An e-Rant about Politics, Religion, Software, etc.

On Thursday evening, MSNBC hosted a Presidential debate between the eight Democratic candidates for President. After watching several such debates back during the election season of 2004, I was prepared for another display of the corporate media’s bias and how certain candidates get selected for media exposure and hype before the public even gets a real chance to know who is running for the Presidency and how the candidates stand on the issues.

So far my candidate Congressman Dennis Kucinich has received better treatment from the press this time around. I have seen quite a few interviews with him recently and all of them have been rather good in terms of giving him a chance to talk about policy instead of campaign fund raising and polls. Indeed, many interviewers have even drawn attention to the fact that Kucinich is the only one of the Democratic Presidential candidates who was in office at the time of the illegal invasion of Iraq and had the judgment and political courage to oppose the Iraq War before it started, to vote against it, and to continually fight it.

I was glad to see that tonight’s debate allowed Kucinich to shine better than in the previous campaign cycle. He got to talk several times about two of his strongest points: his consistent opposition to the Iraq War and his plan for Universal Health Care that will eliminate the enormous waste and bureaucracy created by the health care insurance industry by removing them from the equation.

Still, it wasn’t really a fair debate between the candidates and the evening showed some of the biases that you get when the corporate media has the ability to anoint certain candidates and choose who answers what questions and how many.

Being the analytic sort, I decided to perform an experiment and keep track of some data while watching the debates. Read more

As an anarchist, I have extremely mixed feelings about participation in bourgeoisie elections. Reading the excellent A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, one gets a deep sense that real political change almost always occurs through direct action taken by the people rather than through participating in elections and appealing to politicians in hopes that they will listen to the people instead of their backers in big business.

That is why historically many if not most anarchists have been opposed to voting. The argument is that participating in the election rat race with sacrifices of time, energy, and money in the hopes of getting a candidate elected who will then bring about change once in office is usually a doomed effort that ultimately results in little more than draining people of energy and enthusiasm that they could have instead devoted to organizing and direct action. I can understand this position, and I have felt some of the effects that it predicts first hand.

Despite these experiences and despite the risks of losing sight of the true battlefield within our hearts and out in the streets and halls of society, we cannot completely shun elections, for they can sometimes (though not often) prove beneficial to the cause of human freedom and progress. Read more

Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.

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