Another socialist blog

You don’t often hear me agreeing with the Libertarian Party, but once in a while they’re absolutely right, and they’re right about Rush Limbaugh:

“One thing we don’t hear from American politicians very often is silence,” said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. “By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite.

“And that’s good news, because the next time they do speak up, there’ll be no reason for anyone to listen.”

The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers — drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his Palm Beach housekeeper — has caused a media sensation ever since the megastar’s shocking, on-air confession last week.

As the Limbaugh saga continues, here’s an important question for Americans to ask, Libertarians say: Why are all the drug warriors suddenly so silent?

“Republican and Democratic politicians have written laws that have condemned more than 400,000 Americans to prison for committing the same ‘crime’ as Rush Limbaugh,” Seehusen pointed out. “If this pill-popping pontificator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card, these drug warriors had better explain why.”

To that, I can only add that Limbaugh is one of those hypocrites. Like the Republicans and Democrats, Rush Limbaugh has been making a career of demanding that drug users should all go to prison:

Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up. — Rush Limbaugh, October 5, 1995

I agree with Eric Lee when he says that activists and trade unionists should be concerned about the spam problem. If email becomes unusable, we will be much less able to get our own message out, but the rich will still have ways of getting their own propaganda in front of the public.

Spamming, the sending of unsolicited bulk email, is quintessentially capitalistic: a public resource (the Internet) is used to produce private profit. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits—that’s what capitalism is all about. And for a small number of big spammers, it’s big business.

I don’t think that Lee’s suggeste tactics are all that likely to “actually work,” though, if we define a working tactic as one that reduces the total load of spam on the network. Filtering of spam after it arrives, whether at the server or the email client, does nothing to inconvenience the spammer. We, however, suffer even if we don’t have to read the spam: the network slows down, the mail server gets busier and slower, and eventually the monthly bill goes up to pay for increased capacity.

The concept of a multi-layered defense is a good one, though. The following defenses can all be used at once for real effectiveness:

• Boycott spammers. Never, ever buy anything that has been advertised via spam. Make sure your friends understand why they should do the same. Spam is no longer the sole province of sleazy pornographers—it’s used by sleazy mainstream businesses more and more. If they don’t get sales, they’ll quit spamming.
• Boycott the Internet service providers (ISPs) who harbor spammers. Reputable ISPs all have a policy that strictly prohibits spamming. So spammers have to find a spam-friendly provider to stay in business. These spam havens are only interested in making money, and the community be damned. If the legitimate customers flock to the competition, the spam hosts will see that spam is bad business. If you stay with a provider that has a pro-spam reputation, you’re prolonging the problem. Unfortunately some large ISPs, e.g. Pacific Bell, are spam-friendly.
• Insist that your ISP block email from spam-friendly networks. Wait a minute, didn’t he just say that filtering was no good? Yes, but blocking is different. It’s possible to set up the server to refuse to accept email from any particular area of the Internet. If the spammer is in that blocked-out area, he doesn’t get a chance to transmit his spam to our server. Thus the network isn’t slowed down, and our server doesn’t waste time processing junk email. There are several public lists of spam-friendly networks, and using several of them in layers provides a good degree of protection. (This server currently uses nine different public blocking lists.)
• The most successful of these lists is SPEWS, which has a simple but very effective policy about listing networks: first, they list only the spammer’s own network address. If the ISP doesn’t do the right thing and kick the spammer off the network, SPEWS increases the listing to include adjacent network addresses. And the listed space just keeps getting bigger and bigger until the spammers are gone. What starts out as the spammer’s problem very quickly becomes the ISP’s problem, as the other customer start to scream that their legitimate email is getting blocked by recipients who use SPEWS. Customers pay to get connected, not DISconnected, and the ISP knows this. There is a long history of spammers losing their Internet access because of blocking lists.
• Report the spam you get. Reputable ISPs don’t host spammers, but they don’t always know there’s a spammer on their network unless they get complaints from the public. It’s hard to know whom to complain to, because the spammers forge the email in an effort to divert complaints. The From line is always bogus, the various other headers are almost all bogus as well, even the web site advertised in the email may be several jumps away from the spammer’s real web site. Fortunately, there is SpamCop, a service that analyzes your spam and can tell you where to send that complaint—it even composes a polite complaint letter for you, and mails it. I’ve reported half a dozen spams while I’ve been typing this email.

All these measures are effective: they increase the spammer’s cost of doing business and put many spammers out of business permanently.

Internal memos leaked from the Diebold corporation are proving a continuing embarrassment to the company. So much so that they are using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor the documents.

According to Why War?, “These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection.” My favorite excerpt:

I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.

The search for those elusive weapons of mass destruction is winding down, because they simply have not turned up. The central justification for the war against Iraq turns out to have been a fraud.

Meanwhile, another sovereign power—Microsoft—has admitted it lied when it claimed that the iLoo was a hoax. For those of you who weren’t following, press reports (confirmed by Microsoft) said Microsoft was planning to develop an Internet-connected portable toilet, complete with monitor and keyboard. After a tidal wave of satire, Microsoft then claimed the whole thing had been a hoax. This too, seemed implausible: an elaborate hoax that somehow involved an entire division of the company, plus a number of hired consultants from outside the company. Now they say they were lying when they said they had been lying before. But they’re telling the truth now—really, they promise.

Displaying its usual lack of appreciation for irony, the Bush regime has warned Iran against “any outside interference” in Iraq. Ari Fleischer, a bit of an outsider vis-a-vis Iraq himself, said the U.S. will use military force to prevent “infiltration of agents to destabilize the Shi’a population” of Iraq.

The sinister goal of these “agents” is, according to U.S. officials, to promote friendly Shiite clerics and possibly an Iranian model of Islamic government. This activity is ordinarily called political organizing.

The Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad has been looted while American soldiers 200 feet away watched and did nothing. The losses include, among other irreplaceable items, the earliest known calendar. Iraq is, after all, the place where civilization itself got started.

Meanwhile, “the Oil Ministry headquarters on Palestine Street has been ringed by more than 70 US troops and protected by up to a dozen or more armoured personnel carriers.”

But it’s not about the oil, really, we promise.

This time it’s Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, who managed to suggest, on the floor of the House of Representatives, that all blacks use drugs. Then Republicans managed on a largely party-line vote to stand behind her on a vote about whether to strike her racist comment for the record.

Cubin apologized in the traditional, insincere manner of racists who got caught: she is sorry “if” she offended the “sensitivities” of her listeners.

Those who were paying attention in December, just four short months ago, will recall that after Trent Lott made racist remarks, the Republicans fell all over themselves to say that Republicans were not racists. I’ve tried in vain to find any news reports of Trent Lott commenting on the Cubin fiasco, but found only a great and eloquent silence.

Though American politicians are presently oversupplied with foreign enemies, Fidel Castro has obligingly given them another target: his crackdown on dissidents resulted in prison terms of up to 25 years for some of his political opponents. The House of Representatives has unanimously voted to condemn the repression. There were cries of outrage from Florida Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and New Jersey Reps Robert Menendez and Republican Chris Smith, in particular.

Each of these four hypocrites was among the 356 Representatives who voted for the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act without first reading it. That law provides for life imprisonment for terrorism offenses, which are defined so broadly as to include just the kind of free speech activities that landed the pro-democracy Cubans in prison.

Today’s news is full of “confirmed” reports that chemical weapons have been found in Iraq. We can expect the Bush administration to claim vindication for their invasion of Iraq, since Iraqi possession of chemical weapons was the pretext for the invasion. Sensible Americans should view these claims with suspicion.

Leaving aside the fact that several previous reports of chemical weapons evidence have been found to be false, there is very little reason to believe this latest report. The U.S. military has zero credibility. The alleged evidence is presented to us by the same people who started the war. It would be no exaggeration to say that the political fate of the President of the United States, and many of his cronies, depends on finding chemical weapons in Iraq. We don’t think he’s above planting the evidence.

Even if the reports are true, however, the presence of banned weapons in Iraq in no way vindicates the war. The war was never about Iraq posing a threat. First and foremost, George Bush needs a permanent foreign war to maintain his repressive political program at home. Constant terror alerts and constant war provide justification for unprecedented rollbacks in civil liberties. They also provide cover for a domestic economic policy that is all about helping the rich at the expense of the working class. Huge tax breaks for the rich are just the most conspicuous aspect of the Bush program. Subsidies for churches, increased work requirements for those on welfare, handouts to insurance and drug companies, deregulation of media ownership, and the outlawing of affirmative action are all in progress.

The war is also part of a broad plan to remake the world on behalf of American capitalists. Under the Bush doctrine, no country is allowed to defend itself, or even potentially defend itself, from the United States. Under the Bush doctrine, only the United States still enjoys sovereignty, and only countries other than the United States are subject to international law. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have been just the beginning of this imperial plan. The next war, against Iran or North Korea or perhaps Syria, is presumably in the planning stages already.

The so-called liberation of Afghanistan has already returned the countryside to the rule of the brutal warlords who ran the place before the Taliban. The “liberation” of Iraq will, if Bush has his way, be implemented as a military occupation and dictatorship.

So none of our criticisms of the war, or the war criminals who started it, are going away. Nor will we stop opposing the war, or the occupation of Iraq, when the shooting stops.

NPR’s Fresh Air did an interesting interview last week with Newsweek’s Middle Eastern Regional Editor Christopher Dickey in which he pointed out, among other things:

I think the important thing for people in the United States to understand is that this war has almost no credibility as far as the rest of the world is concerned, certainly not in the Arab world.

I’ve been talking to a lot [of Iraqi refugees]…. There has been no refugee flow out of Iraq whatsoever. All the flow has been back into Iraq by people who want to go be with their families, help defend their homes, and in some cases, many say they want to help defend Saddam Hussein.

You have to remember that a couple of weeks ago nobody would have given a plugged nickel for Saddam Hussein. People didn’t support him, they didn’t like him, they saw the horrors that he represented. They didn’t particularly like the idea of this war, in fact many, many were opposed to it, but they didn’t like him. Now, he emerges as a kind of a hero, standing up to the United States, holding fast against the American onslaught…. This is the superpower, the greatest power on earth, bringing an enormous amount of force to bear on a country of 24 million people, that has been under boycott and embargo for the last 12 years, and has had its army decimated in several wars. So to see the Iraqis standing up at this point [weeks into the war], to see Saddam standing up, is a source of inspiration and pride, and also growing anger, in the Arab and Muslim world. It is not really not improving the image of the United States.

Nobody in this part of the world uses the word “liberation.” President Bush can repeat that again and again as much as he wants, and so can Tony Blair. The fact is, nobody believes it. Everybody here sees this as an invasion and the beginning of an occupation of a sovereign Arab state.