Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video. Show all posts
Tariq Ali - The rotten heart of Europe
[En] British historian, filmmaker and activist Tariq Ali on the 15th of May 2012 at the 5th Subversive Festival in Zagreb (Croatia). http://www.subversivefestival.com/
Slavoj Žižek - Signs from the future
[En] Der slowenische Philosoph und Kulturkritiker Slavoj Žižek am 14. Mai 2012 auf dem 5. Subversive Festival in Zagreb (Kroatien). http://www.subversivefestival.com/
Slavoj Zizek: God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse conversation with Jack Miller
Slavoj Zizek, renowned Slovenian critical theorist, dissects and reconstructs three major faith-based systems of belief in the world today, showing how each faith understands humanity and divinity-and how the differences between the faiths may be far stranger than they at first seem.
Jack Miles is Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.
Tariq Ali: Capitalism and Democracy: Economic Crisis and Democratic Deficit
Tariq Ali, Opening Keynote Address: International Week 2012 Living Democracy: Citizen Power in a Global Age
Žižek Talks Austerity Among the Greeks
This weekend Slavoj Žižek was in Athens with Alexis Tsipras,the president of SYRIZA—the Coalition of the Radical Left—and Kostas Douzinas, Philosophy of Law professor of Birbeck, University of London, to discuss European austerity and Greece's pivotal position to elect a government that counters the “madness of market ideology.” Expanding on his recent essay in the London Review of Books, Žižek argues that far from being the “irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging” thorn of Europe, the Greeks are the very lifeblood of the Europe to come. “Far from a threat to Europe, you are giving a chance to Europe to break out of its inertia, to find a new way.”
If you can read Greek, there is more stuff here, from Red Notebook. Žižek's latest from Verso is Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
If you can read Greek, there is more stuff here, from Red Notebook. Žižek's latest from Verso is Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.
Communism, A New Beginning? Conference Now Online
We're pleased to finally post video from our Communism, A New Beginning? conference from back in October in the debut of our incredibly novel YouTube page. It's an interesting look back to a weekend of what was the first month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street; around when Étienne Balibar spoke on “Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics,” peaceful protesters just uptown at Times Square were arrested and en route to Central Bookiong.
Here is a guide to the talks given at this conference:
DAY 1
Alain Badiou: Politics and State, Mass Movement and Terror (presented by Bruno Bosteels)
Frank Ruda: Remembering the Impossible. For a Meta-critical Anamnesis of Communism
DAY 2
Bruno Bosteels: On the Christian Question
Susan Buck-Morss: Communism and Ethics
Adrian Johnston: From Scientific Socialism to Socialist Science: Naturdialektik Then and Now
Étienne Balibar: Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics
DAY 3
Jodi Dean: Communist Desire
Slavoj Žižek: Freedom in the Clouds
Here is a guide to the talks given at this conference:
DAY 1
Alain Badiou: Politics and State, Mass Movement and Terror (presented by Bruno Bosteels)
Frank Ruda: Remembering the Impossible. For a Meta-critical Anamnesis of Communism
DAY 2
Bruno Bosteels: On the Christian Question
Susan Buck-Morss: Communism and Ethics
Adrian Johnston: From Scientific Socialism to Socialist Science: Naturdialektik Then and Now
Étienne Balibar: Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics
DAY 3
Jodi Dean: Communist Desire
Slavoj Žižek: Freedom in the Clouds
Watch all eleven and a half hours of the conference on our playlist here.
Slavoj Žižek vs David Horowitz with Julian Assange
It was bound to end in disaster: two ideologues, one a communist and the other a neo-conservative, “do battle” over a skype link from a house in England where Assange is held under house arrest.
“You are a supporter of the closest thing we have to Nazism, which was a utopian idea, in the Middle-East! You support the Palestinians!” rails Horowitz in his opening statement. “I don't see anything to distinguish the Palestinians, who want to kill the Jews, from the Nazis.” It becomes clear almost immediately that, perhaps, this debate will generate more heat than light. But Žižek is in no mood to get burned, at one point needing to be physically restrained by Assange. Both sides accuse the other of being Nazis, and further accusations flung at public figures. Horowitz doesn't hold his tongue:
“Europe is a cultural theme park. It is insignificant. That's what the welfare state did — it took Europe out of the picture ... The Swedes have no morals”
His choicest morsels of opprobrium are reserved for Obama, however: “You've got a leftist in the White House, a guy who was brought up and trained by communists, whose whole political career was in the communist left”. This point is the most contested by Žižek: “In what meaningful sense is [Obama] a communist?”
Horowitz: "The United States is crippled in part because the Commander-in-Chief is a leftist!"
Žižek: "Here I respectfully disagree... if the United States still have a certain attraction and so on to the world, it is because of people like Obama!"
The circus continues, but perhaps the sanest moment lies in Žižek's last words, as the credits roll: “This was madness”.
Short Documentary: Understanding PIPA / SOPA & Why You Should Be Concerned
Most everyone has noticed the wide swath of internet websites that have been blacked out in protest of the pending PIPA / SOPA legislation in congress, but not as many people understand exactly why those bills are such a problem.
This short documentary explores PIPA and SOPA, how the bills work, who’s behind them, and why all internet users have reason to be concerned.
Please help us by SHARING THIS VIDEO
and spreading the word about PIPA / SOPA.
The fight to prevent online censorship in the U.S. is far from over. While SOPA’s future seems increasingly bleak, PIPA has not been pulled from consideration in the senate, where it will be up for a vote later this month.
It is important to understand that PIPA has the same fundamental problems of SOPA. It is NOT a compromise bill; at this point, it is little more than a legislative strategy to abandon the SOPA branding in favor of PIPA.
Both bills contain vague language and reach too broadly, threatening free speech and innovation on the web. Both institute a private right of action for companies to block access to infringing content without due process. Both contain an immunity clause to protect these companies from legal consequence if they make mistakes. And both set the wrong global precedent by encouraging other countries to censor the internet based on their own domestic laws.
While President Obama is opposed to the DNS-blocked mechanisms proposed in the bills, the language still exists. As well, Obama has not come against the legislation itself, nor has he signaled his intention to veto the legislation if it passes. These bills don’t need to be fixed, they need to be scrapped.
Currently, PIPA or a similar bill have a real chance of passing. But you can help to stop them:
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE
Tell them you oppose PIPA, SOPA, and any other form of internet censorship.
CENSOR YOUR WEBSITE OR BLOG
And join hundreds of others like Wikipedia and Reddit in protesting these bills.
SHARE THIS VIDEO
Help spread the word that The News won’t.
Source: http://newleftmedia.com/
Tariq Ali: Obama’s Expansion of Af-Pak War "Has Blown Up in His Face"
Amid ongoing U.S.-Pakistani tensions and fears of a military coup in Pakistan, we are joined by British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker and novelist, Tariq Ali. Ali discusses Pakistan’s internal turmoil, as well as Pakistani attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy, the GOP presidential contest, and the prospect of a military strike against Iran. "[Pakistanis] are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face," Ali says. [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to Pakistan, where some say a military coup is imminent. The country’s government is facing uncertainty over its future, four years after a return to democratic rule. During that time, there has also been a near collapse in relations between Pakistan and the United States. The last year witnessed an increase in drone attacks, the killing of two Pakistanis by CIA contractor Raymond Davis, and the U.S. raid that led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Now Pakistan has forced the U.S. to close a key drone base and threatened to shoot down any U.S. drones. This follows an attack on a senior al-Qaeda member last week, the first drone strike after an eight-week pause. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports the United States is paying six times as much to send war supplies to troops in Afghanistan after Pakistan closed two key border crossings to NATO convoys. The closings came after a U.S. air strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.
Yesterday, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said the relations with the United States were on hold.
For more, we’re joined now by Tariq Ali, British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker, novelist. He’s the author of over 20 books, including The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, as well as The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!
TARIQ ALI: Great to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: First, is a coup imminent in Pakistan?
TARIQ ALI: I don’t think so. I think the military is not interested in pushing for a coup at the moment. They are relying on the Supreme Court to get rid of a corrupt president. And what has happened is that the Supreme Court has instructed the Prime Minister to charge the President with corruption and related crimes, and the Prime Minister has refused. So the Supreme Court is now charging the Prime Minister with contempt of court. That was the last news I got from Pakistan. And the military is going to let all this play out.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But now, the Prime Minister was at first saying that he believed the President had immunity. What is the legal situation in Pakistan of sitting presidents and leaders of the country, in terms of their immunity from prosecution?
TARIQ ALI: Well, there is no immunity, but a national reconciliation ordinance was passed by the assembly on the say-so of the military when the United States sent Benazir Bhutto back. And they said all the politicians’ crimes, financial crimes, the slate would be wiped clean. This was accepted. Now there’s an appeal in the Supreme Court saying that the NRO was illegal, and the Supreme Court has accepted that. So no one—no corrupt politician, in power or out of power, has immunity, if that decision is upheld.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the Obama administration unveiled a new military strategy billed as a move toward a leaner, streamlined global U.S. force. The U.S. vows a stepped-up focus on the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the increased use of drone strikes that have targeted militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The plan also touts a reduction in military spending, but only when compared to previous increases. Unveiling the plan at the Pentagon, President Obama said military spending will exceed its levels at the end of the George W. Bush administration’s second term.
TARIQ ALI: Well, Amy, the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers and the bombing of their checkpoint makes no rational sense at all. The United States did it. They knew it was a military checkpoint. They knew that it was Pakistani soldiers. They haven’t yet been able to come up with any reasonable explanation as to how that happened. So one has to assume that it was deliberate. And this happened roughly at the same period as Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, sent a message to the Pentagon saying, "Come and help us against our own army. We’ll do whatever you want," which has become a huge scandal in Pakistan. It’s like a Clancy novel. And the ambassador actually going and pleading. This ambassador has now been removed. Another one has been appointed. So all sorts of things are going on behind the scenes, of which we haven’t yet heard the whole—the whole story is yet to come out.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Tariq, I’d like to ask you about this whole trend of the relations with allies in the region, not just in terms of the huge tension between the U.S. and the Pakistani military, but the front page of the New York Times today, a lead article about the growing tension between the Afghan army and the U.S. military, to the point that Afghan soldiers trained by the U.S. are repeatedly attacking and killing U.S. soldiers.
TARIQ ALI: Well, the reason for this, Juan, I mean, I’ve pointed this out several times, that the insurgents in Afghanistan, like all guerrillas, have said to their supporters, "When you’re offered free training, if they want to try and recruit you into their army, do it. Go and learn how to do it." And they’ve infiltrated the Afghan army and the police force. And the United States is very well aware of this, which is why now serious negotiations are taking place with the insurgents to try and find some solution in Afghanistan. But this has been going on for ages. And it will carry on, because it’s a traditional way of resistance when your country is occupied. You take the weapons of your enemy. You use them against them. You infiltrate the enemy’s security services. And the Afghans have done all that.
AMY GOODMAN: This relation between the U.S. and Afghanistan—if the Afghanistan war comes to an end, does that mean Pakistan will not be getting the billions of dollars that it’s been getting as it plays both sides?
TARIQ ALI: Once the United States decides to withdraw from Afghanistan—
AMY GOODMAN: Which it hasn’t.
TARIQ ALI: —and the likelihood is that this will be sooner rather than later—the money will stop, of course. I mean, given the economic crisis here, it’s impossible to justify spending so much on military armaments and supplying the Pakistan army. The question is, will they do to the Egyptian army, as well? Both these armies are heavily dependent on U.S. funding.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And we here are so consumed, increasingly, by the presidential elections and the various Republican debates. The reaction in Pakistan to what’s going on among the candidates for president here in the U.S., if any?
TARIQ ALI: Bemusement. I mean, they are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face. The candidate who is—people take quite seriously is Ron Paul, but simply because he says he’s in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from all over the world and ending the imperial role. And that, of course, is very popular all over the world. And people are not aware of some of his other positions, but this one they concentrate on, because they say no other candidate is even talking about America as an empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear-armed Pakistan—nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, talk about that dynamic and the United States, and the amount of money that the U.S. is putting into Pakistan.
TARIQ ALI: Well, both—the United States has now accepted the Indian nuclear weapons, which is why the Indians have come on board, participating in maneuvers, etc. And Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are a fait accompli. There’s nothing that can be done about it. The danger is that if the Afghan War continues and the U.S. carries on the drone attacks, that within the army there will be so much anger that there will be a split. And if the Pakistan army splits, then there is no guarantee what is likely to happen, which is why American policy should not encourage such a split, but actually stabilize the situation and calm it down. 'Til now, they've been doing the opposite.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran?
TARIQ ALI: Iran, in my opinion, the Pentagon generals are not in favor of a war on Iran, because that would overstretch the United States, and the Iranians will—are quite a strong country, economically and militarily. They will probably respond within Iraq, within Afghanistan, on the Lebanese border, and in Iran itself. So, is the United States going to be prepared to fight four wars to do something that the Israelis want more than anyone else? I mean, ideally, the United States should have been mending its fences with Iran. I mean, Nixon did it with China. Obama should have flown to Tehran and done a deal with them. They refused to do that, because of the pressure of the Israelis, and the result is now tension. And if the Iranians close down the Straits of Hormuz in any conflict, which they are threatening to do, this will affect oil supplies to the West. And given the economy is already in a mess, the situation will become catastrophic. So I think it would be a crazy president who ordered bombing raids on Iran at the moment.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And we only have a few seconds, but your sense of the post-Occupy Wall Street period, the impact on the progressive and popular movement here in the U.S. and its ability to affect policy in the country?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I think the Occupy movements in the United States are themselves a reflection of what happened earlier in the Arab world and the changes taking place there. So it’s an important beginning. My fear is that the movement might die out unless it moves forward. And the way to move forward is to have a set of demands, a charter for changing America. I mean, there should be a charter from progressives for changing America. No one is coming up with it from the mainstream.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us. The latest book of Tariq Ali is The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/20/tariq_ali_obamas_expansion_of_af
Yesterday, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, said the relations with the United States were on hold.
HINA RABBANI KHAR: I would say they are conveniently on hold, until we start re-engaging. If an incident happened in a reaction to that, the government clearly said that we will be looking at, you know, re-evaluation of our terms of engagement with the United States. Now, that re-evaluation process is underway as we speak. So, ’til the time that that re-evaluation process is not complete, we cannot start the re-engagement.AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the State Department announced the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, will visit New Delhi on his way to Kabul for talks with President Karzai and other top officials.
For more, we’re joined now by Tariq Ali, British-Pakistani political commentator, historian, activist, filmmaker, novelist. He’s the author of over 20 books, including The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, as well as The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!
TARIQ ALI: Great to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: First, is a coup imminent in Pakistan?
TARIQ ALI: I don’t think so. I think the military is not interested in pushing for a coup at the moment. They are relying on the Supreme Court to get rid of a corrupt president. And what has happened is that the Supreme Court has instructed the Prime Minister to charge the President with corruption and related crimes, and the Prime Minister has refused. So the Supreme Court is now charging the Prime Minister with contempt of court. That was the last news I got from Pakistan. And the military is going to let all this play out.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But now, the Prime Minister was at first saying that he believed the President had immunity. What is the legal situation in Pakistan of sitting presidents and leaders of the country, in terms of their immunity from prosecution?
TARIQ ALI: Well, there is no immunity, but a national reconciliation ordinance was passed by the assembly on the say-so of the military when the United States sent Benazir Bhutto back. And they said all the politicians’ crimes, financial crimes, the slate would be wiped clean. This was accepted. Now there’s an appeal in the Supreme Court saying that the NRO was illegal, and the Supreme Court has accepted that. So no one—no corrupt politician, in power or out of power, has immunity, if that decision is upheld.
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, the Obama administration unveiled a new military strategy billed as a move toward a leaner, streamlined global U.S. force. The U.S. vows a stepped-up focus on the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the increased use of drone strikes that have targeted militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The plan also touts a reduction in military spending, but only when compared to previous increases. Unveiling the plan at the Pentagon, President Obama said military spending will exceed its levels at the end of the George W. Bush administration’s second term.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We will be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific, and budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region. We’re going to continue investing in our critical partnerships and alliances, including NATO, which has demonstrated time and again, most recently in Libya, that it’s a force multiplier. We will stay vigilant, especially in the Middle East. I think it’s important for all Americans to remember, over the past 10 years, since 9/11, our defense budget grew at an extraordinary pace. Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this: it will still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, you wrote The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. And included in answering this, talk about what happened with the 24 Pakistani soldiers, the significance of this, and how the U.S. is perceived in Pakistan.
TARIQ ALI: Well, Amy, the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers and the bombing of their checkpoint makes no rational sense at all. The United States did it. They knew it was a military checkpoint. They knew that it was Pakistani soldiers. They haven’t yet been able to come up with any reasonable explanation as to how that happened. So one has to assume that it was deliberate. And this happened roughly at the same period as Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, sent a message to the Pentagon saying, "Come and help us against our own army. We’ll do whatever you want," which has become a huge scandal in Pakistan. It’s like a Clancy novel. And the ambassador actually going and pleading. This ambassador has now been removed. Another one has been appointed. So all sorts of things are going on behind the scenes, of which we haven’t yet heard the whole—the whole story is yet to come out.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Tariq, I’d like to ask you about this whole trend of the relations with allies in the region, not just in terms of the huge tension between the U.S. and the Pakistani military, but the front page of the New York Times today, a lead article about the growing tension between the Afghan army and the U.S. military, to the point that Afghan soldiers trained by the U.S. are repeatedly attacking and killing U.S. soldiers.
TARIQ ALI: Well, the reason for this, Juan, I mean, I’ve pointed this out several times, that the insurgents in Afghanistan, like all guerrillas, have said to their supporters, "When you’re offered free training, if they want to try and recruit you into their army, do it. Go and learn how to do it." And they’ve infiltrated the Afghan army and the police force. And the United States is very well aware of this, which is why now serious negotiations are taking place with the insurgents to try and find some solution in Afghanistan. But this has been going on for ages. And it will carry on, because it’s a traditional way of resistance when your country is occupied. You take the weapons of your enemy. You use them against them. You infiltrate the enemy’s security services. And the Afghans have done all that.
AMY GOODMAN: This relation between the U.S. and Afghanistan—if the Afghanistan war comes to an end, does that mean Pakistan will not be getting the billions of dollars that it’s been getting as it plays both sides?
TARIQ ALI: Once the United States decides to withdraw from Afghanistan—
AMY GOODMAN: Which it hasn’t.
TARIQ ALI: —and the likelihood is that this will be sooner rather than later—the money will stop, of course. I mean, given the economic crisis here, it’s impossible to justify spending so much on military armaments and supplying the Pakistan army. The question is, will they do to the Egyptian army, as well? Both these armies are heavily dependent on U.S. funding.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And we here are so consumed, increasingly, by the presidential elections and the various Republican debates. The reaction in Pakistan to what’s going on among the candidates for president here in the U.S., if any?
TARIQ ALI: Bemusement. I mean, they are basically suffering because Obama, arrogantly, escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and thought he could get away with it. That has now blown up in his face. The candidate who is—people take quite seriously is Ron Paul, but simply because he says he’s in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from all over the world and ending the imperial role. And that, of course, is very popular all over the world. And people are not aware of some of his other positions, but this one they concentrate on, because they say no other candidate is even talking about America as an empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear-armed Pakistan—nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, talk about that dynamic and the United States, and the amount of money that the U.S. is putting into Pakistan.
TARIQ ALI: Well, both—the United States has now accepted the Indian nuclear weapons, which is why the Indians have come on board, participating in maneuvers, etc. And Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are a fait accompli. There’s nothing that can be done about it. The danger is that if the Afghan War continues and the U.S. carries on the drone attacks, that within the army there will be so much anger that there will be a split. And if the Pakistan army splits, then there is no guarantee what is likely to happen, which is why American policy should not encourage such a split, but actually stabilize the situation and calm it down. 'Til now, they've been doing the opposite.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran?
TARIQ ALI: Iran, in my opinion, the Pentagon generals are not in favor of a war on Iran, because that would overstretch the United States, and the Iranians will—are quite a strong country, economically and militarily. They will probably respond within Iraq, within Afghanistan, on the Lebanese border, and in Iran itself. So, is the United States going to be prepared to fight four wars to do something that the Israelis want more than anyone else? I mean, ideally, the United States should have been mending its fences with Iran. I mean, Nixon did it with China. Obama should have flown to Tehran and done a deal with them. They refused to do that, because of the pressure of the Israelis, and the result is now tension. And if the Iranians close down the Straits of Hormuz in any conflict, which they are threatening to do, this will affect oil supplies to the West. And given the economy is already in a mess, the situation will become catastrophic. So I think it would be a crazy president who ordered bombing raids on Iran at the moment.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And we only have a few seconds, but your sense of the post-Occupy Wall Street period, the impact on the progressive and popular movement here in the U.S. and its ability to affect policy in the country?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I think the Occupy movements in the United States are themselves a reflection of what happened earlier in the Arab world and the changes taking place there. So it’s an important beginning. My fear is that the movement might die out unless it moves forward. And the way to move forward is to have a set of demands, a charter for changing America. I mean, there should be a charter from progressives for changing America. No one is coming up with it from the mainstream.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us. The latest book of Tariq Ali is The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/20/tariq_ali_obamas_expansion_of_af
"Internet Censorship Affects Everybody": Rebecca MacKinnon on the Global Struggle for Online Freedom
As protests mount against two controversial internet anti-piracy bills moving through Congress, we speak with Rebecca MacKinnon, author of the forthcoming book, "Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom." "If we want democracy to survive in the internet age, we really need to work to make sure that the internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with democracy," MacKinnon says. "And that means exercising our power not only as consumers and internet users and investors, but also as voters, to make sure that our digital lives contain the same kind of protections of our rights that we expect in physical space." She argues that for every empowering story of the internet’s role, there are many more about the quiet corrosion of civil liberties by companies and governments. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Rebecca MacKinnon in Washington, D.C., author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Rebecca, the internet has been touted as such a tremendous liberating force. When we look at the events of this past year, the uprisings throughout the Middle East, part of the discussion of how that moment came is because of the internet, because of social media. And yet you talk about, more often than not, the internet is being used to spy on, to crack down on—spy on people, crack down on civil liberties. Talk about what you have found and how this relates to the legislation that we’re seeing now being developed in Washington.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, thanks very much, Amy, for having me on here today.
And just to connect my book to the issues that you were just discussing in the previous segment about the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, I think the reason why this—these issues are so important for ordinary Americans and really go beyond just sort of a nerdy, geeky technical issue is that in today’s society, we, as citizens, increasingly depend on internet services and platforms, mobile services and platforms, not only for our personal lives and our businesses and our jobs, but also for our political discourse and political activism, getting involved with politics. And so, it’s very important that people who are exercising power, whether they’re corporate or whether they’re government, that are exercising power over what we can see, over what we can access, over what we can publish and transmit through these digital spaces, need to be held accountable, and we need to make sure that power is not being abused in these digital spaces and platforms that we depend on. And so, that’s why this SOPA and PIPA legislation and the fight over it is so important, is who are you empowering to decide what people can and cannot see and do on the internet, and how do you make sure that that power is not going to be abused in ways that could have political consequences. And we’ve actually seen how existing copyright law has sometimes been abused by different actors who want to prevent critics from speaking out.
But coming back to the Arab Spring, my book is not about whether the good guys or the bad guys are winning on the internet. The internet is empowering everybody. It’s empowering Democrats. It’s empowering dictators. It’s empowering criminals. It’s empowering people who are doing really wonderful and creative things. But the issue really is how do we ensure that the internet evolves in a manner that remains consistent with our democratic values and that continues to support people’s ability to use these technologies for dissent and political organizing. And while the internet was part of the story in the Arab Spring in terms of how people were able to organize, it’s not so clear to what extent it’s going to be part of the story in terms of building stable democracies in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, where the dictators did fall, let alone in a number of other countries.
In Tunisia, for instance, there is a big argument going on, now that they’ve had their set of democratic elections to the Constitutional Assembly, and they’re trying to write their constitution and figure out how to set up a new democracy. And Tunisia, under Ben Ali, was actually one of the most sophisticated Arab countries when it came to censoring and surveillance on the internet. And quite a number of the people who have been democratically elected in Tunisia are calling for a resumption of censorship and surveillance for national security reasons, to maintain public morals and public order. And there’s a huge debate going on about what is the role of censorship and surveillance in a democracy, and how do you make sure that power is not abused.
And they turn and look at the United States, they look at Europe, and censorship laws are proliferating around the democratic world. And there’s not sufficient discussion and consideration for how these laws are going to be abused. And we’ve seen, actually, in Europe, with a number of efforts to censor both copyright infringement as well as child pornography and so on, that a lot of this internet blocking that happens, even in democracies, oftentimes exercises mission creep, so things that weren’t originally intended to be blocked end up getting blocked when the systems are in place. It’s really difficult to make sure that the censorship does not spread beyond its original intent. It’s very hard to control. So, this is one of the issues.
It’s not that the internet isn’t empowering. It’s not that the internet can’t help the good guys—it certainly does. But we’re at a critical point, I think, in history, where the internet is not some force of nature. How it evolves and how it can be used and who it empowers really depends on all of us taking responsibility for making sure it evolves in a direction that’s compatible with democracy, and that it doesn’t empower the most powerful incumbent governments or the most powerful corporations to decide what we can and cannot see and do with our technology.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca MacKinnon, talk about the phenomenon, Control 2.0.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Right. So, Control 2.0 is what I refer to in terms of how authoritarian governments are evolving in the internet age. And so, one example I use is China. And China, in many ways, is exhibit A for how an authoritarian state survives the internet. And how do they do that? They have not cut off their population from the internet. In fact, the internet is expanding rapidly in China. They now have over 500 million internet users. And the Chinese government recognizes that being connected to the global internet is really important for its economy, for its education, for its culture, for innovation. Yet, at the same time, they have worked out a way to filter and censor the content overseas that they feel their citizens should not be accessing.
And what’s even more insidious, actually, is the way in which the state uses the private sector to conduct most of its censorship and surveillance. So, actually, what we know as the Great Firewall of China that blocks Twitter and Facebook, that’s only one part of Chinese internet censorship. Actually, most Chinese internet users are using Chinese-language websites that are run by Chinese companies based in China, and those companies are all held responsible for everything their users are doing. And so, they have to hire entire departments of people to monitor their users at the police’s behest and also to not just block, but delete content that the Chinese government believes infringes Chinese law. And, of course, when—in a country where crime is defined very broadly to include political and religious dissent, that involves a great deal of censorship. And it’s being conducted, to a great degree, not by government agents, but by private corporations who are complying with these demands in order to make a profit in China.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca, talk about specifics, like Facebook, Facebook—changes in Facebook features and privacy settings, exposing identities of protesters to police in Egypt, in Iran. Talk about Google. Talk about Apple removing politically controversial apps.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Right. So, for instance, with Facebook, Facebook has its own kind of type of governance, which is why I call private internet companies the "sovereigns of cyberspace." And so, Facebook has a rule where it requires that its users need to use their real name, their real identity. And while some people violate that rule, that makes them vulnerable to having their account shut down if they are discovered. And so, the reason they do this is that they want people to be accountable for their speech and prevent bullying and so on. And that may make sense in the context of a Western democracy, assuming that you’re not vulnerable in your workplace or anything like that, which is even a question, but it means that you have to be—as an Egyptian activist or as an activist in Syria and so on, you’re more exposed, because you have to be on Facebook using your real name.
And actually, a group of prominent activists in Egypt who were using Facebook to organize an anti-torture movement were doing so, before the regime fell, under fake names, and actually, at a critical point where they were trying to organize a major protest, their Facebook group went down, because they were in violation of the terms of service. And they actually had to find somebody in the U.S. to take over their Facebook page so that they could continue to operate.
And you also have a lot of cases of people in Iran. There have been a number of reports of people being tortured for their Facebook passwords and so on. And the fact that Iranian users are, in most cases, using their real names makes them a great deal more vulnerable.
And as you know, here in the United States, Facebook recently was subject to a fine and had to reach a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission because of the changes in its privacy settings that had been sudden at the end of 2009. People had made assumptions about whether their friends could be seen or not publicly. Suddenly those settings changed, and it exposed a lot of people in ways that, in some cases, were very dangerous.
But also, let’s take some other companies and some of the issues that users face. Apple, in its App Store, it has different versions of its App Store in different parts of the world. And their Chinese App Store censors applications that the Chinese government believes to be controversial. So, for instance, the Dalai Lama app in the Apple Store is not available in China. But Apple employees are also making a lot of other judgments about what content is and isn’t appropriate, that goes according to standards that are much more narrow than our First Amendment rights. So, for instance, an American political cartoonist, Mark Fiore, had an app in which he was making fun of a range of politicians, including President Obama, and Apple App Store nannies decided to censor that app, because they considered it to be too controversial, even though that speech was clearly protected under the First Amendment. So you have companies making these judgments that go well beyond sort of our judicial and constitutional process.
You also have Amazon, for instance, dropping WikiLeaks, even though it had not been accused, let alone, convicted, of any crime, simply because a number of American politicians objected to WikiLeaks. And so, there is this issue of: are companies, in the way in which they operate their services, considering the free expression rights and privacy rights of their users sufficiently to ensure that we’re able to have robust dissent, that people can speak truth to power in a manner that may be making current government officials very, very uncomfortable, but which is clearly protected both under our Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca—
REBECCA MacKINNON: Should we be expecting companies to push back a bit more?
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the newly released government documents that reveal the Department of Homeland Security hired the military contractor General Dynamics to monitor postings of U.S. citizens on dozens of websites. The sites monitored included Facebook and Twitter, as well as several news sites, including the New York Times, Wired, The Huffington Post. General Dynamics was asked to collect reports that dealt with government agencies, including CIA, FEMA, ICE. Your thoughts?
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, this is exactly the kind of issue that we need to deal with in a democracy. Now, if they have been hired to monitor postings that citizens are putting on a public website, I think that’s a reminder that our public information is public and that it’s being mined and watched by all kinds of people. But it’s also an example of why privacy settings are so important and why—why it’s important that people should be able to be anonymous if they want to be on the internet, if they fear consequences or if they fear misuse of the way in which they’re carrying out political discussions that could be used against them in different ways.
And there’s also a real issue, I think, in the way in which our laws are evolving when it comes to government access to information stored on corporate servers, that is supposed to be private, that we are not intending to be seen in public, which is that, according to the PATRIOT Act and a range of other law that has been passed in recent years, it’s much easier for government agencies to access your email, to access information about your postings on Twitter, even if they’re anonymous, than it is for government agents to come into your home and search your personal effects. To do that, they need a warrant. There is very clear restriction on the government’s ability to read your mail. Yet, according to current law, if your email is older than 180 days old, the government can access your email, if it’s stored on Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail, without any kind of warrant or court order. So, there’s a real erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights, really, to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. And this is going on, I think, to a great degree without a lot people realizing the extent to which our privacy rights are being eroded.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca, we have 30 seconds, but the significance of Wednesday, of tomorrow, of Wikipedia and many other websites going dark in protest of the legislation here in the United States? What do you think is the most important issue people should take away from what’s happening and also from your book, Consent of the Networked?
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, I think the action tomorrow really demonstrates that internet censorship affects everybody, it’s not just affecting people in China, that this is an issue that we all need to be concerned about, and it can happen in democracies as well as in dictatorships.
And the core message of my book is that if we want democracy to survive in the internet age, we really need to work to make sure that the internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with democracy, and that means exercising our power not only as consumers and internet users and investors, but also as voters, to make sure that our digital lives contain the same kind of protections of our rights that we expect in physical space.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca MacKinnon, I want to thank you very much for being with us, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, co-founder of Global Voices Online. Her new book is called Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/17/internet_censorship_affects_everybody_rebecca_mackinnon
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Rebecca, the internet has been touted as such a tremendous liberating force. When we look at the events of this past year, the uprisings throughout the Middle East, part of the discussion of how that moment came is because of the internet, because of social media. And yet you talk about, more often than not, the internet is being used to spy on, to crack down on—spy on people, crack down on civil liberties. Talk about what you have found and how this relates to the legislation that we’re seeing now being developed in Washington.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, thanks very much, Amy, for having me on here today.
And just to connect my book to the issues that you were just discussing in the previous segment about the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, I think the reason why this—these issues are so important for ordinary Americans and really go beyond just sort of a nerdy, geeky technical issue is that in today’s society, we, as citizens, increasingly depend on internet services and platforms, mobile services and platforms, not only for our personal lives and our businesses and our jobs, but also for our political discourse and political activism, getting involved with politics. And so, it’s very important that people who are exercising power, whether they’re corporate or whether they’re government, that are exercising power over what we can see, over what we can access, over what we can publish and transmit through these digital spaces, need to be held accountable, and we need to make sure that power is not being abused in these digital spaces and platforms that we depend on. And so, that’s why this SOPA and PIPA legislation and the fight over it is so important, is who are you empowering to decide what people can and cannot see and do on the internet, and how do you make sure that that power is not going to be abused in ways that could have political consequences. And we’ve actually seen how existing copyright law has sometimes been abused by different actors who want to prevent critics from speaking out.
But coming back to the Arab Spring, my book is not about whether the good guys or the bad guys are winning on the internet. The internet is empowering everybody. It’s empowering Democrats. It’s empowering dictators. It’s empowering criminals. It’s empowering people who are doing really wonderful and creative things. But the issue really is how do we ensure that the internet evolves in a manner that remains consistent with our democratic values and that continues to support people’s ability to use these technologies for dissent and political organizing. And while the internet was part of the story in the Arab Spring in terms of how people were able to organize, it’s not so clear to what extent it’s going to be part of the story in terms of building stable democracies in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, where the dictators did fall, let alone in a number of other countries.
In Tunisia, for instance, there is a big argument going on, now that they’ve had their set of democratic elections to the Constitutional Assembly, and they’re trying to write their constitution and figure out how to set up a new democracy. And Tunisia, under Ben Ali, was actually one of the most sophisticated Arab countries when it came to censoring and surveillance on the internet. And quite a number of the people who have been democratically elected in Tunisia are calling for a resumption of censorship and surveillance for national security reasons, to maintain public morals and public order. And there’s a huge debate going on about what is the role of censorship and surveillance in a democracy, and how do you make sure that power is not abused.
And they turn and look at the United States, they look at Europe, and censorship laws are proliferating around the democratic world. And there’s not sufficient discussion and consideration for how these laws are going to be abused. And we’ve seen, actually, in Europe, with a number of efforts to censor both copyright infringement as well as child pornography and so on, that a lot of this internet blocking that happens, even in democracies, oftentimes exercises mission creep, so things that weren’t originally intended to be blocked end up getting blocked when the systems are in place. It’s really difficult to make sure that the censorship does not spread beyond its original intent. It’s very hard to control. So, this is one of the issues.
It’s not that the internet isn’t empowering. It’s not that the internet can’t help the good guys—it certainly does. But we’re at a critical point, I think, in history, where the internet is not some force of nature. How it evolves and how it can be used and who it empowers really depends on all of us taking responsibility for making sure it evolves in a direction that’s compatible with democracy, and that it doesn’t empower the most powerful incumbent governments or the most powerful corporations to decide what we can and cannot see and do with our technology.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca MacKinnon, talk about the phenomenon, Control 2.0.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Right. So, Control 2.0 is what I refer to in terms of how authoritarian governments are evolving in the internet age. And so, one example I use is China. And China, in many ways, is exhibit A for how an authoritarian state survives the internet. And how do they do that? They have not cut off their population from the internet. In fact, the internet is expanding rapidly in China. They now have over 500 million internet users. And the Chinese government recognizes that being connected to the global internet is really important for its economy, for its education, for its culture, for innovation. Yet, at the same time, they have worked out a way to filter and censor the content overseas that they feel their citizens should not be accessing.
And what’s even more insidious, actually, is the way in which the state uses the private sector to conduct most of its censorship and surveillance. So, actually, what we know as the Great Firewall of China that blocks Twitter and Facebook, that’s only one part of Chinese internet censorship. Actually, most Chinese internet users are using Chinese-language websites that are run by Chinese companies based in China, and those companies are all held responsible for everything their users are doing. And so, they have to hire entire departments of people to monitor their users at the police’s behest and also to not just block, but delete content that the Chinese government believes infringes Chinese law. And, of course, when—in a country where crime is defined very broadly to include political and religious dissent, that involves a great deal of censorship. And it’s being conducted, to a great degree, not by government agents, but by private corporations who are complying with these demands in order to make a profit in China.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca, talk about specifics, like Facebook, Facebook—changes in Facebook features and privacy settings, exposing identities of protesters to police in Egypt, in Iran. Talk about Google. Talk about Apple removing politically controversial apps.
REBECCA MacKINNON: Right. So, for instance, with Facebook, Facebook has its own kind of type of governance, which is why I call private internet companies the "sovereigns of cyberspace." And so, Facebook has a rule where it requires that its users need to use their real name, their real identity. And while some people violate that rule, that makes them vulnerable to having their account shut down if they are discovered. And so, the reason they do this is that they want people to be accountable for their speech and prevent bullying and so on. And that may make sense in the context of a Western democracy, assuming that you’re not vulnerable in your workplace or anything like that, which is even a question, but it means that you have to be—as an Egyptian activist or as an activist in Syria and so on, you’re more exposed, because you have to be on Facebook using your real name.
And actually, a group of prominent activists in Egypt who were using Facebook to organize an anti-torture movement were doing so, before the regime fell, under fake names, and actually, at a critical point where they were trying to organize a major protest, their Facebook group went down, because they were in violation of the terms of service. And they actually had to find somebody in the U.S. to take over their Facebook page so that they could continue to operate.
And you also have a lot of cases of people in Iran. There have been a number of reports of people being tortured for their Facebook passwords and so on. And the fact that Iranian users are, in most cases, using their real names makes them a great deal more vulnerable.
And as you know, here in the United States, Facebook recently was subject to a fine and had to reach a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission because of the changes in its privacy settings that had been sudden at the end of 2009. People had made assumptions about whether their friends could be seen or not publicly. Suddenly those settings changed, and it exposed a lot of people in ways that, in some cases, were very dangerous.
But also, let’s take some other companies and some of the issues that users face. Apple, in its App Store, it has different versions of its App Store in different parts of the world. And their Chinese App Store censors applications that the Chinese government believes to be controversial. So, for instance, the Dalai Lama app in the Apple Store is not available in China. But Apple employees are also making a lot of other judgments about what content is and isn’t appropriate, that goes according to standards that are much more narrow than our First Amendment rights. So, for instance, an American political cartoonist, Mark Fiore, had an app in which he was making fun of a range of politicians, including President Obama, and Apple App Store nannies decided to censor that app, because they considered it to be too controversial, even though that speech was clearly protected under the First Amendment. So you have companies making these judgments that go well beyond sort of our judicial and constitutional process.
You also have Amazon, for instance, dropping WikiLeaks, even though it had not been accused, let alone, convicted, of any crime, simply because a number of American politicians objected to WikiLeaks. And so, there is this issue of: are companies, in the way in which they operate their services, considering the free expression rights and privacy rights of their users sufficiently to ensure that we’re able to have robust dissent, that people can speak truth to power in a manner that may be making current government officials very, very uncomfortable, but which is clearly protected both under our Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca—
REBECCA MacKINNON: Should we be expecting companies to push back a bit more?
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the newly released government documents that reveal the Department of Homeland Security hired the military contractor General Dynamics to monitor postings of U.S. citizens on dozens of websites. The sites monitored included Facebook and Twitter, as well as several news sites, including the New York Times, Wired, The Huffington Post. General Dynamics was asked to collect reports that dealt with government agencies, including CIA, FEMA, ICE. Your thoughts?
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, this is exactly the kind of issue that we need to deal with in a democracy. Now, if they have been hired to monitor postings that citizens are putting on a public website, I think that’s a reminder that our public information is public and that it’s being mined and watched by all kinds of people. But it’s also an example of why privacy settings are so important and why—why it’s important that people should be able to be anonymous if they want to be on the internet, if they fear consequences or if they fear misuse of the way in which they’re carrying out political discussions that could be used against them in different ways.
And there’s also a real issue, I think, in the way in which our laws are evolving when it comes to government access to information stored on corporate servers, that is supposed to be private, that we are not intending to be seen in public, which is that, according to the PATRIOT Act and a range of other law that has been passed in recent years, it’s much easier for government agencies to access your email, to access information about your postings on Twitter, even if they’re anonymous, than it is for government agents to come into your home and search your personal effects. To do that, they need a warrant. There is very clear restriction on the government’s ability to read your mail. Yet, according to current law, if your email is older than 180 days old, the government can access your email, if it’s stored on Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail, without any kind of warrant or court order. So, there’s a real erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights, really, to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. And this is going on, I think, to a great degree without a lot people realizing the extent to which our privacy rights are being eroded.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca, we have 30 seconds, but the significance of Wednesday, of tomorrow, of Wikipedia and many other websites going dark in protest of the legislation here in the United States? What do you think is the most important issue people should take away from what’s happening and also from your book, Consent of the Networked?
REBECCA MacKINNON: Well, I think the action tomorrow really demonstrates that internet censorship affects everybody, it’s not just affecting people in China, that this is an issue that we all need to be concerned about, and it can happen in democracies as well as in dictatorships.
And the core message of my book is that if we want democracy to survive in the internet age, we really need to work to make sure that the internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with democracy, and that means exercising our power not only as consumers and internet users and investors, but also as voters, to make sure that our digital lives contain the same kind of protections of our rights that we expect in physical space.
AMY GOODMAN: Rebecca MacKinnon, I want to thank you very much for being with us, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, co-founder of Global Voices Online. Her new book is called Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/17/internet_censorship_affects_everybody_rebecca_mackinnon
SOPA: Anti-Piracy or Censorship? Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales vs. Copyright Alliance’s Sandra Aistars
Congressional support for a pair of anti-piracy bills is weakening after Wednesday’s historic online protest in which thousands of websites went dark for 24 hours. Hollywood film studios, music publishers and major broadcasters support the anti-piracy legislation, saying it aims to stop the piracy of copyrighted material over the internet on websites based outside the United States. "We’re talking about sites that are operated and dedicated to piracy and that are really preventing individual creators across the country from having an economic livelihood from their creative pursuits," says Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, whose members include the Motion Picture Association of America, NBCUniversal, Time Warner, Viacom, ASCAP and BMI. But critics say the bills could profoundly change the internet by stifling innovation and investment, hallmarks of the free, open internet. "Wikipedia could be defined as a search engine under these [bills]," says Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. "That would mean that it would be illegal for Wikipedia to link to a site, even if we’re writing an encyclopedia article explaining to the public what is The Pirate Bay, what is going on here, and we want to send you there so you can go and take a look for yourself. That would become illegal. This is outrageous, and it’s just not acceptable under the First Amendment." [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZALEZ: Congressional support for a pair of Hollywood-backed anti-piracy bills is weakening after a historic online protest Wednesday. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia shut down the English version of its website for 24 hours to protest the bills. Thousands of other sites did the same. Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, covered the Google icon on its home page with a black box. Google also urged visitors to sign an online petition asking Congress to reject the bills.
The House bill is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, while the Senate bill is PIPA, the Protect IP Act. The Hollywood film studios, music publishers and major broadcasters like NBC and Viacom have supported the anti-piracy legislation, which ostensibly aims to stop the piracy of copyrighted material over the internet on websites based outside the United States. But critics say the bills would profoundly change the internet by stifling innovation and investment, hallmarks of the free, open internet.
In Washington, at least eight lawmakers announced Wednesday they can no longer support the Senate legislation, including co-sponsors Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Orrin Hatch of Utah, as well as Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland.
AMY GOODMAN: Wednesday’s action against the anti-piracy bills are being described as the largest online protest in the history of the internet. But there were also street protests yesterday against the legislation. In New York, hundreds of people gathered outside the Manhattan offices of Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, co-sponsors of the Senate bill. Andrew Rasiej, chair of the New York Tech Meetup, helped organize the protest.
We’re going to begin with Sandra in Washington. Why do you think these bills are so important?
SANDRA AISTARS: Thank you, Amy, first of all, for having me on the show. I’m really pleased that you’re taking the time to listen to supporters of the bill as well as to opponents of the bill, because there’s a lot of information about the bills out there that I’ve been hearing that understandably would be scary to anybody as to what the bills do. So, thanks for this opportunity.
As to why the bills are so incredibly important, along with the other board members that you’ve mentioned of the Copyright Alliance, I represent thousands upon thousands of individual artists who live all across America. There are about 11 million artists in the United States, and they depend on the internet to network, to market, to fundraise for their work, to connect with their fans, to distribute their work, and basically to make a living. Their ability to do so effectively is being compromised by the fact that there are criminal websites offshore that are dedicated solely to the purpose of distributing counterfeit goods and copyrighted goods for profit with no return to those creators. We’re not talking about the Wikipedias, we’re not talking about Reddit, we’re not talking about Twitter, or any of those very useful social media tools that we all rely on, when we talk about rogue sites that the bill targets. We’re talking about sites that are operated and dedicated to piracy and that are really preventing individual creators across the country from having an economic livelihood from their creative pursuits.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, you felt that these bills were such a threat that you shut down your website. Why?
JIMMY WALES: Well, these bills are very badly written. It’s all well and good to talk about the need to find some solutions to criminal behavior online. It’s not OK to set up a censorship regime in response to that. It’s not OK to have processes in place that would incentivize the credit card companies to cut off legitimate businesses upon a mere complaint. We need to go back to the drawing board and rethink the entire issue, where we put freedom of speech front and center.
AMY GOODMAN: What about that, Sandra?
SANDRA AISTARS: I agree that freedom of speech and First Amendment issues have to be front and center in all of these discussions, and they have been. The bills have nothing to do with censorship, any more than prosecuting somebody for shoplifting has something to do with censorship. If you’re a site that is criminally distributing copyrighted works or counterfeit goods online to U.S. consumers, you’re in no—you’re not committing free speech, you’re not furthering political discussions, you’re committing theft.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But Sandra, companies like Google—
JIMMY WALES: I—if I—
JUAN GONZALEZ: If I can just ask Sandra—companies like Google insist that they already are involved in voluntary policing of their sites and respond pretty rapidly to requests from industry.
SANDRA AISTARS: Right. Google is talking about its programs that are in place to deal with individual instances of infringing content that are placed, for instance, on YouTube by a user. These bills don’t address that issue whatsoever. First of all, they don’t deal with U.S.-based sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, or any other user-generated content site in the United States. They also don’t impose any duty to monitor those sites or to do anything further than what a legitimate site like YouTube already does under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And there are actually provisions in the bill that specifically make that clear and direct courts not to make alterations to copyright law, trademark law or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they enforce these bills. So, these bills are dealing with a totally different problem, which are rogue criminal websites that exist entirely and are operated and dedicated to the purpose of infringing copyright. They’re not legitimate sites like Wikipedia, which police their activities themselves. They are sites that are operated often by criminal elements that are truly dedicated to distributing copyrighted goods without authorization and with no other legitimate purpose.
AMY GOODMAN: Jimmy Wales, if you could respond to that and also talk about how you feel Wikipedia would be affected if this—these bills passed.
JIMMY WALES: So, what has been just said here is just simply not true. If you look at the content of these bills, they are very clearly about censorship. The Senate version has provisions to implement DNS blocking of overseas websites, and the bills contain provisions that would make it illegal for Google to link to, for example, The Pirated Bay. That’s pure and simple censorship of Google, and there’s no way around it. Those are the measures that we’re protesting. Those are the things that are wrong.
If you want to go up against those sites, if you want to do something about those sites, you need to go and lobby in those countries and get their laws changed so that they reflect the same kind of situation which you’ve accepted is a valid way of doing things, as we do inside the U.S. with the takedown and notice provisions and all the things that have worked so well for 10 years.
In terms of how this would affect Wikipedia, it affects us in several different ways. The definitions are so broad, Wikipedia could be defined as a search engine under these things, and then that would mean that it would be illegal for Wikipedia to link to a site, even if we’re writing an encyclopedia article explaining to the public what is The Pirate Bay, what is going on here, and we want to send you there so you can go and take a look for yourself. That would become illegal. This is outrageous, and it’s just not acceptable under the First Amendment.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jimmy Wales, you’re having an enormous effect. I mean, the internet—thousands of sites going dark yesterday is certainly the internet that roared. And you even have the co-sponsors of the bill, like the conservative Florida Republican senator, Rubio, backing off. One congressman, one senator after another is pulling away from support. How did this legislation get written? And what are your plans for further protest?
JIMMY WALES: Well, so, my view is that further protest isn’t really right. We’ve got the attention of Congress. They realize that they can’t just listen to Hollywood. They need to listen to the users of the internet. They need to listen to their voters. The thing to do now is to go back, and all of the things that our friend from ASCAP was just talking about, in terms of thinking about these rogue sites, thinking about people who are really engaged in economic profiteering off of other people’s work in an inappropriate, illegal way, let’s target that activity. Let’s not target Wikipedia, Google. Let’s not set up a DNS censorship regime.
So, in my view, I think there is a way forward. I think what’s going to happen now, we’ve got, so far, 35 senators, which is up from five before the protest, who have come out against the bill. I think we can essentially say it’s a dead letter, these bills aren’t going to go anywhere. My view is, we shouldn’t just simply gloat and sit here and say, "Ah, hurray, we won." We should actually be constructive now. We should say, "OK, look, we do want to come back," and we want to say, "Look, if there are legitimate problems, let’s analyze those. Let’s come up with solutions that work for everybody."
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sandra Aistars, what about that? Because you’ve called the protest a publicity stunt and that it’s spreading some irresponsible claims. Do you think that this protest, the range of it and the extensive nature of it, is calling for a re-examination of these bills?
SANDRA AISTARS: Well, I think the bills are being re-examined and have been re-examined. That’s part of the normal legislative drafting process. I think what happened yesterday was—you know, was interesting. It was interesting to me personally that Wikipedia took itself online in an act of self-censorship, you know, to protest the bills. But I think what needs to happen in any legislative process is that people have to look at what the bills actually say. Mr. Wales, in talking about the provisions of the bills, is referring to a bill that no longer exists and, frankly, didn’t exist in the form that he suggests it did to begin with. I’d direct folks to look at the manager’s amendment to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is available on the House Judiciary Committee website, and to look at the provisions of that bill. I’d also note that the legislative process is, as I said, you know, lengthy, and debate occurs around provisions of any bill. And that’s occurring now and has been occurring now. It’s been—over the last couple of days, there have been various modifications that have been made in addition to those that were proposed in the manager’s amendments to SOPA to address some of the concerns about DNS blocking. So both Senator Leahy and Congressman Smith have suggested that they would remove all of the DNS provisions from the bill and move forward with the provisions that are less controversial.
On DNS blocking and whether it’s appropriate to use or not to use, I’d also point people to the fact that our trading partners in Europe, in the United Kingdom, in various E.U. countries, are already implementing DNS blocking to block The Pirate Bay. So, the specific types of activities that Mr. Wales was suggesting need to occur and that we should be pursuing abroad are in fact being pursued abroad. And what we’re looking for is help from domestic sites, under this legislation, to collaborate with the attorney general when a site is declared to be dedicated to infringement by a federal district court and to stop doing business with those sites.
AMY GOODMAN: Jimmy Wales, I know you have to go off to Skye TV in the same building just a—but a quick question.
JIMMY WALES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Sandra Aistars? And also, the power of the companies that she represents, like MPAA? Sandra Aistars just mentioned, for example, Senator Leahy, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, liberal senator from Vermont, colleague of Christopher Dodd from Connecticut, who retired and became head of the MPAA. Has that weighed in, in terms of getting the initial support? Now people, you know, senators, one by one, stepping back.
JIMMY WALES: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s clear that, you know, that there is a process by which lobbyists spend a lot of money, make a lot of friendships, and have influence on legislation. And 30, 40 years ago, there wasn’t much the rest of us could do about it. Now we can get organized on the internet, and we can say, "Hey, wait a minute. You’re supposed to be here sticking up for us, not for a handful of small—a handful of big companies." So, I think that we have a chance to make a difference.
The one other comment I wanted to make is pointing to what some countries in Europe are doing in terms of DNS filtering and blocking, to me, is entirely unpersuasive. This is America. We have the First Amendment. There are certain things that Congress just simply cannot do. The fact that freedom of speech is not as strong in other countries around the world is something not to copy, but something to fight.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Jimmy Wales, for being with us. Sandra Aistars, if you could stay for a moment, we wanted to play a clip for you from one vocal critic of the two anti-piracy bills, who has been pioneering—he is a pioneering internet writer and New York University professor, Clay Shirky. Earlier this week, he recorded a TED Talk called "Defend Our Freedom to Share (Or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea)." This is part of what Professor Shirky had to say.
SANDRA AISTARS: You know, if the bills did what the professor says they do, I would be the first one standing up to oppose them. It’s simply not true. The artists and the creators that I represent rely on the internet to share their work, to communicate their work, to communicate with each other, to find new ideas, to build on each other’s works. And they would never stand up for a bill that does what the opponents propose that this bill would hypothetically do in some—some situation. Look at the text of the bills. There’s no shifting of the burden of the proof. There’s no reference to any site bearing any remote resemblance to YouTube or to TED or to Twitter or to Wikipedia. The bills go after sites that are primarily dedicated to commercially distributing infringing copyrighted works. This isn’t about people sharing their own works. This is about people abroad in criminal syndicates ripping off U.S. artists’ works and selling them back into the U.S. marketplace without any return going to the creators of those works. And that’s just simply morally wrong, and it’s offensive to the rights of creators to make a living out of their works.
AMY GOODMAN: We thank you for being with, Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, former vice president and associate general counsel at Time Warner Inc.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be speaking with Bill McKibben, founder 350.org, one of the organizations that spearheaded the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama has now rejected the pipeline’s application to cross the United States. Stay with us.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/19/sopa_anti_piracy_or_censorship_wikipedias
The House bill is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, while the Senate bill is PIPA, the Protect IP Act. The Hollywood film studios, music publishers and major broadcasters like NBC and Viacom have supported the anti-piracy legislation, which ostensibly aims to stop the piracy of copyrighted material over the internet on websites based outside the United States. But critics say the bills would profoundly change the internet by stifling innovation and investment, hallmarks of the free, open internet.
In Washington, at least eight lawmakers announced Wednesday they can no longer support the Senate legislation, including co-sponsors Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Orrin Hatch of Utah, as well as Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland.
AMY GOODMAN: Wednesday’s action against the anti-piracy bills are being described as the largest online protest in the history of the internet. But there were also street protests yesterday against the legislation. In New York, hundreds of people gathered outside the Manhattan offices of Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, co-sponsors of the Senate bill. Andrew Rasiej, chair of the New York Tech Meetup, helped organize the protest.
ANDREW RASIEJ: I used to joke that politicians don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter. But in regards to PIPA and SOPA, their ignorance is no joke. In an effort to combat piracy, which we all would like to minimize, if not outright eliminate, Congress, at the behest of moneyed special interests representing copyright-holding industries, is proposing to redesign the internet in a way that is detrimental to our industry and to the open web. If they are successful, they will not only stifle innovation and investment in emerging technology companies in New York and elsewhere, they will irrevocably damage the architecture of the internet so as to embolden censorship around the world.AMY GOODMAN: Other protesters in New York compared the bills to actions taken by China and Iran to censor the web.
IAN BASSIN: I think it sends the wrong signal to give the government the ability to shut down websites. The web should be a free medium that promotes democracy around the world. When America is trying to convince China and Iran that they shouldn’t be shutting down the web, we shouldn’t be setting a bad example.AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by two guests. Jimmy Wales is an internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia. He’s joining us from a studio in London. In Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance. She is former vice president and associate general counsel at Time Warner Inc. Board members of the Copyright Alliance include the Motion Picture Association of America, NBCUniversal, Time Warner, Viacom, ASCAP and BMI.
We’re going to begin with Sandra in Washington. Why do you think these bills are so important?
SANDRA AISTARS: Thank you, Amy, first of all, for having me on the show. I’m really pleased that you’re taking the time to listen to supporters of the bill as well as to opponents of the bill, because there’s a lot of information about the bills out there that I’ve been hearing that understandably would be scary to anybody as to what the bills do. So, thanks for this opportunity.
As to why the bills are so incredibly important, along with the other board members that you’ve mentioned of the Copyright Alliance, I represent thousands upon thousands of individual artists who live all across America. There are about 11 million artists in the United States, and they depend on the internet to network, to market, to fundraise for their work, to connect with their fans, to distribute their work, and basically to make a living. Their ability to do so effectively is being compromised by the fact that there are criminal websites offshore that are dedicated solely to the purpose of distributing counterfeit goods and copyrighted goods for profit with no return to those creators. We’re not talking about the Wikipedias, we’re not talking about Reddit, we’re not talking about Twitter, or any of those very useful social media tools that we all rely on, when we talk about rogue sites that the bill targets. We’re talking about sites that are operated and dedicated to piracy and that are really preventing individual creators across the country from having an economic livelihood from their creative pursuits.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, you felt that these bills were such a threat that you shut down your website. Why?
JIMMY WALES: Well, these bills are very badly written. It’s all well and good to talk about the need to find some solutions to criminal behavior online. It’s not OK to set up a censorship regime in response to that. It’s not OK to have processes in place that would incentivize the credit card companies to cut off legitimate businesses upon a mere complaint. We need to go back to the drawing board and rethink the entire issue, where we put freedom of speech front and center.
AMY GOODMAN: What about that, Sandra?
SANDRA AISTARS: I agree that freedom of speech and First Amendment issues have to be front and center in all of these discussions, and they have been. The bills have nothing to do with censorship, any more than prosecuting somebody for shoplifting has something to do with censorship. If you’re a site that is criminally distributing copyrighted works or counterfeit goods online to U.S. consumers, you’re in no—you’re not committing free speech, you’re not furthering political discussions, you’re committing theft.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But Sandra, companies like Google—
JIMMY WALES: I—if I—
JUAN GONZALEZ: If I can just ask Sandra—companies like Google insist that they already are involved in voluntary policing of their sites and respond pretty rapidly to requests from industry.
SANDRA AISTARS: Right. Google is talking about its programs that are in place to deal with individual instances of infringing content that are placed, for instance, on YouTube by a user. These bills don’t address that issue whatsoever. First of all, they don’t deal with U.S.-based sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, or any other user-generated content site in the United States. They also don’t impose any duty to monitor those sites or to do anything further than what a legitimate site like YouTube already does under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And there are actually provisions in the bill that specifically make that clear and direct courts not to make alterations to copyright law, trademark law or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they enforce these bills. So, these bills are dealing with a totally different problem, which are rogue criminal websites that exist entirely and are operated and dedicated to the purpose of infringing copyright. They’re not legitimate sites like Wikipedia, which police their activities themselves. They are sites that are operated often by criminal elements that are truly dedicated to distributing copyrighted goods without authorization and with no other legitimate purpose.
AMY GOODMAN: Jimmy Wales, if you could respond to that and also talk about how you feel Wikipedia would be affected if this—these bills passed.
JIMMY WALES: So, what has been just said here is just simply not true. If you look at the content of these bills, they are very clearly about censorship. The Senate version has provisions to implement DNS blocking of overseas websites, and the bills contain provisions that would make it illegal for Google to link to, for example, The Pirated Bay. That’s pure and simple censorship of Google, and there’s no way around it. Those are the measures that we’re protesting. Those are the things that are wrong.
If you want to go up against those sites, if you want to do something about those sites, you need to go and lobby in those countries and get their laws changed so that they reflect the same kind of situation which you’ve accepted is a valid way of doing things, as we do inside the U.S. with the takedown and notice provisions and all the things that have worked so well for 10 years.
In terms of how this would affect Wikipedia, it affects us in several different ways. The definitions are so broad, Wikipedia could be defined as a search engine under these things, and then that would mean that it would be illegal for Wikipedia to link to a site, even if we’re writing an encyclopedia article explaining to the public what is The Pirate Bay, what is going on here, and we want to send you there so you can go and take a look for yourself. That would become illegal. This is outrageous, and it’s just not acceptable under the First Amendment.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Jimmy Wales, you’re having an enormous effect. I mean, the internet—thousands of sites going dark yesterday is certainly the internet that roared. And you even have the co-sponsors of the bill, like the conservative Florida Republican senator, Rubio, backing off. One congressman, one senator after another is pulling away from support. How did this legislation get written? And what are your plans for further protest?
JIMMY WALES: Well, so, my view is that further protest isn’t really right. We’ve got the attention of Congress. They realize that they can’t just listen to Hollywood. They need to listen to the users of the internet. They need to listen to their voters. The thing to do now is to go back, and all of the things that our friend from ASCAP was just talking about, in terms of thinking about these rogue sites, thinking about people who are really engaged in economic profiteering off of other people’s work in an inappropriate, illegal way, let’s target that activity. Let’s not target Wikipedia, Google. Let’s not set up a DNS censorship regime.
So, in my view, I think there is a way forward. I think what’s going to happen now, we’ve got, so far, 35 senators, which is up from five before the protest, who have come out against the bill. I think we can essentially say it’s a dead letter, these bills aren’t going to go anywhere. My view is, we shouldn’t just simply gloat and sit here and say, "Ah, hurray, we won." We should actually be constructive now. We should say, "OK, look, we do want to come back," and we want to say, "Look, if there are legitimate problems, let’s analyze those. Let’s come up with solutions that work for everybody."
JUAN GONZALEZ: Sandra Aistars, what about that? Because you’ve called the protest a publicity stunt and that it’s spreading some irresponsible claims. Do you think that this protest, the range of it and the extensive nature of it, is calling for a re-examination of these bills?
SANDRA AISTARS: Well, I think the bills are being re-examined and have been re-examined. That’s part of the normal legislative drafting process. I think what happened yesterday was—you know, was interesting. It was interesting to me personally that Wikipedia took itself online in an act of self-censorship, you know, to protest the bills. But I think what needs to happen in any legislative process is that people have to look at what the bills actually say. Mr. Wales, in talking about the provisions of the bills, is referring to a bill that no longer exists and, frankly, didn’t exist in the form that he suggests it did to begin with. I’d direct folks to look at the manager’s amendment to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is available on the House Judiciary Committee website, and to look at the provisions of that bill. I’d also note that the legislative process is, as I said, you know, lengthy, and debate occurs around provisions of any bill. And that’s occurring now and has been occurring now. It’s been—over the last couple of days, there have been various modifications that have been made in addition to those that were proposed in the manager’s amendments to SOPA to address some of the concerns about DNS blocking. So both Senator Leahy and Congressman Smith have suggested that they would remove all of the DNS provisions from the bill and move forward with the provisions that are less controversial.
On DNS blocking and whether it’s appropriate to use or not to use, I’d also point people to the fact that our trading partners in Europe, in the United Kingdom, in various E.U. countries, are already implementing DNS blocking to block The Pirate Bay. So, the specific types of activities that Mr. Wales was suggesting need to occur and that we should be pursuing abroad are in fact being pursued abroad. And what we’re looking for is help from domestic sites, under this legislation, to collaborate with the attorney general when a site is declared to be dedicated to infringement by a federal district court and to stop doing business with those sites.
AMY GOODMAN: Jimmy Wales, I know you have to go off to Skye TV in the same building just a—but a quick question.
JIMMY WALES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Sandra Aistars? And also, the power of the companies that she represents, like MPAA? Sandra Aistars just mentioned, for example, Senator Leahy, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, liberal senator from Vermont, colleague of Christopher Dodd from Connecticut, who retired and became head of the MPAA. Has that weighed in, in terms of getting the initial support? Now people, you know, senators, one by one, stepping back.
JIMMY WALES: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s clear that, you know, that there is a process by which lobbyists spend a lot of money, make a lot of friendships, and have influence on legislation. And 30, 40 years ago, there wasn’t much the rest of us could do about it. Now we can get organized on the internet, and we can say, "Hey, wait a minute. You’re supposed to be here sticking up for us, not for a handful of small—a handful of big companies." So, I think that we have a chance to make a difference.
The one other comment I wanted to make is pointing to what some countries in Europe are doing in terms of DNS filtering and blocking, to me, is entirely unpersuasive. This is America. We have the First Amendment. There are certain things that Congress just simply cannot do. The fact that freedom of speech is not as strong in other countries around the world is something not to copy, but something to fight.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Jimmy Wales, for being with us. Sandra Aistars, if you could stay for a moment, we wanted to play a clip for you from one vocal critic of the two anti-piracy bills, who has been pioneering—he is a pioneering internet writer and New York University professor, Clay Shirky. Earlier this week, he recorded a TED Talk called "Defend Our Freedom to Share (Or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea)." This is part of what Professor Shirky had to say.
CLAY SHIRKY: Because the biggest producers of content on the internet are not Google and Yahoo!—they’re us—we’re the people getting policed, because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal content—innocent until proven guilty—and reversing it: guilty until proven innocent. You can’t share until you show us that you’re not sharing something we don’t like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegally falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with 100 million users. So this is the internet they have in mind.
Imagine this sign everywhere, except imagine it doesn’t say "College Bakery." Imagine it says "YouTube" and "Facebook" and "Twitter." Imagine it says "TED," because the comments can’t be policed at any acceptable cost. The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we’re given the freedom to create, to produce or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us—the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs—are in the business of having to police us or being on the hook for contributory infringement.AMY GOODMAN: New York University Professor Clay Shirky. We’ll link to his full TED Talk at democracynow.org. Sandra Aistars of the Copyright Alliance, what is your response?
SANDRA AISTARS: You know, if the bills did what the professor says they do, I would be the first one standing up to oppose them. It’s simply not true. The artists and the creators that I represent rely on the internet to share their work, to communicate their work, to communicate with each other, to find new ideas, to build on each other’s works. And they would never stand up for a bill that does what the opponents propose that this bill would hypothetically do in some—some situation. Look at the text of the bills. There’s no shifting of the burden of the proof. There’s no reference to any site bearing any remote resemblance to YouTube or to TED or to Twitter or to Wikipedia. The bills go after sites that are primarily dedicated to commercially distributing infringing copyrighted works. This isn’t about people sharing their own works. This is about people abroad in criminal syndicates ripping off U.S. artists’ works and selling them back into the U.S. marketplace without any return going to the creators of those works. And that’s just simply morally wrong, and it’s offensive to the rights of creators to make a living out of their works.
AMY GOODMAN: We thank you for being with, Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, former vice president and associate general counsel at Time Warner Inc.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be speaking with Bill McKibben, founder 350.org, one of the organizations that spearheaded the protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama has now rejected the pipeline’s application to cross the United States. Stay with us.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/19/sopa_anti_piracy_or_censorship_wikipedias
Clay Shirky: Why SOPA is a bad idea (TED video)
What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.
http://americancensorship.org/
http://sopastrike.com/
See also:
Internet Censorship Bills (SOPA/PIPA)
1. Watch and then share this video
2. Learn about the protests against SOPA
3. Read what the experts have to say in the quotes
4. Read these articles
5. Check out the Infographic:
Reactions to these bills, “SOPA" H.R.3261 and PIPA S. 978
See how the internet fought back: American Censorship Day in Numbers.
Žižek on Occupy & the Arab Spring (video)
Slavoj Zizek in an interview for Germany's Deutsche Welle television, talking about Occupy, communism and the need for a reinvention of democracy.
Slavoj Žižek is regarded as one of the ideological pioneers of the Occupy movement, but he says its demands don't go far enough. Žižek sees no future for capitalism and is calling for a radical break with the past in favor of a new social order.
Slavoj Žižek is regarded as one of the ideological pioneers of the Occupy movement, but he says its demands don't go far enough. Žižek sees no future for capitalism and is calling for a radical break with the past in favor of a new social order.
Video: Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault in conversation
Two giants of French philosophy discuss psychology, Western culture and the Kantian turn in the history of philosophy in this hidden gem of a video. Michel Foucault is interviewed by Alain Badiou, the acclaimed author of many books including Pocket Pantheon, and the forthcoming The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012), which both engage with Foucault's thought.
The interview was originally recorded in 1965, and is now accompanied by English subtitles. With thanks to @thewarmjets and @demoboroi.
Slavoj Žižek on the Occupy movement for Al Jazeera— videos and transcript
Slavoj Žižek has been interviewed by Al Jazeera to give his unique perspective on the tumultuous changes happening in the world financial and political systems. In an extensive conversation with Tom Ackerman, Žižek discussed the Arab Spring, London Riots and the Occupy movement, as well as the various financial and political crises across the world from Europe to India. Throughout the discussion, Žižek explored the themes of violence across the political spectrum and his irresistible desire to provoke friends and enemies alike.
Visit Al Jazeera to view the interview in situ.
Žižek also visited St Marks bookshop to discuss his views on the Occupy Wall Street protest.
Žižek argued that now was the time for careful, critical thinking in order to avoid the Left being paralized by melancholy. Impose Magazine has produced a transcript of the talk:
Visit Impose Magazine to read the transcript in full.
Visit Al Jazeera to view the interview in situ.
Žižek also visited St Marks bookshop to discuss his views on the Occupy Wall Street protest.
Žižek argued that now was the time for careful, critical thinking in order to avoid the Left being paralized by melancholy. Impose Magazine has produced a transcript of the talk:
I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that—the other Sunday, about 9 days ago—that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, “They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. We are here to enjoy ourselves. Have a nice collective experience,” and so on and so on. That's precisely what I want to render problematic. How? You know, I would like to start with maybe a surprising point: the relationship between melancholy and prohibitions. The idea is the following one: modern subject paradigmatically is melancholic and the thing he is melancholic about, the lost object, is precisely collective, transgressive experience of carnival. For example, there is quite a nice a book from 2007 by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, where her thesis is that with modernity proper, not renaissance, what is lost is precisely this collective carnivalesque experience: we are no longer dancing in the streets, pleasure becomes a private thing, and so on and so on.
What I want to problematize is precisely the implicit causality, which is: first something was prohibited, or rendered inaccessible—collective dancing in the streets, whatever—and then we get melancholic. But I think it's the opposite way around. I think that melancholy comes first and prohibition is a way to avoid the deadlock of melancholy.
One has to be very precise here about the structure of melancholy. The usual, I call it in a friendly way, [?], Judith Butler reading is that melancholics are more radical, faithful than those who go through the work of mourning. The idea is that mourning, the Freudian [?], means to accept the loss of the object. You work to it symbolize the loss and you pass over to the real object. Why? A melancholic is not able to drop the object, remains faithful to the object. Those of you know Judith's work on gender and so on: remember what's her precise point. A kind of a tricky, ethical, strictly ethical, rehabilitation of both gay and lesbian homosexuality. The idea is that our first object of libidal investment is the same sex parent. Why? The price for becoming normal heterosexual is that you identify with the lost object, and in this way you become the normative subject, like a woman identifies with mother's feminity, a son with father's masculinity. And in this way, you accept the loss because you yourself identify with the lost object and become normal. She delves into this in detail if you want, in her maybe best book, I claim, The Psychic Life of Power. And then the idea is that gay people are a little bit more ethical here. They don't accept the loss of the, as it were, primordial object.
Okay, I see here many problems. The first one is, you know that Butler's basic theory of gender is that gender is nothing natural, our gender identities are constructed through performative practices, re-enactments, so on and so on. My first very naive question here is: if this is true, how then can the child identify with the same sex parent prior to any performative identification and so on? It's as if the child nonetheless experiences sexual difference, father, mother before... okay it's another one.
What I want to say is that I want to problematize the underlining notion of melancholy. I think a good old-fashioned return to Freud, which has political bearing today, is very helpful here. Namely if you read closely Freud in his Mourning and Melancholy, he says something almost exactly opposite. His point is not melancholic subject more remains faithful to the object—no no no. He says something wonderful: he says that melancholy is something like mourning in advance. A melancholic treats the object of libidinal investment as lost while the object is still here[...]
Visit Impose Magazine to read the transcript in full.
Arundhati Roy @ Occupy Wall Street
Arundhati Roy spoke at the People's University in Washington Square Park, New York on 16th November.
Arundhati Roy is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (out now).
What you have achieved since 17 September, when the Occupy movement began in the United States, is to introduce a new imagination, a new political language into the heart of empire. You have reintroduced the right to dream into a system that tried to turn everybody into zombies mesmerised into equating mindless consumerism with happiness and fulfilment.She went on to outline some possible demands for the Occupy movement:
We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As “cap-ists” and “lid-ites”, we demand:
• An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.
• Natural resources and essential infrastructure—water supply, electricity, health, and education—cannot be privatised.
• Everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.
• The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents' wealth.
This struggle has re-awakened our imagination. Somewhere along the way, capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights”, and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.Visit the Guardian for a full transcript.
Arundhati Roy is a contributor to Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (out now).
Occupy Wall Street Draws Massive Turnout in NYC and Across the Nation to Mark 2-Month Milestone
JUAN GONZALEZ: The Occupy Wall Street movement entered its third month Thursday with protests against the economic system in dozens of cities across the country. Police report over 300 people were arrested nationwide, with the majority of those arrests taking place here in New York City when protesters attempted to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. Democracy Now!’s Ryan Devereaux was there and filed this report.
PROTESTERS: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!
RYAN DEVEREAUX: Thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the streets of Lower Manhattan Thursday morning, kicking off a day of mass demonstrations and the arrest of well over 200 people.
PROTESTERS: Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
RYAN DEVEREAUX: After weeks of planning, protesters chose to clog the Financial District with a series of staggered marches, entering the Financial District from multiple directions in an effort to delay the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange and shut down Wall Street. The demonstrators linked arms and formed human barricades in front of key intersections in the area. According to organizers of the action, online RSVPs for the protest tripled after protesters were evicted from their base of operations at Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square earlier this week.
PROTESTER: Well, we are hearing from Occupy movement occupations in other places that have been evicted, but, you know, you can’t evict an idea whose time has come. And I think people are getting stronger every day and feeling like, you know, this is the time to start movement building and looking towards the future, building an economic justice movement that works for everybody.
RYAN DEVEREAUX: The city responded to the demonstration with full force. At least four helicopters hovered overhead while scores of NYPD officers, vehicles and barricades could be seen on every street. Police used batons and physical force to break up human barricades and forcibly arrested protesters who defied orders to stay out of the street. The department claims more than 240 people were arrested over the course of the morning. Though the opening bell did ring and Wall Street managed to conduct business as usual, the daily operations of the Financial District were significantly altered by the day’s actions. The protesters largely viewed the demonstration as a success and a declaration that the Occupy movement is still strong.
Lisa Fithian is a longtime organizer who became involved with Occupy Wall Street prior to the September 17th protest.
LISA FITHIAN: Today was an amazing demonstration of people power. We had thousands of people pour into the streets around Wall Street, marching together strongly, dropping off hundreds of people at each access point, that it was closed down. We set up human barricades, people linking arms, preventing people from getting inside. We effectively shut down Wall Street this morning. We did it with our stories, with our bodies, with our hearts. And I’m very proud of what we did here today, because we showed the world that we can come out—they can evict us from our homes, but they can’t take us out of the streets, and they can’t stop our spirit. And we put our bodies out today. People were arrested, blocking people coming in. And it’s been a huge day so far. And I look forward to see what we do the rest of the day, the march later today and actions around the country.
RYAN DEVEREAUX: For Democracy Now!, this is Ryan Devereaux.
David Harvey at #OccupyLSX—“This is going to change politics in a very fundamental way”
Last Saturday, November the 12th, David Harvey visited Occupy London Stock Exchange. The author—amongst others—of A Companion to Marx's Capital and Spaces of Global Capitalism described Occupy LSX as “a marvelous kind of site” and invited the protesters to “keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.” We publish below the full speech, transcribed by Elaine Castillo.
"This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great—I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think, going to change things.
Because one of the things that I think we’re learning over the last few years actually and particularly over the last few months, is that it’s people—on the street, in the squares—that really matters, in the end. Because that’s the only political force we’ve got. They’ve got the money, they can buy politics, the can buy the media, they can buy anything they want. We don’t have that. The only thing we have is people. And a mass of people. And the more people mass on the street, the harder and harder it becomes for them to say, ‘Oh, no, your interests are not our interests.’
And the other thing that needs to be established here is that, you know, we live in a world where people talk about the importance of public space. But most of the time the public is not allowed to be in that public space. What you’re showing is: people belong in this public space. And when we get in this public space, we can turn it from a public space into a commons. Into a political space. Where we can start to discuss and understand, and start to militate against the incredible, incredible concentrations of wealth and power.
And we’ve been through something called a crisis, a crisis for whom? Actually, you look at the number of billionaires around the world, there are about 30% more billionaires now than there were three years ago. The crisis has been a way of assembling even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And the way in which it is done is to go after people who are the most vulnerable. That is, you extract wealth from those who can least afford to have that extraction visited on them.
And at the same time, this crisis is one where the real questions are never being addressed. And the three big questions indeed I think to be addressed are these: firstly, there’s the question of global poverty. And it’s not only global poverty but it’s global inequality. And it’s not only inequality of wealth and inequality of income, but it’s the inequality of political power. That in fact, that wealth, that income, is being used to buy politics. And this of course this is a bit of an old tradition, I mean, in the United States, Mark Twain said of the US Congress, he said: ‘The United States always has the best Congress that money can buy.’
And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist managerial techniques. And those corporatist managerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.
Now, one of the ways in which people like to take on the question of global poverty is this. They say, Well, okay, we should have more and more NGOs, we should set up, you know, things and try to help people in poverty by doing this and doing that, you know, dividing blankets here and a bit of medical care there. Which is not all bad. But the problem, I try to say to people who are into that, the one thing you don’t seem to understand, is that you cannot solve the problem of global poverty without going after the accumulation of global wealth. And until you all leave your anti-poverty campaigns and you actually join the anti-wealth campaigns, nothing’s going to happen.
I mean, I’m old enough to remember the anti-poverty rhetoric of the 1950s and I remember it in the 1960s, I remember it in the 1970s, and the 1980s—-and then we had the millenium goals, ‘We’re going to eliminate global poverty by 2015,’ and here we are, four years to go, and it’s much worse than it was. We hear it again and again and again. And the reason that happens is that the solution we are told that must be applied to solve global poverty is the very set of mechanisms that produce it. That is, free markets, free trade, free right on the part of capitalist class to exploit, to the hilt, everybody that they can get their hands on.
Furthermore, it’s not only about exploiting labor. What is now going on is that we are finding more and more that accumulation of wealth is through the dispossesion of others’ wealth. I mean, the capitalist class doesn’t even know how to produce wealth anymore. What they are very good at is stealing. They’re good at robbery. they’re good at actually legalizing the extraction of wealth by all sorts of means. ‘Eminent domain’, ‘move populations out of here…’ And right now, worldwide, there is what we call a ‘land grab’ going on. That is, an attempt to color all of the resources of planet earth so that, actually, a small group of people effectively control all of the resources which allow social life to flourish. We cannot let that concentration of wealth continue. It has to be stopped. It has to be reversed.
And how can it be reversed when we don’t have the money to buy politics, when we don’t have the money to buy the media, when we don’t have the money to dominate the television, when don’t have all the… how do we do it? Well, you’re showing ow you do it. You assemble in places like this. And you stay in places like this. You don’t say, We’re going to have a demonstration and then go home. No. You stay. You stay.
And the fact that you’re staying is, I think, the most, one of the most significant political events that’s actually happened, over the last ten, fifteen, even fifty years. And I think that is absolutely why this is such a fabulous situation that you’ve created. You’re taking a public space, you’re turning it into a commons, and you’re saying, ‘Our intersts have to be heard, our voices have to be heard.’ And at this particular point, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you’re saying, the most important thing is that you are here, and you’re goddamn staying here.
Now I suggested that one of the big problems in the world is global poverty, now that’s associated with something which I think is another aspect of our political situation. Capital works in such a way that it incurs certain costs in what it does. But what it also does is to try to shed those costs and make somebody else liable for them. And there are a whole bundle of costs which are associated with the reproduction of society. We talk about education, we talk about health care, we talk about basic human services, we talk about caring for the elderly, we talk about dealing with the problems that are created through alienation in terrible work environments, we talk about all of those issues. Well, the economists have a little word for this. They call it ‘externalities.’ And what’s meant by that is actually you take a cost which you should bear, but you get rid of it. You turn the cost into an externality that somebody has to pay for.
Well, since Thatcher, there’s been a systematic assault, to try to turn more of the costs of social reproduction into externalities. Costs that capital will not bear. ‘You bear the cost of your own education, you bear the cost of your own health care. and if you get sick and you die, that’s your own fault. It’s not capital’s fault.’
Now in the 1950s and 1960s, the state was forced by political circumstances to bear some of those costs and to tax capital, to bear some of those costs. But what Margaret Thatcher started to do was to say, ‘Look, we are actually not going to pay those costs anymore, they’re up to your wn personal responsibilties, it’s up to your own personal savings, it’s your own personal life and you have to take care of it, and if you don’t take care of it and get into trouble, that’s your problem.’
Now that was what Thatcher launched, and actually there’s a pattern that goes on here. Everybody thought when Thatcher was gone—-got rid of Major as well—-that things would change. No! We got Tony Blair. And what did Blair do, he deepened what was going on. Blair started to introduce the top-up fees at universities, Blair is the one who started to push this Thatcherite agenda even further. And right now what we’ve got is a situation where the Thatcherite agenda is with us even though she is long gone.
And this is a global problem. I mean, I was in Chile recently, fabulous situation in Chile, I hope you can establish links with then. The students there have occupied all of the public universities. And mind you, they’re not moving! They’re not going anywhere and they’ve been doing it for four or five months. Quite a few of the high schools ae actually occupied. And what they’re saying is this:
‘Pinochet privatized all of the educational system; when Pinochet went and we got social democracy, we got rid of the dictatorship, we imagined that things would change. They didn’t change; in fact, they’ve got worse. So what we have to do is to end that process that Pinochet started.’ This is what they’re saying.
And we have to end what Thatcher started, and reverse it entirely. In other words, what we have to have is a political program to end the whole Thatcher era because it has not ended at all, and what we see with the current conservatives right now is that they want to make it even more Thatcherite than Thatcher.
That this, if you like, what the political task is. To force capital to bear all of those costs that it doesn’t want to bear. It should take care of education. We should have a free decent education for everybody. And it should be an equal quality education; none of this nonsense about, If you go live in this suburb, you get decent education and if you live in the inner city, you get crap. No. We should actually equalize educational opportunity everywhere. And the same occurs with questions of health care. The same thing happens with all of the forms of social services; they have to be revolutionized.
They have to be actually transformed in such a way that they’re not run through some abstract bureaucracy but they’re run on a popular kind of basis. In other words, what we want is not simply the restablishment of some bureaucratic welfare state, what we want is the restoration of the right to decent health care, decent caring, and for that to actually be then rendered on a popular basis. It is, if you like, popular assemblies that should decide about hospital populations, it’s things of that sort that need to be dealt with in a much more democratic kind of way.
The other huge problem there is globally is the problem of environmental degradation. Again, capital does not want to bear those costs. It says basically, well, if islands go underwater because of global warming and sea levels rise, let other people bother with the costs. Not us. So again, it’s a matter of real costs which are visited upon people, all around the world—-indigenous populations in particualr are being very hard hurt by all of this. These costs have to be brought back and capital has to be forced to pay those costs. But they’re not going to do it voluntarily; they’re only going to do it if they’re forced to. And they’re going to be forced by political process, and they’re going to be forced by political oposition.
So those it seems to me are the two big global issues that we face, and it’s going to take a global movement to deal with them. And what we see is a global movement emerging. I mean, there have been elements of it that have been working for a long tme, you have things like, groups like the landless peasant group in Brazil; fantastic movement. You have the Chilean students who have been militating along these lines now for some for or five years. Let’s give a shout for the Chilean students…
We have a Maoist insurrection in Central India, which is portrayed as a very cruel and horrible kind of thing, but it turns out if you read Arundhati Roy, or something like that, these are people who are really struggling, just to say alive, in the circumstance where they’re constantly being attacked by the political power and the police power of the state apparatus. And the same would be true in countries like Bolivia, where you see indigenous populations mobilizing, and they’ve mobilized in very very strong kinds of ways. So all around the world there is a growing sense that the system which has been constructed does not and cannot work, and furthermore it must not be allowed to work any further.
And there is, to me anyway, one of the big final problems, which is that capital is always about growth. You see the newspapers, and what are they saying, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a crisis, we have no growth.’ And people only stop talking about criss when we get three percent growth minimum. Which means that this form of society we live in is actually given over to compound growth forever. Three percent compound growth forever. Now think of that for a moment. Three percent compound growth on all the resources that we consume. Three percent compound growth on all the money which we accumulate. When capital was about what was happening in Manchester and Birmingham, and that kind of thing in say 1820, three percent compound growth for a long time looked okay. I mean, there were all these areas of the world that hadn’t been conquered by capital yet, you know, Asia, China in particular, there were plenty of places to go.
So where does the three percent growth come from now? The whole world is saturated, saturated with consumer goods, saturated with that growth. And what has to happen is we have to start to think about the move towards about a zero growth economy. and as we think about that, we have to understand very clearly that that is a non-capitalist economy. That is a non-capitalist economy for a very simple reason that capital is about accumulation, it’s about growth.
And what we’re moving to right now is a situation of low growth, but continuous capital accumulation by that small group that controls most of the resources. And so three percent growth is going on for them, and their rates of remuneration continue to rise. I mean, I thought it was obscene and wrote violently about it back in 2003, when the leading hedge fund managers around New York City in one year received 250 million dollars of personal compensation just for themsemlves, I thought that was grossly and absolutely unethical. And then in the middle of the crisis just two years ago, the top five hedge fund owners in New York received, in personal remuneration, three billion dollars each in one year.
Now what my students say to me is, ‘How do you become one of those?’
And I say, ‘Well, you know, you can go try, but they’ve got it all locked up, there’s no way you’re gonna get it; the only way you can get a piece of that action is to make sure you reclaim it back.’
Now when you look at the structure, when you say, look at the bonuses, the billions of bonuses—
(microphone shorts out briefly)
…yeah, bonuses, you know, the thing that struck me about that, the very year they were receiving something like, in Wall Street they were getting something like, 40 billion dollars in bonuses in one year. In that very same year about 2 million people lost their houses to foreclosure. And what that meant was, there was actually a transfer of wealth going on. Because all of those houses, may of which were illegally foreclosed, were actually, then, that wealth was flowing up to the coffers of the bankers. This is what I mean by predatory practices, this is what I mean by stealing. The capitalist class doesn’t actually work anymore; it uses the financial system to steal.
Now one of the things that occurs to me, and I think this is significant, is to start thinking about how to organize political movements that actually have a big impact. And I want to give you just a couple of examples in recent years of political movements that have had a big impact in the short term and have some long term lessons to teach us.
One movement I’ll mention first is the immigrant rights movement of 2006 in the United States. There was at that time a proposal to criminalize all illegal aliens. Now this is a very terrible thing to propose. And what happened was, the response was, immigrant workers, many of them illegal, decided they were not going to go to work. And when they decided that, collectively, suddenly what we saw was: cities stopped. Los Angeles closed down. Chicago closed down. New York almost closed down, San Francisco almost closed own. And many other places, companies seeing what was happening, particularly those employing illegal workers, just decided they weren’t going to open their doors anyway, there was no point.
Now what this showed was a tremendous show of force. A tremendous show of force. We can close whole cities down. And actually when you start to look at it, you see that in closing the city down, you can actually stop capital accumulation.
We saw an unfortunate example of that in the wake of 9/11 in New York City. The city was shut down, you couldn’t pass through the bridges, you couldn’t use the tunnels, you couldn’t move, and that went on for about two or three days. And then all of a sudden people realized if this went on for much longer, this was the end of capitalism. So the mayor came on and said, For god’s sakes, get out your credit cards and start shopping. For god’s sake, get in to the restaurants and go to the Broadway shows and just go back, you know, and… enjoy the… the… the ‘situation.’
So what you need, what is clear, is that if you stop the movement of capital, and it’s very easy to do—-cities are very vulnerable, the food chain into New York City, if you disrupt that, this is a major catastrophe. And there’s a tremendous amount of political power. So one of the thing that we have to think about is how to organize political actions in the city that actually have an impact upon how the city works. And as you do that, start to use that as a threat because we need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests.
And one of the other examples I would mention would be a city like Cochabamba in Bolivia or El Alto in Bolivia. I mean, El Alto, essentially, the whole city went on strike. And it brought down two presidents. And because it brought down two presidents, it meant that Evo Morales could get elected.
So yes, indeed, bring down David Cameron, how are you going to do that? But there’s a problem with that, which is you would like to think if you bring down David Cameron, there would be someone on the other side who would do what you want to see done, but there’s not. So what we need to do is to start to build a political force that forces someone on the other side to do what you are asking for. Which is: move away from this gross inequality of wealth, take care of the environmental dilemmas, and do something radically different to end Thatcherism. That is what we have to do. Clean it out, clean it out, start all over again. Start all over again, how do we do that?
Well, you have to start from the bottom up. And this is again something that’s very significant here, that this movement is not guided by some ideology from the top down, it’s guided from the bottom up and that is crucial.
Because until we know how to create democracy at the local level and then build that democracy into configurations that remain democratic right to the top, then we will not be able to implement a program. We will see good ideas co-opted by capital. And that is one of the most serious difficulties of any political movenent; you come up with good ideas, and then they co-opt them for their own purposes. No.
Just going back to the immigrant rights movment, the interesting thing about it was the way it got demobilized was actually dividing immigrants from other low-paid workers. And in particular it pointed to the immigrants, who were mainly Hispanics, and the right wing had this enormous propaganda campaign in which it said that basically: ‘Unemployment in the African American community is due to Latin American immigration.’ It divided. It divided. And because it divided, it ruled.
So one of the things that it seems to me that’s terrific about these assemblies, is that it seems to me there is a spirit that says, ‘Even though we are very different and have different ideas, we will not be divided. Furthermore, not only will we not be divided, but we will not be diverted.’
Because the way in which they operate is generally to create some sort of argument that kind of says, ‘Well, you’re really talking about the wrong thing, why don’t you worry about this over here, rather than worry about that over there.’ In other words, there are tremendous attemps in the media and elsewhere to divert you from what it is you want to do. Tremendous attempts will be fostered to divide you.
And it will be hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve been in political movements where it’s hard not to be divided. It’s hard to stick with your own position and at the same time compromise with others who have very different positions. These are not easy things to do. But if you set yourself the rule: I will not be diverted, I will not, we will not be divided. Then it seems to me, you have a long way to go and in fact you’re gonna have a terrific impact upon the political climate of this country.
So these, it seems to me, are some of the issues that I would want to bring to the table. I left New York about four days before they occupied wall street so I haven’t actually been to Wall Street yet, this is my first time to one of these meetings. And I think this is absolutely great, and I think when I get back I’m gonna get to try to get together with the Wall Street folk as well. And what I’m sure they would want me to say to you is: Keep the struggle going. Keep going. The struggle continues, as they say. Keep it going. And that is the crucial question: that we have to be persistent, as well as undiverted and undivided.
So I’m going to stop here because I want to have more of a conversation and get kind of responses from what you think, and how you think, because I want to take some ideas back with me to the United States when I get there and perhaps also when I return to Argentina, try to have some conversations there. Because this movement is not just about London. You’re in the heart of the beast, the belly of the beast. And your job is to give the beast stomachache.
But the more stomachache they get, the more grouchy they’re likely to get. So you have to understand that that is likely to happen. And then you have to stiffen your resolve. This is going to be a long haul for all of this, I think, and so I congratulate you on what you’ve done. This is a marvelous kind of site, I think it’s a marvelous initiative that you’ve taken, and I think that, like I say, this is going to change politics in a very fundamental way. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”
Transcript by Elaine Castillo.
"This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great—I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think, going to change things.
Because one of the things that I think we’re learning over the last few years actually and particularly over the last few months, is that it’s people—on the street, in the squares—that really matters, in the end. Because that’s the only political force we’ve got. They’ve got the money, they can buy politics, the can buy the media, they can buy anything they want. We don’t have that. The only thing we have is people. And a mass of people. And the more people mass on the street, the harder and harder it becomes for them to say, ‘Oh, no, your interests are not our interests.’
And the other thing that needs to be established here is that, you know, we live in a world where people talk about the importance of public space. But most of the time the public is not allowed to be in that public space. What you’re showing is: people belong in this public space. And when we get in this public space, we can turn it from a public space into a commons. Into a political space. Where we can start to discuss and understand, and start to militate against the incredible, incredible concentrations of wealth and power.
And we’ve been through something called a crisis, a crisis for whom? Actually, you look at the number of billionaires around the world, there are about 30% more billionaires now than there were three years ago. The crisis has been a way of assembling even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And the way in which it is done is to go after people who are the most vulnerable. That is, you extract wealth from those who can least afford to have that extraction visited on them.
And at the same time, this crisis is one where the real questions are never being addressed. And the three big questions indeed I think to be addressed are these: firstly, there’s the question of global poverty. And it’s not only global poverty but it’s global inequality. And it’s not only inequality of wealth and inequality of income, but it’s the inequality of political power. That in fact, that wealth, that income, is being used to buy politics. And this of course this is a bit of an old tradition, I mean, in the United States, Mark Twain said of the US Congress, he said: ‘The United States always has the best Congress that money can buy.’
And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist managerial techniques. And those corporatist managerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.
Now, one of the ways in which people like to take on the question of global poverty is this. They say, Well, okay, we should have more and more NGOs, we should set up, you know, things and try to help people in poverty by doing this and doing that, you know, dividing blankets here and a bit of medical care there. Which is not all bad. But the problem, I try to say to people who are into that, the one thing you don’t seem to understand, is that you cannot solve the problem of global poverty without going after the accumulation of global wealth. And until you all leave your anti-poverty campaigns and you actually join the anti-wealth campaigns, nothing’s going to happen.
I mean, I’m old enough to remember the anti-poverty rhetoric of the 1950s and I remember it in the 1960s, I remember it in the 1970s, and the 1980s—-and then we had the millenium goals, ‘We’re going to eliminate global poverty by 2015,’ and here we are, four years to go, and it’s much worse than it was. We hear it again and again and again. And the reason that happens is that the solution we are told that must be applied to solve global poverty is the very set of mechanisms that produce it. That is, free markets, free trade, free right on the part of capitalist class to exploit, to the hilt, everybody that they can get their hands on.
Furthermore, it’s not only about exploiting labor. What is now going on is that we are finding more and more that accumulation of wealth is through the dispossesion of others’ wealth. I mean, the capitalist class doesn’t even know how to produce wealth anymore. What they are very good at is stealing. They’re good at robbery. they’re good at actually legalizing the extraction of wealth by all sorts of means. ‘Eminent domain’, ‘move populations out of here…’ And right now, worldwide, there is what we call a ‘land grab’ going on. That is, an attempt to color all of the resources of planet earth so that, actually, a small group of people effectively control all of the resources which allow social life to flourish. We cannot let that concentration of wealth continue. It has to be stopped. It has to be reversed.
And how can it be reversed when we don’t have the money to buy politics, when we don’t have the money to buy the media, when we don’t have the money to dominate the television, when don’t have all the… how do we do it? Well, you’re showing ow you do it. You assemble in places like this. And you stay in places like this. You don’t say, We’re going to have a demonstration and then go home. No. You stay. You stay.
And the fact that you’re staying is, I think, the most, one of the most significant political events that’s actually happened, over the last ten, fifteen, even fifty years. And I think that is absolutely why this is such a fabulous situation that you’ve created. You’re taking a public space, you’re turning it into a commons, and you’re saying, ‘Our intersts have to be heard, our voices have to be heard.’ And at this particular point, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you’re saying, the most important thing is that you are here, and you’re goddamn staying here.
Now I suggested that one of the big problems in the world is global poverty, now that’s associated with something which I think is another aspect of our political situation. Capital works in such a way that it incurs certain costs in what it does. But what it also does is to try to shed those costs and make somebody else liable for them. And there are a whole bundle of costs which are associated with the reproduction of society. We talk about education, we talk about health care, we talk about basic human services, we talk about caring for the elderly, we talk about dealing with the problems that are created through alienation in terrible work environments, we talk about all of those issues. Well, the economists have a little word for this. They call it ‘externalities.’ And what’s meant by that is actually you take a cost which you should bear, but you get rid of it. You turn the cost into an externality that somebody has to pay for.
Well, since Thatcher, there’s been a systematic assault, to try to turn more of the costs of social reproduction into externalities. Costs that capital will not bear. ‘You bear the cost of your own education, you bear the cost of your own health care. and if you get sick and you die, that’s your own fault. It’s not capital’s fault.’
Now in the 1950s and 1960s, the state was forced by political circumstances to bear some of those costs and to tax capital, to bear some of those costs. But what Margaret Thatcher started to do was to say, ‘Look, we are actually not going to pay those costs anymore, they’re up to your wn personal responsibilties, it’s up to your own personal savings, it’s your own personal life and you have to take care of it, and if you don’t take care of it and get into trouble, that’s your problem.’
Now that was what Thatcher launched, and actually there’s a pattern that goes on here. Everybody thought when Thatcher was gone—-got rid of Major as well—-that things would change. No! We got Tony Blair. And what did Blair do, he deepened what was going on. Blair started to introduce the top-up fees at universities, Blair is the one who started to push this Thatcherite agenda even further. And right now what we’ve got is a situation where the Thatcherite agenda is with us even though she is long gone.
And this is a global problem. I mean, I was in Chile recently, fabulous situation in Chile, I hope you can establish links with then. The students there have occupied all of the public universities. And mind you, they’re not moving! They’re not going anywhere and they’ve been doing it for four or five months. Quite a few of the high schools ae actually occupied. And what they’re saying is this:
‘Pinochet privatized all of the educational system; when Pinochet went and we got social democracy, we got rid of the dictatorship, we imagined that things would change. They didn’t change; in fact, they’ve got worse. So what we have to do is to end that process that Pinochet started.’ This is what they’re saying.
And we have to end what Thatcher started, and reverse it entirely. In other words, what we have to have is a political program to end the whole Thatcher era because it has not ended at all, and what we see with the current conservatives right now is that they want to make it even more Thatcherite than Thatcher.
That this, if you like, what the political task is. To force capital to bear all of those costs that it doesn’t want to bear. It should take care of education. We should have a free decent education for everybody. And it should be an equal quality education; none of this nonsense about, If you go live in this suburb, you get decent education and if you live in the inner city, you get crap. No. We should actually equalize educational opportunity everywhere. And the same occurs with questions of health care. The same thing happens with all of the forms of social services; they have to be revolutionized.
They have to be actually transformed in such a way that they’re not run through some abstract bureaucracy but they’re run on a popular kind of basis. In other words, what we want is not simply the restablishment of some bureaucratic welfare state, what we want is the restoration of the right to decent health care, decent caring, and for that to actually be then rendered on a popular basis. It is, if you like, popular assemblies that should decide about hospital populations, it’s things of that sort that need to be dealt with in a much more democratic kind of way.
The other huge problem there is globally is the problem of environmental degradation. Again, capital does not want to bear those costs. It says basically, well, if islands go underwater because of global warming and sea levels rise, let other people bother with the costs. Not us. So again, it’s a matter of real costs which are visited upon people, all around the world—-indigenous populations in particualr are being very hard hurt by all of this. These costs have to be brought back and capital has to be forced to pay those costs. But they’re not going to do it voluntarily; they’re only going to do it if they’re forced to. And they’re going to be forced by political process, and they’re going to be forced by political oposition.
So those it seems to me are the two big global issues that we face, and it’s going to take a global movement to deal with them. And what we see is a global movement emerging. I mean, there have been elements of it that have been working for a long tme, you have things like, groups like the landless peasant group in Brazil; fantastic movement. You have the Chilean students who have been militating along these lines now for some for or five years. Let’s give a shout for the Chilean students…
We have a Maoist insurrection in Central India, which is portrayed as a very cruel and horrible kind of thing, but it turns out if you read Arundhati Roy, or something like that, these are people who are really struggling, just to say alive, in the circumstance where they’re constantly being attacked by the political power and the police power of the state apparatus. And the same would be true in countries like Bolivia, where you see indigenous populations mobilizing, and they’ve mobilized in very very strong kinds of ways. So all around the world there is a growing sense that the system which has been constructed does not and cannot work, and furthermore it must not be allowed to work any further.
And there is, to me anyway, one of the big final problems, which is that capital is always about growth. You see the newspapers, and what are they saying, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a crisis, we have no growth.’ And people only stop talking about criss when we get three percent growth minimum. Which means that this form of society we live in is actually given over to compound growth forever. Three percent compound growth forever. Now think of that for a moment. Three percent compound growth on all the resources that we consume. Three percent compound growth on all the money which we accumulate. When capital was about what was happening in Manchester and Birmingham, and that kind of thing in say 1820, three percent compound growth for a long time looked okay. I mean, there were all these areas of the world that hadn’t been conquered by capital yet, you know, Asia, China in particular, there were plenty of places to go.
So where does the three percent growth come from now? The whole world is saturated, saturated with consumer goods, saturated with that growth. And what has to happen is we have to start to think about the move towards about a zero growth economy. and as we think about that, we have to understand very clearly that that is a non-capitalist economy. That is a non-capitalist economy for a very simple reason that capital is about accumulation, it’s about growth.
And what we’re moving to right now is a situation of low growth, but continuous capital accumulation by that small group that controls most of the resources. And so three percent growth is going on for them, and their rates of remuneration continue to rise. I mean, I thought it was obscene and wrote violently about it back in 2003, when the leading hedge fund managers around New York City in one year received 250 million dollars of personal compensation just for themsemlves, I thought that was grossly and absolutely unethical. And then in the middle of the crisis just two years ago, the top five hedge fund owners in New York received, in personal remuneration, three billion dollars each in one year.
Now what my students say to me is, ‘How do you become one of those?’
And I say, ‘Well, you know, you can go try, but they’ve got it all locked up, there’s no way you’re gonna get it; the only way you can get a piece of that action is to make sure you reclaim it back.’
Now when you look at the structure, when you say, look at the bonuses, the billions of bonuses—
(microphone shorts out briefly)
…yeah, bonuses, you know, the thing that struck me about that, the very year they were receiving something like, in Wall Street they were getting something like, 40 billion dollars in bonuses in one year. In that very same year about 2 million people lost their houses to foreclosure. And what that meant was, there was actually a transfer of wealth going on. Because all of those houses, may of which were illegally foreclosed, were actually, then, that wealth was flowing up to the coffers of the bankers. This is what I mean by predatory practices, this is what I mean by stealing. The capitalist class doesn’t actually work anymore; it uses the financial system to steal.
Now one of the things that occurs to me, and I think this is significant, is to start thinking about how to organize political movements that actually have a big impact. And I want to give you just a couple of examples in recent years of political movements that have had a big impact in the short term and have some long term lessons to teach us.
One movement I’ll mention first is the immigrant rights movement of 2006 in the United States. There was at that time a proposal to criminalize all illegal aliens. Now this is a very terrible thing to propose. And what happened was, the response was, immigrant workers, many of them illegal, decided they were not going to go to work. And when they decided that, collectively, suddenly what we saw was: cities stopped. Los Angeles closed down. Chicago closed down. New York almost closed down, San Francisco almost closed own. And many other places, companies seeing what was happening, particularly those employing illegal workers, just decided they weren’t going to open their doors anyway, there was no point.
Now what this showed was a tremendous show of force. A tremendous show of force. We can close whole cities down. And actually when you start to look at it, you see that in closing the city down, you can actually stop capital accumulation.
We saw an unfortunate example of that in the wake of 9/11 in New York City. The city was shut down, you couldn’t pass through the bridges, you couldn’t use the tunnels, you couldn’t move, and that went on for about two or three days. And then all of a sudden people realized if this went on for much longer, this was the end of capitalism. So the mayor came on and said, For god’s sakes, get out your credit cards and start shopping. For god’s sake, get in to the restaurants and go to the Broadway shows and just go back, you know, and… enjoy the… the… the ‘situation.’
So what you need, what is clear, is that if you stop the movement of capital, and it’s very easy to do—-cities are very vulnerable, the food chain into New York City, if you disrupt that, this is a major catastrophe. And there’s a tremendous amount of political power. So one of the thing that we have to think about is how to organize political actions in the city that actually have an impact upon how the city works. And as you do that, start to use that as a threat because we need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests.
And one of the other examples I would mention would be a city like Cochabamba in Bolivia or El Alto in Bolivia. I mean, El Alto, essentially, the whole city went on strike. And it brought down two presidents. And because it brought down two presidents, it meant that Evo Morales could get elected.
So yes, indeed, bring down David Cameron, how are you going to do that? But there’s a problem with that, which is you would like to think if you bring down David Cameron, there would be someone on the other side who would do what you want to see done, but there’s not. So what we need to do is to start to build a political force that forces someone on the other side to do what you are asking for. Which is: move away from this gross inequality of wealth, take care of the environmental dilemmas, and do something radically different to end Thatcherism. That is what we have to do. Clean it out, clean it out, start all over again. Start all over again, how do we do that?
Well, you have to start from the bottom up. And this is again something that’s very significant here, that this movement is not guided by some ideology from the top down, it’s guided from the bottom up and that is crucial.
Because until we know how to create democracy at the local level and then build that democracy into configurations that remain democratic right to the top, then we will not be able to implement a program. We will see good ideas co-opted by capital. And that is one of the most serious difficulties of any political movenent; you come up with good ideas, and then they co-opt them for their own purposes. No.
Just going back to the immigrant rights movment, the interesting thing about it was the way it got demobilized was actually dividing immigrants from other low-paid workers. And in particular it pointed to the immigrants, who were mainly Hispanics, and the right wing had this enormous propaganda campaign in which it said that basically: ‘Unemployment in the African American community is due to Latin American immigration.’ It divided. It divided. And because it divided, it ruled.
So one of the things that it seems to me that’s terrific about these assemblies, is that it seems to me there is a spirit that says, ‘Even though we are very different and have different ideas, we will not be divided. Furthermore, not only will we not be divided, but we will not be diverted.’
Because the way in which they operate is generally to create some sort of argument that kind of says, ‘Well, you’re really talking about the wrong thing, why don’t you worry about this over here, rather than worry about that over there.’ In other words, there are tremendous attemps in the media and elsewhere to divert you from what it is you want to do. Tremendous attempts will be fostered to divide you.
And it will be hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve been in political movements where it’s hard not to be divided. It’s hard to stick with your own position and at the same time compromise with others who have very different positions. These are not easy things to do. But if you set yourself the rule: I will not be diverted, I will not, we will not be divided. Then it seems to me, you have a long way to go and in fact you’re gonna have a terrific impact upon the political climate of this country.
So these, it seems to me, are some of the issues that I would want to bring to the table. I left New York about four days before they occupied wall street so I haven’t actually been to Wall Street yet, this is my first time to one of these meetings. And I think this is absolutely great, and I think when I get back I’m gonna get to try to get together with the Wall Street folk as well. And what I’m sure they would want me to say to you is: Keep the struggle going. Keep going. The struggle continues, as they say. Keep it going. And that is the crucial question: that we have to be persistent, as well as undiverted and undivided.
So I’m going to stop here because I want to have more of a conversation and get kind of responses from what you think, and how you think, because I want to take some ideas back with me to the United States when I get there and perhaps also when I return to Argentina, try to have some conversations there. Because this movement is not just about London. You’re in the heart of the beast, the belly of the beast. And your job is to give the beast stomachache.
But the more stomachache they get, the more grouchy they’re likely to get. So you have to understand that that is likely to happen. And then you have to stiffen your resolve. This is going to be a long haul for all of this, I think, and so I congratulate you on what you’ve done. This is a marvelous kind of site, I think it’s a marvelous initiative that you’ve taken, and I think that, like I say, this is going to change politics in a very fundamental way. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”
Transcript by Elaine Castillo.
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