James McEnteer : How Intolerance Is Poisoning the Well

Art by Alice Brickner / Getty / Big Questions Online.
Deadly discourse:
How intolerance poisons our well

Most public 'discussion' consists of one side lobbing insults at the other from across an unbridgeable divide. There is little genuine give and take.

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2012

Intolerance runs rampant in American public discourse. Blog and article comment threads degenerate quickly into insult and abuse. The most innocuous opinions about almost anything can provoke shrill, scathing attacks. Even fact-based news accounts excite condemnation as biased or irrelevant.

Deep reserves of anger apparently abide in the U.S. population, ready to explode into violent rhetoric at the smallest transgression -- real or imagined -- against the responder’s hobbyhorse, be it guns, religion, sexuality, race, the environment,or whatever else.

Three related phenomena largely account for this inflammatory incivility: a meretricious media, more desperate than ever to survive; irresponsible religious and political figures, willing to enunciate increasingly extreme and outrageous views for high-profile notoriety; and the nature of the internet itself, the most powerful and pervasive system of communication yet devised.

The internet connects everyone to everyone else, conjuring global intimacy. Thanks to cell phones and YouTube, we can all be “in the moment” when a woman lets fly a racist rant in the London underground or a mob storms a public square in Madrid or Cairo or Oakland or a crime occurs somewhere on the planet. Every place appears as near or far as any other, here on our screen.

Modern technology can summon up flash mobs or instant wads of cash to protest or abet incipient events. We can weigh in instantly to “like” or condemn what we see or hear, calling forth responses to our own responses, ad infinitum.

Aided by the anonymity of user names, the level of interchange on comment threads trends downward over time, not up, producing more heat than light. Our sense of familiarity, however illusory, with events or newsmakers, breeds a primal contempt that tends to focus personal and political frustrations into immoderate attacks that in turn provoke others.

Irresponsible political heavyweights also demean our discourse. Mitch McConnell declared that the top priority of Congressional Republicans was to make sure Obama is a one-term president. That’s a pathetic partisan agenda for a so-called major party leader, considering the many challenges we face as a nation and a species.

Of course such a lame and limited ambition is far easier to accomplish than trying to restore employment, boost the economy, reduce military spending, promote environmental health, improve education, etc. etc. But McConnell and his ilk are not really out to better the lot of average Americans. Their goal is to serve their sponsors and masters, who enrich and enable them.

Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham rail against Muslims and homosexuals from pulpits they call “Christian,” though the blind hatred they flaunt contradicts the love and tolerance Jesus Christ actually espoused. Phony Christian bigots like Graham and Robertson -- and the Westboro Baptist Church -- poison our atmosphere and disinhibit their followers to commit acts of violence.

These false prophets spew enmity and discord in the name of religion, like the killers of abortion doctors who consider themselves “pro life,” a murderous irony they have not the eyes to see.

Media feed on conflict as much as the Pentagon does and, like the military, may sometimes provoke it for their own ends. To whip up interest in the “information” they peddle for (decreasing) profit, media amplify the divisive words of bigots, fools, and scoundrels (with someone like Robertson, they get a three-fer) and then play up the predictably outraged responses.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network and numerous publications give platforms to political zombies like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, to rouse the faithful and enflame opponents. Murdoch resuscitated Gingrich after his well-deserved political demise, granting him an artificial afterlife.

Murdoch’s largesse enabled the foredoomed Gingrich campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The ethically impaired former House Speaker made over-the-top remarks that provided provocative headlines, enlivening the deadly primary process, feeding the Murdoch machine.

A recent British government report declared Murdoch unfit to lead a major corporation. But who will stop him? Murdoch is a major polluter who ought to be fined for degrading our atmosphere.

Like the irresponsible political and religious figures they interview, media “personalities” feel a need to top one another or themselves, to raise the decibel level to maintain their visibility. These talking heads give their fans permission to speak and behave outrageously. After he shot an unarmed black teenager to death, George Zimmerman sought out Fox stalwart Sean Hannity for counsel. Why?

The Trayvon Martin killing has become a flashpoint for issues from gun rights to racial profiling. Martin and Zimmerman turned into instant symbols and martyrs for different points of view. Some public figures donned hoodies in support of Martin, while one company does a brisk business marketing rifle targets with a hooded figure in their bull’s eye.

Events like the Trayvon Martin murder are difficult to discuss -- or even to perceive -- on their own terms, devoid of the biased context into which such incidents “fit.” Our preconceptions determine the meanings of everything that is said or done.

Most public “discussion” consists of one side lobbing insults at the other from across an unbridgeable divide. There is little genuine give and take. Thesis and antithesis rarely move toward any synthesis. They merely reenforce entrenched beliefs. Media promote and thrive on this sort of futile noise and conflict, a circus that distracts from the decreasing abundance of bread, enabling business and politics to proceed as usual with minimum interference.

Our lack of civility has consequences. Bullying -- including cyber-bullying -- of school-aged children by their peers (and in some cases, the parents of those peers) causes terrible harm, including suicide and murder. This trickle-down meanness merely follows the examples set by public figures in media and politics who belittle others for their religious preferences or sexual orientation.

With fewer defenses, our children are more likely to suffer the sometimes fatal effects of our toxic emotional environment before the rest of us. Mentally unstable individuals like Jared Loughner, who killed six people and injured 14 in Tucson in 2011, also absorb the free-floating anger around them without a clear sense of what it signifies or where to direct it.

Even adults in traditionally calm corners of this world, such as the fanatical anti-Muslim Norwegian who murdered 77 of his countrymen to avoid multicultural contamination, can be twisted by the overheated sentiments of foaming politicians, amplified by media. Who will take responsibility for such consequences?

There is a high price to be paid for allowing violent, hateful speech to predominate over more rational forms of public discourse. I fear we have only begun to pay it.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Machines Change, Our Work Remains the Same

Early computer. Image from Corbis-Bettmann.
The limits of internet activism:
Machines change, the work remains the same

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2011

When I first got involved in left/radical political organizing in the 1990s, I don’t recall any of us referring to our efforts as “phone activism” or calling ourselves “fax activists.” A friend who started organizing in the early 1960s assured me that he never heard the term “mimeograph activism” in those days. We used telephones, fax machines, and mimeographs in our organizing work, but the machines didn’t define our work and we didn’t spend a lot of time arguing about the implications of using them.

Today the terms “online activism” and “internet activist” are common, as are discussions about the positive and negative effects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on left/progressive political organizing. (See interview with Joss Hands on "Activism in a digital culture.”)

Is CMC so dramatically different, or is the left simply caught up in the larger culture’s obsession with life online? I will start with observations that likely are not controversial, and then step back to frame the question in ways that may not be widely accepted.

Two basic points:

First, CMC makes possible the distribution of information to a larger number of people at lower financial cost than previous technologies (though the ecological cost of a communication technology that creates highly toxic e-waste and consumes enormous amounts of energy may make this technology prohibitively expensive in the long run) and allows for easier and faster feedback from the recipients of that information.

Second, while the technology is too new for definitive assertions, there is a seductive quality to CMC that leads some groups and individuals to spend too much of their time and resources online, even when there’s ample reason to suspect that expense of energy isn’t productive.

Two corollary cautions:

First, political information is not political action. Being able to distribute more information more widely more quickly does not automatically lead to people acting on that information. The information must be presented in ways that lead people to believe they should act, and there must be vehicles for that action.

Second, what appears to be wasting time online is not always a waste of time. Just as we solidify bonds with people face-to-face by chatting about the mundane aspects of our lives, we sometimes do that online. Political organizing -- like all of life -- includes such interaction.

So, it’s true that the things we do with a computer online are often like the things we do, or did, with telephone calls, faxes, and mimeographs; the question is how to most effectively apportion our time, energy, and resources on these machines as part of a larger organizing strategy. In that sense, deciding whether to focus on an email or a door-knocking campaign is a straightforward calculation about resources and the likely outcomes of using those resources in different ways.

It’s also true that we should be more critically self-reflective about our use of computers for political organizing, lest we be seduced by how productive we imagine we are being online simply because of the speed and reach of CMC. Because an email campaign can reach more people quickly, we are tempted to believe it will lead to the more effective outcomes, though the patient work of door-knocking may yield better long-term results if it builds deeper support that endures.

As our organizing tools change rapidly, these calculations of the likely success of different tactics are not always easy to make, but they are relatively simple questions to formulate. Much more vexing are questions about the complex changes in the world in which we are organizing.

We like to say the internet has changed everything, perhaps in as dramatic a fashion as the printing press changed the act of reading. But the world of the 15th century was not changing at anything like the speed that the world is changing today. We need to think about the “everything” in which our email messages are bouncing around. We need to be clearer about the scale of the problems we face, the scope of the changes necessary to address the problems, and the time available to us for creating meaningful change. To illustrate these issues, I’ll talk about the state of the ecosphere.


Scale of the problems

For many years activists focused on “environmental problems,” offering ways that humans could adjust the way we live to cope with problems of dirty air, dirty water, and dirty land. The assumption behind those projects was that an environment consistent with long-term human flourishing was possible within existing economic, social, and political systems.

That assumption was wrong, and evidence continues to pile up that the ecosphere cannot sustain billions of people when even a fraction of them live at First-World levels. Look at any crucial measure of the health of our ecosphere -- groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity -- and the news is bad and getting worse.

And we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of oil with no viable replacement fuels. And we can’t forget global warming and climate instability. Add all that up and it’s not a pretty picture, especially when we abandon the technological fundamentalism of the culture and stop believing in fantasy quick fixes for deeply rooted problems.

Our troubles are not the result of the bad behavior within the systems in which we live but of the systems themselves. We have to go to the root and acknowledge that human attempts to control and dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.


Scope of the changes

So, we either abandon the industrial model of development based on the concentrated energy in fossil fuels or we face a significant human die-off in a grim future that is within view. Abandoning that industrial model means a sudden shift in human living arrangements that would be unprecedented in history. We have to redefine what it means to live a good life, dramatically lowering our energy use and reducing our expectations about the material goods we consume.

That means that we not only won’t be getting a new flat-screen television, but that we won’t be amusing ourselves with new Hollywood movies and TV. It means not only that we won’t be able to buy an SUV, but that we won’t be using cars for routine personal transportation. It means a whole lot less of everything, and such changes in living arrangements are impossible within capitalism.

While capitalism is not the only unsustainable economic system in history, it is the system that structures the global economy today, and it has to be scrapped. If a transition to a sustainable economy is possible, it also means we will have to abandon the nation-state as the primary unit of political organization and find functional political systems at a much lower level.

These changes in economic, social, and political systems mean significant changes in how we understand the nature of the self, the relationship to other humans, and the human place in the larger living world. When we redefine what it means to live a good life, we will be defining what it means to be human.


Time available

No one can predict the trajectory of a full-scale ecological collapse, in part because it is complex beyond human understanding and in part because how we act in the present can affect that trajectory. But even without the capacity to predict with precision, we have to make our best guesses to guide our choices in organizing.

The best-case scenario is that we have a few decades to accomplish these changes. The worst-case scenario is that we are past the point of no return and that the systems in place will exhaust the ecosphere’s capacity to sustain human life as we know it before we can adjust.

If ecological collapse is either coming soon or already in motion, then traditional organizing strategies may be obsolete. The problem is not just that existing economic, social, and political systems are incapable of producing a more just and sustainable world, but that there isn’t time available for working out new ways of understanding our self, others, and the world. There is no reason to assume that the non-human world will wait while we slowly come to terms with all this; the ecosphere isn’t going to conform to our timetable.


Where this leaves us

Though I made no claims to special predictive powers, two things seem likely to me: (1) All human activity will become dramatically more local in the coming decades, and (2) Without coordinated global action to change course, there is little hope for the survival of human society as we know it.

When I offer such an assessment, I am routinely accused of being hysterical and apocalyptic. But I don’t feel caught up in an emotional frenzy, and I am not preaching a dramatic ending of the human presence on Earth. Instead, I’m taking seriously the available evidence and doing my best to make sense of that evidence to guide my political choices. I believe we all have a moral obligation to do that.

As a result, I have recommitted to local organizing that aims mainly to strengthen institutions and networks on the ground where I live, rooted in a belief that those local connections will be more important than ever in coming decades. At the same time, I try to maintain and extend connections to like-minded people around the world, hoping that those connections can contribute to the possibility of coordinated global action.

In short, I am trying to become more tribal and more universal at the same time, recognizing there is no guarantee that of a smooth transition or success in the long run.

In these efforts, I engage in a considerable amount of computer-mediated communication. Whenever it’s feasible, I favor direct human communication in face-to-face settings, on the assumption that local networks will be strengthened by such communication in ways that CMC cannot foster.

I also use CMC to reach out beyond the local, both to learn about global initiatives and to contribute to such initiatives. I try to take advantage of the opportunities offered by CMC without being seduced by illusions of easy organizing through the send button.

So, a summary that likely isn’t controversial: These days almost all left/radical organizers will communicate online, but the social justice and ecological sustainability at the heart of left/radical politics isn’t going to be achieved online.

It’s tempting to leave the discussion at that level, but the questions about scale/scope/time aren’t addressed by that easy summary. With a larger focus, the trouble with CMC -- with all the time and effort it takes to learn new programs, keep up with the constant changes on the internet, think about the role of the virtual world in real-world politics -- is that it keeps us stuck in the past.

That may seem paradoxical; we’re used to talking about the people who don’t embrace computers as being the ones stuck in the past. After all, isn’t the internet the key to the future? Not if the future is going to be defined by less energy and less advanced technology.

If the changes outlined above are an unavoidable part of our future, then we would be well advised to start weaning ourselves from the high-energy/high-technology world, not only in our personal lives but in our organizing as well. That doesn’t mean immediately abandoning all the gadgets we use, but rather always realizing that our efforts to make the most effective use of the gadgets in the short term shouldn’t crowd out the long-term planning for a dramatically different world.

That different world may well impose changes on us before we have been able to face them ourselves. Novelist/poet/critic Wendell Berry captures this when he writes, “We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need.’ I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.”

The task is daunting, but it is our task nonetheless. Berry is not optimistic about the future, but he concludes with our charge:

“Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”[1]

When we lack answers to difficult questions -- or even a way to imagine finding answers -- it’s easy to put the questions aside. Better, I think, to let the questions continually disturb us.

Every time I touch the keyboard of my laptop to write an essay that will be posted on a web site, which I will send to editors via email, my thoughts are troubled.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, and one of the partners in the community center “5604 Manor.” He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. This article also appears at the New Left Project.]

[1] Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 196.

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Glenn W. Smith : Aristotle and the Cyberpoke

Photo of cyberpoke by Willie Pipkin / DogCanyon.
Making real connections:
Aristotle and the cyberpoke

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / January 6, 2011

Democratic political consultant and progressive Texas blogger Glenn W. Smith will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. To stream Rag Radio live on the internet, go here. To listen to this interview after it is broadcast -- and to other shows on the Rag Radio archives -- go here.

WEST TEXAS -- I’m partial to the desert mountains of West Texas, but on my frequent visits out here I’m always surprised -- and touched -- by the strong spirit of friendship and community that marks the place.

“Friendship holds political communities together,” said Aristotle, and he was on to something. American political culture has deteriorated as the various perils of modernity weakened the role of friendship in our political life. It’s a weighty, complicated topic. I just don’t want to be friendly with Glenn Beck.

It seems appropriate to kick off the New Year with a reminder that “concord” -- the word Aristotle used -- is instrumental to a community’s pursuit of justice. The loss of some sense of reciprocity and mutual concern for others is a dangerous consequence of a political culture lost in myths of hyper-individuality and zero-sum thinking in which one’s gains seem to depend upon the losses of others.

Out here for a West Texas New Years with large groups of friends from all over America, I find a common understanding of our absolute dependence upon one another. And this is a place our myths tell is a veritable source of the independent rugged individualist.

There are some rugged folks, and they understand that concord doesn’t mean conformity. But by God if your truck breaks down, they’re there to help you, and they expect the same in return.

Every year some of my friends and I give a small New Years Eve country concert on the front porch of the old Stillwell Store not far from the Rio Grande and Big Bend National Park. Ranch folk come from all over. The Stillwell family puts out a nice spread of food. We hail from very different worlds, but those differences disappear on this day because we’re all here for one reason: a shared moment of concord.

Look at the picture above. This old cyberpoke is taking advantage of the wireless on the patio the Marathon Motel (you might have seen it Wim Wenders 1984 film, Paris, Texas). He was sittin’ there at his computer when we checked in early last week.

It’s a cool picture (taken by Austin guitarist Willie Pipkin), and it tells us something. The possibilities for connection among us are nearly infinite, even though it sometimes seems like the web adds a bit of fragmentation, isolation, and loss of real-world community.

We tend to gather on the web with those we’re pretty sure will agree with us, and we lose (if it’s all we do) the wordless, emotional lessons of connections with strangers, with different others who, say, work a mountain ranch while we race around our cities.

Aristotle said true friendship transcends simple utilitarian relations, making justice possible and the political community stronger. And that’s another danger of distant internet connections: it often seems to come with a utilitarian end in mind. We need to take this action, make this point, cause this political consequence.

But these downsides and dangers are outweighed, I think, by the magnified possibilities of authentic connection -- and even concord. But it will take an effort, maybe a special effort, to bring such a spirit to the digital world.

By the way, the thin gruel of what’s called “bipartisanship” shouldn’t be mistaken for authentic friendship. Real friendship requires moral steadfastness and honesty. I may not win the given political argument, but if I’m to be a friend to others, the least they should expect is sincerity and moral courage.

[Austin's Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

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Dan Lyons : The Internet Splits in Two

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski speaks to media on net neutrality December 1, 2010 at FCC headquarters in Washington, DC. Photo by Alex Wong / Getty Images.
Compromise on net neutrality:
The Internet splits in two

By Dan Lyons / The Daily Beast / December 22, 2010

Tuesday’s FCC ruling on net neutrality shifts billions in profits and boils down to one fact: There will soon be a fast Internet for the rich and a slow Internet for the poor.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a set of net neutrality rules Tuesday, and nobody is happy. While liberals claim the FCC has caved to pressure from carriers, right-wingers are calling the new rules a government takeover of the Internet. In their tea-addled brains, the new rules represent yet another example of creeping socialism taking over every aspect of our lives. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is "Julius Seizure." Cue the black helicopters.

No matter what you think about the new rules, however, they signal an important turning point in the development of the Internet. We are going from Phase One, where everything is free and open and untamed, into Phase Two, which is all about centralization, consolidation, control -- and money.

Because don’t kid yourself. Money is driving all of this. As in: Hey, we’ve created this marvelous new platform for communicating with each other. We’ve demonstrated that very large sums of money can be generated by sending stuff over these wires. Now let’s figure out who gets what.

Tuesday’s new FCC rules grant two big concessions to carriers. First, the rules will apply to wired broadband connections, but they will pretty much leave wireless alone. Second, carriers remain free to create “fast lanes” on the Internet. They can charge Internet companies to ride on the faster pipes, and perhaps also charge consumers more money to get access to those speedy services.

That is a huge deal. It means we are entering an age in which we will have two Internets -- the fast one, with great content, that costs more (maybe a lot more) to use, and then the MuggleNet, which is free but slow and crappy. Cable TV vs. rabbit ears.

On wireless -- which eventually will be the more important platform -- that disparity will be even more evident. The rich will get great stuff. The poor will get, well, what the poor usually get, which is not much.

Oddly enough this bifurcation resonates beyond just the speed of our Internet connection. It also is happening to information itself. We could be heading into a world where the rich get better information, from a wider choice of sources, while the poor get less.

That’s already happening, to some extent. If you’re a trader on Wall Street and can afford a Bloomberg terminal, you get better information sooner than the poor schlumps who are home trying to play at being day traders.

It will happen even more as news organizations, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and The New York Times, start putting content behind pay walls.

And so the digital divide widens into an information divide, which of course has huge implications for politics, economics, and even democracy itself.

Consider that in the 2008 election both sides were struggling to reach so-called low information voters. What happens when access to information becomes even more restricted? Where your ability to become informed is based upon your ability to pay? That’s the world we’re heading into. The first 15 years of the Internet, where it was all about peace and love and freedom, are drawing to a close.

The ultimate irony is that we are creating an information age where some of us -- many of us -- will get less information instead of more.

In his terrific new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Columbia University professor Tim Wu describes the way every new communication platform starts out with a phase where there is openness and innovation, and where lots of amateurs (now we call many of them “hackers”) try out different things and spout lots of utopian rhetoric about making the world a better place.

Then, about 15 years in, things start to close down and become more centralized. The new platform becomes dominated by a small number of companies in the hands of powerful visionaries with an urge for empire-building. This also happened in telegraph, movies, radio, telephone -- and now it’s happening to the Internet.

Steve Jobs is building an empire around selling music, movies, and news to people who own iPhones and iPads. Mark Zuckerberg is building an empire around the gathering and selling of the personal data of a half a billion people.

Now the carriers get their slice of the action. A lot of people hate the carriers, but try, for a moment, to see the world through their eyes. For 15 years they have sat around watching hundreds of billions of dollars of market value get created on the end of their wires (Google, eBay, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook) while all they get is a puny monthly subscriber fee.

The carriers won’t say this publicly, but I’m sure they resent being denied a share of the wealth being created on the platform that they’ve been so kind to build and maintain for the rest of us. What they also won’t say publicly, or at least not in this blunt a fashion, is: If you want us to keep building out more bandwidth, then start sharing the loot. Otherwise you can go build your own high-speed network.

Obnoxious? Certainly. But also persuasive. The FCC’s compromise probably represents the best deal anyone could get.

What this means for society remains to be seen. But I’m pretty sure those of us who have been around for Phase One of the Internet are going to look back on these last 15 years as the good old days.

[Dan Lyons is technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of Fake Steve Jobs, the persona behind the notorious tech blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Before joining Newsweek, Lyons spent 10 years at Forbes. This article was originally published by the The Daily Beast and was distributed by Free Press.]

Obama caves on net neutrality



Interview with Timothy Karr, director of Free Press, by the Young Turks

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John Naughton : The WikiLeaks Backlash and the Culture of the Internet

Political cartoon from The Young Diplomat.
Killing the messenger:
The attack on WikiLeaks

It represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet...

By John Naughton / December 6, 2010

"Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the run-up to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds -- first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the U.S. government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook -- the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured.

The response has been vicious, coordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the U.S. administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington, DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the U.S.-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British, and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates -- who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly -- and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the U.S. was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the U.S. is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the U.S. and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London, and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers -- again located somewhere on the net.

The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing -- one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a U.S. senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information."

This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us."

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the U.S., and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the U.S. and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied, or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies -- with the exception of Twitter, so far -- bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonizing dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables -- and probably of much else besides -- are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent.

Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behavior; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

[John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. This article was originally published in The Guardian, UK, and was distributed by CommonDreams.]

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William Michael Hanks : Net Neutrality / Open Internet Under Fire

Cartoon from Schrier Blog.
Is FCC dropping the ball?
The fight for a free internet

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / October 15, 2010

Also see Mike Hanks' companion article: Net Neutrality / Stop Thief!

And see Net Neutrality Timeline, Below

A strong right punch from the DC Appeals Court in April stunned the FCC, leaving it dazed and staggering. The champion of the people's Internet entered the ring with a good fight plan and a righteous score to settle with the opponent.

But, in a strong defense by a heavy-muscled corporation, the court delivered a near knockout punch to the open Internet defender. Blocking the FCC's regulatory blow to Comcast, the court held the FCC had no authority to regulate Comcast's Internet bandwidth management policies.

The fight started brewing in 2007 when the Associated Press (AP) discovered that Comcast was blocking transmission of BitTorrent Peer-to-Peer file exchanges without notifying customers. A complaint was filed with the FCC by Internet and legal advocates and the FCC held public hearings on the issue. But at the first bell Comcast was caught wearing brass knuckles under the gloves.

Then FCC Chair Kevin Martin called for public comments. The first hearing was at Harvard and was packed with shills, hired by Comcast, who filled the available seats. Advocates of an open Internet could not be seated and the campus police blocked their entry. Public outcry and overwhelming evidence moved the FCC to sanction the media giant anyway. That's when the battle got bloody.

Comcast punched back with a suit in federal court that demanded a stay of the FCC sanction. The court held in early April that a change during the Bush administration shifting the authority in such matters from Title II to Title I of the Communications Act resulting in the commission being powerless in the matter.

That left the current FCC Chair Julius Genachowski with only one backup punch -- to switch the authority back to Title II of the Communications Act and reassert control over Internet services. But so far the Commission seems dazed and unable to react.

In August, while the Commission was still seeing stars, Google and Verizon proposed a "compromise" that called for unhindered Internet access for wired customers while leaving the door wide open for wireless providers to decide whatever they like, regardless of customer demands. They insist that their ambitious plans to enter the wireless business had nothing to do with their suggestion.

Another blow to Net Neutrality came in September when Sen. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced he was dropping the push for a Net Neutrality bill in Congress. This came after the Open Internet Coalition pulled it's support and it seemed unlikely the bill would receive Republican support.

Calls for Chairman Genachowski to act on the promises made by President Obama to vigorously fight for a free and open Internet have gone unheeded. It's looking more like a free-for-all -- a fight where the referees seem to be bought and the champ's taking a fall.

Unless the FCC gets off the mat, the next round will be when Congress reconvenes after the elections. By then the ringside tickets will be sold out, the fix will be in, and the citizens -- the real owners -- will get the cheap seats where they can't be heard. But, hey, maybe it'll all be on television, if you paid your cable bill.

[William Michael Hanks lived at the infamous Austin Ghetto and worked with the original Rag gang in the Sixties. He has written, produced, and directed film and television productions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The U. S. Information Agency, and for Public Broadcasting. His documentary film The Apollo File won a Gold Medal at the Festival of the Americas. Mike lives in Nacagdoches, Texas.]

Also see:

• William Michael Hanks : Net Neutrality / Stop Thief! / The Rag Blog / October 15, 2010

Super highway: Traffic jam ahead? Photo by Sean Nel. Image from Robin Good.
Timeline of recent events (from SaveTheInternet.com).

2007. Comcast gave us a glimpse of a world without Net Neutrality when an Associated Press investigation found that the company was blocking the file-sharing application BitTorrent. Despite mounting evidence of Internet blocking, the company refused to come clean and disclose its “network management” practices. A coalition of Net Neutrality supporters and legal scholars filed a complaint with the FCC urging the agency to stop the cable giant from meddling with our ability to share information online.

2008. The FCC took complaints about Comcast’s blocking seriously and convened a series of hearings across the country so that interested citizens could weigh in. Fearful that the public would lay into Comcast for violating Net Neutrality, the company hired people off the street to pack the first hearing at Harvard. The seat fillers took up so many chairs that Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry by campus police.

In response to the public outcry and a mountain of evidence, FCC Chair Kevin Martin sanctioned Comcast for violating Net Neutrality. The complaint was brought to the agency after a coalition of Net users and activists caught the cable giant red-handed, jamming use of popular file-sharing applications. Martin ruled that Comcast had "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access and failed to disclose to consumers what it was doing. But the ink was barely dry on the FCC order before Comcast filed an appeal in federal court, challenging not only the FCC’s ruling but the agency’s entire authority to protect Web users.

2009. Buried deep in President Barack Obama's American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is a line that brought a smile to the faces of Net Neutrality supporters -- and a scowl to phone and cable industry lobbyists. It requires that billions of dollars directed to connect more Americans to broadband be spent on services that meet "nondiscrimination and network interconnection obligations." The stimulus package stipulated that federal money earmarked for high-speed Internet services be spent the right way: building networks that abide by Net Neutrality.

The fight for Net Neutrality gained ground when Julius Genachowski, the newly appointed FCC chair, announced plans to expand existing agency rules to protect the free and open Internet. Genachowski said the FCC must be a "smart cop on the beat,” preserving Net Neutrality against increased efforts by providers to block services and applications over both wired and wireless connections. The chairman cited a number of examples where network providers had acted as gatekeepers and concluded, “If we wait too long to preserve a free and open Internet, it will be too late.

2010. As the FCC began its Net Neutrality inquiry, the phone and cable industry that controls Internet access for 97 percent of Americans went into a spending overdrive. They funneled tens of millions of dollars to nearly 500 Washington lobbyists. Their mission: further consolidate industry control over Internet access and kill Net Neutrality, before the public gets a say. Untold sums have also been spent on Astroturf groups, fake grassroots operations that are funded by corporations to manufacture the impression of public support and that generate misinformation designed to sway policymakers and the media.

In early April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the FCC lacks the authority (under the jurisdiction it claimed) to protect Internet users against network operators. The case was brought by cable giant Comcast after it was sanctioned by the FCC for blocking Net users’ access to file-sharing applications. The ruling effectively gave corporate gatekeepers control over Internet users’ online experience, and it called into question the FCC’s ability to act as a public interest watchdog over our country’s communications media.

We now wait to see whether the FCC will reclassify the Internet Service Providers from Title I to Title II and thereby reassert jurisdiction or whether Congress will act with legislation to preserve Internet Neutrality. Nothing is likely to happen before the mid-term elections. The outcome of those elections will undoubtedly affect the vitality of efforts to save the Internet from corporate piracy.

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Larry Ray : Amazon: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

Graphic, with a tad of Photoshop by Larry Ray, from Mobile Reference.
Amazon: Don't call us, we'll call you
(Or: Dude, my shoe's got a square toe)

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / August20, 2010

OK, I should never have ordered a pair of shoes over the internet. But Amazon.com has always had good stuff, good prices, and fast delivery. I've ordered lots of stuff from them over the years. A brand new iMac, top of the line bread baking machine, shelves of books and other stuff that has always arrived in great shape at a notable savings. But I had never had reason to ask questions or talk about an order with a customer service agent.

That's good, because Amazon's idea of customer service doesn't mean dialing a 1-800 number and talking to someone. Their approach to customer service is just like ordering merchandise on Amazon. You are expected to click your way through a series of drop down windows with fixed choices till you narrow down a specific item that requires customer service, and then you click some more for options on how you contact customer service. A toll free customer service number is not an option and was not handily located on their web site. Playing "Where's Waldo" to find a phone number is not customer service.

I really wanted to talk to someone at Amazon about the pair of Rockport ProWalker shoes that arrived with the front sole and curved toe of the right shoe looking not at all like the left one. Someone in Bangladesh running the toe rounding grinder clearly dozed off, grinding most of the toe area off the right shoe even leaving a flat spot on what was supposed to be an ample, evenly curved toe. Not to worry, it was boxed up and sent right off... to me.

Worse yet, the quality of the shoes was more like what one might see in a Big Lots or Dollar Store closeout, not anything like the Rockport shoes I have worn for years. So, at this point you really want to talk to someone when things get this messed up. And you would think someone there would want to learn about shoddy merchandise going out under the company name.

If you find the word help in tiny blue lettering in all the stuff at the upper right of the page and then click around enough you eventually get to their customer service page.

The first option is to contact Amazon by email ("Usually answered within 12 hours") the other option is "PHONE" and clicking that does not lead you to a phone number, rather you must enter your area code and telephone number and Amazon will call you back. And you can only email or be called back after clicking through a series of drop-down menus and selecting from a list of reasons why you need customer service... there is no drop-down option to simply "Talk to a human being."

After facing this inflexible wall of non-applicable options, for the hell of it I just typed "Amazon.com 1-800 number" into a search engine and got 4,540,000 returns.

Amazon has never published its toll-free customer service number it seems. And this has infuriated hundreds of thousands of Amazon customers. Checking the search results, the story of Amazon's inflexibility has been reported for years by major news media like NPR, The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and countless news blogs and web sites.

One personal blog called amazoncustomerservice.blogspot.com publishes not only all of Amazon's toll free numbers, but all the other Amazon business and departmental numbers and addresses in the USA and in the UK. This site also provides the hard, if not impossible to find direct toll free numbers to Yahoo, PayPal, E-Bay, and Netflix.

I dialed Amazon's toll free U.S. number, (800) 201-7575, and after a bit of a pause for clicking and connecting and the routine recording declaring, "This call may be recorded for quality purposes," I got Maria in Manila. Very sweet girl, happy to have her job in the call center there. Her pronounced accent was lilting and understandable. She knew nothing at all about Amazon's quality control or about mismatched shoes, but did find the return policy and procedures on her printed flow sheet which she read to me.

I had already printed out the Amazon return UPS label and returned the shoes. But Maria was so nice, even though she clearly knew nothing about Amazon's quality control operation, I simply thanked her for her help with return policy rules and confirmed that my credit card had been credited with a refund.

I returned to the Amazon page and in the search bar under "All Departments" at the top of the page, I typed in "customer service number" and promptly got three returns. The first was a book in Kindle Edition from which I took the graphic at the top of this article, "Secret Toll-Free Customer Service Phone Numbers and Shortcuts to an Operator for Nearly 600 Businesses and US Government Agencies " Clicking this $3.99 bargain opens up information about the book's content, and lo! scrolling down we read:

Did you notice that it is hard to find customer service phone numbers on many web sites? Well, businesses hide their customer service phone numbers. They want you to fill out lengthy online forms. BEAT THEM WITH THIS SECRET YELLOW PAGES BOOK. It collects nearly 600 Hard-to-Find Toll-Free Customer Service Phone Numbers together. Better yet, we tell you how to skip automated prompts and talk directly to a human operator."

And there, on Amazon's own web site, this book offers as an example of what is in their treasure trove of information... and who did they choose for their example? Yep, you guessed it:

Example for Amazon.com toll-free phone numbers

Amazon.com (Cust. service): 1-800-201-7575; to reach an operator, do not dial or say anything.

Amazon.com (Seller support): 1-877-251-0696; to reach an operator, do not dial or say anything.

Amazon.com (Rebate status): 1-866-348-2492; to reach an operator, press 0.

Amazon Visa: 1-888-247-4080; to reach an operator, dial 00 at each prompt.

None of this would concern my college student granddaughter. I, however, am old enough to remember real customer service from the electric power company, the telephone company, catalog order departments, and many others. You dialed a number, talked with someone and found out what you needed to know.

At Amazon, AT&T, the cable TV company, and other places where I spend money, they are not interested in talking... they don't need to anymore. As soon as people willingly started to spend several dollars for a cup of coffee, who needed customer service any longer?

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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BOOKS / Dick J. Reavis on 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'

A worrisome message from Nicholas Carr:
What The Shallows means for the left

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / July 10, 2010

[The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (Norton, 2010; Hardcover, 276 pp, $26.95).]

Literature students in American universities no longer see any point in reading whole novels. Instead, they want to scrutinize a work’s most pregnant passages, scanning or overlooking the balance of the texts. This is the most startling notice I encountered among dozens of disconcerting reports in The Shallows, a June book subtitled What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

Much has been made in the mainstream press about the warnings advanced by the book’s author, Nicholas Carr, a journalist best known for a 2009 tome about Google. Most reviewers of his present volume have focused on his predictions of doom for libraries and the printed word, though as a careful author, he doesn’t quite predict anything so dire, perhaps for a reason any long-form journalist knows well: publications that don’t preach hope don’t sell as well as those that do.

Carr draws his arguments from reports of recent, but still pioneering, studies of brain physiology, and from psychological experiments. His book got a boost in late May when researcher Sara Konrath of the University of Michigan presented a paper before a Boston meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, claiming that empathy levels among college student had dropped 40 percentage points over the last 25 years. Konrath and other researchers blamed the decline on webification and computerized social networks. It was as if she had gone to Boston to confirm the predictions Carr had made.

His text, without help from Konrath, carries a worrisome message, especially for oldsters with the ideological biases of those who click to this blog. The message is that the death of ideology and activism may finally be upon us.

Carr’s chief point is that computerized search engines, Tweets and the like, as books originally did, have reduced the value of memory and cogitation, while boosting the lures of immediacy and statistical citation. Today we can get decision-making data faster than ever. We need not, or we come to believe they that we need not, meditate, ponder, or even sleep upon what we’ve absorbed -- let alone bring first-hand experience to our tasks.

The prevalence of this attitude, whose venerable genealogy Carr traces, came home to me a couple of months ago in a conversation with a student editorialist who, as a budgetary measure, seriously advocated that university bureaucrats be sent packing and students be hired, at lower salaries, to take their places. Though as a professor I am naturally no fan of university administrators, the proposal struck me as foolish.

“But if you do that,” I told the student, “we will lose institutional memory.”

“No we won’t,” he insisted. “We now have databases!”

The error of mistaking Google links for judgment, I might add, is not new to today’s college generation. A cohort of Mexico correspondents saw the same sort of unseasoned judgment in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, while the NAFTA agreement was being debated. From what reporters in Mexico could see, economists and pundits were tapping macro statistics about the Mexican economy and concluding that it was on the cusp of joining the developed world. We looked around, at the problems of daily life in Mexico, and said to each other -- though rarely in print -- “Huh? Somebody who doesn’t know this country has got it all wrong!”

The subsequent development of the web has put a similar capacity for error at the fingertips of every literate American, as is evident in today’s proliferation of well-sourced bloggers who are bereft of personal experience. People in home offices in Iowa opine about the measures Pakistanis should take to quiet the Taliban -- or about the need to “secure our border” with Mexico. In the past, such opportunities for error were reserved to the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and think tanks with outsized endowments. Every fool with a web browser can now regard himself as a legislator and editorialize about what he or she “supports” or “opposes” -- as if someone with clout were heeding.

Carr’s warnings are practically an obituary for those of us who, largely as a fruit of the turmoil of the ‘60’s, developed dissident world views. Pacifism, socialism, Pan-Africanism: ideologies like these cannot be formed without the careful study of whole works of thought, because they draw a systemic picture of life that differs from prevailing “pragmatism,” i.e., the philosophy of adjustment to “democratic” capitalism.

The tools of the declining Left -- newspapers, heavy tomes, study sessions -- have little appeal today. Bits of information dropped into the world view of “pragmatic” common sense spur political action, in the rare instances when any is in the cards. When one Arizona rancher is murdered, presumably by Mexican immigrants, national outrage takes root within days: nobody feels a need to live on the border or to study the history of Mexican-American affairs.

Not all of Carr’s news is disheartening when read from the Left, however. He says that the emerging mentality is collective and that it quickly forms a consensus. He sees this as endangering an individualism and a literary heritage that he treasures, but he contradicts himself by reporting a finding, common to dozens of observers, that what the web does is heighten individualism through what scholars call the “fragmentation” of personal tastes and interests. Andy Warhol may have said that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, but what fragmentation means is that in many senses, everyone will be an eccentric for life.

As an old socialist, I of course have faith that people will regain empathy and that their movements will someday reinvigorate systemic critiques and visions -- or concoct new ones -- and will improve the world in qualitative ways: history can’t be over yet! But in the United States, no movement has done as much in the past two generations, and Carr and Kornath give little reason for hope. The upshot of The Shallows is that whatever happens in our nation, risings like the ‘60’s are at least a couple of generations away.

[Dick J. Reavis is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

• Find The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, on Amazon.com.

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Salon et al : Romancing the Stone

On a roll: Image from Luminous Landscape.
Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone:
The Salon/Adobe/Oracle/Dell connection

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2010

As the recent replacement of General McChrystal by General Petraeus as military leader of the Pentagon’s war in Afghanistan indicates, Rolling Stone magazine can publish an article that has a profound effect on U.S. politics during the current historical era of endless war abroad and endless economic recession at home.

But it’s unlikely that Rolling Stone will publish many news articles that are critical of either the Internet magazine Salon’s lack of reporting about U.S. political prisoners or of the way Salon, Adobe Systems, Oracle, or Dell Inc. executives obtain their wealth.

Here's why:

1. As of June 1, 2010, Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner and his Wenner Media LLC firm apparently owned 10.1 percent of the Salon Media Group’s common stock;
2. Adobe Systems Co-Chairman of the Board John Warnock is also Salon’s Chairman of the Board;
3. former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen sits on Oracle’s corporate board;
4. and current Adobe president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, sits next to Texas Billionaire Michael Dell on the Dell Inc. Board of Directors.

Between 2004 and February 2006, Wenner also sat on Salon’s board of directors, after investing $200,000 in the Salon Media Group in December 2003. According to a January 15, 2004, Salon press release, after Rolling Stone invested in Salon, the Salon founder and then-CEO, David Talbot, stated:

I look forward to working with Jann Wenner on the Salon board of directors... Everyone at Salon is also very excited about collaborating with Rolling Stone... Salon’s partnership with Rolling Stone is full of great promise.

The same press release also reported that Wenner said:

I’m excited about this collaboration between Rolling Stone and Salon.

Ironically, a few years before Wenner joined its corporate board, Salon had posted an article by Sean Elder on June 28, 2002, titled “The Death of Rolling Stone,” which observed:

...The truth is that Rolling Stone has been such an undistinguished hybrid -- part ‘70s-style journalism (investigative reporting, distinct voices and rambling interviews), and part any other entertainment magazine you can name for so long that most of its subscribers are probably unaware that they still get it...

As Rolling Stone has slowly morphed into a magazine just like dozens of others, it has lost its reason for being... Rolling Stone seems like an anachronism, the Ladies’ Home Journal of rock journalism...

Salon’s Website attracts about 5.4 million unique visitors per month and “ultimately, Salon charges advertisers for a set number of ad impressions viewed by a Website visitor,” according to the Salon Media Group’s June 2010 10K S.E.C. financial filing.

Between March 2009 and March 2010, for example, Salon collected over $2.9 million from its corporate advertisers and $701,000 from its 15,800 paid subscribers (who pay Salon between $29 and $45 each year). In addition, none of Salon’s 45 full-time and two part-time employees are unionized or subject to a collective bargaining agreement.

Yet, according to its June 2010 10K financial filing:

Salon has been relying on cash infusions primarily from related parties to fund operations. The related parties are generally John Warnock, Chairman of the Board of Salon, and William Hambrecht. William Hambrecht is the father of Salon’s former President and Chief Executive Officer, Elizabeth Hambrecht, a Director of the Company. During the year ended March 31, 2010, related parties provided approximately $2.6 million in new loans.

Curtailment of cash investments and borrowing guarantees by related parties could detrimentally impact Salon’s cash availability and its ability to fund its operations.

Warnock (a founder and former CEO of Adobe Systems, as well as an Adobe board co-chairman since 1989) has sat on the Salon corporate board since 2001 and been Salon’s chairman of the board since December 2006. As of June 1, 2010, Adobe board chairman Warnock owned 41 percent of Salon’s Series D Preferred Stock, 52.8 percent of Salon’s Series C Preferred Stock, and 18.5 percent of Salon’s Series A Preferred Stock; while his Adobe Systems firm owned 100 percent of Salon’s Series B Preferred Stock.

Besides providing “cash infusions” for the media firm whose former president and former CEO is his daughter, William Hambrecht currently sits next to Salon board member Elizabeth Hambrecht on the WR Hambrecht & Co. investment firm’s corporate board, is a member of the Motorola and AOL corporate boards, and co-founded the United Football League in December 2009. The Hambrecht family’s tax-exempt Sarah & William Hambrecht Foundation also owns stock in Salon.

Sitting next to Salon Chairman of the Board Warnock on Adobe’s corporate board between December 2000 and April 2008 was an Adobe executive named Bruce Chizen who “has served as a strategic advisor to Adobe Systems Incorporated... since November 2007,” according to the website of the Oracle computer software company -- on whose corporate board former Adobe board member (and Adobe’s CEO between April 2000 and January 2005) Chizen currently sits. Coincidentally, on June 16, 2010, Bloomberg News reported the following:

Oracle Corp., the world’s second- biggest software maker, faces a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower and the U.S. Justice Department claiming it overcharged the government by tens of millions of dollars.

“Oracle failed to disclose discounts that it gave its most favored commercial customers, according to a complaint in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Under General Services Administration contracts, the government must get the company’s best prices, according to the complaint.

“Oracle knowingly and recklessly employed these techniques to offer commercial customers deeper discounts without offering those deeper discounts to the U.S. government," it said...

The complaint alleges "various schemes Oracle used to give commercial customers deeper discounts than the GSA schedule provided."

Taxpayers "overpaid for each Oracle software product by the amount of discounts and reductions from other commercial pricing practices that should applied to each such purchase," according to the complaint...

When Oracle board member Chizen was an executive at Salon board chairman Warnock’s Adobe firm, he apparently was not reluctant to eliminate the jobs of a lot of Adobe workers in order to enrich Adobe’s already wealthy top executives and stockholders. As the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, observed on June 3, 1999:

Adobe Systems Inc. yesterday announced it will slash 250 jobs by the end of the year, the second round of layoffs to hit the San Jose graphics software maker in the past nine months.

...The layoffs... will cut about 9 percent of Adobe's workforce...

Yet in the same breath, Adobe executives said revenues for its second quarter, which ends tomorrow, should be better than expected. Adobe expects as much as $246 million in revenues for the quarter, which would touch the high end of analysts' estimates.

"The business is doing well and we are certainly excited by that," said Bruce Chizen, Adobe executive vice president for worldwide products.

"But we have an obligation to... our stockholders... to grow this company aggressively" he said...

Adobe dominates the market for graphics and document software used by publishers with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and PageMaker…

Last August, Adobe announced a restructuring that eventually pared 350 positions, or 12 percent, of its workforce...

...Chizen said the company's goal is to save about $25 million to $30 million in administrative costs annually.

And in 2005, Chizen and Salon board chairman Warnock’s profitable Adobe firm was also not reluctant to lay off more U.S. workers, despite generating “record profits” in 2005. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (12/16/05) noted:

Adobe Systems Inc. posted higher fourth-quarter earnings Thursday but said it expects to cut 650 to 700 jobs as it folds recently acquired rival Macromedia Inc. into its operations...

At Thursday's earnings announcement, Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said 2005 was "another remarkable year for Adobe." He added, "We grew our business 18 percent, generated record profits, and for the third consecutive year achieved record revenue for the fourth quarter and year." ...

The 11 percent to 12 percent companywide work force reduction will... help the company... achieve its 2006 financial targets, said Murray Demo, Adobe's chief financial officer...

Salon Chairman of the Board Warnock founded his then-privately-owned Adobe Systems firm with his current co-chairman of the Adobe corporate board, Charles Geschke, in 1982; but, ironically, “their original product called PostScript was derived from technology... developed at the University of Utah,” a publicly-funded state university, according to A History of the Personal Computer by Roy Allan.

The same book also noted that “shortly after the founding of Adobe, Apple Computer made a significant financial investment in the company.”

Besides owing 19 percent of Adobe’s stock until 1989, Apple Computer was apparently, simultaneously, the biggest “customer” of the same Adobe firm that it partially owned until 1989. As the 1997 book Apple by Jim Carlton revealed:

[Apple Computer Founder] Steve Jobs... got Apple to invest $2.5 million in... in Adobe...

By 1989, Adobe had grown to a minibehemoth selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Postscript and related programs per year... Adobe licensed PostScript for use on Apple’s Macintosh, with Adobe receiving royalty payments as well as money for the use of PostScript-related Type 1 fonts... It had mushroomed in size in tandem with Apple’s growth...

...Apple paid Adobe royalties on PostScript sold in Laser-Writers, as well as an extra $300 for each Type 1 font needed to print characters...

In 1986, for example, Apple accounted for 80 percent of Adobe’s sales, according to the International Directory of Company Histories.

The current Adobe CEO and president (who both sits next to Salon board chairman Warnock on Adobe’s corporate board and next to Texas Billionaire Dell on Dell Inc.’s corporate board), Shantanu Narayen, also has not been reluctant to lay-off a lot of Adobe workers. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, for example, on December 4, 2008:

Adobe Systems in San Jose is laying off 600 employees...

The layoffs... represent 8 percent of Adobe's global workforce...

“The global economic crisis significantly impacted our revenue during the fourth quarter," Adobe's president and chief executive officer, Shantanu Narayen, said in a statement. "We have taken action to reduce our operating costs and fine-tune the focus of our resources on key strategic priorities."

Yet the AFL-CIO website indicates that “in 2009 Shantanu Narayen received $6,663,781 in total compensation” -- after the Adobe CEO and Dell Inc. board member eliminated the jobs of eight percent of Adobe’s workers in 2008. And although Adobe’s 2009 revenues still exceeded $2.9 billion, in November 2009 the Tech Crunch website confirmed that Adobe executives were going to lay off 680 more Adobe workers -- representing nine percent of Adobe’s remaining work force -- in 2010.

According to the TechAmerica Foundation’s recently-released annual Cyberstates report, Cyberstates 2010: The Definitive State-by-State Analysis of the High-Technology Industry, the U.S. high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs in 2009 -- including 112,600 jobs eliminated by high-tech manufacturing firm executives and 20,700 jobs eliminated by software services company executives.

But at Adobe board Co-Chairman Warnock’s Salon Media Group, Salon executives still seem to earn a lot more money than the average U.S. worker. According to Salon’s December 2009 10K financial filing, for example, Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh “received cash compensation of $219,000 during fiscal year 2009” and “Richard Gingras, who became” Salon's “CEO effective May 1, 2009, earns a base salary of $230,000.”

Coincidentally, in a July 10, 1999 Salon article, Salon Editor-in-Chief Walsh wrote the following in reference to U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and his U.S. left supporters:

...The Mumia cult sickens me like little else in American politics today. For the white left, it's Black Panther worship all over again, with even less to worship... Abu-Jamal has done little but run a one-man self-promotion machine from prison.

...Mumia's minions are content with marching in the streets and signing petitions on behalf of their cuddly convict. "He is just beautiful," says author Alice Walker. "He has a lot of light. He reminds me of Nelson Mandela." What an insult to Mandela...

Mumia madness pushed me over the edge earlier this year, when Oakland teachers demanded to stage a teach-in on his behalf throughout the Oakland schools...

Besides owning both stock in Adobe Co-Chairman Warnock’s Salon Media Group and Rolling Stone magazine, Wenner’s media firm also owns both Us Weekly magazine (www.usmagazine.com) and Men’s Journal magazine (www.mensjournal.com). According to New York Magazine (3/27/00) in at the turn of the century, Wenner Media was still a private company “worth somewhere between $500 million and $750 million, with earnings in the $40 million-to-$60 million range.”

In the early 1990s, Wenner spent about four months out of the year at his three-story country manor in East Hampton, Long Island, employed servants there, and also owned both a five-story Manhattan townhouse and a Mercedes limousine, according to the book Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History by Robert Draper.

And in October 2009, Wenner apparently purchased an eight-room, three-story waterfront home on one and a half acres in Montauk, Long Island for $11.9 million -- after previously purchasing a 62.9 acre upstate estate in Tivoli, New York for $5.8 million in 2007, according to the New York Post (10/22/09).

So if you’re a U.S. music fan who’s been suffering economically during the current U.S. historical era of endless war abroad and endless economic recession at home (or been laid-off recently by corporations like Adobe, Oracle, and Dell), don’t expect Rolling Stone or Salon to be that eager to promote a more equitable redistribution of the U.S. celebrity music world and U.S. high-technology computer industry’s surplus wealth in 2010.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]
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Internet Freedom : It's On the Line

The battle for Net Neutrality:
Corporate takeover or opportunity?

By Megan Tady / April 12, 2010

On Tuesday, April 6, a federal court decision put the Internet, and your ability to use it, in jeopardy. It’s a major setback for free speech online and for the prospects of connecting the entire country to broadband.

The Washington, DC, Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lacks the current authority to enforce rules that keep Internet service providers from blocking and controlling Internet traffic -- a principle called Net Neutrality.

The court ruled in favor of the Internet service provider Comcast, which was caught blocking the file sharing service BitTorrent in 2007 and contested the FCC’s attempts to stop the company. The decision makes it nearly impossible for the FCC to follow through with plans to create strong Net Neutrality protections that keep the Internet out of the hands of corporations. Additionally, without authority over broadband, the FCC could be unable to implement portions of its just released National Broadband Plan designed to bridge the digital divide.

Millions of Internet users don’t realize that a battle over the future of the Internet is being played out right now in Washington D.C.. On one side are public interest and consumer groups, small businesses, Internet entrepreneurs, librarians, civil libertarians, and civil rights groups. They want to preserve the Internet as it is -- the last remaining open communications platform where anyone with access and a computer can create and consume online content. The principle of “Network Neutrality” is what makes this open communications possible. Net Neutrality is what allows us to go wherever we want online.

In a message to members of the organization ColorofChange.org, Director James Rucker stressed the importance of Net Neutrality for voices, perspectives, and communities traditionally marginalized and ignored. “For Black folks, [Net Neutrality] is crucial,” he writes. “For the first time in history we can communicate with a global audience -- for entertainment, education, or political organizing -- without prohibitive costs, or mediation by gatekeepers in government or industry.”

On the other side of this battle are the Internet service providers who want to dismantle Net Neutrality. Not only do they want to provide Internet service, but they want to be able to charge users to prioritize their content, effectively giving the Internet service providers the ability to choose which content on the Web loads fast, slow, or not at all.

The foundation for the Net Neutrality battle began in 2002 with the Bush FCC reclassifying broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This was a huge blow to Internet protections like Net Neutrality because the FCC doesn’t have the same regulatory oversight over information services that it has over telecommunications services.

It is this classification loophole, coupled with the D.C. Circuit’s decision, that let Comcast wiggle out from under the FCC’s thumb and convince the courts that the FCC has no business clamping down on their Net Neutrality violations. And it is this loophole that will make the FCC powerless when it comes to achieving many of the objectives set out in the Obama administration’s national broadband plan to provide high speed Internet access to rural America.

The FCC can resurrect its power by changing broadband back to a “telecommunications service.” Reclassifying broadband will make these questions about FCC authority obsolete, allowing the agency to get back to the important work of protecting free speech online and bridging the digital divide.

While this fix may seem simple, it will take political courage from the FCC and Chairman Julius Genachowski to do the right thing. The telecom industry will be hammering the FCC with pressure to keep broadband a lawless land in order to deepen their control and enormous profits. At the same time, concerned Americans are encouraging the FCC to protect Net Neutrality and the national broadband plan.

Free Press Director Josh Silver reminded the public what’s at stake during an interview Wednesday on Democracy Now! “People have to remember, all media -- television, radio, phone service -- every type of media other than the printed page, will soon be delivered by a broadband or Internet connection.”

Like me, you love the Internet. It takes you where you want to go. Frustrated with mainstream media you have found alternative news and information online, like this very site. You turn on your computer and you’re connected to the world. Our relationship with the phone and cable companies should stop when we pay for our Internet service. These companies should not be able to block, control, or interfere with what we search for or create online. Nor should they be able to prioritize some content over others.

Let’s hope the court just handed the FCC the best opportunity to make a systemic change to how they oversee our nation’s primary communications platform, and their ability to stop the corporate takeover of the Internet once and for all.

[Megan Tady is a blogger and campaign coordinator for the national, non-profit media reform organization Free Press. Megan has traveled across the country interviewing people who struggle to live and work without high-speed Internet access. This article was published in Women's International Perspective and distributed by Media Channel.]

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