by raising all the issues the Democrats won't. He's showing the Democrats up and showing the US what a real progressive acts like. He was right, you know, no Democrat would have considered changing anything if they had won. Losers revisit strategy and message, winners figure they can't afford to change.

During the Q&A session after Moore's speech, he had these pearls of wisdom to offer:

"Q: Who's our Arnold?
MM: Well, ask Caroline Kennedy. And who wouldn't vote for Tom Hanks? We need someone who's beloved and trusted by American people. May seem facetious but it's true."

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Hanks would either not run for office at all (a wise choice since he has no material political background of any kind elective or not, something for which he will be appropriately skewered if he runs for US President; at least Nader had done more things for this country than any US President in living memory), or that he would run as a Republican because he's richer than Croesus so he's more amenable to a tax plan that lets him keep most of the money he has (oh, wait, that wouldn't really differentiate the parties enough, would it?).

Forgive me. He could run as a Democrat. And lose.

Moore last endorsed General Wesley Clark who entered the Democratic Party primary race late, failed to dazzle at debates, and never really gained much steam with the public ultimately losing to pro-war/pro-NAFTA/pro-war resolution/anti-gay marriage Kerry. Perhaps Moore is not the person to ask for good advice on who the Democrats should run. Or do we need to remind ourselves of when Moore said Oprah should run for President?

I still think Democrats won't vote for a woman, regardless of how well-qualified she may be (and I'm not saying Caroline Kennedy or the much-buzzed favorite Hillary Clinton would be well-qualified, I'd have to learn more about their records before I can offer that opinion).

"Q: What about Hillary? John Edwards?
MM: Well, she's a star. Edwards is not a star. And nothing wrong with discussing Obama. Sure, they're people who say 'well, he can't win.' I'm not so sure. Americans are not so closeminded. Give Americans some credit for rising above their own personal prejudice and bigotry. Democrats become weak-kneed so easily. Be proud of who you are---have the courage of your convictions. Why are we still listening to 200 members of the DLC. They're Republicans posing as Democrats."

Edwards is not a "star" (whatever that means) because he lost. Are the Democrats so easily disenchanted while they try in vain to rerun the 2000 election? Shall we look forward to another stiff-as-a-board candidate for US President from the Democrats (and, yes, I believe lazy-minded perceptions like that carry weight with an audience that largely doesn't know anyone's record and has little intellectual curiosity to learn voting records)?

There is something wrong with discussing Obama for US President, even from the know-nothing perspective offered by Moore: Obama has done so little of national import he's an unknown quantity to most Democrats. Now that the second Bush II administration is a lock, we'll get to see how Obama handles himself when war with Iran comes around, something he told the Chicago Tribune he could see himself voting for.

"Q: What's the one-liner for Dems?
MM: Hmmm. Maybe, 'We're Going to Kick some Ass.'"

Warmongering is not attractive in a candidate or in someone stumping for a party. How sad to see that Moore can't even fall much in line with his former criticisms of the Democrats (which we only get a faint whiff of in this talk and Q&A).

"Q: Tomorrow, the vote will be certified. You had that extraordinary scene in Fahrenheit from 2001 showing members of the House being gaveled down, out of order, with not a single Senator rising in support. What do you expect tomorrow?
MM: I'm hoping that one Senator will join with John Conyers--just to investigate the vote so we stop this from ever happening again and send a strong message to some of these hack Secretaries of State."

One Senator is too low to convince any thinking person that the Democrats care about voting rights. One Senator is going to send the same message as was sent in 2000—don't bother challenging anything, we're just here to follow in the direction the Republicans want to lead because we're really after the same audience they are: corporations.

When do progressives choose to stand up for their values?

2005-01-05T19:56:00.000-06:00

A passage I read about how the "Democrats [are] Split Again Over [the] Party's Agenda" brought to mind a question. First, the passage:

"During the 1990s, many liberals felt that Clinton abandoned class-conscious themes by supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and a balanced federal budget. Conversely, in 2000, centrists charged that Al Gore fissured Clinton's winning coalition by reverting to a populist message that they believe drove away affluent social moderates."

Exactly what "populist message" did Gore pitch during his campaign for president? Even Michael Moore, who now spends so much time trying to convince his fans to vote Democrat, listed many ways in which Gore and Bush were arguing the same points from the same perspective. Back then, Moore thought the Democratic Party could not be fixed from the inside and Moore was more critical of the Democratic Party. But the two candidates were shockingly similar and both candidate's views were clearly not populist.

Later, on another issue allegedly of interest to Democrats—voting rights—I read something that jogs the memory:

"In a measure of the dispute's political delicacy, proponents are considered unlikely to find a senator who will co-sign the objection, which is required to force Congress to act on the challenge."

The reminder is confirmed in the last line of the AP piece:

"In January 2001, some House Democrats challenged Florida's electoral votes but no senators joined in the effort, dooming it."

If you saw Fahrenheit 9/11 (or if you can watch it for about 10 minutes) you saw the most powerful scene in the whole movie—the scene where Congressional Black Caucus members are gavelled off the podium by "populist" Al Gore (then President of the Senate as well as Vice President of the United States) because no senator would sign the CBC's letter challenging the Florida election results from 2000.

The Democrats really are a decadent party. But if the Republicans are smart, they'll realize that they had better keep the Democrats around because the Democrats understand the value of colluding with the Republicans to keep competitors away, and because the Republicans should understand the value of a "competitor" which they can control (Democrats eagerly adopt the Republican issues and framing of those issues). So, when do progressives realize that the Democrats aren't progressive and that progressive voters need to stand up for their values?

[Update: As of 2:24p Central time on January 6, 2004, during the Gonzalez confirmation hearings, C-SPAN reported that the US Senate had rejected the 2004 election challenge. While Gonzalez was stumbling to find the words to Dick Durbin's question on whether the US military can use torture under any circumstances, the election deal had been sealed. The Senate vote was 74-1 against—only Sen. Boxer (D-CA) voted to support the challenge. So, please, come on and tell me why I can trust the Democrats to support my voting rights when they won't support a challenge that would have ended no differently if they had all voted to support the challenge. It's easy to be a saint in paradise, but Democratic Party responsibility has been laid down by the corporate funders who want Bush in office.]

Obama is "man of the year" for one newspaper.

2005-01-01T10:53:00.000-06:00

The Madison Capital Times has named Barack Obama man of the year for 2004 despite that Obama has said he could favor bombing Iran (and the Chicago Tribune reports similarly). I think it would have been wiser to wait to see what Obama does while in the US Senate, at the least; placing a higher value on championing bombing people into democracy should be chastised too.

The Madison Capital Times has an interesting quote on why he recently won in Illinois:

"Obama beat more prominent Democrats for his party's Senate nomination because he was more courageous politically - opposing the war in Iraq, criticizing the Patriot Act and promising to battle corporate special interests."

I disagree. I think Obama won because Illinois' most densely populated counties are gerrymandered to support the Democratic party, and because Obama had no real opponent. Initially Obama faced an opponent whose divorce secrets were leaked--taking Jeri Ryan to sex clubs around the world--then Obama had no opponent for a while. Later, Obama faced Alan Keyes who had little time to prepare a campaign and (more importantly) had poor positions and appropriately wasn't taken too seriously.

It's not hard to win when one faces such disorganized opposition. This is not worthy of celebration because it is a coronation.

PBS changes look bad, and some good news

2004-12-27T23:43:00.000-06:00

Bad news first:

"NOW" with Bill Moyers is no longer. NOW will be hosted by NPR's David Brancaccio. NOW had been sliding ever since Brancaccio came on board (I first noticed the goofy animations with sound effects and the occasional "What NOW?" segment after he came on; this segment always struck me as odd because I think it's part of doing a good piece to point out to someone what they can do to avoid the bad things being described in the piece, don't wait until a few segments later). My guess is that you can expect fewer in-depth reports on a range of subjects NPR is more comfortable bringing us (or not bringing us): virtually nothing on media consolidation (a staple of the former NOW show under Moyers) because that might raise the spectre of low-power FM which NPR worked to defeat when they felt it posed competition for their listener base; the rising cost of health care will be covered but without any mention about practical solutions including universal single-payer health care (if this manages to somehow leak out, I'm sure it won't receive any serious analysis); interviews with right-wing or "centrist" "newsmakers" who want to inform us how social security should co-exist with investment plans (because co-existance makes eventual takeover easier to swallow).

NOW will shrink to 30 minutes. This means less time for in-depth coverage of...anything, really. But this also means 30 minutes for PBS to fill with something else, something pro-corporate like another half hour of Tucker Carlson or that new talk show with Paul Gigot, who gets enough coverage from his articles in the Wall Street Journal and his time on PBS' NewsHour (referred to more accurately as the LiarHour by Paul Mueth, co-host of News from Neptune). In case you haven't seen Gigot's PBS show, it's a lot like "Washington Week in Review" with Gwen Ifill in that they both have on some journalist friends from the corporate (and during times of war, possibly embedded) press. They all cover what the White House tells them to and in the way the White House tells them to so they can continue to be called "journalists".

If NOW were a community media production, I'd cut them a lot of slack. I know how community media runs on no money for the show (or whatever the hosts can afford to put in), and no staff--two big factors that determine how much of a show there will be. I host a community radio show called Digital Citizen every other week. I rarely have substitute hosts and I spend considerable time researching things to talk about on the show, recording phone interviews, editing other pieces, and I have no staff to speak of.

But PBS is nobody's community TV station, it's a bona-fide corporate-funded outlet for news and entertainment. Take a look at some of the heavy hitters funding the LiarHour alone: ADM (corporate criminal: pricefixing), SBC (telecommunications corporation), CIT (commercial finance corporation), and Grant Thornton (an accountancy firm).

Time will tell, of course, and I will happily watch NOW beyond my assessment period if I'm wrong. But NPR is untrustworthy and fails to cover items of genuine interest to my Digital Citizen audience which I could easily defend as worth anyone's time.

Neither they nor NOW covered the Microsoft anti-trust case and its settlement (the largest anti-trust case in US history with a settlement widely viewed as insubstantial). There was no debate or discussion about what Microsoft did wrong from the perspective of one of their biggest competitors: The free software movement. The free software movement, now 20 years old, has provided the only real competition to proprietary software (including virtually all of Microsoft's software). Occasionally we get to hear from the open source movement (offering their watered-down version of the debate which never includes software freedom but instead banks on elements monopolists can compete with handily like price, features, and technical correctness).

If your PBS outlet is like mine, you have the opportunity to see a lot of business shows (Business week, Wall Street Week with Fortune, Nightly Business Report, and various business segments on other PBS shows).

But there's no coverage of this issue or technological-ethical issues to speak of on PBS, NPR, or NOW. Even during the media reform concern, there was no room for discussing free software from the perspective of not choosing between masters (Apple or Microsoft? Word or WordPerfect? Netscape or Internet Explorer? Eudora or Outlook? Which media mega-corp should run your TV and radio? Should we think beyond dividing up media the way we do--TV and radio are one in the digital age, right?). The Eldred v Ashcroft case got NOW's attention, and Eben Moglen was briefly in one segment of that piece. But that was the closest NOW ever came to discussing the issues of intellectual freedom.

I promised you some good news, so I had better get to it. Check out these quotes:

"[I]f Kerry were half as radical a departure from the Bush agenda as the Republicans claimed, the case for voting for him would be a lot stronger.

But Kerry isn’t any of the things that the Republicans denounced him for being. He hasn’t rejected the Bush Doctrine of waging "pre-emptive" wars--in fact, he boasts that he will use more U.S. soldiers to win the "war on terror." He isn’t about to "cut and run" from the U.S. occupation of Iraq--actually, he promises to carry out the occupation for oil and empire more effectively. He’s not for raising taxes to pay for "big government" spending programs--he’s for more tax relief for U.S. corporations (sure, in the disguise of a program to reward businesses that keep jobs in the U.S., but we’ve heard that one before, and should know by now that the trickle-down effect didn’t work, whether it was promoted by Ronald Reagan or the NAFTA-loving Clinton administration)."

This comes from the Socialist Worker on why voting for the lesser evil is harmful to long-term progress. Well worth reading, and please note the publication date as I am late to the table on their article, not they. Also, read Counterpunch. All cards on the table: I've contributed an article to Counterpunch.

The Democratic Party ValuSlide™: Pro-choice? Let's not be so hasty!

2004-12-24T01:46:00.000-06:00

Nothing I'm about to say hinges on your personal views on abortion or mine. This issue is about watching what the Democrats are up to.

Re-evaluating the position in both houses of Congress and the loss of another Presidential run has them mulling over which of their values to dump.

No matter whether you call it "Eye[ing a] Softer Image" or "Rethinking" abortion, the outcome is the same: Democrats, widely considered (among those who only think of two American political parties) as the pro-choice party, are now considering dumping their pro-choice stance in order to open the door for their former abortion opponents.

Go all the way, Democrats: run some high office candidates who are not pro-choice. This should help your would-be supporters get to know themselves better by making them choose which they value more: pro-Democrat or pro-choice.

If this comes to pass, ask your pro-choice friends who vote Democrat what they'll do. Then ask them again in 3 years. Then compare their answers. When they change (and they almost certainly will change their tune because it's easy to stand up for values you don't have to defend, it's another thing to decide which values to defend when some are in conflict), ask them why they changed.

My bet is that the person you ask will pick "voting pro-choice" now, and "voting for the Democrat to oust the Republican" later on.

Issues like abortion get a lot of coverage in elections. The Democrats courting non-pro-choice voters is one of those things that effectively reframes a national election in a way a bunch of outsiders (third-party/independent supporters, and the majority of non-voters) are denied the power to do.

In three years, even if both the Republican and Democrat are not pro-choice, a third-party or independent will run, support the pro-choice line, and still be precluded from participating in the national debates.

The only way this could get more interesting is if the Republican were pro-choice and the Democrat not.

But who will remember in two and a half years?

2004-12-23T16:39:00.000-06:00

You don't hear this often from people you can point to as reputable sources of information—journalist Harvey Wasserman discussing the ongoing controversy surrounding the presidential vote in Ohio said: (emphasis added)

"Based on the exit polls, we have had statisticians look at the validity of the exit polls in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio. We have had one statistician tell us that the odds on the exit polls being wrong in the three states, which they were, -- either the exit polls are wrong or the ballot count was wrong -- the odds against it are 150 million to one. There's no way that George W. Bush won this election."

That's right—someone from outside the apparently ignorable "blogosphere" is saying this on Democracy Now!.

But is it significant? I'd say so, but not for the reason you might think.

If you've read this blog for long, you know that I find this interesting not so much for determining who is US President (that was settled by the two parties allowed to be heard on the matter, not by voters, and you're not going to get vastly different policy from one of these candidates over the other). I find this interesting as a taste of what is not to come from those who call themselves "progressives".

In two and a half years, do you think anyone will remember this? Do you think progressives will recall this and arrive at the reasonable conclusion that the Democrats are untrustworthy, that they can lose elections all on their own and be counted on to not do the work to defend voting rights?

Or will we get a list of lame reasons why the Democrats of 2008 (remember, even progressives don't care about midterm elections where you have more voting power) are significantly different and this time for sure they'll defend everyone's voting rights by living up to what John Edwards told the country a few hours before he conceded the election to Bush:

"John Kerry and I made a promise to the American people that in this election every vote would count and every vote will count."

"If You Vote for War, You Go to War"?

2004-12-22T23:44:00.000-06:00

Looking at Jacqueline Marcus' summary of Eminem's lyrics I have to wonder who wrote the headline and whether that applies to all those who voted for war, or just legislators. After all, if the US sends in all the Bush and Kerry voters maybe we'll be able to stay there ten more years or fulfill the US' dream of permanent Iraqi bases.

Democrats "debate" on Democracy Now! or is it just discussion?

2004-12-19T13:18:00.000-06:00

On the Friday, December 17, 2004 Democracy Now! (transcript) there is a discussion between two Democratic Party supporters: Prof. Manning Marable, Professor of History and Political Science and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and founding Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and Donna Brazile, former head of the Al Gore campaign in 2000.

Some notes:

Amy Goodman brings up corporate campaign financing at the top of the segment, but it is not discussed again. The single most important reason why the Democrats are circling the drain went virtually undiscussed. MoveOn.org, the Democratic Party front group, said that "we bought it, we own it [the DLC]" so the issue for them revolves around money, not a better take on the issues.

This is a discussion, not a debate as it was pitched on the show, because the participants are not at odds over most of the issues being discussed. Goodman is also not provoking the discussion to explore where the two don't agree.

Brazile brought up Barack Obama in Illinois as though he's a shining star of the Democratic Party receiving wild support from Illinois voters. For a significant amount of time, Obama had no competition in his race. When he ran against Alan Keyes, he was so far ahead he basically just had to not say anything obviously foolish to avoid defeating himself.

Nobody cares about Obama's support of "welfare reform" (taking money from poor people) or implicit support of corporate welfare reform (giving money to corporations). Not even so-called progressives.

Inclusiveness in debates is never discussed—the Democrats and the Republicans collude to exclude a mutual threat from third parties and independents.

Marable said "I think that clearly mainstream democrats represent, both ideologically and in terms of public policy, positions that are clearly centrist and relatively speaking to the left of the Republican Party." yet most Democrats: voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, voted for giving the US President sole authority to make war anywhere without Congressional oversight, downplay universal single-payer health care, and taking corporate campaign funding. Most Democrats did nothing to help the Congressional Black Caucus speak on the floor of the Senate when questioning the Florida vote in 2000 (no Democratic Party senator signed their letter). Most Democrats did not sponsor the universal single-payer health care plan Kucinich used as the health care plan for his presidential campaign in 2004. Most Democrats could have co-sponsored it to show support for progressive legislation. The bill would not have gone to the floor for a vote, much less passed, but this shows how hard it is for Democrats to make signal votes.

'Tis the time to dust off "progressive" values.

2004-12-16T18:41:00.000-06:00

Who will remember language like this (soon to be published in "The Nation") in 3 years:

"Looking out over Washington, DC, from his plush office, Al From is once again foaming at the mouth. The CEO of the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council and his wealthy cronies are in their regular postelection attack mode. Despite wins by economic populists in red states like Colorado and Montana this year, the DLC is claiming like a broken record that progressive policies are hurting the Democratic Party.

From’s group is funded by huge contributions from multinationals like Philip Morris, Texaco, Enron and Merck, which have all, at one point or another, slathered the DLC with cash. Those resources have been used to push a nakedly corporate agenda under the guise of “centrism” while allowing the DLC to parrot GOP criticism of populist Democrats as far-left extremists. Worse, the mainstream media follow suit, characterizing progressive positions on everything from trade to healthcare to taxes as ultra-liberal. As the AP recently claimed, "party liberals argue that the party must energize its base by moving to the left" while "the DLC and other centrist groups argue that the party must court moderates and find a way to compete in the Midwest and South."

Probably nobody at The Nation. Yes, this is the same Al From who said that Nader didn't cause Al Gore to lose in 2000 ("The assertion that Nader's marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. When exit pollers asked voters how they would have voted in a two-way race, Bush actually won by a point. That was better than he did with Nader in the race."), but that is quickly pushed aside by true Democratic Party loyalists to favor blaming Nader for Gore's not taking office. After all, we're supposed to forget the tens of thousands of Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush in 2000 and had their votes counted (unlike the disenfranchised Florida voters who still can't vote there). And we're also supposed to forget that it wasn't Nader's job to help elect Gore. Gore and Nader were opponents, not running mates.

In January 2005, you'll be able to read "Debunking Centrism", an article which represents a serious turn of affairs for The Nation, which now finds it comfortable to challenge the Democratic Party on taking corporate cash and not providing universal single-payer healthcare.

It wasn't that long ago that this same magazine criticized Nader (who was stumping for the things progressives allegedly want) and encouraged him to not run in 2004. Nader, correctly, stayed in the race in part because the Democrats did not have the courage to seriously challenge the Republicans on important issues of the day (including the invasion and occupation of Iraq, not supporting universal single-payer health care, standing up to corporate crime, fraud, and abuse).

Don't let articles like "Debunking Centrism" fool you—when push comes to shove, and there's an election to talk about, these progressives will stand behind the Democrats no matter where the Democrats want to take them.

Right now you'll be able to find lots of left-leaning people criticizing Kerry and the Democrats. There is no election in front of them (even these self-styled progressives don't care about midterm elections where voters have more power and often get to weigh issues of local importance—"think globally, act locally" and "all politics is local" be damned).

It's not in vogue anymore to champion "catastrophic coverage" health care that doesn't reach everyone, only reaches those it covers in emergency situations, and only covers part of the cost even then (like Kerry did). It's not okay to echo "can't cut and run" (like Kerry did), now one is expected to soundly and totally become anti-war and "support the troops by bringing them home" (good luck to the anti-war movement, which stunted themselves to be ABB for a year, by passing this one off. We all know roughly 3/4ths of you stood behind pro-war Kerry, even in gerrymandered districts where voters had the freedom to vote their conscience).

Don't get used to those values, if you're like a lot of so-called progressives in the US, you'll be dropping them again in three years.

Some Democratic Party highlights from recent election years

2004-12-05T13:43:00.000-06:00

Voting rights and hearing from a broad spectrum of candidates are important issues, particularly to those who either lost their voting rights without good reason and those who feel railroaded into voting for the lesser evil.

Here are a few highlights from what the Democrats have done to help the registered voters justify becoming engaged in the voting process.

2000

In 2000, American investigative journalist working for the BBC Greg Palast had a showstopper story about the "scrub" lists of people whose voting rights were taken away from them. His news was featured prominently on his website, Democracy Now!, and his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and in various articles, yet he couldn't get on US corporate media to talk about it.

The corporate media airs the televised debates hosted by the Commission on Public Debates (an official-sounding but private organization which is run by the DLC and the RNC). The CPD took over the debates formerly run by the League of Women Voters. A majority of the US public wants to see Nader and Buchanan participate in these debates. Nader, who has a legally-held ticket, is forced off the campus where the debates are being held. He was trying to watch the debates via closed-circuit TV in another building. Nader sued the CPD and, on the eve of the trial, settled with the CPD, gaining a letter of apology and a donation to a voter project hosted at Harvard.

After the effects of the Florida vote "scrubbing" were known, the Congressional Black Caucus could not find one senator to sign their letter inquiring about the Florida vote. You probably saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 where CBC member after CBC member went up to the podium to address the Senate but were gaveled off by none other than President of the Senate and Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore. If not one senator would sign, that includes Democrats Kennedy, Kerry, and Lieberman (who was running for Vice President at the time).

2002

In 2002, the Democrats ran Janet Reno for Governor of Florida. There was no discussion of voting rights nor did the Democrats work to fix the "scrubbing" situation. Many would-be Democratic Party voters were unable to vote for Reno. Reno lost the election and conceeded defeat to Bill McBride a week after the election.

2004

Still no action from the Democrats about voting rights in Florida. Greg Palast again warns that the 2000 "scrubbing" debacle isn't over because the disenfranchised voters rights haven't been restored. One would think that it would be easy to stand up for the disenfranchised when one isn't in power—even if one is just another corporatist, why waste a chance to look progressive?

In Illinois, the Democrat-controlled state government allowed Bush to appear on the ballot by changing the law that used to require all parties nominate their candidates before the end of August 2004. The 2004 Republican National Convention was held after the Illinois state deadline, so the Illinois Democrats pushed back the deadline so that the Republicans could legally place George W. Bush on Illinois ballots. There is no indication that the Democrats would be so forgiving to any independent candidacy or alternative party.

Again, the DLC works with the RNC to control the only debates the President and Vice President candidates are allowed to participate in. George Farah's organization, Open Debates, published leaked documents which confirmed the details of the arrangements for the debates including room temperature, the number of writing implements made available, and mandating that the questions asked by members of the public would be completely scripted and made available to Kerry and Bush in advance. These debates would feature only Kerry and Bush, despite other candidates which could theoretically get enough electoral votes to win the presidency. NOW with Bill Moyers runs a scathing criticism of the CPD in an interview with George Farah. After one of the CPD debates, NOW runs a pair of two-way debates between Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party and Ralph Nader (running as an independent), and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party. C-SPAN also runs a debate featuring Cobb, Badnarik, a Socialist candidate, and Peroutka. Unlike the CPD debates, neither of these debates featured candidates that largely agreed on all of the major issues of the day.

After the Kerry-Edwards campaign told us they wanted every vote to count and that they wanted every vote to be counted, they conceeded defeat to George W. Bush. Ohio's recount effort were lead by a joint effort between the Libertarians and the cash-poor Greens who somehow raised over $100,000 to learn the efficacy of the voting machines used there. On Democracy Now!, Democratic Party supporter Jesse Jackson says that it wouldn't take much money to help out with this recount effort. The Democrats, meanwhile, continue to sit on over $50M left over from the Kerry-Edwards campaign. The Democrats have yet to foster any grassroots campaign (a charge regularly levelled against the Greens and Nader).

US 2004 Election conclusions.

2004-11-03T01:54:00.000-06:00

Bush will remain president.

The Democrats won't have a Nader scapegoat (which they didn't have in 2000, but don't tell a Democrat that), they'll have to face the fact that their candidate lost all on his own.

Kerry was a weak and stiff candidate—like Gore was in 2000 and Dole was before Gore.

Right now, Hillary Clinton is planning to run in 2008. So is Jeb Bush. Clinton will lose to the Bush juggernaut because Democrats aren't progressive enough to vote for a woman and because Democrats aren't progressive enough to challenge their federal party to lose their corporate campaign funding.

Dan Rather will continue to say wacky offensive pseudo-folksy shit (from 2000: the close race was like "two babes in bikinis running to the beachhouse ... It's going to be hot and tight.").

The US is far more conservative than the Left wants to admit. The Left doesn't have as many supporters as the Left wants to claim. The Right is more powerful because their messages are more easily understood and more popular with an increasingly stupid country: 11 out of 11 states OK gay marriage bans, Bush gets a popular vote mandate (millions more than the US participants in the biggest single march against the invasion of Iraq), the American South wants Republicans more than Democrats.

At least 100,000 Iraqi dead

2004-11-01T13:32:00.000-06:00

According to an interview with Les Roberts on Democracy Now!:

The Pentagon may be collecting civilian death figures and keeping them secret.

A survey concluded that there is at least 100,000 Iraqi dead.

This is, of course, appalling but not surprising. And it still doesn't come close to the estimate Secretary Albright gave of the deaths caused by Clinton's continuation of the sanctions against Iraq. There, half a million Iraqi were said to be dead.

And if you choose Republican vs. Democrat, you get to say how many more should die because neither major party candidate wants to pull out ("can't cut and run"). How many fewer Vietnamese dead would there be if people had pushed the pull out agenda sooner? It's not a question of when the right time to pull out is, it's a question of how quickly can people mobilize to prevent the war from starting in the first place and if that cause loses, how quickly can the public call for pull out.

How quickly the Left crumbles under the weight of repetition.

2004-10-27T22:46:00.000-05:00

Mark Fiore, cartoonist and critic from the Left, lampoons the Bush administration in "OppositeLand" that "Inspections worked" and "Sanctions worked". But one must ask, worked to achieve what?

Inspections worked to make Hussein get rid of the weapons which we gave him the money to buy or supplied him with outright. He was our friend against the Communists but when he wants to keep a nationalized oil program, he's not our buddy anymore. Democrats and Republicans agree: nationalizing a resource the US can either use or make money from is worth going to war over.

Under Clinton alone, the Iraqi sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, over 500,000 of them children. Is that progress? Is that beneficial to the US or is it justifiable on the grounds of living an ethical life? I don't think so.

But apparently in the fever to tell us how much of a threat to human life President George W. Bush is, some on the Left are willing to endorse a policy that killed far more people than Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This kind of analysis completely leaves out that we shouldn't have done this in the first place and that we should indeed leave immediately (including the corporate occupation). Who steps in to clean up the mess we've made? I'm not exactly sure, but I'm sure that the US is screwing it up and therefore they must go.

In another Fiore cartoon, "The Treason Hunters", Fiore points to a number of people on the Right who criticized the war and/or the occupation and, therefore, contradict White House doctrine. Fiore shows this in order to illustrate that the Left isn't alone, that they were right all along, and now they get their moment to gloat.

Unfortunately their moment in the sun is spent criticizing according to how well the war is being fought, not that it should not have been fought at all.

Those ABB supporters tell us the marches against the war will pick up again after November 2, 2004 (US election day). I look forward to the day when members from a variety of political backgrounds work together again to march against the war. Unfortunately, they'll risk the validity of their entire message by doing so after a majority of them vote for a war supporter (Kerry).

Here's betting if anyone dares to raise the conflict between who they voted for and what policy change they endorse, that person will be drummed out of the so-called peace marches and excuses will be made for how Bush's war must be opposed at the ballot box but Kerry's war must be voted for.

Development by accretion; Apple repeats NeXT's error?

2004-10-27T03:37:00.000-05:00

Jef Raskin, one of the big movers and shakers behind the MacOS graphical user interface, was interviewed by The Guardian. He notes that Apple develops "by accretion", not fixing the old stuff but acquiring new stuff to throw on top of the old stuff (in the hopes you won't notice the underlying broken stuff).

This is a shame, but predictable.

At NeXT, Steve Jobs' former company which Apple bought out and eventually used to build much of what is in MacOS X today, various "kits" or packages of functionality, were introduced, used by what few small third-party developers delivered anything for NeXTSTEP, and then those loyal developers were frustrated as quite a few kits were dropped.

PhoneKit (for ISDN support), MusicKit (for doing fancy music stuff with the NeXT cube's DSP chip; this was picked up by a third party), IndexingKit (for fast searches of documents), and other kits were dropped soon after they were released. NeXT treated 3rd party developers like crap and few stuck around to keep getting kicked around.

This is one of the reasons NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP (which, despite the name, was not "open source") are highly overrated operating systems.

Worse yet, when the kits were dropped, they remained proprietary software. So developers couldn't inspect the source code of the kit, copy the useful parts into their programs so as to increase the odds of justifying continued development.

I look at MacOS X today and I wonder if it has pretty much seen all the innovation it will see for the next 5 or 10 years. After a while, NeXT seemed to only care about certain aspects of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP (like WebObjects, another kit for making database-driven websites like web-based storefronts). The lower level parts (like the underlying BSD 4.3 OS) didn't get upgraded or enhanced to fix annoyances like having to reboot to really clear out the swapfile.

By the way, WebObjects didn't take off and never will. It was too clumsy to do what it tries to do and being proprietary it's inherently untrustworthy. There's tons of free software to do the same work and that is clearly where web merchants have gone for their web-based storefronts.

Bipartisan love for media corporations.

2004-10-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

Looking at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center's website, I came across a link to this cartoon. One of the bubbles (ostensibly read by a Sinclair corporation newsreader) reads "This program comes courtesy of a company that stands to profit handsomely from media consolidation efforts supported by the incumbent [President Bush].". But history shows there is bipartisan support for raising the caps on media ownership.

In the 1996 Telecommunications Act media ownership caps were raised. These ownership caps were more famously raised again in June, 2003 when the Republican-led FCC held a meeting. According to an interview on Democracy Now! which aired shortly before the June 2003 FCC meeting, Los Angeles lost 90% of its childrens TV programming as a result of the Clinton-time media ownership limit raising.

The Left has been railing against the Republicans for the 2003 media ownership cap, but they've been curiously silent about the Clinton-time effort in the same direction. Why is this?

Perhaps both major parties are more interested in placating their corporate campaign contributors than many on the Left are willing to admit during election time. I think this is one of the reasons a growing segment of registered American voters choose not to vote—mutual disgust with being shoehorned into a false dichotomy where both choices are unappealing.

If the Democrats cared, they could run a truly progressive candidate for office and leverage that disgust into electoral victory.

Common Dreams: 3 kinds of articles; Democrats: one kind of victory?

2004-10-24T15:56:00.000-05:00

There are three kinds of articles on Common Dreams, a Progressive website which seems to consist largely of whole-hog copying of articles from a variety of sources:

Pimp Kerry's policies.
There aren't too many of these articles because you can't polish a turd.

Criticize Bush's policies.
There is a lot to work with here because Bush's policies have hurt the US at home and abroad. But the most offensive of these articles are the ones that never mention how Kerry is no better.

Piss on Nader.
The third of these are articles which try to demonize Nader for daring to compete with the Democratic Party. Unlike in 2000, the Greens don't receive this criticism this time around because their candidate, David Cobb, has been running a "safe-state" campaign where the Greens concede the floor to the Democrats in the states which the Democrats most want to win.

The Democrats are taking a very odd tactic for the second term in a row: bitch at anyone who won't vote for Kerry (particularly those in contested states who will vote for Nader). Has yelling at someone ever convinced them to do what you want? Does that work with you? Does presenting only one side of the story (how the opponent sucks) convince you that there are only two ways to decide the matter and that you had better pick the other candidate? Are you more likely to buy into an idea because someone has threatened you with mass destruction and oppression if you don't go along? These are the impressions I get from the Democrats for two terms now.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still don't care about the thousands of overwhelmingly Black and Latino voters in Florida who have still not regained their voting rights. Many Floridian Blacks and Latinos were prohibited from voting in 2002, and still won't be able to vote in 2004. Janet Reno was able to run in Florida on the Democratic Party ticket without ever raising the loss of voting rights as a campaign issue. This says as much about the corporate media as it does about the Democratic Party. But it suggests a more disturbing pattern may be afoot.

Donna J. Warren identified a number of big issues in which the Democrats were on a wrong side of the debate, sometimes even helping their Republican counterparts move legislation that hurt Progressive voters.

What if the Democrats are losing to win another goal: the complete eradication of other progressive parties and independent candidates. What if the Democrats realize that by going along with Republican Party bills, losing close races by not trying as hard as they can (remember when no Senators signed that Congressional Black Caucus letter about the Florida voters "scrubbed" from the voting rolls?), taking corporate campaign funding (which wouldn't be necessary if they trusted that their message would resonate with the voters), they can lose to win big points for their corporate friends by solidifying a two-party system where both parties exist to shuffle more money and influence into corporate hands?

Important movies

2004-10-18T01:25:00.000-05:00

There aren't that many movies that are good. Fewer still are important. Here's my picks on the movies I think are important.

The Corporation

The movie asks "If corporations are legal persons, what kind of people are they?". If there's one big thing the movie doesn't talk about, it's corporate influence on political campaigns. On the one hand, this is incredibly important, on the other hand the theatre edit of the movie for US audiences is 2.5 hours long and editing another segment would have cost more time and money. I recommend seeing the 3-hour 3-part documentary because you get time to discuss what you just saw with fellow viewers. In this form, another hour is not a problem to watch.

The rBGH story is worth the price of admission all by itself. Reporters like Jane Akre and Steve Wilson are part of what we lose when more media enters fewer corporate hands.

Gandhi

It's interesting to see the difference between the treatment he received and how he reacted. It made me want to read more about his life and learn what the movie left out.

More as I think of them.

Why I don't trust the Left

2004-10-17T13:00:00.000-05:00

In no particular order:

I fear that media exclusion will be endorsed, not challenged, by the Left.

After Amy Goodman interviewed Larry Flynt she said she had received a large number of letters asking why she would interview him at all. Keeping Flynt off the air seemed to be more palatable than hearing the mix of progressive (Democrats and Republicans exhibit hypocrisy with sex and money scandals) and regressive (women's equality movement is nothing but a bunch of ugly women; no woman has ever complained about their photo in Hustler) statements Flynt made.

FAIR surveyed corporate media (including PBS which takes corporate "underwriters" — ads that don't mention prices) and concluded that "Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups". The Left has something to complain about here. This is a significant problem everyone ought to be genuinely concerned about. When Leftists encourage that exclusion, they exhibit hypocrisy.

The cure for bad speech is more speech. The Left can debunk arguments by including those they object to. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a perfect example of what happens when media exclusion is leveraged: he turned Disney's unwillingness to distribute the movie into an ad for the movie. Doubly ironic here because his movie wasn't as good as "The Corporation" or "Super Size Me".

The anti-war movement was right but the marches have stopped.

Why? The anti-war organizers claim that the marches will pick up after the election; in other words, after one has lost their only leverage to make a candidate move to their agenda.

A full belly is the enemy of the revolution.

Clinton was many times more effective at killing Arabs than Bush yet the Left was largely silent. Clinton's wars are barely mentioned today. The Left was easily placated with jobs (even jobs which don't pay a living wage) and at the time there were no big marches against the killings going on overseas.

Going beyond one's expertise with bad arguments/Engaging in behavior one criticizes elsewhere

Professor Robert McChesney has written some of the most insightful media analysis. His "Media Matters" show covers issues of interest to media analysts and interviews people who talk about media analysis. People listen to his media analysis for good reason, he backs up his statements up with examples and logical criticism based on what actually happened.

On Sunday, October 17, 2004 his show offered electoral analysis which was largely flamebait for Nader voters (or anyone who dares challenge the Democrats). Listen as he and his guests discuss why voting for Nader is a mistake. There's no substantive discussion of voting records, campaign funding, or campaign promises. They claim Nader has none of the arguments he had in 2000 and that he is "right on every issue". The guests and host didn't know why people would support Nader, and in a turn reminiscent of Fox News, there was no attempt to bring in a guest who could respond or explain how even if one buys the "safe-state" voting strategy, one can still vote for Nader in the majority of US states (including in Champaign County, Illinois where the show is produced) either on the ballot or as a write-in. One could use this same argument to support any other non-Democrat/non-Republican.

By contrast, listen to Nader's recent talk in Seattle. His main question — What's your breaking point? — can be interpreted in a way that has nothing to do with his campaign for US President. If the Left has no breaking point, the Left should admit that they are unquestioning Democrats, willing to go wherever that party leads.

My posts to Slashdot.

2004-10-15T20:34:00.000-05:00

My posts to Slashdot interest some. Perhaps they'll interest you.

Of course, posting to a forum you don't control is risky. Your posts can be edited or hidden without your approval. But I do take e-mail seriously. So if you'd like to reply via e-mail and lose the publicity that comes with replying publicly, feel free.