It seems so rare to find anyone of integrity and purpose among the ruling elite of our nation today. We have become a democratic state of cynics, ruled by cynics. We see ulterior motives in every action, every vote, and every speech. The result of this cynicism is that our representatives, our nation’s leaders, believe that provincial notions such as law, justice, and equality are simply maudlin platitudes to be thrown about between kissing infants on the campaign trail. So when integrity rears its head within the stinking milieu of our national politics it is literally stunning to behold.
The past few weeks have been filled with consternation for those of us involved in telecommunications and civil liberties issues. This week, two of the major issues came to a head: FISA reform and Telecom Immunity. Senator Reid (D) announced last week that he would violate Senate traditions, ignoring Senator Dodd’s hold, and bring the highly flawed Bush administration FISA bill, S.2248, to a vote. Aside from expanding warrantless, unsupervised, surveillance, the bill would grant retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies which may have broken the law repeatedly over the past six years. Senator Dodd vowed he would filibuster the bill.
While numerous Democrats claimed they opposed the bill and telecom immunity — including Sen. Reid– few actually stood to oppose it. Sens. Clinton, Biden and Obama found they could not leave the diners and palm pressing of Iowa to return to Washington to perform the job they were elected to do. My own Senator, Durbin (D), refused to answer my inquires or discuss his position on the bill. But Senator Dodd sped from the campaign trail to defend the principles of the fourth amendment and equality under the law. While I listened to the floor debate on Monday, I was both infuriated, by the obvious mendacity of those standing for the bill, and inspired by the integrity of Sen. Dodd and those few who stood with him. In the end, Senator Reid was forced to withdraw the bill until next year. For those of us involved in this issue, it was as close to a moment of true democracy that we have seen in ages. Nearly magical.
There are a number of things I generally avoid talking about because they force me to apply logical arguments in opposition to irrational, racist, ignorant, or hateful rhetoric. But in today’s media landscape –where even the most irrational arguments are accepted, if they tow the authoritarian line– it seems that thoughtful people must continue to battle against stupidity. While there is much stupidity around now a days, Tom Tancredo has managed to rise above the extraordinary levels set by his blowhard compatriots this week and earn a heartfelt “STFU, you ignorant jackass” from me. In defending his decision not to participate in the Univision GOP debate, tonight, Tancredo issued a statement in which he asserts,
“It is the law that to become a naturalized citizen of this country you must have knowledge and understanding of English, including a basic ability to read, write, and speak the language,” Tancredo said. “So what may I ask are our presidential candidates doing participating in a Spanish speaking debate? Pandering comes to mind.”
According to the Immigration and Nationality Act an immigrant must show the “ability to read, write, and speak English” in order to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Additionally, they must show “a favorable disposition towards the United States.”
So, Tancredo is asserting that if you are a naturalized citizen and you don’t speak english you’re not only breaking the law but you are unamerican. He is suggesting that multi-lingualism is something new and frightening. Since the first immigrants arrived in this country they have brought with them their own cultures and languages. My great-grandmother –a naturalized citizen– never did converse in english, preferring her native polish. My great-grandfather ran for councilman and served his constituents in their native tongue. Was he illegal, Tom? My grandfather, who served in the Pacific as a mechanic on Bougainville and other hellish hotspots, was completely bi-lingual and chose to live in a neighborhood where polish was the everyday language of commerce and life. Was he unamerican, Tom?
There is nothing new or different about immigrant groups retaining their language for two or three generations. As a boy, when I visited my grandfather’s house, I remember seeing the local newspapers in polish, hearing the local polish radio stations, and watching the badly dubbed polish TV — in fact, the first time I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” it had been dubbed into polish. The nature of media is to serve its audience, to pander to them in some way to get their attention. It is assinine to assert that an immigrant is somehow less American because they have not fully discarded their native language.
A little history lesson may be beneficial for for Tom, and his followers. The idea of a national language was broached early on in the days of our republic, it was dismissed as impractical and pointless. The leading languages our founding fathers considered for their new country, Tom, were french and greek — with some calls for hebrew. English, it seems, was too much associated with the monarchy they had just fought to free themselves from. By not choosing a national language, our early statesmen and thinkers allowed America to do with language what it does best with all things: assimilate, adapt, and grow. If we were to characterize American english as a person we would have to characterize it as (with some apologies to my feminist friends) a happy slut. Our language gleefully takes vocabulary where ever it finds it –a greek prefix here, a latinate suffix there, a spanish noun, a turkish title, it doesn’t care. English has grown in use around the world not due to US military might, but because it adapts and remains relevant. English is never lacks for vocabulary to describe the world. Why? Because it accepts all comers and adapts itself to the world. People, Tom, do not assimilate countries and languages do –otherwise they become irrelevant.
Language is not what defines us as Americans. The english language is simply a way in which we express our culture. The question of what it means to be an American goes back to the earliest days of the original colonies. It’s a question which is at the heart of American literature and art. To some degree, Americanism can be defined as the ability to survive in a new land away from home and loved ones, to seek a better economic and civic life for yourself and your loved ones, to define a new country as it defines you. This has never been a easy process, as bigotry and hatred have always followed newcomers. But one would think that our country would have learned by now that it is those who dare to leave all, or those who standup against the injustices of their migration, which bring to this country the courage which is so desperately needed.
I’ve been meaning to write about all economic lunacy perpetrated by the Federal Reserve for sometime, but this quote from this weekend’s OPEC summit just floored me:
On Friday, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, warned that the dollar could “collapse” if the US currency was mentioned in the declaration.
His remarks – made in what was supposed to be a closed ministerial meeting – were accidentally broadcast to reporters.
Al-Faisal is stating that the dollar is is in such a precarious position that even mentioning that OPEC needs to consider the effects of a low dollar on its members could cause the currency’s collapse. This would lead to outright panic here in America, as well as many of the oil producing states, such as Saudi Arabia, which use dollars as the basic pricing mechanism for oil. Because of the fall in the dollar’s value –44% since the last OPEC meeting 7 years ago– a number of the oil states are calling for greater oil prices to offset the devaluation. This, of course, will result in deepening the nascent recession here at home –which will, no doubt, result in the Fed cutting baseline rates again, thus, causing greater devaluation of the dollar.
In other words, under current Fed policy, we’re screwed. The Fed, however, sees it differently. By cutting baseline rates they are funding speculative investing, and keeping the equities and option markets (artificially) high. The Fed seems to be counting on foreign interests to keep the dollar from collapsing. The belief, seems to be, is that China, which holds around $1 trillion in US bonds, and the oil states of OPEC cannot afford to see the US currency collapse, and will continue to invest in dollars. But this is a strategy of russian roulette. Eventually, these states will decide they can no longer afford the losses on the dollar and begin to reinvest elsewhere –China, earlier this year began selling off US bonds at an alarming rate.
Last week President Bush charged congressional Democrats with spending money like “a teenager with a new credit card.” This from a man whose administration shipped360 tons of US dollars to Iraq with no accounting or oversite in place. This from a man who has presided over the greatest increase in national debt in US history; an in increase in spending which has had no positive effects for the majority of Americans. When Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson borrowed, they did so to try to enrich the American people. This president has done so simply out of hubris, and has enriched only the wealthy. The American people have found their wages stagnated at levels lower then those 30 years ago. They have found themselves with crumbling infrastructure, a crumbling military, and an inept and crony filled regulatory landscape to protect them.
I don’t generally believe in grand conspiracy theories, but, if I did, I could easily see one here. Thanks to Bush’s tax cuts, and outrageous spending on a never ending war and ‘homeland security,’ coupled with the “spend it now” attitude of the Federal Reserve we find ourselves perilously close to an economic meltdown. When one looks around, one can easily see the ‘free market’ wolves waiting in the wings. They will cry out that the problem with the US is that it spends too much on social programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, and others; that government is too inefficient and we need to privatize more and let the markets run without restraints and regulations. The fact is, they will be responding to a crises of their own making.
This Sunday, 11/18/07, the NorthShore chapter of the Illinois Green Party will be showing Ian Inaba’s film American Blackout at our coffeehouse. The film documents the practices of fraud and voter caging which have occurred in recent elections. There will be a number of Illinois Green candidates attending the showing, as well as people involved in recent suits launched against the Federal Election Commission. We expect an interesting and enlightening discussion following the showing. The film will begin around 4:00 Pm at 1813 Dempster, Evanston, IL. There is, of course, no admission charge — though we’d appreciate it if you bought a cup of coffee or a snack.
I have been asked by some journalists and others to comment on the recent actions taken against Comcast and their policy of interfering with peer-to-peer application traffic. Of course, the problem with journalists and policy makers is that they don’t want to understand the real issues involved; they simply want to setup a black and white polemic and decide which side is right. In this case, everyone is wrong.
The whole thing began about a month ago when the AP reported that Comcast was blocking traffic associated with BitTorrent, GNUtella, and other file-sharing applications. In a semantic parsing that would please even the most jaded pentagon technocrat, Comcast denied that they were blocking any traffic. In actuality, Comcast wasn’t really blocking traffic; they were simply imitating traffic in order to get the sharing computers to ignore the data sent between them. This approach is quite a bit sleazier then actually blocking the traffic, as it forces the hosts to keep establishing their connections to one another. Nonetheless, the die was cast, and consumer groups filed a complaint with the FCC and called for congress to impose Net Neutrality regulations. Meanwhile, hordes of libertarian network operators began complaining about how the government shouldn’t interfere with how they run their networks. Three days ago the story got bigger when a California resident filed suite against Comcast for breach of contract, arguing that Comcast does not deliver the promised Internet speeds it advertises, and actively interferes with the performance of certain applications.
The issues and problems surrounding this debacle are an outgrowth of the severely flawed telecommunications policies of the FCC and the federal government’s failure to deal with those bad policy choices. Comcast should to have the right to regulate traffic allocation on their own network. The nature of the HFC architecture employed by cable Internet providers means that limited bandwidth is shared within local distribution areas. This means that if your neighbor is using huge amounts of bandwidth to download an episode of Lost, there is less overall available bandwidth for you. Cable operators want to ensure that burst bandwidth is available to users, so they set the cable modem’s overall limiting quite high (usually between 4 Mb/s & 8 Mb/s); however, this leads to the problem of active users consuming large amounts of bandwidth for extended periods. In the case of peer-to-peer applications, Comcast was trying to ensure that there was excess burst bandwidth available to more casual users of common Internet applications. However, Comcast should have informed their customers that they were limiting specific traffic and applications. By not doing so, they operated in duplicitous and deceitful manner. This is a clear case of Comcast wanting to have it all: they want to pick up subscribers by touting high bandwidth numbers and then limit the users who actually use the bandwidth they’re paying for.
To allow the federal government, however, to dictate what is valid network traffic could lead to disastrous consequences. To be adaptable to the ever changing applications and protocols on the Internet any legislation would need to be written broadly. This could easily lead to situations in which it becomes technically illegal for service providers to mitigate spam, intervene in a virus outbreak, or prioritize voice or video traffic. For many years the Internet community of operators and developers have done an exceptional job of regulating and expanding the applications and data on the Internet. This was primarily due to the need of numerous network operators being forced to work together to exchange data and adhere to standards. Recently this has started to change; however, as the number of autonomous carriers has begun to shrink. This has placed business pressures on the remaining networks to try to keep more traffic and services on their networks and worry less about exchanging data with others.
The overall problem is that there is a lack of competition in the marketplace. If subscribers had multiple choices of broadband providers they could choose a provider based upon their application needs. Network Neutrality only becomes an issue because last mile monopolies have been encouraged by the FCC. With the loss of data line sharing requirements for copper, coax, and fiber, consumers are left with very few choices between Internet providers. Additionally, the deregulation of last mile data facilities means that no company can enter into the market to satisfy customer demands. For instance, a service provider who wishes to target peer-to-peer users cannot, economically, gain access to the copper or coax wire entering your home. This means that consumers will always be tied to one or two service providers and their policies. If competition was encouraged in this market, questions of Network Neutrality would not even arise. Consumers would simply change providers from those who do not satisfy their needs to those which do. The FCC, with their unique brand of logic, keeps insisting that fewer providers means more competition and better products for consumers. In any other market this logic would be dismissed as laughable: do we really believe we would have better automobiles if there were only two or three manufacturers? But in the world of telecommunications this ass-backwards logic seems to be accepted as gospel –proselytized with massive political contributions.
Without re-regulation of last mile facilities the only hope consumers have is Network Neutrality legislation. Network operators and admins should work with lawmakers to try to ensure that any regulations are adaptable enough to address their concerns. If operators, and the companies they work for, simply continue to oppose Neutrality regulation they will soon find themselves having to interpret poorly written regulation and hope that no one complains when they get it wrong. This is simply a case where consumers are not going to stand for biased monopolies, and the monopolies will have to get used to operating in a more neutral fashion.
One of the great things about running an independent coffeehouse is the variety of people you meet and the movements you become aware of. A year or so ago, one of our regular customers convinced us to become an exchange point and merchant for Liberty Dollars. The Liberty Dollar is a private currency which is backed by, and minted with, precious metals. Carol and I saw the dollars as a type of local currency and worked to get other local business owners to sign up as merchants. This afternoon our original Liberty Dollar customer came by, somewhat panicked, and took all the literature and promotional materials from our shop. He simply told Carol, something bad had happened. It turns out that federal agents raided Liberty Dollar’s headquarters, in Evansville, IN, this morning and seized all their assets –including gold, silver, and platnium bullion–, its records, and its minting dies. At this point, the Western District of North Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office, which issued the warrants, has not detailed any specific charges against the Liberty Dollar.
There is nothing inherently illegal with private or local currencies — in fact the United States has a long history of alternative currency models. Private currencies, however, cannot be represented as legal, government backed, tender. This point was always stressed to any of our Liberty Dollar users. Most of our users, however, didn’t care, as they saw the coins — made of silver — as having traditional fungible value. Personally, I have some issues with metallic currency standards, and a number of the folks with Liberty Dollar and I had some heated discussions about the topic. However, I always found the Liberty Dollar people to be very thoughtful, well informed, and committed. So I would be surprised to find that there was any real illegality occurring within Liberty Dollar itself.
It does seem odd that the government would choose this time to act against the Liberty Dollar, and in such a heavy-handed fashion. It may be that some in the government are concerned about the perceived value of the US dollar –presently trading at 1.47€ and $1.02 to the Canadian dollar, a drop of 50% in the past 9 months. If even a small percentage of Americans began to loose confidence in the dollar and began to adopt a commodity based currency, the result could be disastrous: we could easily find ourselves in a period of hyper-inflation and economic depression. Of course, eliminating commodity currencies does not prevent this from happening anyway. If such a downturn would occur it would be the result of the disastrous monetary policies followed for the past seven years, far more then it would be the fault of the Liberty Dollar.
Today is Armistice day - Veteran’s Day. A day to try to remember all those of sacrificed their lives and more for their countries. It is a truism that as time passes, we forget the conflicts of the past: the reason’s they were fought and the people who sacrificed for them. For how long will we remember today’s conflicts? How long until we repeat the same mistakes over?
It seems so rare to find anyone of integrity and purpose among the ruling elite of our nation today. We have become a democratic state of cynics, ruled by cynics. We see ulterior motives in every action, every vote, and every speech. The result of this cynicism is that our representatives, our nation’s leaders, believe that provincial notions such as law, justice, and equality are simply maudlin platitudes to be thrown about between kissing infants on the campaign trail. So when integrity rears its head within the stinking milieu of our national politics it is literally stunning to behold.
FISA, justice, telecom
