p2pnet.net News View:- Autumn is here. The leaves are turning, falling, along with temperatures. Winter is on its way. Not much time for reflection. That can hold until the deep cold arrives, and we can sit in front of a warm fire.

But some thoughts can’t wait. That’s what makes the world go ’round.

Last week, the President signed into law, legislation that formally eliminates the American concept of Habeas Corpus. Somewhere, sometime, between the time Congress voted to legislate the Military Commissions Act of October 17, 2006, and the government signed it, the wording of that law changed.

The published law reads, now, that any citizen, anywhere, including you and I, will no longer enjoy the explicit language of our Constitution which states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Although there was a concerted effort of omission on the part of our country’s major media providers to withhold that news, some have become aware. Can you hear quiet songs of lament in the background?

This week, America’s baseball World Series began. I can’t watch it. Nor, can anyone else who doesn’t pay for the games to be broadcast over media networks in Iowa. The airwaves belong to the general public. As part owner, I have no right to watch the games over airwaves controlled by our government. Somehow, the government has figured out that our airwaves should be licensed for billions of dollars to a small handful of media providers. Major League Baseball offers distribution licenses to those media outlets that are willing to pay “fair market value” for the privilege of broadcasting the games.

In my part of the country, the price is too high. The market forces used to justify the concentration of media ownership aren’t working.

When something doesn’t work, it gets fixed. That’s the American way. The best way to fix the wrongs that are happening in our country, is to vote the bums out. But alas, with the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, there is no way to vote the bums out. Sure, we still have elections, but, under the law as it’s written, our right to vote has literally been eliminated.

Proprietary voting systems ensure the vote count in elections will be held in secret. There’s no way, including the presence of paper ballots, to subject our elections process to public scrutiny. No one, including our court system, will be able to oversee our elections through public scrutiny of the vote count. Everyone knows, or should know that. Makes you wonder if the concentration of media ownership is in cahoots with the present government administration. Instead, we get all kinds of articles that run around the fact that in America, the elections will require that the vote count be secret, controlled by a small handful of proprietary voting systems CEOs.

I’d write a Letter to the Editor. But, here in America, we have newspapers controlled by a small handful of owners. Editors who don’t play the “so-called secret” game of censorship lose their livelihoods. Of course, they lose them anyway as the concentration of our media nears monopolistic dimensions. I’ve wrtten several Letters to the Editor, here in Iowa, as of late. Not one of them have been published to my knowledge by any of 20 “so-called” local papers around the state.

When I lived in Reno, Nevada, I did manage to get some Letter to the Editor efforts published, but only after I fired off complaints to local, state, federal consumer organizations, along with the attorney generals agencies at the state and federal level.

I suppose I could do that again. Wonder if that tactic works in Iowa? Can you hear the quiet songs of lament in the background?

This winter, as the warm fire glows, maybe there’s time to reflect on the possibility of moving to a communications infrastructure that is not in the hands of the powerful.

Community wireless networks can be created with little more than cheap tin can antennas. Spend $3 to $7 per antenna, and the neighborhood, community, county, state can be hooked up. Which, naturally, brings me to the issue of P2P network applications. If you’ve not heard of such things, just ask the nearest Internet user.

Users of P2P networks run the risk of jail time, if they’re selected for prosecution by the organization that controls 85% of the music we listen to around the world. Amazing fact, eh? That changes, of course, if our communications infrastructure becomes independent of the present corporation control.

Videoconferences can be held on such networks, issues discussed without someone censoring the discussion, locking folks out of the room, hauling some rabble-rousers off to a secret detention, for speaking their piece. I’m looking forward to this year’s time for reflection.

Are you?

Tom Poe - p2pnet
[Tom Poe is a VA pensioner, living in Iowa, USA. He says he likes the idea of replenishing our public domain, and at the same time, buying directly from Independent Artists.]

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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