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Huge Consensus To Overturn Court’s Mistake

lnxwalt — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:23:34 +0000

Left and right united in opposition to controversial SCOTUS decision – Yahoo! News

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that the vast majority of Americans are vehemently opposed to a recent Supreme Court ruling that opens the door for corporations, labor unions, and other organizations to spend money directly from their general funds to influence campaigns. N3TM0uSe

As noted by the Post’s Dan Eggen, the poll’s findings show “remarkably strong agreement” across the board, with roughly 80% of Americans saying that they’re against the Court’s 5-4 decision. Even more remarkable may be that opposition by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents were all near the same 80% opposition range. Specifically, 85% of Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 76% of Republicans opposed it. In short, “everyone hates” the ruling.

The poll’s findings could enhance the possibility of getting a broad range of support behind a movement in Congress to pass legislation that would offset the Court’s decision. Of those polled, 72% said they supported congressional action to reverse its effects. Sen. Charles Schumer, who’s leading the reform effort in the Senate, told the Post that he hoped to get “strong and quick bi-partisan support” behind a bill that “passes constitutional muster but will still effectively limit the influence of special interests.”

This is possibly the best news that could come for our nation right now. The Supreme Court’s decision pairs with an earlier error in which corporations (which are state-chartered groups of individuals organized for a specific purpose) were declared to have “personhood” and the rights that go with it. One of those rights is the right to petition for redress of grievances–to lobby and to campaign–which is where the SCOTUS’ corporate political “free speech” decision is based.

I only hope that any amendment strikes at the heart of corporate personhood, which is the root of most of our nation’s problems. What is needed is a much restricted definition of personhood. For example, the legal shield known as the “corporate veil” makes sense–although we should broaden it to cover the forms of business that smaller, locally-owned businesses frequently take: sole proprietorships and partnerships–while giving lobbying and campaigning rights to corporate-style entities is one hundred percent wrong.

Why? Because this gives the few people who control the organization more of a voice than their investors and employees or members, more of a voice in the running of this country than large numbers of individuals, couples, families, and smaller organizations. (Corporations include most unions [Teamsters, UAW], non-profit groups [United Way, American Red Cross], churches [Presbyterian Church-USA, United Methodist Church], industry groups [AHIP, ABA], and advocacy groups [GreenPeace, MoveOn.org], as well as many for-profit entities [GM, Microsoft]). The person who owns stock in Microsoft may have a different view on an issue than the company’s managers. Why should they be able to take his money and use it to oppose his viewpoint? The truth is, any issue that will seriously affect the organization will also affect its members, employees, or stockholders, each of whom already has the right to lobby and campaign.

Please note that the organizations listed are merely examples. I have no personal knowledge of how well any of those groups represent the interests of their employees, shareholders, or members. What I do know is that when organizations have more of a voice in governing our nation than individuals have, the effect is corrosive, with continual erosion of individual and consumer rights by this group or that one.

Have you ever wondered why the financial regulators didn’t watch the banks and insurance companies they were supposed to oversee? Those companies had billions of dollars riding on decisions the regulators made. They could flood congressional offices with lobbyists within a few hours of an initiative to tighten supervision. You and I, on the other hand, have to work 10 hours, drive an hour to get home, pick up Junior from soccer practice, stop and pick up something for dinner, get Junior in the bathtub, get him to bed, and then remember that we were going to write a letter to Senator so-and-so about the banks and insurance companies misbehaving.

Wondering why it seems like no matter who is in office, nothing ever changes? Well, while you are busy working, pressure groups like the AARP are busy canvassing congresspeople for their views on some new tax proposal. Letting corporation-type organizations lobby or campaign (which also includes financial or “in-kind” donations to candidates’ campaigns) guarantees that those organizations with the most to gain or lose from a proposal will work hard to out-shout and out-lobby the rest of us. Most of us may be interested in this proposal or that one, but not to the point of it being vital for our next quarter’s earnings. Thus, we are going to be less active in lobbying and campaigning than they are.

One final point: Our founders were well aware of corporations and their power. One of the precipitation acts that led to our independence was the British government selling an exclusive franchise for tea sales in the American continent to the British East India Company, a corporation! So it is interesting that neither the Articles of Confederation, nor the Constitution that replaced them, mention corporations or their rights. I speculate (rightly, I believe) that they believed this made it plain that rights remained in the hands of individuals, and that the government had no power to recognize nor grant most rights (such as the right to lobby and campaign) to corporations of any type.

The only solution that makes sense is a constitutional amendment which dramatically curtails corporate personhood. If the above-mentioned amendment only reacts to this specific court decision, it will be easily misdirected away from its intended purpose. Further, it is dangerous to make amendments focus only on specific court decisions (not that it hasn’t happened before). Instead, we should consider the universe of potentially-related decisions and craft an amendment that states in broad strokes which ones should be allowed and which ones should not. In my opinion, focusing only on for-profit corporations’ lobbying doesn’t begin to solve the problems of this decision, nor the related problems that have already cropped up in the past.

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The Alexandria Project: A Serialized Technology Thriller

lnxwalt — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:44:30 +0000

Alexandria Project (an eNovel) – ConsortiumInfo.org

How completely different, might you ask, as if on cue? Glad you asked. Quite completely different. More specifically, I’m in the process of writing a cybersecurity novel called The Alexandria Project, and I’m going to share it here in serial form, in the grand tradition of yesteryear, when authors like Charles Dickens presented their latest works in weekly or monthly (often cliff hanging) chapters. N3TM0uSe

Except in this case, there will be a few twists. For one, in between installments you’ll be able to follow Frank Adversego, our erstwhile cybersecurity hero, on Twitter. He’ll share his mordant view of the day’s events (real and fictional) with you, and perhaps provide the occasional clue as to what might happen next.

No one can be all business, all the time. We have to do something to enjoy ourselves once in a while.

Andy Updegrove is an attorney who is active in helping industry groups develop open standards. This is his first, to my knowledge, foray into publishing creative fiction. I have to say, that I am enthralled at the story. I find myself checking almost every day to see whether the next installment is out.

The story involves a breach of electronic security, and the security experts who must track it down and contain the damage, but it is more than that. It is also a modern version of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. I highly recommend it.

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2010: A Year Of Challenges

lnxwalt — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:33:06 +0000

After a year in which it seemed that the new administration was merely an extension of the old, many people are waiting to see some of the “change” they were promised. Others fear that change, seeing it as moving us down a road to Soviet-style destruction, and therefore, they oppose the initiatives of the new administration. N3TM0uSe

In my own view, the new administration came in with too many expectations. It was expected that the President would be able to walk on water and to cast out evil & selfish bankers. In fact, the President has worked hard not to offend the banks and insurance companies, a much more moderate approach than his most extreme backers expected. He was expected to put millions of people back to work. It is likely that his ’shovel-ready’ public works programs had the effect of using federal funds to pay for projects that would have been built anyway, with state and local funding. It was expected that he would bring a surge of assistance to the urban areas where low-income minorities have been left out of the productive side of the economy. He has actually been a little preoccupied–it isn’t just White people that sometimes ignore the needs of the inner cities–with other parts of his job. There are other areas such as these, but the point has been made that many Americans thought they voted in the Messiah, and are finding that he is just another man.

This year has barely even started, but I see it being a time when everything we thought was so secure will be exposed as being built upon sand. The idea that the government and its various regulatory bureaus can provide for us and protect us from the cold, cruel world is likely to be shown as false. Back in the 1930s, Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Roosevelt tried interventionist “let’s do something to put people to work” policies. They did not succeed at ending the Depression. Congress tried to reduce oversupply with the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, putting up barriers to a wide variety of imports. The result was predictable: our trading partners retaliated with their own trade restrictions, and the economy sunk even lower. The thing that finally brought an end to the Great Depression was war: World War II, with its nearly unlimited demand for munitions and weaponry.

I’m trying to point out that government intervention isn’t going to save us from this mess. Because this isn’t just a recession or even just a depression. This is a time of transformation, similar to the one we experienced at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This has been going on underneath the covers for some time, but with the massive job losses and the wholesale nationalization of the auto industry, we can finally see it clearly. The government cannot save us, because the government does not know what is going on, nor does it know what is going to arise to replace the big industrial companies. None of us know what is going to arise.

That is why we’ll face challenges getting the economy started–putting people to work again–as we learn that allocating money for “shovel-ready” public works projects mostly shifts payment responsibility for projects that were already going to be built away from state and local governments (the taxpayers of that area) onto all of us who pay federal taxes. We’ll find that this isn’t just about big make-work programs. This is about the de-industrialization of America, coupled with the export of the high-tech jobs that we thought were going to be the replacement for the manufacturing jobs being lost. America is at a crossroads, and no one seems to know where to go next.

The challenge, then, for you and I, is going to revolve around building and maintaining our small, locally-owned businesses. We need to be the ones who reshape our communities. One way that we can do this is to local-source most of our products, services, and labor. By doing this, we can help our own towns and cities to regenerate some of the jobs that were lost. Now, I have to be clear that you won’t find everything you need in your local community–at least, not if your community is like mine–but you can expand that to cover in-state production or in-country production. Do not forget that not every product produced nearby is sold out of a storefront. Sometimes, you may need to buy online–don’t forget to look for PayPal or Google Checkout instead of giving your financial information directly to every vendor–in order to get goods and services that are being produced relatively close to your homebase.

The econolypse isn’t just about the recession. Your challenges aren’t either. Get ready to face your challenges and do not let yourself be cowed by the howling and noise of the large out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) who are even now lined up to request special favors from the government. You have a job to do, and your town or city is depending on you (even if they don’t know it).

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A Question Of Authority? Or Parade Of Errors?

lnxwalt — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:06:47 +0000

Federal judges on Friday seemed unwilling to accept the FCC’s argument for censuring Comcast after it was discovered in 2008 to be throttling or slowing down file-sharing traffic on its Internet connections, according to a story published by The Wall Street Journal. N3TM0uSe

“You can’t get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good,” the WSJ quoted Chief Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Judges question FCC authority in Comcast case | Signal Strength – CNET News

In a way, it is a good thing that judges are questioning the authority of government agencies to act. On the other hand, Comcast and the cable industry are creations of the FCC, in that it was federal rules that gave them the ability to do what they do. Just as with the telephone companies, FCC rules, including the choice to allow them to cut out ISP intermediaries for their high-speed Internet access services, is at the heart of the problem.

You see, if I sign up for dial up service, I might be able to get it through my local telephone company. There are, or were, dozens of companies (including AOL) that offered such Internet access across the country. Locally, Sunrise Internet Services offers it to this day.

If I want high-speed Internet across DSL or cable connections, the company that owns the lines does not have to allow other companies to compete, thanks to decisions made by the Commission. This decision was the one that enabled Comcast to take anti-consumer actions such as polluting the downloads of its paying customers. The errors the FCC (and Congress and the Department of Justice) made dating back into the late 1990s are what allowed Comcast and other “last-mile” owners to act with impunity toward consumers.

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Watching It All Fall Apart

lnxwalt — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 07:42:00 +0000

This is a pretty amazing animation that shows just how widespread and how deep the recession has been. N3TM0uSe

The only thing is, this is not just a recession. It might not even be just a depression. It seems to be a permanent inflection point in the national economy. If you look at the job losses, for example, most of them are gone forever. Chrysler, for example, will probably close entirely in 2010. The current and former employees are not going to get their jobs back. Ever.

Unfortunately, the government’s recovery efforts are focused around two things: protect the banks and get state governments (and their contractors) spending, so that their employees will spend, in the hope that we can return to the conditions of recent times. We all know that the conditions of recent times were an illusion, that America has been losing industry after industry and exporting its middle-class jobs since the late 1970s. Thus, we all know that the government’s efforts, as the now stand, are doomed to failure. We, and most other nations, are ignoring the lessons of this econolypse.

Do not get me wrong. They very well could convince enough consumers that things are better so those consumers will be willing to take on debt to buy more stuff. They could very well convince enough bankers and business managers that things are better so they will be willing to make more loans, make more products, and hire more workers. But it will not last. The economy has fundamentally changed, and we would do better to face the facts and act accordingly.

In many ways, this is equivalent to the Industrial Revolution, when farm labor dried up and factory jobs arose to replace them. Many people decried the end of their traditional employment, but their complaining had no impact on the eventual replacement of their whole economic basis. That base was replaced with one focused solely around the exchange of currency, with the use of mechanical equipment to replace the human and animal labor that had previously powered the whole world’s economy. The only thing is, it is not apparent what the new model will be, nor what business structures will arise to exploit it.

Still, we do know that hyperglobalism [PDF] has made every community very dependent upon the choices of strangers in remote places. We know that information assymetries of the type that brought down the financial industries will continue to exist. Therefore, we ought to try very hard to “close the circle” in our communities. Do you have a local banker, local baker, local butcher? Does your local baker have a nearby miller to supply his flour? Does that miller and that butcher have a local farmer to supply the grain and the meats? Does your local construction guy get his lumber from a locally-owned hardware store, and does that hardware store have a nearby lumber mills to supply its own needs? We need to build networks of small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), whether they are family-owned businesses (FOBs), minority-owned businesses (MOBs), owner-managed businesses (OMBs), woman-owned businesses (WOBs), or community-based groups (CBGs).

At least until things start to gel, and we can understand what the new world will look like, your best bet is your nearby community. If you are betting that your future economic lifeline will come through some large, out-of-area corporation (LOOAC), you will probably be disappointed. It is up to YOU and your family members, friends, and neighbors, to work in “coopetition” and help trap a larger fraction of your area’s income within the community. Close the circle or prepare to starve.

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