The GOP, as we all know, is desperately afraid of the possibility that the 2006 midterms will put Democrats in a position to hold some hearings. If we do get that lucky, I worry a bit that there may be a temptation to engage in overkill — a hundred hearings a day on a thousand subjects — when the smart play is to focus in a few key topics. The wildly underexplored subject of what’s been going on with the money being spent in Iraq strikes me as something that should be a prime candidate.
I agree with Matt that the Democrats need to be smart about how they go about investigating the Bush administration and should concentrate on the key areas that best illustrate their massive failure. I also agree that war profiteering is an overlooked subject that focuses on the corrupt crony capitalism that has fueled this administration from day one. (Jane was on this a year ago.) It’s long past time people started asking where in the hell all that money went.
I would suggest that the other two issues that are ripe for investigations, and which would capture the worst of the egregious actions of the Bush administration, are presidential abuse of power and the manipulation of intelligence and strategic errors of Iraq. Those are the areas in which it is important to demand accountability from the administration and demonstrate to the American people that mature, responsible leadership will not allow such behavior to go unpunished.
Republicans are working themselves into a frenzy about these impending investigations and they are worried for very good reason. They have treated the congress like their own private fiefdom and ignored every standard of normal political decency. It’s not going to be pleasant for them. But it is essential that this happen. No forgive and forget this time. It was the Democrats’ failure to follow through (after a good start in the post Watergate years) when Iran-Contra happened. They got spooked by Reagan’s mystique and Republican cant and it led to the revival of these pernicious, undemocratic practices that came out of the Nixon era. This time they went so far as to openly launch a pre-emptive war of aggression. We cannot allow that to happen again.
I’ve always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state’s only function is policing, it functions as a … police state.
We’ve watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:
Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.
Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.
If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation’s spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.
The new proposals, which have received little public attention, dovetail with an ongoing Bush administration crackdown on unauthorized leaks.
[…]
Critics described the potential penalties outlined in the measure as “draconian.”
“In a moment when the intelligence community should be looking forward toward what it does best, the arrest powers represent a step back toward the Nixon-era abuses,” said Jason Vest, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.
The plan by Congress to target the pensions of intelligence agency employees would harm the overall spy effort, according to critics. Some, including former senior intelligence officials, warned that it would create an overly repressive environment within the agencies that could inhibit officers from speaking up, even internally, and discourage risk-taking.
The proposal to penalize leakers with loss of pension will do nothing “but keep good people from going to work in the [intelligence community] agencies,” according to a senior intelligence official, who was quoted anonymously yesterday in a letter to the House Intelligence Committee from the Project on Government Oversight.
[…]
The measure also directs Congress to conduct a study of possible new sanctions against those who receive leaks of classified information, including journalists.
Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that such sanctions would represent a significant departure by the government, which usually targets only the person who leaks information, not the recipient.
“That is not the prevailing understanding under the law,” he said. “If it were, [Washington Post reporter] Bob Woodward would not be a wealthy, best-selling author. He would be serving a life sentence.”
At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is “just clarifying the authority” of agency security officers “to arrest individuals.”
It would apparently overrule a written opinion by the Maryland attorney general’s office, which stated that the NSA’s police powers are limited to the agency’s grounds and to streets within a 500-foot perimeter of its Fort Meade campus.
The June 2005 opinion concluded that, under Maryland law, NSA officers “may make a citizen’s arrest” and would have no immunity from liability for their actions if they are outside their jurisdiction. It notes that NSA officers can only carry firearms within that jurisdiction. The bill would allow them to carry guns.
[…]
Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a “worrisome” expansion of power.
“That’s why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials,” he said. “I don’t know that this needs to be an intelligence officer’s function. I wouldn’t think it should be.”
Aftergood termed the proposal “shocking” and said “it raises the specter of a secret police force that is unaccountable and operates outside of the normal law enforcement parameters.”
I know I feel safer already, don’t you?
This is the kind of stuff that’s going on right now in the Congress, even as the president’s approval rating sits in the low 30’s and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA “security” authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.
This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It’s hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that’s what they’re doing (among other heinous things.)
I will look forward to another sanctimonious lecture from intelligence chairman Pat Roberts on the horrors of unauthorized leaking when this legislation gets to the Senate. He knows wehat he’s talking about. After all, he committed one of the most egregious leaks in recent memory.
We’ve discussed the strange phenomenon of wingnut fascination with bestiality, specifically sex with dogs. And recently we’ve been treated to the ick inducing sight of seven year old girls dressing up in ball gowns and pledging to their fathers to remain “sexually pure” until daddy turns them over to their husbands.
Via Septic Tank at Kos, here’s another peek into the strange, disturbed world of rightwing moralist sexual imagination: teen sex cults. It has even infiltrated the hallowed halls of science at the FDA:
Attorneys for a New York women’s group plan to grill Food and Drug Administration officials this week about their failure to decide whether an emergency contraceptive pill called Plan B may be sold without a prescription.
Former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy operations commissioner, and Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center, are to testify in court-ordered depositions to be taken by attorneys for the Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday through Friday in Washington, D.C., and Rockville, Md.
The women’s group seeks to force approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.
Simon Heller, one of the attorneys, plans to quiz Woodcock on a March 23, 2004, staff memo suggesting she was concerned Plan B might lead to teenage promiscuity.
The FDA is only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of drugs.
In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: “As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.”
Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B.
“This was the level of scientific discourse,” Heller said in an interview, referring to concerns attributed to Woodcock. “I find it very odd that these people who are supposed to be responsible scientists and doctors are making up wacky reasons.”
Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to assume that Woodcock’s dark fantasies came from her own twisted imagination because I haven’t been able to find any other references to Plan B and teen-age sex cults. However, that’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of ludicrous paranoia out there about Plan B. The biggest purveyor of lies on this subject appears to be the Concerned Women For America (a cult if I’ve ever seen one) that writes volumes of misinformation and misleading blather about everything, but particularly sex.
Rather than reducing the core problem of young people engaging in sexual activity (which carries life-long consequences), it encourages sexual activity. An official survey revealed that MAP use among teenage girls in the United Kingdom more than doubled since it became available in pharmacies, increasing from one in 12 teen-agers to one in five. Among them were girls as young as 12. A girl who said she was 10 years old told the pharmacist “she had already used it four times.”
[…]
Even morning-after pill proponents agree that sexually active girls are likely victims of sexual abuse, and interaction with medical professionals is an important defense.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported: “The younger women are when they first have intercourse the more likely they are to have had unwanted or nonvoluntary first sex, seven in 10 of those who had sex before age 13, for example.”
…The rush to choose “pregnancy outcome options” may preempt efforts to rule out sexual abuse. “Sexual abuse is a common antecedent of adolescent pregnancy, with up to 66% of pregnant teens reporting histories of abuse…. Pregnancy may also be a sign of ongoing sexual abuse…. Boyer and Fine found that of 535 young women who were pregnant, 44% had been raped, of whom 11% became pregnant as a result of the rape. One half of these young women with rape histories were raped more than once.”
It should be noted that this same group enthusiastically endorsed the South Dakota abortion law that offers no exemption for rape or incest.
The Bangkok Post reported disturbing consequences of easy availability of the morning-after pill for the past 15 years, including:
Random studies showed that men are the most frequent buyers. “They buy the pills for their girlfriends or wives so that they don’t have to wear condoms and feel they’re at no risk of becoming a father afterwards. Some women I’ve spoken to said that they didn’t even know what they were taking; that the guy just said it was a health supplement,” said Nattaya Boonpakdee, program assistant at the Population Council (an agency dedicated to promoting and developing contraception and abortion methods).
“Although many feminists believe that the morning-after pill gives them more control over their own bodies, it would seem, judging from the few studies conducted so far, that it is actually being used by men to exploit women.”
This is more of that taking away women’s autonomy is really giving them “freedom” gibberish that these robotic forced birth freaks spew. They might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it makes.
They believe that the morning after pill is an abortion. But they would be against it even if it weren’t because it encourages promiscuity. Or it allows men to exploit women. Or it’s unsafe. Or it will give women emotional problems. Or physical problems because women who have abortions are more likely to die than women who don’t. Except they aren’t. But no matter, even if that isn’t true, there are always a thousand reasons why women should not be allowed to fuck. Pick one and run with it.
“The morning-after pill is a pedophile’s best friend,” Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson’s decision. “Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines.”
Pedophiles and sex-machines. Hoo baby. But hey, if it’s fantasies of teen sex cults that rev these gruesome, obsessive imaginations, have at it. It would be nice if the scientists at the FDA got their jollies elsewhere, however. This is important.
I have had the privilege of reading Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “How Would A Patriot Act” and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is not just a litany of the gross abuse of power, the novel unconstitutional theories or the excessive fear mongering of the Bush years, although he lays them all out in frightening simplicity. This book is about how these actions debase our national character. I would submit that in this unpredictable era of global change, an immensely powerful nation like the US cannot lead, or even participate in any positive way, if the world believes it to be crassly amoral.
I’m not naive about American history. I know that the last two hundred plus years are rife with examples of our government failing to live up to its ideals. But for many of us who have grown up in the post World War II world of American dominance, watching our country casually discard its hard-won moral authority in favor of a childish insistence on “might makes right” is beyond disturbing. It hurts.
This is an issue with which every American, regardless of party, should be concerned. The founders knew that relying on the good will of men in power is stupid and we are seeing their predictions come true before our very eyes. The modern Republican leadership may currently have a monopoly on authoritarian impulses, but they are by no means the only people in this country who could be seduced by this Republican notion of executive authority. The constitution is what protects all Americans from the dark side of human nature when it has power over others, regardless of party or political philosophy. Those of us who worry about this usurpation of the constitution and degradation of the Bill of Rights know that this is not a passing fashion that will easily be tucked back into its former shape. Once you allow powerful men to seize power it’s awfully hard to persuade their successors to give it back.
As we go into this election season we are going to be talking a lot about what we stand for, what we believe and who we are as a party and as a country. This book is, in my view, necessary reading for everyone in the party who is working on our message. Unless we insist upon accountability for what these people have done, I fear that the country will not be able to recover. People need to see that our system of government can not only survive such assaults on its integrity, but that justice and the rule of law will reassert themselves under responsible leadership. It must be publicly demonstrated that this doctrine of unlimited presidential authority is unacceptable and Unamerican.
A distorted, authoritarian undemocratic view of American government has persisted now for more than a generation among certain conservatives. This philosophy has taken us from Watergate to Iran-Contra to Impeachment to the supreme court deciding a presidential election and the last five years of unprecedented assaults on the constitution in the name of a war that has no end. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this philosophy once and for all before it kills us. Greenwald’s book is one of the first stabs at doing that and it’s vital that the rest of us do our part.
If you believe as I do that this is the issue of our time, this book lays it all out in stark, clear prose. Send one to your Senator or congressman. They need to read it.
Bush = Lincoln? Sure. Like Dan Brown = Walt Whitman
In case you’re not yet convinced, Arthur Schlesinger explains why Bush ain’t Lincoln, and for the helluva it tosses in good reasons why Bush ain’t Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy either. Also, notice how Schlesinger cleverly disses Bush by pointing out that these three were war veterans, not drunken, promiscuous fratboys who used their fathers’ good name to avoid military service:
The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ “
This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin’s attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.
It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine “our own attitude — as individuals and as a nation — for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. It was compatible with the George Kennan formula — containment plus deterrence — that worked effectively to avoid a nuclear clash.
The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war.
A thrilling, beautiful description of the new science of evolution. Ostensibly a review of three books, the authors have written a succinct lay-person’s introduction (more like a toenail in the water) to the theory of “evo-devo,” the function of HOX genes, and other fascinating contemporary science. Don’t miss it.
Amid all the partisan rancor of congressional politics, the softball league has for 37 years been a rare case of bipartisan civility, an opportunity for Democratic and Republican aides to sneak out of work a bit early and take the field in the name of the lawmaker, committee or federal agency they work for.
This year, the league will be missing something: a lot of the Republicans.
During the off-season, a group of Republican teams seceded from the league after accusing its Democratic commissioner, Gary Caruso, of running a socialist year-end playoff system that gives below-average teams an unfair chance to win the championship.
The league “is all about Softball Welfare — aiding the weak by punishing the strong,” the pitcher of one Republican team told Mr. Caruso in an email. “The commissioner has a long-standing policy of punishing success and rewarding failure. He’s a Democrat. Waddya’ expect?” read another email, from Gary Mahmoud, the coach of BoehnerLand, a team from the office of Republican Majority Leader John Boehner.
Is every Republican in Washington the emotional age of seven? The rules require that some of the lesser teams get a chance to participate in the “playoffs” so the manly he-men who have shed their blood and sweat throughout the grueling season are angry that it denies them their rightful place atop congressional softball Olympus. After all, they deserve the glory:
The congressional league is a relaxed affair: No umpires call balls and strikes, so batters don’t have to swing until they get a pitch they like. Fields are open to the public, so most teams dispatch an intern or junior aide to reserve a field several hours before game time.
Can someone tell me why these awesome GOP athletes aren’t in Iraq instead of measuring their dicks in a slow-pitch softball league that a junior high girls team could easily dominate? Could it be because they are a bunch of pathetic, bedwetting chickenshits? I thought so.
Thanks to reader Samela for pointing out this incredible series in the Chicago Tribune outlining contractor abuses in Iraq. It’s rather surprising that no other papers or any of the networks have bothered to report the story (at least that I’m aware of) but I can understand it. The sheer volume on inhumane activity that the Bush administration has endorsed or perpetrated is so huge that it’s hard to keep up.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Tribune.
[…]
The State Department launched an investigation and promised other actions earlier this year in response to a series published Oct. 9-10 by the Tribune, “Pipeline to Peril,” that detailed many of the abuses now cited in the memos.
The stories disclosed the often-illicit networks used to recruit low-skilled laborers from some of the world’s most impoverished and remote locales to work in menial jobs on American bases in Iraq.
Although other firms also have contracts supporting the military in Iraq, the U.S. has outsourced vital support operations to Halliburton subsidiary KBR at an unprecedented scale, at a cost to the U.S. of more than $12 billion as of late last year.
This issue with contractors and human trafficking is not unique to Iraq. We experienced problems with them in Bosnia, too:
…[he] witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”
…women and girls were handed over to bar owners and told to perform sex acts to pay for their costumes.The women who refused were locked in rooms and withheld food and outside contact for days or weeks. After this time they are told to dance naked on table tops and sit with clients. If the women still refuse to perform sex acts with the customers they are beaten and raped in the rooms by the bar owners and their associates. They are told if they go to the police they will be arrested for prostitution and being an illegal immigrant.”
This problem is compounded by the fact that there are a lot of questions as to whether or not there is any legal remedy. The military appears to be saying they will require contracts to include protections against human trafficking and abuses, but there’s no word on how such contracts can be enforced or whether they fall under under US or Iraqi law.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor to have you here. I’m a first-year student in South Asia studies. My question is in regards to private military contractors. Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to these contractors in Iraq. I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions.
THE PRESIDENT: I was going to ask him. Go ahead. (Laughter.) Help. (Laughter.)
Q I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. (Laughter.) Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less against — over our American military contractors. I would submit to you that in this case, this is one case that privatization is not a solution. And, Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?
THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that very much. I wasn’t kidding — (laughter.) I was going to — I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question. (Laughter.) This is what delegation — I don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case, but never — (laughter.) I really will — I’m going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work. I’m — thanks. (Laughter.)
Despite all the hilarity, this is actually quite an important question. From Guantanamo to illegal wiretapping to military contractors, the law has been twisted or ignored by this administration. In the case of contractors who participate directly in the conflict, the law ironically suggests that they are “unlawful combatants.” If they are caught breaking laws in Iraq, they fall under no enforceable legal system and are merely sent home. Meanwhile, the unlawful combatants we capture, many of whom have now been found to be factually innocent, are held indefinitely in Guantanamo and in secret prisons around the world.
You will all likely recall that strange moment a couple of months ago when General Peter Perfect publicly contradicted Rumsfeld on the issue of whether or not an American soldier or marine was honor bound to stop abuses if he or she saw them happening. Pace said yes, Rumsfeld said they should just be “reported.” Guess what?
…there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq’s Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.
But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.
This practice of leaving the detainees in place has raised concerns that detainees now face additional threats. It has also prompted fresh questions from the inspectors about whether the United States has honored a pledge by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that U.S. troops would attempt to stop inhumane treatment if they saw it.
[…]
The Iraqi official familiar with the joint inspections said detainees who are not moved to other facilities are left vulnerable. “They tell us, ‘If you leave us here, they will kill us,’ ” said the Iraqi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because, he said, he and other Iraqis involved with inspections had received death threats.
The U.S. official involved in the inspections, who would not be identified by name, described in an e-mail the abuse found during some of the visits since the Nov. 13 raid: “Numerous bruises on the arms, legs and feet. A lot of the Iraqis had separated shoulders and problems with their hands and fingers too. You could also see strap marks on some of their backs.”
“I was not in charge of the team who went to the sites. If so, I would have taken them out,” the U.S. official wrote, referring to the detainees. “We set a precedent and we were given guidance” from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “but for some reason it is not being followed.”
Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the commander of U.S. detention operations in Iraq, said in an interview, “I would strongly disagree with the statement that Americans are seeing cases of abuse and not doing anything.”
There are other quotes by generals saying that no abuse of any kind has been seen, while other military officers admit that there has been torture including burning with cigarettes, dislocated shoulders from hanging from ropes etc. And the beat(ings) go on.
The US government has lost all moral authority and no longer even theoretically adheres to a consistent set of principles. It indefinitely imprisons citizens and non-citizens alike as non-combatants, some of them innocent, saying the “battlefield” comprises the whole planet, including Smalltown USA. Yet we place our own non-combatants on the real battlefield and protect them by saying there is no legal system that applies them. The taxpayers of this country are paying for human trafficking. The administration created a series of secret prisons for the sole purpose of circumventing American laws. The government advances theories of executive authority that kings and dictators could appreciate. And we are now in the process of enabling the country we liberated from a tyrant to create tyrannical institutions of their own in the name of democratic government.
Every one of those things will make us less safe and yet the perpetrators insist that they are all done to protect us. And they are finally admitting that most of this is done purely for domestic political reasons.
Mark Kleiman finds that the rightwing bigotsphere has decided the secret prison story was an elaborate ruse to trap CIA leakers. There never were any prisons.
I urge everyone to click this link and read Matt Stoller’s post about this threat to your access to Hullabaloo and other blogs if the rapacious greedheads get their way. This is no drill. The internet providers are trying to dismantle Net Neutrality, which is the principle that bars companies from blocking content they don’t like. Up to now the internet has been open, allowing innovations like blogging to emerge on the same playing field as the commercial web sites and compete for readers without needing to pay money for the privilege. With the help of Republicans and certain misguided Democrats, corporate America is about to change all that if we don’t stop them.
This isn’t some arcane technological issue. It affects all of us who surf the internet. It means that the network providers will be able to make deals with certain companies to degrade or cut off your access to its competitors to give you an incentive to use their service. The providers complain that companies like Google or Yahoo are making big bucks and they should get a piece of the action. But the only thing they have to offer these companies is access — and the only way they can assure them that they will get their money’s worth is by assuring them that they can deliver customers. Right now, everybody competes openly for readers and customers. If this bill passes, that will change. Internet providers will be in the business of delivering customers to certain web sites and they will likely use all the technical capability they have to do it.
Watch this very short video for a simple explanation of how this will work. Read Matt’s post on this subject. And contact your representative.
As Matt says:
Can we win this fight? Yes, we can. Congress isn’t that set on giving away the internet. They just don’t understand the issues involved and don’t think anyone’s paying attention.
I have been remiss in not publicizing this issue until now. This may very well affect what I do. If a telco or cable company decides they don’t like this blog, for political or any other reasons, they could theoretically slow it down or block it so that their customers cannot see it. In this environment that is a very scary thing.
Keep in mind that when the Bush administration decided they wanted to shred the constitution and conduct warrantless wiretaps, they went to the telephone companies and the telephone companies said not a word about it.
Consider that the former owners of my own cable company and internet provider, Adelphia, were right wing religious zealots (and crooks) who refused to show certain content on their cable line-up. And consider that there are only a handful of high speed internet services even in a metropolis like Los Angeles.
If you think that this country would be better off politically with another corporate cartel deciding what information you can have access to, then don’t bother calling your congressman. But if the internet has become an important source of news and information that you believe is important to a functioning democracy, get on the horn.
Here is a map showing where members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee stand on this subject. As it turns out my own congressman, a member, has not yet committed. He is going to hear from me today. Perhaps those of you who live here in Southern California (or not) would like to call or fax one of his offices and let him know where you stand.
