Archive for the ‘democracy’ Category
Democracy is what is at stake
February 13, 2009The Internet is the last bastion of freely diverse communication. Radio and TV have been de-regulated (both officially and through lack of enforcement) to the point where differing viewpoints are squashed under a sea of propaganda. People running for public office are not afforded the air time that by law, the radio and tv stations were supposed to provide for free. The list of negative situations goes on and on.. and now that the Internet is popular, the rich information mongers who seek profit at the expense of Freedom, Democracy, and Public Welfare – have every intention of doing the same thing they’ve done with Radio and TV, to the Internet.. only worse, because of the advanced auditing capabilities of fully digital communications.
Currently on the Internet, news from around the world can be broadcast, seen, shared, commented on, and replied to.. news that DOESN’T appear on TV or Radio. Also on the internet, political candidates can post their speeches, policies and campaign messages in a variety of media, all potentially for free.. anyone wondering about what the various candidates are likely to stand for can view this material just as easily as any other candidate, regardless of how much money those candidates have at their disposal. The same is not true for TV and Radio.. or even often, in-person. Candidates are frequently now, barred from attending debates and rallies if they don’t have x amount of dollars to PAY for a seat in the debate.. which is horribly corrupt.
On the Internet however, all these viewpoints can still be expressed on a much more equal basis. Aside from the basic Internet connectivity (which really by now should be free for all U.S. citizens.. much easier to build than interstate highways) or hosting charges, there are no other mandatory costs associated with making your views available to others via the Internet. If you have connectivity or hosting through a provider that has a certain transfer rate, that rate is the same for all customers, no matter what the subject matter or content of their messages are. Many providers operate through advertising and allow “customers” to post their text, audio, or video for free.. for all to see at full speed, all the time.
So obviously, rich social oppressors who are friends with the rich owners of media and connectivity companies will want to squash this source of diversity, free expression, free reporting, and free democracy (voting can also happen over the internet!). And what better way to squash than through monetary restriction! More profit for their corporate pals and more oppression of opposing viewpoints for them. A win-win solution for them.. a big fat lose-lose for everyone else on the entire planet.
You at the FCC should also realize that your very jobs are tied into this as well. You’re appointed by elected officials. If the officials who appoint you are unable to compete with other candidates who have more money than they do, you’ll be out of a job as soon as a richer candidate comes into office… What’s more, if the political landscape is further made into a dictatorship, the role of the FCC will likely disappear completely.. it will just be the Media Broadcast division of Blackwater Homeland Security and will have no need for regulation of any kind.. merely heavily armed raids inflicted upon any persons who are deemed enemies of Broadcast Corporations.
Wouldn’t you like to keep your jobs and your role as a regulatory commission? Don’t you think that Democracy and Freedom are more than buzz words? Do you CARE about the future of this country? Do you realize that through the Internet is one of the last ways that the defining principles of our Constitution can be practiced?
Well for that to continue, we need some things called equal access, free speech, and what is now being called Net Neutrality. If you allow the telcos and the social oppressors to shut down freedom on the internet.. that’s it, game over. The only way freedom within U.S. borders can continue is through underground, grassroots efforts. The technological equivalent to the pony express. TV, Radio, and Internet will be utterly and completely useless for real communication, real news, and real democracy… because diverse viewpoints and diverse candidates will be shut out by the power of the dollar.
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Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet’s gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that don’t pay their added tolls.
This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination.
to Obama – Jobs and The Economy plan outline
November 22, 2008
Federal and State Departments for employing people directly
For centralized services mainly
Track everything to measure success
Loans, Tax Breaks, Grants, and Contracts for companies/people
For individuals and small regions
Guard against monopolies
Job Categories
Research – reviving old tech and finding new tech
Design – making what is built the best it can be
Non-toxic fabrication methods
Recyclable materials
Power/battery efficiency
Construction – manufacturing and building new solutions
Installation – putting new solutions directly into use
Retrofitting – replace innards with green tech, melt/recycle old tech
Maintenance – keeping centralized, business, and home solutions running
Trade – exporting services, technology, and equipment internationally
Job Industries
Power Generation from Wind, Solar, Thermal, and Tidal
Dual focus on centralized and home/business generators
Decentralization reduces transmission waste
Australian Power Tower Design
Cut subsidies for toxic dig & burn sources
coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear
Cut subsidies for ethanol crops
New Power Storage
Hyper-efficient batteries
Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Flywheels
Rain Collection
Electric Transportation
Bikes, Scooters, Cars, Trucks, Busses, Trains
Focus on fully Electric Vehicles
Power management intelligence
Retrofitting used cars with new fuel/engines
Cut subsidies for gas, diesel, and ethanol vehicles
Carbon Neutral Building
Green Materials
Energy Efficiency
Water conservation
Green Roofing
Grass, Garden, Function (rain to power conv.)
Water Purification
“Amphitheater” and other designs
Reduce waterway contamination
from farmland, industrial, and residential waste water
renegotiate/enforce pollution agreements
Greener General Consumer Goods
electronics, clothing, furniture, etc.
Organization and Transparency
Invest in transparency network for governmental funding tracking
Fund a universal citizen participation network
(of my design: swiftmouse.com/icare/ )
Education Jobs
Grade School
Federally fund public schools
Boost teacher salaries
Reduce administrator salaries
Reduce class sizes
Build more schools
150 students max
Replace outdated materials
Develop admin software to reduce waste/corruption
Broaden subjects taught
Increase support staff for students
Shift style from industrial-lecture to “coaching” model
Create more types of counselors
for students
for teachers
Focus on participation instead of assessment
Mandate paid leave for parents to participate certain days a week
Regulate out corporate influence
Increase food self-sufficiency
school gardens, cooking, and nutrition
College and University
Increase subsidies
Encourage lower tuitions
Offset textbook costs
Increase financial transparency
Reduce administrator pay
Increase instructor and assistant pay
Federal grants for more domestic students
Reduce interest rates for student loans
Build additional colleges
Promote continuing education
Trade School
Validate/Accredit certifications
Build some federal trade schools for industries in this outline
Adult School
Fund night-time working family education
Community promotions
Modernize courses
Increase teacher pay
Free School (“teach-in”)
Subsidy funding
Promotion grants
Certification and accreditation
Prison and Jail Schools
Create one or more in every jail and prison
both state and privatized
Fund and manage separately from prison/jail budget
Textbook publishing
Research and Develop electronic materials technology
Encourage younger authors to publish
Re-assess copyright law to make developing coursework easier/cheaper
Agriculture
Break up and auction off farming conglomerates
Fund small farmer buy-back programs
Subsidize smaller and independent farms
Encourage more employment and less equipment
Research and Educate for best practices
Encourage systems-based “grass farming” approach
Organic growing
Locally consumed
Humane livestock conditions and waste management
Increased crop/breed diversity
Gather and compile local/cultural wisdom
Employ ex-farmers as educators
Ban genetically modified food and open-air testing
Tax sale of nonreproducible hybrid seeds heavily
Create subsidies/policies for decentralized farming
Urban gardens
Commercial building roof gardens
“pea patch” community gardens
Organize farmers markets
Organize/assist CSA programs
Create a federal farmworker job type
Create federal farming exchange programs
land owners open specific acres for outside farmers to grow on
Expire patents on all “living systems”
Healthcare
Grow Medicare jobs and eligibility to replace Insurance for all ages
Treat all citizens automatically for basic care
consider most women’s treatments as basic care
Treat immigrants and foreigners with some conditions and charges
Normalize practitioner salaries for basic care
Offset cost of “optional” medical care with federal funding
Working class pays moderate amount
Rich pay more
Set up little state run clinics in communities without nearby hospitals
mobile and in unoccupied buildings
Develop open source tools for medical information management
Provide incentives for doctors and nurses to return to general practice
Ban Insurance companies from healthcare
Liquidate assets of healthcare portions of insurance companies
Replace with loans/savings programs for costly optional treatments
Employment Quality
Streamline federal employment hiring procedures
Cap executive pay maximums
Raise minimum wage
Increase vacation time
Increase national holidays
Reduce weekly hour maximums
Regulate against “crunch times”
Create incentives for co-op style businesses
Everyone is paid the same
Everyone has a vote for important decisions
Encourage “monkeysphere”-aware organization sizes
Ensure new programs reach the most marginalized populations
American indian, african american, latin american, immigrant
My Obama Cabinet Picks
November 20, 2008Here’s what I wrote in to Obama’s transition site regarding picks for the upcoming administration’s cabinet appointees.
White House Chief of Staff
Dennis Kucinich – Senator
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
Al Gore – Speaker
Director of the Office of Management and Budget
Ralph Nader – Senator
Director of the National Drug Control Policy
Cynthia McKinney – Green Party
United States Trade Representative
Noam Chomsky – Writer, Analyst
Secretary of State
Michael Frente – Musician
Secretary of the Treasury
Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia
Secretary of Defense
Jeremy Scahill – Reporter
Attorney General
Steven Shapiro – ACLU
Secretary of the Interior
Lawrence Lessig – Creative Commons
Secretary of Agriculture
Michael Pollan – Reporter, Writer
Secretary of Commerce
Naomi Klein – Writer, Reporter
Secretary of Labor
Mary Beth Maxwell – American Rights at Work
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Eric Schlosser – Writer
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Jesse Jackson – Speaker
Secretary of Transportation
Chris Paine – Filmmaker
Secretary of Energy
Cathy Zoi – ACP
Secretary of Education
Nicholas Negroponte – OLPC Maker
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
John Kerry – Senator
Secretary of Homeland Security
Barbara Boxer – Senator
to Obama – Chief Technology Officer
November 11, 2008The internet has the potential to be an amazing means to right the wrongs of the past and remain an agile society faced with resource depletion.
Network transmission must be kept free, open, and unbiased – that makes the rest possible. National effort must be put into solving some of the employment crisis by hiring people to build free access hardware, educational materials, independent media, governmental transparency, and bring it all back together with Democracy 2.0 online.
Power that with electricity from “green economy” energy infrastructure and you’ve got a bright future for this country.
For various reasons, these would be my picks for CTO in order of priority:
Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons
Brewster of Internet Archive
Craig Newmark of Craigslist
Rob Malda of Slashdot.org
to Obama – my vision of the future
November 9, 2008
As for actions, they can be prioritized into the following categories:
1. Diverting funding from the absurdly rich to the working class.
2. Turning our foreign actions from aggression to healing.
3. Holding the crimes of the Bush administration to account.
4. Healing our population and planet.
5. Reforming our government to fully represent us.
My expanded action list can be found at ihoby.com/plan but I can also summarize further in future posts.
1. Diverting Funds – Bankers and Billionaire Corporations have been receiving free handouts in the form of subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks funded by the hard work and tax dollars taken from the majority of Americans. This has gone too far for too long. While Americans are increasingly prudent and in need, they are being neglected by the collusion of business and government setting disaster capitalism to run amok. Business is treating government and government is rewarding business.. this exclusive relationship is poison for this nation’s people, land, sea, and air. It’s a poison that has built slow but it’s effects are unmistakable in causing this financial crisis and climate change. Trickle-down economics has been proven time and time again to never work. Trickle-up however, obviously works very well.
The rich have this power because we are allowing them to keep it – either from kindness, obedience, or ignorance. The time has long since past when we need to claim our eminent domain on the hoardings of the rich, to cut off their supply of corporate entitlement programs, corporate welfare, corporate socialism. They have enough money to be just fine while we route our federal spending back into America’s communities:
– bail out the families facing foreclosure, make their mortgages be affordable
– start the Green Economy with jobs building wind and solar generators
– supplement medical costs to make health care affordable
– increase the minimum wage and lower taxes for smaller businesses
All this and more can be funded by cutting off the corporate free lunch and requiring the richest CEOs and bankers to pay their fair share.
2. Foreign Actions – Our wars of aggression into Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) are clearly both internationally illegal and extremely immoral. They were started out of a series of dysfunctional world views and need to be ended immediately so that pacification, reconciliation, and healing can bring about the changes and improvements that war can never, ever accomplish.
– remove combat from countries we’ve invaded, replace with infrastructure services
– cut aid to countries who are committing atrocities
– halt all contracts to mercenary, service, and construction profiteers
– cut spending on military procurement programs
3. Holding Accountable – Many many people in and well outside of the Bush administration are clearly guilty of some involvement in War Crimes, Treason, Crimes Against Humanity, and other more minor but serious breaches of law and moral turpitude. Since these crimes were not thwarted at the time or dealt with swiftly after through impeachment – they’ll have to be treated to justice slowly and carefully over the next few years. The perpetrators of these modern atrocities have done these deeds in our name, with our flag, and they must not be allowed to continue their evil deeds under new titles.
– set Congress to investigate War Crimes, Invasion Pretext, War Contractors and Mercenaries, Election Crimes, 9/11 “false flag” evidence, Domestic Spying, etc.
– prosecute perpetrators of crimes being investigated in federal and international courts
– draft regulation to help keep these tragic atrocities from happening again
4. Healing – The endeavor of medicine should simply not be run by organizations who’s primary goal is to maximize profit. That is unfortunately what we have and that is why our medical system is failing to meet the needs of Americans. We also have industries trampling across our fragile earth in a reckless surge of exploitation and pollution. Our natural systems, our global ecosystems cannot handle this level of abuse. We must enact ambitious programs to provide free healthcare for all citizens, affordable healthcare for all people, and a livable planet for ourselves and our successors.
– build a free, universal healthcare system
– dismantle the insurance companies and replace them with assistance programs
– ban the building of any new “dig and burn” plants
– build “green” sources of energy
– shut down the existing “dig and burn” plants
5. Progressive Reform – The Bush administration has been the most secretive, corrupt, criminal, deadly, and unrepresentative office ever. They have privatized, militarized, and marginalized more aspects of our country than ever should have been. All of this has to stop, all of it must be reversed. We want a government who is accountable, transparent, just, peaceful, respectful, and receptive.. a government who spends our money wisely and truthfully.
– do all of the previously stated action items
– expand citizen access to continually participate through democracy
– regulate yourselves
– solve problems instead of creating or exacerbating them
– declassify, declassify, declassify
Palin puff piece and ignorant comments
September 15, 2008Regarding lost elections, when there is significant fraud in 2001 and 2004:
– ballot miscounts, caging lists, and supreme court “arrangement” in 2001
– voter harassment both via phone and while waiting in line to vote
– voting machine shortages in poor neighborhoods
– voting machine “glitches” that always favored republicans
– central tabulators that were wildly different from exit polls for the first time since they’ve been recorded
– programmers hired by republicans to write programs for swapping voting totals
– absentee ballots from soldiers overseas being thrown out
– and these caging lists consisting primarily of names common among black and hispanic democrat voters (which, when found and checked for accuracy by county officials, turned out to 95% WRONG on listing people ineligible to vote)…
..well, there’s certainly cause to cry foul. There is also plenty of reason to question how well our votes will be accounted for in this year’s election. Most of these insecure, compromised, or buggy voting machines and central tabulators are still being used. The caging lists are still growing, being filled with even more names of people who have every right to vote. Polling stations have not been given more resources. The people who harassed voters were never found and stopped.
If the loss had been fair and square in either case then we’d have no one to blame but ourselves. But when there is so much thwarting of fair elections by the people in charge of providing them, the burden of responsibility rests overwhelmingly with the cheaters.. cheaters who have used their false-win to undermine everything that America is supposed to stand for – turning us more rapidly than ever from a nation of Freedom, Justice, Opportunity, and the pursuit of Happiness into a nation of Oppression, Secrecy, Occupational War, Torture, Neglect, and rampant Corruption.
All of the major problems being faced by the US: Iraq, Afghanistan, Torture, Katrina, Gas Prices, Mortgage Crisis, Lending Crisis, Food Prices/Shortages, Climate Change, Federal Overspending, National Deficit, Outsourcing, Low Wages, Unfair taxes, etc. etc… these are all present or worse from the direct decisions made by Republicans on behalf of corporations and other sources of privately held wealth.
They don’t care about the future and they certainly don’t care about you. They think of you as a national resource, something to be neglected and exploited… like a feedlot animal, a strip mine, or an oil well.
Palin is no different in that respect, in that she has no respect for life or dignity beyond her own inner circle. She sees herself as a Christian Soldier.. a General even, ordering all women to be mothers – be they poor, abused, raped, or otherwise – so they may give birth to fodder for endless war and corporate servitude. She believes it to be God’s will that the rich be powerful and pampered; and that the Earth and its poor are here to be neglected, controlled, and exploited for the whims of the powerful.
In Palin’s vision of the world, every mother is on her own.. as is every child, once born. When they leave the womb, their right to life and happiness ends.
Then in her ideals, your children may be allowed to starve on the street, die of a preventable illness, treated as a criminal, tried as an adult, put on death row, sent to war, accused of being a terrorist, abducted and held in secrecy, tortured, deported, harassed, or drown in the aftermath of a hurricane.
No help from the government.. because helping a nation’s residents is not what McCain, Palin and the rest of them see the role of government to be.