JPBlog

A few years ago the Republican-dominated Texas legislature enacted a series of limitations on plaintiffs' ability to recover for personal injury cases, including caps on non-economic damages and changes in the way damages are calculated when more than one party is at fault. The Texas Monthly has an article on what it has meant for the average Texan, which is not good. It has become impossible for many injured Texans to get redress in the courts. Mississippi is following in the footsteps of Texas. Never have so many been bamboozled by so few.

Hurt? Injured? Need a lawyer? Too bad.

Based on the Geneva Conventions, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled the Bush administration's argument for trying "enemy combatants" in Guantánamo before military commissions with virtually none of the protections guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution or even to military personnel under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Stevens, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer formed the majority, with Scalia, Thomas and Alito the minority. Roberts, who had voted to uphold the government while sitting on the Court of Appeals, was disqualified.

The ball is back in Congress's court. It could pass another law to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over the tribunals. It is troubling to this lawyer that Congress has the power under the Constitution to limit the jurisdictions of the federal courts at its whim. It is even more troubling that Congress would exercise that power to facilitate what are in essence Star Chambers, in which the defendants are not allowed to attend their own trials, to confront their accusers, or even be informed of all the evidence against them.

There is no legitimate justification for such marsupial jurisprudence based on military expediency. The War on Terror is no more a war than the War on Drugs and Guantánamo is no battlefield. The administration's argument--that the prisoners are not entitled to due process or even humane treatment because they are "enemy combatants"--is an argument no person of minimal intelligence and decency would accept for a moment. Only a judge conditioned by years of slicing and dicing principles of justice and fairness in the interest of expediency could seriously entertain such a monstrous proposition that merely by calling prisoners of war something different the administration can strip them of the rights enjoyed by prisoners of war under the U.S. Constitution and solemn treaties our government entered into more than 50 years ago.

What is so disheartening about this whole controversy is that it should even exist. What have we become as a people when we regard justice as something that can be doled out by the government to some but denied to others with an arbitrary logic determined by a powerful few? That's far more scary than the terrorist threat.

Hamden v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, No. 05-184, Supreme Court of the United States (large .pdf file)

No surprises here.

It appears that the Republicans do not have the votes to overcome a filibuster of the telecommunications bill, at least for now. The campaign for net neutrality has been highly effective in the face of intense propaganda and arm-twisting by the telecommunications industry.

It struck me today as I was walking down Capitol Street that monopolists, even the high-tech ones, are not really interested in technological innovation. They are interested in money, and they are extraordiarily profitable, since they can raise prices without being undercut by competition. Radically new technologies are a threat to well-established monopolies, so unless they see how it will enable them to continue their monopoly, they will try to kill it. When ARPA wanted to build the first packet-switching network in the world, they went to AT&T, which declined. With IP technology taking over voice communication, it's understandable why AT&T wasn't interested in a technology that would threaten its monopoly. ARPA contracted the job to another company which created ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. Yes, the Internet was not a product of private enterprise or the free market. The U.S. military was responsible for getting it all started.

For readers who are under 30, AT&T owned virtually all the telephone infrastructure in the United States, including the telephones in people's homes. BellSouth was an operating subsidiary of AT&T named South Central Bell. Several Supreme Court cases over a period of twenty-five years ultimately led to a court-ordered breakup of the company. The portion of AT&T that retained the name took over long-distance.

There are plenty other examples of monopolies fighting innovation. Microsoft innovates when it has to, as it has with Internet Explorer, which it neglected for years, until the clamor over its security weaknesses and obsolete interface forced it to make some changes. The U.S. auto industry has been remarkably inflexible.

American Radio Works has performed a valuable service by making available online a database of free travel taken by our legislators and their staffs and paid for mostly by lobbyists between January 2000 and December 2005.

Out of curiosity, I looked up my congressman, Chip Pickering, and came away with a much deeper understanding of why he votes the way he does. He's vice chairman of the house Energy and Commerce Committee and a member of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. That's the committee and subcommittee that defeated net neutrality amendments and gave the phone companies almost everything they wanted. Pickering was with them all the way.

So let's look into where he's traveling and who's paying his travel. Our Mississippi legislators are here. Pickering's page is here.

His office reported 38 office trips furnished by outside parties, amounting to $39,078.90 in value. Pickering's share was $14,850.99. Of the 14 trips he reported, 5 were paid for by telecoms: 3 by CTIA-The Wireless Association, 1by AT&T, and one by BellSouth. Four trips were paid for by defense contractors.

His staff took a lot of trips that were paid for by the telecoms. I haven't counted them up, but the great thing about the Internet is that you can look at the information yourself with a couple of clicks. (By the way, do you think you would be able to access that information if the telecoms had the power to control the content coming into your home or business? Pickering's vote against net neutrality would give them that power.)

Pickering, who serves on a committee with jurisdiction over telecommunications and the Internet, seems to be awfully popular with the big telecommunication companies. For a little more insight into his friends, click over to OpenSecrets and look at where his campaign contributions are coming from. In 2005-2006, the communication/electronics sector gave him $171,211, far outstripping the next sector, health, with $105,454.

Now look who his biggest donors are: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Together, these five corporations gave $62,000 and Pickering is running unopposed. Every one of these corporations has a direct interest in controlling access and usage of the Internet. Every one of them fought net neutrality bills in Congress with swarms of lobbyists and millions of dollars spent on slick, misleading commercials.

Now you can understand why Pickering doesn't care a fig about the Internet empowering citizens; he knows on which side his bread is buttered and votes accordingly.

Unfortunately, he has no Democratic opponent in November. It's hard to believe that Mississippians, if they were really informed, would return him to Congress given his record of voting against his constituents' interests. Then again, it just may be that he doesn't regard the people of his congressional district as his constituents, but just chumps to be thrown a bone now and then while he cuts taxes and doles out pork for his real constituents. You judge.

Thom Hartmann observes that the United States is not at war with Saddam Hussein or Iraq; we won that war. Didn't the president announce the end of the war in May 2003 from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln? Remember "mission accomplished?" This is one time we should take him at his word. The United States wages war extraordinarily well; our troops were in Baghdad in a matter of days, having rolled over the Iraqi armed forces like a high-speed bulldozer.

Once the enemy is conquered, the war ends and the occupation begins. We are no longer at war with Iraq or in Iraq. Our troops are standing on someone else's soil, not ours, and the course of the occupation as well as its ultimate outcome depends on our recognizing that fact and acting accordingly. The Bush administration has ignored that fact and treated the Iraqi people like serfs or worse. The Iraqis have responded predictably, just as we would, by fighting back the only way they can: with guerilla tactics.

When an occupation goes sour the occupier will ultimately face only two choices: it must either withdraw and cut its losses or it must wipe out a significant part of the population in order to subdue the rest. That is a choice that the Bush administration is avoiding, for reasons that I will discuss when I review Greg Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse. The result is that soldiers are dying every day with no progress in controlling the insurgency.

The Republican party, according to Hartmann, is attempting to frame the occupation as a war because Americans don't like to lose wars, even endless ones. Occupations, on the other hand, have none of war's patriotic dimensions, and people expect them to be over in a reasonable time and for the troops to come home. Democrats, therefore, have every reason to challenge the Republicans' misuse of the term war and every reason to frame the occupation of Iraq as what it really is, an occupation.

The war is over and we won. We're losing the occupation. There's no shame in ending an occupation, even one we're losing. Let the Iraqis solve their own problems. We have plenty of problems here at home to keep us occupied. Uppermost is how to repair the damage done to this nation by the party that presently controls the White House and Congress.

Thom Hartmann: Reclaim The Issues - "Occupation," Not "War"

Larry Beinhart in the Huffington Post wrote an excellent article on why the Bush Administration's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, combined with record-breaking deficit spending, hasn't benefitted the American people. The answer in a nutshell: the rich invested the extra money in the stock market and real estate, not enterprises that create jobs. All that extra money came from us, the taxpayers.

Actually, as wages are driven down, pension funds are under funded or looted, public services are cut and the public debt is increased, it means that the money Bushenomics is spending is from the general population. In that circumstance, corporate profits are not so much profits, but a transfer of value and productivity into cash. It is a sort of hollowing out of our businesses and indeed of the entire country.

My conservative acquaintances, most of them arrogant in their certainty, have been avoiding me lately. It's always been a mystery how otherwise intelligent and well-meaning persons can persuade themselves to believe economic and political propositions no sensible person of even ordinary intelligence would entertain for a second. The only reason I can think of is that they hope to cash in on the booty before it all falls down around our ears.

The opening ceremony for the Jackson International Ballet Competition (IBC) was a hit, with a sellout crowd and a some fine dancers who set the bar very, very high. This is an artistic event that is worth taking a great deal of trouble to see.

The competition will run for two weeks, with the final performances of the winners on July 1 & 2 in Thalia Mara Hall. Jackson hosts the IBC only once every four years (alternating with Varna, Bulgaria, Moscow and Tokyo), so go whenever you can. There are precious few opportunities in this area to see live, world-class performances and this is one of them. For ticket information, call 601-973-9249 or emai Aislynn Thomas, the box office manager.

According to a report by Global Insight, the Jackson housing market is 3.6% undervalued in contrast to the overvaluation in many other metropolitan areas. The good news is that homes in Jackson are likely be less affected by a bursting of the national real estate bubble predicted by many economists. This is in stark contrast to the overvaluation of homes in more "popular cities" like Naples, Florida (102.6%), Salinas, California (79.1%) or Medford, Oregon (66.4%), where homeowners could face a catastrophic adjustment.

House Prices in America (Updated for the 1st Quarter of 2006)

The lopsided vote in the House of Representatives the other day showed the difference between an industry that has been lobbying Congress for a hundred years and a group of very successful upstart companies that simply don't know how to play the Washington, D.C. game. Their ignorance and inexperience could will cost them dearly.

Read a very savvy article on what happened. Maybe top executives at Google, eBay and Microsoft will be quick studies. Their future depends on it.

6/18/2006 Caviat: In this battle the dotcoms happen to be on the right side because their existence depends upon the Internet remaining an open commons, but this does not mean that their primary motivation is the public interest, or that they will advocate net neutrality next year if it is more profitable to do otherwise. The Internet, designed and built by taxpayer money, will remain open only if the ability of the major players to control and deny access is strictly regulated. Many users of the Internet are not old enough to remember that only 13 or 14 years ago the telephone companies wanted to block telephone subscribers from using modems without paying outrageously high fees for "data" access, but were prevented by the regulatory agencies from interfering. Had they been able to "de-neutralize" the net then it would have never become the information superhighway it is now, but instead, would have remained the equivalent of an overpriced gravel toll-road, with speed-traps at every intersection. Gopher (and it's big sister, Veronica) would have stayed the search engine of choice.

Keep in mind what broadcast, cable and satellite television have become under the free market system. Sure, you have a choice; you can choose between hundreds of channels carrying mostly junk or worse. On the Internet, you have a choice between millions of web sites, and if you can't find something you like (or don't like something you find) you can set up your own website for $10/month or even less. The cost of entry is for all practical purposes zero. The telecom companies would like to limit your choices to web sites that make a profit—for them. They would love to charge you dearly for the privilege of having a website and even more for the traffic that your site generates. Given a sufficient lock, they could even demand a percentage of your revenue if you happen to be selling something through your website.

Because of the way corporations and our economy are structured, a typical corporation cannot stand the idea of someone else making a buck if the corporation can make that buck instead. Typical examples of this corporate mentality are the efforts of successful franchisors to take over the businesses of their franchisees. Radio Shack once had a foolproof method of acquiring their franchises: it didn't reimburse the franchisee when people returned defective equipment, so the franchisee was at the mercy of Radio Shack's quality control. The more defective items, the less the franchisee made. But I digress.

The Miami-Dade school board has voted to ban a library book for young children that portrays life in Cuba a bit too idealistically for local tastes. The entire 24-book series for young children on other lands and other cultures of which the targeted book is a part will be removed from all the libraries in the system. The New York Times has the story.

So, instead of banning books like Huckleberry Finn that might be uncomplimentary of our own country, a book that says good things about an official enemy must now be kept away from our children. Granted, Cuba is not a bastion of free speech. The parent that objected to the book is a former political prisoner of Castro's communist regime, so he is undoubtedly sincere in his belief that the book dishonestly depicts Cuba in too favorable a light.

On the other hand, Cuba could not be anywhere as evil as our government and the Cuban exiles would have us believe. It is not Ceauşescu's Romania or Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution. Although it is difficult to assess the proportion of iniquity between them, as Dr. Johnson once remarked. it would be hard to say that Cuba is more oppressive than our close friend and ally, Saudi Arabia, or the murderous and rapacious Pinochet regime in Chile, bought and paid for by the U.S. The Cuban regime is "evil" only because it refuses to follow the neoliberal economic model that has long impoverished Central and South America for the benefit of U. S. corporations and the local elites that did their bidding.

While those among us with strongly-held beliefs may find it easy to convince themselves that heresy should be suppressed, history has again and again demonstrated that there is no better remedy for error than free and open competition in ideas—where everyone has the right to speak, write and publish, but no one has the right to be taken seriously.

The New York Times reports this morning that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has notified Karl Rove's lawyer that his client will not be indicted in connection with Plamegate. For most of us, this came as a surprise, since Rove has testified in front of the grand jury six times and had obviously been up to his ears in the planning and execution of the White House campaign to discredit Joe Wilson.

It seems to this writer that, from the news reports on what transpired during the Plamegate episode, Rove is criminally liable for lying in one form or the other and perhaps for conspiring to out an undercover CIA agent. It is therefore fair to conclude that Fitzgerald has been squeezing Rove relentlessly for information about the classified leaks and Rove has been fervently singing to keep himself out of the slammer.

With Rove being let off the hook, it is reasonable to conclude that the special prosecutor now has all the evidence he needs to proceed with the indictment and prosecution of more important high-level miscreants.

What has transpired up to now is prelude; let the drama begin.

We are informed that the House of Representatives will vote on whether the Internet will be the exclusive property of a few large corporations to do as they like or will remain neutral to content. This may be the single most important event in the history of the Internet up till now, because the essential character of the Internet is threatened.

Moveon.com has created a most amusing and educational movie made by Grammy-nominated musician Moby.

Click here to watch the movie.

The giant media companies rankle at the low entry cost of the Internet, because it is the only thing that stands between them and total control of the flow of information. Right now, you can build a web site and make it available to the world for $10 per month. Startup costs are negligible. Everybody can participate. It's precisely the opposite of the top-down command structure of newspapers, television and cable.

If there were ten competing broadband ISPs it wouldn't make much of a difference, but with only three giants controlling most of the access to the Internet, its fundamental character would change. There would be nothing to keep them from slowing down or even blocking web sites that don't pay extra fees or that are a little too critical of them.

The Internet is too important to be left to the whims of politicians. If you want the Internet to stay neutral as to content, let your congressman know. It doesn't matter if his largest contributors are the telecommunications companies, like Chip Pickering, my representative. Tell them, anyway.

The great Bengal poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) via The Episcopal Peace Fellowship wrote the following lines which seem to me particularly relevant to our nation:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Boston Police can alert local residents while a crime is in progress with a computerized system that automatically sends text messages and emails and receives anonymous reports of crimes. According to the Boston Globe, the cost to get started was only $1,475.00 for a single PC. If the mayor wants to control crime here in Jackson, this might be a good start.

City police to send residents electronic crime alerts

All four of our congressional representatives voted "yes" on H.R. 5429 that allows drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge. The oil to be had is miniscule in comparison to our present and future needs, but it will make a handy profit for a few energy companies, and in the process damage a delicate ecosystem that is already stressed by rising temperatures. The billl has little chance of becoming law, as similar bills have already been defeated in the Senate, but it is still surprising that Bennie Thompson, whose votes are usually reasonable, voted with the dark side this time. See the vote here, where you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and send your representative a message.