Tag Archives: corporate

Worldwide Protest as U.S. Government Threatens to Censor Internet

by Cimaxion


Today Candlelight Stories joins with other sites to protest two proposed laws in the United States, called SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act. On January 24th, the U.S. Senate will vote on the PROTECT IP Act to censor the Internet, despite opposition from the vast majority of Americans. These laws give corporations the ability to sue any web site they feel threatens their copyrights in some way. They could essentially shut down any site simply by pointing a finger. So corporations would use this power to harm smaller competitors. The U.S. government could shut down any site or blog it had the slightest problem with. Censorship as practiced in places like China would suddenly become the norm here in the United States. China is a nightmare. We don’t want to do things like they do.

A free, open, uncensored Internet is a basic and fundamental right that must be preserved here in the United States if it is to have any chance at all on a worldwide basis.

Join us to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity.

Here’s a massive list at the Center For Democracy & Technology of organizations, companies, web sites, blogs and individuals who are opposed to the censorship bills.

At the links below you can send your protest to Congress and learn much more about these bills and how they seek to end the open Internet.

Take action by contacting Congress via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

AmericanCensorship.org has a large selection of ways you can take action and black out your web site in protest.

Take action by contacting Congress via Google.

Four Reasons to Support Occupy Wall Street

by Cimaxion

Yes, deregulation of the banking industry has led to absolute chaos and total criminality. It is abundantly obvious. The presidents serving since 1980 have been completely owned by corporate lobbyists, as have all senators, representatives and Supreme Court justices. I have arguments with some of the tactics of Occupy Wall Street, but I think they are very minor compared to the overall message. The separation of government from corporations has become an urgent necessity and does in fact require a mass movement of people across the placid lawns of government. Politicians should be examined for any corporate connections whatsoever and immediately dismissed if they fail the test. Corporations should be checked for any attempts at electoral influence. A Constitutional amendment that declares corporations to be nothing more than legal abstractions and forbids them from influencing the federal government is essential. After all, corporations seek to produce products at the lowest possible cost and currently do so by using concentration camps in China. They would gladly build those concentration camps in the U.S. if it was cost-effective. Such entities cannot be allowed the slightest influence on American politics. We may be forced to totally ban all political contributions that do not come directly from an individual person.

Musician and Activist Tom Morello Talks to Press About Occupy Wall Street

by Cimaxion

Former Rage Against the Machine member, Tom Morello, who has been playing for and talking to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Los Angeles, speaks with reporters about what is going on with this explosive movement.

And here is a repost of my film, ‘One Day Occupy L.A.,’ which features an incredible live soundtrack of Morello playing for the protest in Los Angeles just this week.

Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall Street): A Film by Alex Mallis

by Cimaxion

This film shows how the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement organize themselves in lower Manhattan. They seem to be forming something like a little community with food services, minor first aid, a library, battery charging and even video editing services for all the people covering the action. These people are working hard and have an uncommon seriousness about them. This is something new. These are mainly young people. They are waking up from iPod oblivion and showing the world that they can make a difference in a democracy decayed by a corporate stranglehold over the government. These are people who can see that corporate management structures have totally occupied and taken over the United States government all the way up to and including its Supreme Court. In fact, there is no other way to dismantle this criminal structure. It can only be broken up by massive groups of angry protesters who simply never stop coming.

The film was shot and edited by Alex Mallis.

Here’s a simple and clear opinion piece about the reform movement represented by Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street Protest Video by Django’s Ghost

by Cimaxion

Django’s Ghost has posted a stirring and rather enthralling video compilation of the ongoing and exploding phenomenon known as Occupy Wall Street. The film is set to several rock & roll protest songs and it gets across the feelings of rising anger and the public’s growing awareness that it can in fact stop the corporate takeover of the United States.

The protesters seem to me to be a rather intelligent and well-behaved crowd. Some of the New York police however appear to be overeager. Cops always end up on the wrong side of these things. They never get it right. Many of them seem to be pretty easy-going, but there are always the brutes that come stomping in and make a mess of things.

I love the way the crowd is so heavily armed with photographic equipment. The protesters are their own journalists!

This movement is spreading quickly. It’s come to Los Angeles at City Hall and is springing up in other cities as well. People are angry about the corporate takeover of their country and their Supreme Court. Losing a President to corporate interests is one thing. That is rather expected. Obama jerked us all around and then turned into a cheeseball from General Motors. But when our Supreme Court gets bought out and turns into a boardroom… well, that is a terrifying problem. That is just about the end of the line. A democracy cannot survive the corruption of the judicial branch.

Thanks to Marc Campbell at Dangerous Minds.
 

Delete Your Facebook Account

by Editor | 2 Comments

See the insipid goober just to the left.  That’s Mark Zuckerberg.  He runs Facebook, the site that gathers tons of your personal and public information to form what he hopes will be an all-pervasive social network.  Being young is no excuse for this guy.  A young a-hole grows into an old a-hole very quickly.  This is what the Web’s leading a-hole said recently:

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Do you learn to talk like a corporate dick by accident or is it something they teach in business school?

In other words: Facebook thinks making your information public is the new default norm.  Private information is a thing of the past.  They’ve basically just taken away users’ ability to keep their information private.  Public is Facebook’s new ‘norm.’

So let’s show this pre-pubescent nincompoop that we like our privacy.  Delete your Facebook account.  I did.  Start a blog.  It’s much more fun than struggling through a crappy interface just to tell people about your latest haircut.

Some students at New York University have funding and are working on a new open-source social network with freely distributed code.  You know, like the Firefox browser.  Their service is called Diaspora.  That’s the best idea I’ve heard about in years.  Open source social networking… with privacy.

Here’s the WikiHow article on how to permanently delete your Facebook account.

Here’s an update: The students working on Diaspora have raised over $115,000 via online donations.  This is a great start for their development project and means they don’t have to answer to a corporate investor.

Another open-source effort at social networking is OneSocialWeb which actually has working open-source code.  Their software works sort of like the open-source blogging software, WordPress.  You can install your own version of it on a web server if you want.

Here’s an excellent Wired article on the up and coming alternatives to Facebook.