Digital Citizen

According to the International Herald-Tribune, junior Illinois Democratic Party Senator Barack Obama said:

“I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president’s authority,” [and,] “I believe if we began impeachment proceedings we will be engulfed in more of the politics that has made Washington dysfunction,” he added. “We would once again, rather than attending to the people’s business, be engaged in a tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, nonstop circus.”

One notable reaction (reminiscent of the reaction Vice President Cheney received in New Orleans shortly after hurricane Katrina hit) is found on digg.com:

“Well, fuck you then, Obama.”

Today the GNU General Public License version 3, the preeminent free software license, and the GNU LGPL were released today at noon Eastern Daylight Time. Read the press release about the announcement events or go directly to the Free Software Foundation’s website for live streaming coverage of the events.

Here are the official recordings, most likely licensed to share under a simple verbatim copying and distribution license:

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire recording is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

• Low quality Ogg Vorbis+Theora
• Medium quality Ogg Vorbis+Theora
• High quality Ogg Vorbis+Theora

Read the press release about today’s GPLv3 launch and the new GPL (HTML, TeX, Text) and Lesser GNU GPL (HTML or Text).

Congratulations to the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen (or his Wikipedia entry which has many pointers to his talks), the Software Freedom Law Center, and the community who participated in GPLv3 revisions and critique. Our hard work will definitely benefit us all and continue to serve as a constitution of the free software movement.

The Creative Commons organization has a blog entry on “mainstreaming open music” quoting a means for taking over with music people can share. I think this is right-headed and entirely more productive than trying to negotiate a less painful arrangement with corporate labels and their representatives.

This kind of discussion reframes the debate toward something technocrats do well: how shall we use what we’ve got to better allow people to easily hear this music? The free software music player Rhythmbox makes it easier to audition Jamendo and Magnatune tracks. It’s my hope that this kind of collaboration will spread. If you’re interested in listening to a lot of music, I’m sure there are people who would like to hear your recommendations!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Clinton later pardoned Marc Rich.

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

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

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

Now, Rudy is ready to be President.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard Dean - 14 minutes, 7 seconds.

John Kerry - 12 minutes, 31 seconds.

Wesley Clark - 10 minutes, 36 seconds.

Richard Gephardt - 10 minutes, 2 seconds.

Joe Lieberman - 9 minutes, 26 seconds.

Carol Moseley Braun - 8 minutes, 39 seconds.

Al Sharpton - 8 minutes, 28 seconds.

John Edwards - 8 minutes, 0 seconds.

Kucinich - 5 minutes, 9 seconds.

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

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

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