Written by Jeremy Cloward, Ph.D. – Diablo Valley Collage
“To understand what goes on in the world today, it is necessary to understand the economic [forces] that stand behind the political events.”[1]
-Kwame Nkrumah, Leader of the Gold Coast & Ghana (1951-1966)
Introduction
Dr. Haing Ngor, survivor of the Khmer Rouge “killings fields,” concluded that the Cambodian government lost its civil war (1967-1975) with the Khmer Rouge because the nation had lost its “moral direction.”[2] As one example, he explained how some Cambodian generals sold US-supplied weapons to the Khmer Rouge for their own personal benefit. As a consequence of the individual greed by some of the country’s top military men the Khmer Rouge became stronger, the civil war continued and when the US withdrew from Southeast Asia for good in April of 1975, the Lon Nol government collapsed in less than a week.
The following is a project of Fight for the Future. Please read the article and follow the links. We must all work together to protect internet freedom, and fight censorship.
Congress is considering a “fast track” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If you are not familiar with “fast track” in these terms, it is DC-speak for an anti-democratic process where Congress gives full authority to the Executive Branch to negotiate trade deals, with no meaningful debate or transparency.
If the Fast Track bill passes, it’s a death blow for democracy and Internet freedom. However, if Fast Track fails — and it’s going to be a really close vote — there’s a very good chance that the entire TPP will fall apart. The U.S. negotiators are trying to bully other countries into adopting SOPA-like copyrigh t policies that would lead to a more expensive, censored, and policed Internet. If we defeat Fast Track, the U.S. loses their biggest bargaining chip, and the corporate lobbyists who are driving this deal won’t have the leverage they need to get what they want.
Fight for the Future has been researching the crap out of this and developing their strategy and it’s clear to us that we win or lose the war against the TPP with this battle against Fast Track. That’s why we’ve pulled out the big guns. For the last few weeks they have been quietly building an epic coalition of groups from across the political spectrum to oppose this. It’s an unlikely list of names: reddit, the AFL-CIO, EFF, the Sierra Club, Imgur, the Pirate Party, 350, BoingBoing, and the Teamsters — these are groups and companies that rarely agree on much of anything, but they can all agree that Fast Tracking the TPP is a terrible idea. So together, we’ve launched “10 Days to Stop Fast Track.”
The next ten days are going to be awesome for us, and terrible for the corporate lobbyists who are so desperate to control the free and open web. We need all hands on deck for this. You’ve read this far, now do what has to be done.
A screenshot of the English Wikipedia landing page, symbolically its only page during the blackout on January 18, 2012. (A dynamic version of the page can be seen at en.wikipedia.org/?banner=blackout, though the “Congress lookup” feature no longer works.)
On January 18, 2012, a series of coordinated protests occurred against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These followed smaller protests in late 2011. Protests were based on concerns that the bills, intended to provide more robust responses to copyright infringement (colloquially known as piracy) arising outside the United States, contained measures that could cause great harm to online freedom of speech, websites, and internet communities. Protesters also argued that there were insufficient safeguards in place to protect sites based upon user-generated content.
The move to a formal protest was initiated when some websites, including Reddit and the English Wikipedia, considered temporarily closing their content and redirecting users to a message opposing the proposed legislation. Others, such as Google, Mozilla, and Flickr, soon featured protests against the acts. Some shut completely, while others kept some or all of their content accessible. According to protest organizer Fight for the Future, over 115,000 websites joined the internet protest.[1] In addition to the online protests, there were simultaneous physical demonstrations in several U.S. cities, including New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, and separately during December 2011 a mass boycott of then–supporter Go Daddy. The protests were reported globally.
The January protest, initially planned to coincide with the first SOPA hearing of the year, drew publicity and reaction. Days prior to the action, the White House issued a statement that it would “not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.” On January 18 itself, more than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, 3 million people emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills, more than 1 million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, Twitter recorded at least 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets, and lawmakers collected “more than 14 million names—more than 10 million of them voters—who contacted them to protest” the bills.
During and after the January protest, a number of politicians who had previously supported the bills expressed concerns with the proposals in their existing form, while others withdrew their support entirely. Internationally, “scathing” criticism of the bills was voiced from World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as well as the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. Some observers were critical of the tactics used; the Boston Herald described the service withdrawals as evidence of “how very powerful these cyber-bullies can be.” Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Chris Dodd stated that the coordinated shutdown was “an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.” Others such as The New York Times saw the protests as “a political coming of age for the tech industry.”
By January 20, 2012, the political environment regarding both bills had shifted significantly. The bills were removed from further voting, ostensibly to be revised to take into consideration the issues raised, but according to The New York Times probably “shelved”[5] following a “flight away from the bill”. Opposers noted the bills had been “indefinitely postponed” but cautioned they were “not dead” and “would return.”
Dr. Haing Ngor, survivor of the Khmer Rouge “killings fields,” concluded that the Cambodian government lost its civil war (1967-1975) with the Khmer Rouge because the nation had lost its “moral direction.”[2] As one example, he explained how some Cambodian generals sold US-supplied weapons to the Khmer Rouge for their own personal benefit. As a consequence of the individual greed by some of the country’s top military men the Khmer Rouge became stronger, the civil war continued and when the US withdrew from Southeast Asia for good in April of 1975, the Lon Nol government collapsed in less than a week.
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