As you may know, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided not to bring the PROTECT IP Act (the Senate’s version of SOPA) up for a vote next week. And since I’ve heard from many of you about this issue, I wanted to take a moment to share why I support copyright protection legislation – as well as why I believe holding off on this bill is the right thing to do.
As someone who has worked hard to protect net neutrality, I understand as well as anyone the importance of keeping the Internet free from undue corporate influence. There are millions of Americans who rely on a free and open Internet to learn, communicate with friends and family, and do business.
At the same time, there are millions of Americans whose livelihoods rely on strong protections for intellectual property: middle-class workers – most of them union workers – in all 50 states, thousands of them here in Minnesota, working in a variety of industries from film production to publishing to software development.
If we don’t protect our intellectual property, international criminals – as well as legitimate businesses like payment processors and ad networks – will continue to profit dishonestly from the work these Americans are doing every day. And that puts these millions of jobs at serious risk.
Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open, Innovative Internet
Guest Column
by Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt
Thanks for taking the time to sign this petition. Both your words and actions illustrate the importance of maintaining an open and democratic Internet.
Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the PROTECT IP Act and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support—and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet.
While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
Editor’s note: The following is the foreword to Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It, by Jeffrey Clements, a new book from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth.
It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states.
The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws.
God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter.
What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.
But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices–especially the tolerance and extension of slavery–created tensions that finally tore us apart.
The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.
This narrative suggests that our democratic experiment is working, albeit slowly. If we have never been entirely unified in our ideals, the Civil War at least re-unified our institutions. A century and a half later, we rally around the same flag. Or so we think.
This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement’s “vision statement” to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:
We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.
The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.
Here is what I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:
Perhaps it’s true that the people united will never be defeated. But they can be arrested.
That was the local Alabama authorities’ instinctive reaction to the uprisings of the 1960s. And it worked really well — if rights and consequences are no concern.
Find a reason, in some obscure or rarely enforced municipal ordinance, to arrest the agitators. Or just invent an offense, snatch the pesky ones, and drag them away. Rights have no role in this drama.
The plot is simple: Make the troublemakers disappear, tangle them in legal proceedings, bust their budgets with bail and fines and lawyer fees, and scare off sympathizers who see all this and decide to cower.
by Michael Braunstein
Guest Column Special to the Locust Fort News-Journal
The current economic collapse that has led to the continued occupation of Wall Street is a long time in the making, and solutions are not easily coming.
Our current economic system dates back to the beginning of the 1830′s when specialization of employment and a surplus of goods brought economics from the area of biblical mandate and the Divine Rights of Kings to the realm of conscientious political policy.
Every seven to ten years between 1830 to 1929 the American economy went through a terrible boom and bust cycle from complete unemployment and economic standstill to full employment and then crashing back to zero.
by Michael Braunstein Special to the Locust Fort News-Journal
View photos with this column at Michael’s Flickr Photo Stream
NEW YORK – The occupation started as a call out for a short weekend occupation by the activist group Adbusters and quickly swelled to include Anonymous, US Day of Rage, and was soon joined by a large cadre of activist groups and a very large number of activist citizens.
A group of college kids with signs has expanded into a self-sustaining city that spontaneously organizes to help itself eat, sleep and take wet sleeping bags to the dry cleaners.
During my visit, there was an operations central, a refectory, a library, and while I was talking to somenone, a spontaneous group formed to take wet sleeping bags to the laundry. People were tabling for organziations, making signs and engaging passers-by with thought provoking conversations.
Back in 1971, the environmental movement was just a dream in the minds of people who wanted the governments and the corporations of the world to respect the planet that we all live on.
In other words, quit setting off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, and quit spewing toxic chemicals into our air, our water sources and on our land. Back then we still had lead in our gasoline, with Los Angeles and other big cities covered with air so toxic it was literally killing people.
Our national forests were being treated as a piggy bank for the large lumber firms who clear-cut the forests and turned them into agricultural plantations, row after row of straight lines that wiped out most of the forest eco-systems. Our rivers were used as dumping grounds for chemical manufacturers, fouling our drinking water and poisoning any living thing that lived on or near it. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually caught fire.
An awareness of those problems led to the first Earth Day, and to passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well a host of other environmental regulations that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
