January 2015

Net Neutrality: Stop Congress


Dan Massey
and I were there at the birth of the Internet, Dan directly involved in the research and development that brought it about. Based on the work of Alan Turing and others, the Internet was an expensive, tax-payer-funded, labor intensive product for the military. By the late 70s, it became a utility available to the public.

The great joy of its arrival in our home was supercharged by sharing the recognition throughout the world that for the first time in history everybody could be an author.

It changed everything.

That long ago, you paid for the creation of, and the permanent public access to, a neutral Internet. For sometime now it has been unfortunately embroiled in a cultural war with a small group of corporatist elites attempting to exploit this public resource out of greed, and, as always, at the expense of the 98%.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

Think about it. There would be no Internet now if American taxpayers, your parents and grandparents, hadn’t paid for its development, decades ago. For all the activists who are working everyday to Save the Internet, along with anyone else who stops to think about it for 3 minutes, there can be no other premise:  This is a utility that should be treated NO differently that any other public utility such as water and electricity.

As you are probably aware, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has at last been indicating that its 5 commissioners are close to announcing their new rules, another attempt to split the baby, a hybrid that includes giveaways to those who would exploit it rather than organize it for the public good, so they can make money from something we now all share in paying for.

The FCC has been talking about these new rules ever since a Big Cable lawsuit against the FCC was successful in dislodging the previous set of rules which Big Cable found too restrictive. For the last two years, the FCC commissioners have been pressured, you can say assaulted by Big Cable lobbyists and their cronies in Congress, to allow these few huge companies to become the de facto self-regulators of the Internet. This will allow Big Cable to create fast lanes for a selection of their commercial clients/customers while shutting out the rest of us, making us pay more for diminished service in the slow lanes they will let trickle down. Small companies, schools and universities, whistleblowers and activists, non-profits, innovators, and on and on — all shut out.

On Tuesday, President Obama, in his State of the Union speech, made clear that net neutrality is important to everyone throughout the world, saying, “I intend to protect a free and open internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks, so that the next generation of digital innovators and entrepreneurs have the platform to keep reshaping our world.” And, yesterday, we urged you to call Senate and House committee members and their chairmen (who received massive donations from BC) to stop any legislation that would usurp the FCC in order to give the corporatists and the politicians what they want. Tens of thousands of calls and emails were received by Congress, yesterday, and we have to keep calling. Also today, BattlefortheNet.com launched 535 new websites to track all congressmen’s stand on the issue.

Keep the pressure up, and continue to educate yourself about this crucial, life-changing issue. Without a free and open Internet, we are surrendering to the thought police. Your voice and the voices of countless others will be silenced if you don’t act now.

Friday Postscript: The struggle to assure the Internet remains open and available is foundational to efforts to solve some other pressing problems, such as responding to climate change and stemming corporate attempts to capitalize the world’s resources. Soon your enslavement will include demanding you pay  for each quart of water you consume. Climate change is bringing the scarcity of goods, mass migrations, and droughts these profiteers will use to make billions, but only if we let them. 

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TODAY: Take Action for Net Neutrality

Last night, President Obama, in his State of the Union speech, made clear that net neutrality is important to everyone throughout the world.

“I intend to protect a free and open internet, extend its reach to every classroom, and every community, and help folks build the fastest networks, so that the next generation of digital innovators and entrepreneurs have the platform to keep reshaping our world.”

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

We already know that if we don’t continue to have unfettered and free access to this most important utility, the voices of so many people will be unnecessarily silenced, bringing us further under the corporatized, enslaving stranglehold by a small group of elites who lack any empathy for the rest of us.

As the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) seems poised to put all (or at least some) protections of net neutrality in place, powerful lobbyists representing corporations who wish to exploit this utility for their own financial gain are gaming the U.S. Congress in an attempt to circumnavigate the FCC.

[This was Comcast’s big play all along] . . . if they lose the FCC, get Congress to do the dirty work. Now it’s happening. There are two fake net neutrality bills in motion that wouldn’t stop cable companies from discriminating against certain sites, but would block the FCC from enforcing real rules. — Holmes Wilson of  Fight for the Future

We can’t wait until President Obama has to veto attempts by Congress to do the dirty work of the corporatists, or for a possible Republican president in 2 years to allow this travesty. Click here to call the committee members, right now and tell them to stop standing in the way of real net neutrality. We need *everyone* to do this.

So take a few minutes now to call as many of them as you can.

How awesome would it be if while they’re at these bogus hearings, they get panicked texts from staff about the HUGE number of pro-net neutrality calls? 

Many of you have been active all year in making sure the FCC hears your voice. The FCC acknowledged the millions of calls and statements in favor of making the internet a public utility, like water, electricity, and your phone, as it should be. We were heard, and up until this unnecessary interference to neutralize the power of the FCC, it’s been looking good.

We can’t give up, we won’t give up. Make your voice heard, today especially.

 

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The King Center

Hope you all saw my hopeful letter to Martin, yesterday, but today I want to ask people to spend a little time further investigating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenge everyone to get busy if they are not already in furthering his precepts though activism.

One of the best places to advance your education is The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, known as The King Center. Here you will find thousands of digitized documents pertaining to his legacy which established and newly minted activists will find enlightening and empowering. Dr. King’s life and teachings are accessible and the most apt anchor to guide and ground our collective social justice campaigns while giving hope to all the individuals who today, more than ever before, are willing to lay down their lives on behalf of freedom for all people.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. November 15, 1964 Flickr/creative commons

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 15, 1964
Flickr/creative commons

The philosophy of Dr. King underpins his entire life and the lives of his many followers. At The King Center website, you can read all about it in just a few pages. It is guaranteed to give you a new or newly invigorated focus because he addresses the entire breadth of effective activism on any front, regardless of your specific cause for freedom: the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism that exist in an intersectional and vicious cycle; the six principles of nonviolence; the six steps to nonviolent social change; and, concluding, an outline of what Dr. King called, The Beloved Community. In your organizational spaces or at home, print out these few pages and put them on the wall; look and re-read them often.

The goal of Dr. King’s philosophy culminates in the realization of The Beloved Community, the future humane world where old, coercive, and inhumane systems are vanishing, and being replaced with new, voluntary, humane ways of doing things that do not leave anyone behind. VenusPlusX points to the same end point. Dr. King teaches us that this is not an idealistic, perfected world but one where the reconciliation of adversaries is based on a “mutual, determined commitment to non-violence,” where all conflicts are resolved peacefully, “a type of love that can transform opponents into friends.”

In his 1959 Sermon on Gandhi, Dr. King elaborated on the after-effects of choosing nonviolence over violence: “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” In the same sermon, he contrasted violent versus nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

Laying down one’s life for the cause of freedom is perhaps the best, the most noble thing you can do because until everyone is free, no one is free. (For those wondering, yes, that’s also a Jesusonian principle, that the greatest love we have have is to lay down our lives for a friend. But this doesn’t mean dying, it just means living another way.) I can have all the money in the world but if there is one child, perhaps a poor child, maybe a hungry child, living under an oppressive system, I cannot be silent. So I challenge all of you lurkers out there to commit just one hour, 60 minutes, on one day of the week, to do something to advance freedom for all people. You will find it is the most interesting and life-giving party around.

 

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Dear Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968 by Caboindex Flickr/creative commons

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929-1968
by Caboindex
Flickr/creative commons

Dear Martin . . . How happy I am today to see the next generation fully embrace the ideals that identified your short life: the end of poverty, racism, and war, precepts to which I have continued to dedicate my life.

With numerous conferences and forums throughout your birthday weekend, before and after, your mass of followers are playing an invigorating and crucial role right now in schooling the mass of newly minted young activists who are fully committed to ending the murder of young black people, and all attempts to erase an entire race through mass incarceration and domestic and foreign policies favoring whites. This new, gigantic effort is committed to non-violent means to solve these conflicts, a true testament to your life’s work.

As an idealistic teen growing up in post-war America, your ideals called to me as they still do. As a pre-teen I  came into contact with young freedom rider friends of my (Jewish) family who were helping black southerners register to vote, and challenge a rigged system (that is today being re-rigged, unfortunately). I became an activist working throughout the 1960s and 70s, putting more than just boots on the ground in protest of the Vietnam War. Your life and work were the keys that completed my full radicalization, and still motivate my activism today.

In our youth, you and I wrongly supposed that, “Oh, this is going to be solved next week because our arguments were so persuasive and the evidence so damning!” But it wasn’t solved in a week. Instead, it is being solved by the generation we gave birth to.

Today, more than ever before in history, legacy and new activists are working together, communicating through free mass communications, bringing about co-equal citizens of the world who fully envision that better and more humane future: a happy and healthy cohabitation of world citizens in place of the corporatized, enslaving stranglehold by a small number of elites (all old, white, men).

Your dream is becoming a reality, Martin. Your deep compassion for all of humanity is in full flower. It’s just taking this long because it turned out there was and is so much work to do. Nevertheless, we are reveling in this major step forward in out quest for Peace.

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Silencing Climate Change Deniers

According to a new study in the journal Science,”Four boundaries are assessed to have been crossed, placing humanity in a danger zone.”

 

The report defined climate change and loss of species as two core areas of concern. Each “has the potential on its own to drive the Earth System into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed,” the authors wrote.

via Oxfam International Flickr/creative commons

via Oxfam International
Flickr/creative commons

It would almost seem absurd at this point to recognize anyone, high or low, who would argue that the human impacts on the environment have not already reached the “danger zone.” But it’s not absurd, it’s a very, very sad state of current reality.

Alas, we must continue equip ourselves to silence climate deniers by repudiating their arguments, whether a politician or your grumpy uncle Joe, through conversations, publishing, and activism. Quoting from studies or books, such as Naomi Klein’s  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, may help but, unfortunately, these deniers are almost always so proud of their defiance in the face of irrefutable evidence that they refuse to take new information in. If you look closely, you will see that this resistance to new information is a character flaw that seeps into other areas of their thinking, and is therefore hard to overcome.

The cataclysmic results of climate change are already upon us, mass migrations, shrinking coastlines, salinization of drinking water, food scarcity, etc. Are we doomed to wait for the elite to start suffering??

We must keep the pressure on, especially leading up to the hopeful Paris climate summit (Conference of Parties or COP) in December 2015 that will be pushing for ambitious action before and after 2020. Start, if you haven’t already, by updating yourself and staying informed through websites such as the United Nations Climate Change Newsroom. We don’t have a moment to wait, literally.

 

Back To The Future

Lance Shields Installation: "Cosmic Kisses Illuminated"  slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/ Flickr/creative commons

Lance Shields
Installation: “Cosmic Kisses Illuminated”
slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/
Flickr/creative commons

My blog break turned out to be a bit longer than it should have, sorry. But if you have been following the Twitter/venusplusx feed you know I’ve been very busy with activists everywhere as we see, finally, an energizing of the forces for good despite the pain of getting to our destination. And it is and will be painful, very painful for a while, make no doubt, but there’s a new inter-sectional majority able to co-envision the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a mirage, it’s real. A new day is here.

More than at any point in history, our past and present are showing us what we do NOT want to bring into the future. We are now capable of uniting across the world as never before to rescue our planet from the coercive and inhmane systems which enslave us, and at the same time to build, collectively, a survivable culture comrpising humane and voluntary systems devoted to universal safety and peace. (See our Manifesto for more.)

The midwifery of our pain is delivering a new cohesiveness, a new world consciousness, an energized generation of young people who can speak with one voice. VenusPlusX’s mission calls for the end racism and sexual and gender oppression, and equates the fulfillment of that mission with The New Age of Sexual Freedom, as the singular bedrock to all other freedoms because it is the only one that encompasses all other freedoms. For this reason, we are always concerned with the inter-sectionality of all issues pre-empting or otherwise inhibiting this new age, such as Fundamentalism/Xenophobia/Racism/Discrimination, World Poverty/Income Inequality, Climate Change/Migrations/Immigration, etc.

#CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) are trending today as we witness another tragic example of this inter-sectionality, this time in Paris, a terrorist attack against free speech. Attacks on any type of freedom come from fundamentalist extremists who have distorted their own religious teachings (Islam/Judaism/Christianity) to excuse their ignorance and hatred of “other.” Fundamentalist extremists are only concerned with killing or otherwise disappearing certain groups of people they are primitively afraid of, whether in Paris, Uganda, or onMain Street USA. Even Right Wingnut and Xeonophobe Laura Ingraham‘s cynical spin on today’s Paris attack is itself an example of fundamentalist extremism. There is no evidence of mental capacity in her vitriol; if there was a shred of it she would soon discover the intellectual impossibility of her own words. By contrast, editorial cartoonists across the world responded loudly and clearly, showing the power of truth.

#BlackLivesMatter has been a fragile meme under constant attack by the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter crowd who just don’t get it. These individuals have been conditioned culturally to reject all matter of “other” and fear everyone. These are the people who want to go backward in history instead of forward, and by resisting progress, including the evolution of their own thoughts, they have effectively created their own minority that will soon be irrelevant to the march towards racial justice.

#NetNeutrality is fast coming to a head, and, just like #ClimateChange, it’s another battle of corporations versus people. Preparation to fight these issues has never been more focused, organized, and energized.

Likewise, we are prepared to rectify #Immigration and #IncomeInequality by demonstrating the economic rewards of opening rather than tightening borders, and at the same time taking joint responsibility for the physical welfare of all people. Fewer and fewer of us can stand still thinking of those who are suffering under these coercive systems right now, children going to bed fearful, hungry, and often homeless.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and as always will welcome your feedback. The inherent inter-sectionality of each of these hashtags can be negative or positive, but we are beginning to see factual proof of the arc of progress that is capable even of transforming great pain towards the legacy of all that is good. Count on that and stay busy.

Be strong now because things will get better.

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