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The fact that you consider the New Republic left-of-center speaks volumes about your politics. Most Democrats (rank-and-filers, not idiot DNC consultants) can't stand TNR's foreign policy.

Conservatives: please do not take the New Republic as representative of left-of-center views. It is not.

For your left wing fix, consider Counterpunch. For something moderate, take a look at The Nation or the columnists for Salon.

PS Any slashdot story that includes the word "Bush" (notwithstanding those discussing plantlife) is flamebait and should probably go on flamebait central.

Dude, The New Republic is full of neo-conservatives and hardly qualifies as liberal. You want left/center-left, read The Nation or Dissent, or go to the Center for American Progress.

But most Americans don't have a clue what is going on. I saw a billboard last night that said, "Remember, it's your money" -- and it was an ad for Bush-Cheney! The administration that insisted tax cuts were the prescription for times of plenty, for times of recession, for times of peace and times of war, has now seen the unwanted side-effects: a languid recovery, and a trillion dollars added to the debt. A budget surplus, the first in modern times, converted instantly to massive deficit.

Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a way to start talking about the debt as the balance on our nation's credit card. Maybe if we put overspending into terms that the average consumer could understand, and stuck to those terms, people could finally start to get it. This country produces $11 trillion of wealth every year, and, through our government, we are $7.4 trillion in debt. Maybe if we start comparing the government to a family that's making $110,000 a year, but is $74,000 in debt, we could have a real national debate about government spending. The question is not whether "it's your money," but whether, being $74,000 in debt, it's a good idea for you to get a brand-new credit card and go rack up another $4,000 on it every year -- as Bush and the Republican Congress are now doing.

Especially when massive, unavoidable costs are just over the horizon.

Grover Norquist has declared his goal of drowning the government in a bathtub, and his way of doing it is to spend it into oblivion. The Republican Party has sold out the country by signing on with this brand of destruction. What it's going to yield is not prosperity and limited government, but anarchy and -- very possibly, in the decades to come -- the end of America as an economically powerful beacon of freedom. When our children are serfs for the wealthy who have bought up the country, when the old are baking to death because we can't afford to buy them air conditioners, when the poor and the sick die alone because we can't provide them with basic health care, when the unregulated food makes us sick and the unregulated drugs are a crapshoot, when half the country will never be able to retire and will be forced to work at McDonald's and Wal-Mart until their bodies fail, I hope people remember the name of Grover Norquist, and who it was that put his theories into practice. One percent of this country will always enjoy all the best things in life, but everyone else will be wondering what it was like before our government was drowned, and if those folks back in the '90s and '00s knew how good they had it.

My main problem with HAVA is it institutionalizes the inaccurate voter purges that led to thousands of minorities being unfairly excluded from the voter rolls in Florida. HAVA makes such purges nationwide. Read this essay for a quick rundown; search the web for "HAVA" and "disenfranchisement" for much more.

The Nation link

"Same thing with those infamous military ballots: On Friday the GOP trotted out Bob Dole to a rally demanding that undated overseas ballots be counted, when days earlier Joe Lieberman had called for the same thing, and when Palm Beach election officials were turning up only a fraction of the discarded military ballots claimed by the GOP. There was so little basis to the claim of widespread military disfranchisement that by Saturday night Bush's lawyers had withdrawn his suit."

You may be thinking of the lengthy article written by Greg Palast for Salon.com.

Another version of the same article is available, no reg required, at the Nation

Voter registration rolls are handled by the local precinct officials.

Yes, but local precinct officials are subordinate to the state election officials, though, as pointed out in this article, for example: 'In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent.'

It wasn't the local officials who decided to make the purge; it was Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, both Republicans and both working for the G.W. Bush campaign.

The current economic orthodoxy says that if you lose your job, after a short period of time and maybe some retraining you will get a new job at the same wage you were receiving before. You really have to search to find economists who disagree, and they are all really out of the mainstream. IMHO, the unorthodox economists are right on this, and the mainstream economists at the big colleges, think tanks and on Wall Street are all affected by herd mentality. I feel it's a case of the economists who have discovered the correct models being voices crying in the wilderness.

There was just an article in The Nation about this, more on the political side than technical, but of the 4 major voting machines makers, all are heavy contributors to Republican candidates in office.

How They Could Steal the Election This Time

Of course it is the Nation, with a left wing biased, however, they do mention that may Democrats in office are for the no paper trail, electronic voting, but they got stung and are now out of office without a recount. Heh.

And, yes, it is all about money and Democrats are not immune from its influence.

It's not paranoia. These days people are being arrested for carrying anti-Bush signs.

By putting their advertisers' interests above their readers', news sites risk alienating their core customers. Without us, there wouldn't be any advertisers to appease.

This is one more reason why anyone who cares about the content of the news they read should ensure that they read some non-corporate news sources.

As a reader, you should demand that your media keeps your interests in mind, not just the interests of people who want to sell you things.

The worldwide consolidation of media industries has led to a consequent closure of the public airwaves with respect to matters of public interest. As control of this public resource becomes more centralized, the messages transmitted by global media purveyors become progressively less relevant, less diverse, and less reflective of ground truth.

Greg Palast talks a lot about how misinformation (and lack of information in general) comes from media consolidation in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. While I don't latch on to everything the man says I do believe that we are living in a time of self-censorship. While the media says that they are fair and balanced we have fantastic shows like Bill O'Reilly and Fox News! We have proof coming from Iraq war coverage that mentions that of course they back the war!

Are we all going to back "Open Source" media? No. Slashdot might but the rest of the world could give a shit. We are talking about people that just don't give a fuck about thinking for themselves. They care only what they hear on TV and read in their local paper. Spin doesn't exist for them. To paraphrase from Runaway Jury: people just want to come home and sit in their lounge chair and let the cable TV wash over them... The rest of us are conspiracy freaks! Fox News didn't mention anything about this so it must not be true.

Continue your attempts to educate and change the world but don't be surprised when it doesn't do a fucking thing other than label you as someone on the fringe.

Regarding intelligence failures:
Off the top of your head, tell me how many intelligence successes occur annually? No, don't go looking to the media (not even FoxNews...). No, don't even ask Congress.

Can't think of many, right?

By unofficial definition a true "intelligence success" will never be public knowledge. We, as the general public, have no idea of the staggeringly high number of times intelligence has saved our lives. Ironically, we know all too well a sickening amount of detail from such clusterf$%@s that led to 9/11, the U.S.S Cole bombing, etc.

If we had any clue as to how many "intelligence successes" have saved us from destruction/distress we would probably be scared to get out of bed. We should all be thankful that people are out there working to make sure we don't have to hide under the covers quaking in fear.

You wanted some sources? OK:

• Bureau of Labor and Statistics lists plenty of information on employment/unemployment. Take a look at the historical unemployment rates and whip out a calculator. For '92 to '00 I calculate unemployment to an average of 6.1% -- Nothing wrong with that. That's a very healthy unemployment rate and I couldn't complain, but when you compare that with the current rate quoted at 5.6%, a lot of complaints about the current administration's unemployment rate lose their ability to hold water.

• I see 214,000 jobs added last month. That's bad?

• As for the economic theory, I am a firm believer in Keynesian economics as well as the ideas of John Hicks.

• Bankrate.com has some great information and graphical representations of historical rates and economic indicators. Take a look and let me know how you feel about the current indicators?

• If you want a look at how other people are thanklessly putting their lives on the line for my safety and yours, and hence why they command my utmost respect and gratitude to the extent that I refuse to acknowledge intelligence failures, read Book Of Honor by Ted Gup.

Sorry, no references to anything on the Washington Times, FoxNews, the Washington Post, PBS.org, antiwar.com, or thenation.com. Call me crazy, but I like my data unbiased.

That's all for now.

Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images

I know the taxpayers paid for it, but it always seams like it gets exclusivly [sic] licensed to some company for next to nothing then that company charges the people that paid for it in the first place a lot of money to use it.

You're a wisely cynical man.

In the light of the 9/11 Commission's report of the multiple failures of the CIA and FBI that allowed the terrorists to attack us in 2001, in the light of Sibel Edmonds's allegations that the FBI intentionally destroyed translations of intercepted terrorist conversations, in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report about systemic CIA failures to provide accurate intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, why am I less than thrilled to discover that Sandia National Laboratories' businesses?

When I further learn that "Sandia officials say tech firms or venture capitalists can use the lab on a per-request basis," I begin to understand that Sandia's Corporate Business Development and Partnerships aren't using my tax dollars to protect me, they're providing corporate welfare by dong the Research and Development that business wants but doesn't want to pay for.

Remember, these are the same businesses that vociferously object to government programs that might compete with them, whether that's sponsorship of Open Source Software or rural electric cooperatives or IRS software that might be efficient enough to cost H&R Block. These are the same corporations that got a provision added to the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill to prevent the government from getting discounts by buying those drugs in bulk, but which profit from research funded by the National Institutes of Health.

These are the same corporations that want Ashcroft's Department of Justice to stop worrying so much about fixing the FBI's failures, so it can spend government time -- and your money -- prosecuting civil -- civil, not criminal -- suits against file traders under the PIRATE Act on behalf of those corporations. If you need to sue a corporation, you're on your own; maybe you'll get some coupons out of a class action suit. But if the corporation wants to sue you, they get the assistance of top government lawyers and FBI agents packing guns and warrants.

And this just after the U.S. House passed the biggest corporate tax cuts in twenty years, because existing direct subsidies -- or less politely, corporate welfare -- will no longer be permitted under World Trade Organization rules. Even House Republicans admit this tax cut "is riddled with special-interest provisions that would further complicate the tax code, send jobs overseas and worsen a federal deficit already at record highs."

Does anyone really expect Sandia's going to release the source code to the data mining software to us, the citizens who have to pay for it?

Be proud, Americans, of how fat your labor makes your corporate masters! What a joy it is to serve them! It is your privilege to work long hours and pay high taxes so your masters can buy their yachts -- and buy the laws that enslave you.

America, Of the People, By the People, for the Pe^H^H Corporations

Recently on a radio interview I heard the investigative reporter Greg Palast make this exact point, with the addition that the fiasco will be by design. Palast also said that, as bad as the electronic voting machines are, this year the real problems will be happening outside the polling place, with policies and programs such as the "Help America Vote" act, which are designed to disenfranchise voters the same way they were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.

Palast points out that there is a decidedly racist agenda to these voting shenanigans, which he believes are bipartisan, and I believe he is also in favor of using simple paper ballots a la Canada, or using on-site optical readers the way they were used in the non-hanging chad parts of Florida in 2000

The point then is that the chaos likely to occur in November will cover up / give room to maneuver to those who wish the election to go a certain way.

Anyway, I've been looking all over the web to find that program to link to it, but maybe I actually heard it on a real radio this time, because it's nowhere to be found.

I did find a link to a Palast article from the San Francisco Chronicle that touches on this problem of voting disenfranchisement. It's subtitled "It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost" Here's another link to an article in The Nation Magazine entitled Vanishing Votes

For those interested in more of Palast's writings, they can be found at www.gregpalast.com

Oh! I remember now. It was a video on CSPAN on the Washington Weekly program. It's an hour-long interview and call-in show with Palast located here

• a huge number of voters were improperly excluded by K. Harris's office (50,000 to 100,000),
• and thousands of cast votes were spoiled by the idiotic design of the "butterfly ballot" .

All of this, of course, ignores the fact that when the President of the United States decides to embrace the doctrine of preemptive war, claiming that there is an imminent threat to his own nation, the burdern of proof is on him to support those claims. Let's see the evidence of WMDs in Iraq. How about those aerial drones that could be used against the US? An Iraq-Al Qaeda link? Some uranium from Africa? Anything?

All of this, of course, ignores the fact that when the President of the United States decides to embrace the doctrine of preemptive war, claiming that there is an imminent threat to his own nation, the burdern of proof is on him to support those claims. Let's see the evidence of WMDs in Iraq. How about those aerial drones that could be used against the US? An Iraq-Al Qaeda link? Some uranium from Africa? Anything?

I pay for The Nation, which is an excellent news/politics weekly. Some of the stuff is online, but there's nothing like having the paper itself for the train.

I used to get Harper's but I really don't have time to finish a Harpers and they usually just end up in the bathroom after I've read the main story. A fine magazine with some very intelligent writing. The Harper's index is worth the admission price alone.

I subscribe to salon.com too. I never understood the allure of Lumpen and the other 'hip' liberal weeklies.

Thanks to the web and tivo I watch almost no televised news and get my AP/Reuters and NYTimes, Wash Post, etc for free.

Hitchens is a liberal claims the parent post

Liberal compared to whom? Tom DeLay? The late Francisco Franco?

Hitchens likes to think of himself as a modern George Orwell. A man who has turned away from misguided leftist views toward more informed right wing views.

After seeing communism and various other forms of leftism during the civil war in Spain (where Orwell was almost killed by Soviet NKVD assassins), Orwell turned against some of his leftist views. Out of this came is masterpiece 1984, which was inspired by Stalin's Soviet Union.

But there are a few things that "Hitch" misses in his alcoholic fog as he compares himself to Orwell:

1. Orwell was one of the greatest english stylists of the twentieth century. Few people would make a similar claim for "Hitch".
2. Orwell's turning away from the left did not involve embracing people from the ultra-right wing like Ken Starr and John Ashcroft.
3. Orwell did not move rightward for personal financial gain. I would guess that "Hitch" has found it more profitable to be a right wing pundit than a poorly paid writer for The Nation .

Rather than being a modern Orwell, as Hitchens would like to believe himself to be, he is more like David Horowitz, someone who went from shallow left wing views to equally shallow right wing views. Hitchens is a second rate writer seeking a profitable gig.

If the Court majority had been truly concerned about the equal protection of all voters, the real equal protection violation, of course, took place when they cut off the counting of the undervotes. As indicated, that very act denied the 50 million Americans who voted for Gore the right to have their votes count at all. It misses the point to argue that the five Justices stole the election only if it turns out that Gore overcame Bush's lead in the undervote recount. We're talking about the moral and ethical culpability of these Justices, and when you do that, the bell was rung at the moment they engaged in their conduct. What happened thereafter cannot unring the bell and is therefore irrelevant. To judge these Justices by the final result rather than by their intentions at the time of their conduct would be like exonerating one who shoots to kill if the bullet misses the victim. With that type of extravagant reasoning, if the bullet goes on and accidentally strikes down a third party who is about to kill another, perhaps the gunman should ultimately be viewed as a hero.

Why should they refuse ads from Microsoft? Aren't the readers smart enough to make up their own minds about the benefits of Linux? This reminds me of a recent "outrage" when The Nation ran some full-page ads for Faux News. Most of their readers just laughed at Fox for throwing their money away.

I'd rather that organizations who sell ad space have less editorial control. For instance, Adbusters and the MoveOn PAC have repeatedly been denied airtime on network TV, even though they are able to pay for it, simply because the network execs don't like their message. This is a far greater injustice.

That's .7%, and if they did the crime, they can do the time.

Two questions:
A) Is the punishment justified based on the nature of the crime? Take the example of the kid doing 26 years for selling marijuana to other students. That's more punishment than many murderers and rapists will get.
B) Why did they commit the crime, and can we do something about that cause? In other words, can we attack crime at the roots rather than ripping it out after it's sprouted up?

The fact is that we have the largest percentage of our population who are or have done time of any nation in the world. Our rates have been climbing steadly for the several decades from .2% of our population in prison in 1978 to .7% today. He make up 5% of the population of the planet, but we have 25% of the world's prison population. Furthermore, a whopping 4.8% of the black population is in prison right now. That's nearly 1 in 20 and suggests a broken racial and economic policy. It doesn't help that that means 1 in 20 black people won't be able to find a decent job anymore once they're out.

Most of these offenders are there due to drug policy, especially "possession" violations. The federal prison population swelled from 57,000 in 1990 to 130,000 in 2000. 75,000 were drug offenders, and in 1999 over half of all drug offenders were first time offenders receiving on average 4 years in prison. Now, I'm not for legalizing drugs, but I am for taking it down from prison time and from having to report it on job applications for the rest your ruined life to a traffic-sized fine and mandatory rehab. Considering the root causes of drug abuse and its minimal effect on society compared to other crimes, we should be looking into constructive rather than destructive solutions for fixing people's lives. It would save both lives and taxpayer dollars to not have to house all these people in prison.

I assume they're talking about high-security lockdown, reserved for heinous crimes or prisoners who can't get along with the other prisoners and start fights or kill them. I say kill them off, but we keep them around and away from other people.

No, actually, they're probably talking about the fact that prisons don't do enough to prevent them from killing and raping other prisoners in the first place. Some prison guards actually encourage that sort of thing. Abu Ghraib and the presence of an America prison guard in the scandal were no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to prison abuse in America. Our prison situation is a huge shame for our nation. At least it should be, but there's a sizeable half of the voting population *cough* Republicans *cough* that likes it this way and poisons any public debate about fixing it.

This article from The Nation (yes, I am aware that The Nation puts the Liberal in Liberal Media) has a really good discussion of the morality of war. The fact being that people, including innocent people die. You'd better have a pretty good reason to go to war. The kind of reason that you would be willing to die for. The kind of reason that when you hear about children being killed accidently you can honestly believe it was worth it. (see: World War II) Someone trying (yet failing) to create and hide weapons is not this kind of reason.

Our best intelligence indicated that Iraq still had WMDs in their possession and plans to develop more. This coupled with the terrorist environment and the threat of something bigger than 9/11 prompted us to take pre-emptive action. Discovering the lack of WMDs once we got in there does not mean we intentionally lied or that we are bullies and thugs - it means we were wrong, which is a different issue.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!! Wrong again, Jethro!!!!!

Our BEST intelligence told us that there had been no WMD in Iraq since at least 1994. We sacrificed one of the most effective intelligence tools this country has ever had on the altar of politics. Don't get me wrong, though: The Iraqis had the desire, but not the infrastructure to produce, kind of like the Soviet Union during Reagan.

But we flat out KNEW there was WMD in Israel, as there still is...chem, bio and nuke.

... I *GUARANTEE* Dubya is sitting back with a blank stare at times, muttering about how Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and others had promised him Iraqi greeting of flowers and chocolates, guaranteed reelection ...

You left out Cheney, who was the brains and driving force behind the administration's failed experiment in Iraq. Cheney was obsessed with invading Iraq long before 9/11 (which was the perfect pretext), and got Bush to do it (along with Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the DoD who loves war), according to Bob Woodward's recent book

Business's claim is that when someone is automate out of a job, another job magically pops up with the same hourly wage and so forth, although they may need some training for the job shift. This is the claim, though looking at it it doesn't always seem to be the case.

This is the larger paragraph that you quote from:

Several NPA members believe that the main benefit of criticizing and replacing special relativity may be--beyond even the likely development of new energy sources this will facilitate--the undermining of the relativism and subjectivism that have increasingly infused many areas of thought over the past century, since the iconoclastic amorality of Nietzsche. It will then become more difficult to support ethical relativism, and to argue that truth and values are not objective, absolute, eternal, and/or rationally based.

What they are saying is that science has been infected by the same moral relativism as the society at large in which it exists. Instead of ideas being scientifically rigorous and testable by anybody, you have science that is politically expedient. There is no such thing as "objective truth" that might be known, but only a paradigm which scientists view the world. In other words, science is a "subjective experience."

One example of this would be the science of the bush administration. I also think that string theory is another example.

Of course, with any fact you can put a spin on it but this does not matter as long as the listener is aware of the bias. It is a bit scary when a press baron like Murdoch is considered one of the main reasons Blair won the previous elections, and that the future of the Blair government seems to depend on Murdoch not to tell his UK news papers to go after Blair. Either the British readers of Murdochs papers are happy to vote for the guy picked by Murdoch, or they are ignorant of the bias they are served ...

In fairness, California did not deregulate energy. They re-regulated it.

How so?

For one, in the "deregulation" bills themselves was $30B in direct and indirect payments to the 3 big utilities. This was an instant 30% increase in your power bill during the switchover. Essentailly power companies decided to spin off generation and distribution into two seperate organizations. However, since the power plants were massively indebted and expensive (mostly from bad investments in bad nuclear technology) they had to first be bailed (hence $30B).

Second, thanks to price caps and price freezes designed to offset that 30%, the utilities who were local to California had to sell energy at a profit. Thanks to price caps, consumers had no need to consume, and demand increased without natural stops involved. Normally higher demand creates supply/demand pressure which increases prices which in turn forces downward pressure on demand. It's a cycle really. This was shot all to hell. Outside companies in Texas, Oregon, and Washington state decided, hey, let's sell power to California's distribution power companies. We can sell at a higher rate than in our own states. In fact, Texas and Oregon both scrapped rate increases for their customers thanks to the profits from California. In essence, California subsidized the costs of Oregon and Texas's power.

Finally, thanks to a combination of political and economic factors, there was no significant increase in generating capacity despite a massively increased population base (California is and has been growing rapidly for a long time) and high demand. The supply was maxed out from in state sources. No new power generation facilities came online during the mess. When demand spiked due to cold weather or hot weather there was no extra in state supply. Meaning more out of state companies had to provide the slack at a massive premimium. Again, the local providers had to resell this at a loss. This led to the California based companies to be essentially bankrupt, leading to near bankruptcy. This led to the state of California to buy at a fixed rate power contracts to shore up the sagging electric companies, and therefore, absorb the losses that would be passed onto the consumer. Ouch. When the power market started to level off, California was left paying premium rates when power was then much cheaper, thanks to locking in rates at the virtual top of the energy market prices.

This article explains it better than I can.

California should not have bailed out the power companies. Bad move. Price caps meant to help things made things worse. What should have been done was to make the distribution and generation companies pay into a relief fund for people who couldn't pay the rates directly during the deregulation process. The transition between heavily and less heavily regulated markets usually leads to higher prices and production shortfalls. This isn't news. California thought price controls and bailouts and fixed power contracts would make things better.

Nope.

The Nation's Matt Bivens has an interesting take on the state of mind of the folks who would behave like this during the cold war: spooky triumphs. Of course, one could easily argue that this *was* the nature of the cold war.

You mean write in candidates? Like maybe Mickey Mouse, Ben Kenobi, and of course, Steve Jobs?

You can't just write-in anyone in the Write-In candidate box. In some states, you have to register your name as a write in candidate. I knew an election clerk a few years ago who didn't like people who wrote in Mickey Mouse because it wasted their time in counting votes.

At least with write-ins, your vote is recorded.

This is the rule. With all rules, there are exceptions to the rule. During the 2000 election in North Carolina, some voters voted for Nader, but their ballot was not counted.

According to Alex Keyssar:

In North Carolina, for example, Ralph Nader was not on the ballot (because he lacked enough signatures on a petition last spring), and write-in votes for Nader were not counted because he was not an "official" write-in candidate. (Since that fact was not advertised, many people did write in his name and had their ballots thrown away.)

Eric Longley has an article describing problems with write in voting in North Carolina.

However, I'm happier with some clown doing this than I am with someone grabbing a slightly longer snippet of the same thing and using it to sell aftershave. Know what I mean? What really bothers me about modern culture is not so much rampant recycling by people who won't take the effort to come up with their own music, it's rampant recycling by corporate agendas that are determined to recast EVERY possible historical reference and cultural landmark into a meaningless orgy of brainless consumption. That bothers me. Some things matter. When something that was originally intended as a childishly idealistic outburst representing a vague but passionate worldview is repackaged to suggest that it might just as well mean that you should buy Post Toasties, something is lost. It's the impoverishment of intent- that once there was a time that people got passionate and expressed these idealistic views in their vague hippie ways, and then the world came around later and proved that it was meaningless. Maybe the original idealism was not wrong- maybe it's the impoverishment of intent that is wrong. It's like a kind of theft. At what point do you grow so tired of resisting the theft of your meaning that you give up? A few years? All your life? Do you get to have your expressions still convey what you meant even after death? Is the very concept that you 'meant' something by it irrelevant? If you don't change your mind, at what point does the world get to pervert what you meant and steamroller what you intended?

John Densmore of the Doors has written about his efforts to resist corporate hijacking of the Doors' music. He's had Robby Krieger's support and has had a lot of conflict with Ray Manzarek, who likes da money. The offers apparently just kept escalating- millions and millions offered to use that stuff for commercials. Densmore would bring up Vietnam vets who'd written him saying 'When I was in 'Nam your music saved my life. I hung on to life through listening to it because it was something real and honest and it wasn't another lie". To Densmore that was reason enough to fight for the intent of the music to be unaltered. If some rapper guy wanted to rip off loops from the Doors, how would that change the intent of the original music? Maybe it would be unfair to the musicians but that's another story. In some ways doing it without permission is all the better- rip it off and do something interesting, like you're making an audio collage from stolen things, the stealing is part of the gestalt of the artwork. With the commercial stuff, part of the gestalt is the implication that this new use is just as good a meaning, perhaps better, than whatever the music originally meant- and that permission had to be forthcoming. It's like a sanctioning, and again, impoverishment of intent. Three cheers for the Grey Album then, even if it sucks, and especially if it's stolen. At least THAT intent is upfront.

The business-backed politicians who pushed the agreement through the three legislatures promised that NAFTA would generate prosperity that would more than compensate "ordinary" people for its lack of social protections. Foreign investors would make Mexico an economic tiger, turning its poor workers into middle-class consumers who would then buy US and Canadian goods, creating more jobs in the high-wage countries.

But as soon as the ink was dry on NAFTA, US factories began to shift production to maquiladora factories along the border, where the Mexican government assures a docile labor force and virtually no environmental restrictions. The US trade surplus with Mexico quickly turned into a deficit, and since then at least a half-million jobs have been lost, many of them in small towns and rural areas where there are no job alternatives.

Meanwhile, Mexico's overall growth rate has been half of what it needs to be just to generate enough jobs for its growing labor force. The NAFTA-inspired strategy of export-led growth undermined Mexican industries that sold to the domestic market as well as the sixty-year-old social bargain in which workers and peasant farmers shared the benefits of growth in exchange for their support for a privileged oligarchy. NAFTA provided the oligarchs with new partners--the multinational corporations--allowing them to abandon their obligations to their fellow Mexicans. Average real wages in Mexican manufacturing are actually lower than they were ten years ago. Two and a half million farmers and their families have been driven out of their local markets and off their land by heavily subsidized US and Canadian agribusiness. For most Mexicans, half of whom live in poverty, basic food has gotten even more expensive: Today the Mexican minimum wage buys less than half the tortillas it bought in 1994. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans continue to risk their lives crossing the border to get low-wage jobs in the United States.

Corrected link.

The various accounts offered by the White House are almost all inconsistent with one another. On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked, "How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?" Bush replied, "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower--the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there. I didn't have much time to think about it." Bush repeated the same story on January 5, 2002, stating, "First of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on. And you know, I thought it was pilot error, and I was amazed that anybody could make such a terrible mistake...."

I think this companion article is more thorough.

But the modern business world is very short term oriented. What matters is how much MONEY is made NOW! Just do something to make some money and if it results in losses in the future, well, just jump ship or change the company name, or just use an advertising campaign. Even investors are short-term oriented. For instance, many investors (including institutional ones) sell out if things look bad.

Reputation used to mean something at one time but is less important now. Apart from the fact that a lot of industries are monoplized or oligopolized now, companies leverage their brands effectively. Consumers have no idea who owns what brands. So companies shift risky stuff to certain brands (away from safe valuable ones) and then if that fails, just re-introduce another brand. The safe brand is never really impacted.

You'll notice this in movies (as well as many other sectors like cars--do you know who owns Mazda? How about BMW?). For example, the Disney brand is good so Disney never does anything risky or controversial with it. So all the risky films are pushed off to the Touchstone label. If the Touchstone label loses its reputation, Disney will just introduce another one (let's call it NewDreams) and use that. The consumers have no idea what the hell is going on.

In addition to all that, major studios that you might think are seperate are actually owned by the same parent company. Or one film might be co-produced by multiple companies. If you want some information on the concentration of media companies (it is not limited to media but other sectors too), check out this The Nation article (old but relevant as ever).

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying brands are useless. In fact, some companies are valued solely based on brand. Companies like Coca-Cola and Nike derive their value from their brands. My point, however, is that brands are manipulated more easily nowadays. They are not what they meant 50 years ago. If you think KFC sucks, you might go and buy food at Taco Bell and not realize that they are the same companies.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

• Obviously you have never lived in a country that kills its OWN citizens. For something closer to your home (assuming USA), check out the Waco atrocities committed by the government, as well as Ruby Ridge. Here is some If you are into films, you can also check out the controversial documentary on it.
• Obviously you haven't heard of the totalitarian regimes in Germany, USSR, and USA's close friends Saudi Arabia and Egypt. A couple of stories on the state of Egypt (USA's 2nd large recipient of military aid)
• Obviously you haven't heard of the damage done to civil rights activists in the 60's by the FBI and the CIA. Laws were actually changed to prevent this sort of thing.
• Obviously you have never been targetted by the police. (I have no proof of this but if you let me track you, I can find out :) )
• Obviously you are not a minority man (particularly black) living in some parts of USA. (Don't know this either. But I can easily verify this if you send your driver's license to me)
• Obviously you haven't heard of the infiltration of the FBI by organized criminals (particularly the Italian mafia in the 60's and 70's).
• Obviously you haven't heard of police fabricating information and jailing people.
• Obviously you haven't heard of the government cooking up bogus charges and jailing people. (Refer to the previous link and do your research)
• Obviously McCarthyism is not part of your collective mind.
• Obviously you haven't heard of John Ashcroft's recent decree to spy on antiwar activists.
• Obviously you believe the legal system represent justice. (I can't prove this to anyone. It is something that you will realize as you grow up and leave the cave that you have been living in--if you actually manage to do that!)
• Obviously you underestimate the power of the goverment.

For the last two years, all kinds of "liberal" media have been warning you about the attack against our rights and the constitution by Bush, Ashcroft, and the rest the crew. You ignored it. You watched Fox News, and CNN, and The Bachelor, and listened to Bill Reilly and Rush.

Try reading some back issues of The Nation or Mother Jones. Or browse Alter Net. Or even the New York Times, for gosh sakes.

Not that any of the above should be read alone, either. Read the Wall Street Journal, and/or The Economist, or whatever other "conservative" paper/magazine you prefer.

But you can't blame it on any of them. The story is out there. You just didn't bother to pay attention.

try this for a purely economic study of the farm example. in my view as a grower, very well done.

bill moyers

here is a nice little flash-based webpage too about the big ten media companies.

As an article in a recent issue of The Nation put it, I would vote for Count Dracula rather than Bush.

The purpose of the government is to protect the citizens and their property. That's it.

It's up to the individual citizen, not the government, to find his own happiness.

The redistribution of wealth, which you seem to be a big fan of, is plain and simple theft.

Please provide the source for your statement. Otherwise it should be modded as -1 for troll.

Look around the web on site:

here,
here,
here,
here, and lots more places.

It is clear that the majority intent of Florida's voters was to send Gore to the White House. Furthermore, it is clear that Florida's voting process was seriously biased against minorities, who predominantly vote Democratic.

The only reason why this wasn't discovered during the recount was because the Bush family managed to cut the recount short as long as it was still favorable for Bush.

Or we need to add a new mod of "+1 strong opinion of of a bitter loser."

With Bush as president, we all are losing: we are getting wars, economic problems, huge budget deficits, a failing educational system, rollback of civil rights protections, deterioration of international relations, etc.

It is pretty depressing that Republicans care more about who the President had sex with than about how the country is doing.

proof

Next time you should look up the facts before you post.

I must say I am not impressed with Kucinich's position. What is the difference between a patent held by "the public" and simply refusing to issue any patent ? Talking about "public patents" instead of "unpatentable" seems to re-enforce and ligitimize the idea of patenting just about everything, similar to the phrase "intellectual property."

Why is it so hard for these politicans to get their ass out of their mouth ? If you don't want a monopoloy on something, don't issue the patent. Why is it necessary to instead issue a "public patent" ? That would seem to set a precedence that anything NOT "publicly patented" must be owned by someone.

Kucinich needs to be a lot better with the English language and logic if he is going to represent me internationally. With four years of illiterate W behind us, who wants to replace him with a mealy-mouthed moron ?

I will soon be introducing legislation that would create a new network of government labs for the research, development and manufacture of pharmaceutical products and biologics. The labs would be responsible for developing new cures and bringing them to the American people in a timely and affordable manner, something that the pharmaceutical industry has glaringly failed to do. Under the leadership of the National Institutes of Health, these government labs would receive direction on public health priorities. Labs would both perform the R&D for new therapies and cures, and form cooperative agreements with educational, research and private institutions.

In return for cooperative agreements to perform R&D, all research data and findings would be made public on a central website, just like the Human Genome Project. When discoveries are made, the patents would be held by the government and nonexclusive licenses would be attached to them. This would allow companies to compete to manufacture pharmaceutical products, just like generic drug companies do now. This would radically bring down the cost of drugs. In 2000, if drugs had not been subject to patent protection, total savings for government and consumers would have been roughly $80 billion.

I will soon be introducing legislation that would create a new network of government labs for the research, development and manufacture of pharmaceutical products and biologics. The labs would be responsible for developing new cures and bringing them to the American people in a timely and affordable manner, something that the pharmaceutical industry has glaringly failed to do. Under the leadership of the National Institutes of Health, these government labs would receive direction on public health priorities. Labs would both perform the R&D for new therapies and cures, and form cooperative agreements with educational, research and private institutions.

In return for cooperative agreements to perform R&D, all research data and findings would be made public on a central website, just like the Human Genome Project. When discoveries are made, the patents would be held by the government and nonexclusive licenses would be attached to them. This would allow companies to compete to manufacture pharmaceutical products, just like generic drug companies do now. This would radically bring down the cost of drugs. In 2000, if drugs had not been subject to patent protection, total savings for government and consumers would have been roughly $80 billion.

Although Dean has been trying to pass himself off as a progressive on everything from the war to intellectual property, a lot of it is spin. His record in Vermont shows that Dean's no progressive , that he'll cave to corporate interests when it's politically expedient. The real progressive presidential candidate is Rep. Dennis Kucinich , Chair of the Progressive Caucus in Congress. Not only is Kucinich's progressive vision and record unambiguous, he has also refused to take any form of assistance from corporations, like law firms and financial firms, in contrast to the other candidates. That's why I trust him to maintain his position on intellectual property rights *after* he's elected.

He recently wrote an article titled "The Case for Public Patents," in which he explains how public patents and nonexclusive licensing of publicly funded R&D could lower health care costs in the US. He likens the system he envisions to "an 'open source' system that makes data and findings publicly available, instead of held secret as proprietary data." He goes on to say: "Open source is how the Linux computer operating system has become a competitive force against Microsoft's Windows." When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate talking about open source and Linux? This position is also indicative of his view on copyrights and intellectual property rights more generally.

He got a late start (February), but he's been making some real strides lately. The MoveOn primary and a long string of endorsements have given a real boost to his campaign. Also, the grassroots network of volunteers is growing exponentially on the internet , where it looks like the primaries will be determined.