Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules–rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form–the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike–at all levels of government and in all three branches–design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians–and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care. 

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government—often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

OUR “UNFREE MARKET”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e., protective legislation) can be helpful. But most “unfreedoms” can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90% of the soybeans and 80% of the cornplanted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325%. For corn, the cost has risen 2,659% between 1994 and 2011. So through its monopolized control of seeds, it is driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market. Admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

SOCIAL INEQUITY BY DESIGN

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937% between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2% over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves. 

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19% since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41% from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50% below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27% of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes: “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.” 

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by wetikos to perpetuate wetiko.

THIRTEEN WAYS TO START FIXING THE PROBLEM

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority, in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life. 

How do we move toward this goal? Here are 13 ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100% publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25%.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plansand build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council (which I cofounded) has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50% of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must rein in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community, and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world. You can .

Jeffrey Hollender (@JeffHollender) is cofounder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, and now the CEO of Sustain Natural. He is the author of six books, including How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good.

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here. This article was originally published in Fast Company.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

[Photos: Flickr users Quinn Dombrowski, John Murphy, Tobin, Adam Swank, brownpau. vitaliy_73 via Shutterstock]

The post 13 Ways We Can Fix The “Free Market” So It Works For Regular People, Not Just The Rich appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This emerging industry is rapidly growing. Already, the same four mega-corporations that dominate the seed and pesticide industries (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDuPont, Syngenta-ChemChina and BASF) are moving to gain control of digital agriculture and outpace the growth of competitors.

Currently, these “Big Four” platforms are Bayer-Monsanto’s Climate FieldView , DowDupont’s Granular, Encirca and AcreValue, Syngenta’s AgriEdge Excelsior and BASF’s Xarvio and Maglis.

The rise of digital agriculture can further foreclose paths for farmer innovation, serve as a powerful gatekeeper of farmer information and transform farmers from independent business operators to captured users. For example, digital agriculture services can provide exact prescriptions for seed planting and pesticide use. With corporate control over these algorithms, companies can tell farmers exactly where and how to treat their land. That same company has an incentive to direct farmers to use seeds and pesticides that they manufacture.

For example, BASF’s Grow Smart Rewards program offers cash back when farmers use its digital agriculture platform and buy certain pesticides manufactured by the company instead of competitors’ products.

Additionally, digital agriculture platforms are enabling major agribusiness corporations to gain access to tremendous amounts of farm data. Farmers own all of the individual data produced from their farm. The digital agriculture company owns all of the data aggregated from multiple farmers to recommend decisions. This is especially important when considering data portability.

In order to have complete control over their data, farmers must be able to transfer it to a different platform while deleting it from the old platform. While a farmer provides data through Climate FieldView to Bayer-Monsanto, they also receive recommendations based on a collection of data from other farms. In other words, the farmers’ collective data benefits all who have “invested” data into the platform.

However, Climate FieldView’s privacy policy shows a farmer can only delete data that isn’t currently being aggregated with other farmers’ data.

Five neighboring farmers all growing the same crops could submit soil moisture measurements to a digital platform. The platform may view their measurements, compare them to yields, then offer all five farmers specific irrigation plans. All farmers would benefit from their contributions. Yet if one of those farmers became dissatisfied and decided to change platforms, the farmer cannot delete their soil moisture data from the database.

On the surface, this may not matter. But now, that farmer’s neighbors are benefitting from his or her data. The neighbors might have a competitive advantage, while the farmer who left receives no compensation for their competitor’s gain.

These data practices are anticompetitive: they allow a few dominant platforms to grow their databases and profit from farmers’ data while offering nothing in return for the farmers that leave the platform. In order to be truly competitive, digital agriculture needs to allow farmers to freely remove data and transfer it to a new platform, or delete it entirely.

Especially with a robust startup culture in the technology sector, there should theoretically be room for smaller companies to find their niche and offer their own digital agriculture platforms that give farmers more choices. These theoretical platforms would lack the conflict of interest inherent in the platforms of the Big Four companies who can use digital agriculture to push sales of their own products. However, In order to limit competitors from entering this market, the Big Four are utilizing a number of tactics, some of which are unique to the agriculture industry.

Bayer-Monsanto’s design of Climate FieldView gives a perfect example of the ways in which tremendous resources can quickly lead to market dominance in a burgeoning industry. At this stage, Bayer-Monsanto’s first priority is growth, measured in the number of acres on which Climate FieldView is paid for and deployed.

In 2017, Monsanto announced that it surpassed its goal of having Climate FieldView on 25 million acres and reached 35 million acres instead. Agriculture retailer incentives drive much of this growth.

Prior to the completion of the Bayer-Monsanto merger, a CoBank report predicted that the largest impact of the current wave of mergers (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDupont and Syngenta-ChemChina) would be on rebate programs. These programs have become extremely important for retailers, who are required to sell a certain amount of a given product in order to receive cash back. The now-completed mega-mergers will primarily affect rebates in two ways.

First, larger companies have the power and capacity to push for higher sale volumes, which will increase the number of units retailers are required to sell to receive a rebate. Second, these new mega-corporations have more complicated portfolios than ever before.

Digital agriculture is one important piece of the new, complicated platforms and portfolios. In January, CropLife magazine reported that Monsanto was significantly increasing the rebate requirements for Climate FieldView. The author, Paul Schrimpf, speculated that it could be beneficial for some retailers to simply give Climate FieldView to farmers for free, just to reach the rebate requirements.

This control over retailer practices allows companies like Bayer-Monsanto to mass-distribute its digital agriculture platform — to the detriment of smaller, independent companies without a network of retailers profiting off of rebates.

Immense control over retailers has not been enough to stymie tech startups wanting to provide their own individual digital agriculture tools.

Many farmers use Climate FieldView for one or two very specific features. Therefore, there is certainly a market for startups to provide very specialized products that may be cheaper than a large platform and only offer what a farmer may find useful.

In 2016, Monsanto recognized this trend and decided to invest in the Microsoft playbook from the 1990s. Hence, the modern Climate FieldView platform was born.

Similar to how Microsoft turned Windows into a one-stop shop for computing needs, Monsanto expressed the desire to build a “centralized and open data platform.” In this platform, Climate FieldView acts as a sort of “App Store” for agriculture. Startups place their digital agriculture products within the Climate FieldView program for users to choose which ones they like. The startups gain increased access to customers while Bayer-Monsanto gets a share of the profit and access to all of the data.

Climate FieldView is the ultimate power play in a still-forming industry. Since the platform is rapidly growing, it has become a gatekeeper for other digital agriculture products. As a gatekeeper, Bayer-Monsanto gets to pick winners and losers, influencing the path the entire industry will follow.

The Big Four have almost complete control over conventional agriculture across the globe, and these corporations will increase dominance through digital agriculture. These aggressive practices and the potentially disastrous consequences are concerning for small family farmers. Digital farming only addresses the needs of industrial scale farmers and could be used to further lock farmers into a system of chemically intensive agriculture, where they are forced to use the seeds and chemicals the companies manufacture.

This agricultural technology could be a force for good, but it is already on pace to become as anticompetitive as the rest of the agriculture industry and simply another tool for corporate control over farmers — and our food system. It is important that we question how this technology will affect the future of farming and farm labor. Digital agriculture shifts farmer data ownership to mega-corporations so that these corporations can micromanage large sectors of farmland and limit farmer choice and competition — all for the benefit of their bottom lines.

To address this, policy must catch up to this emerging technology and offer farmers control over their data rather than leaving the issue to individual corporations to decide. In the meantime, farmers interested in utilizing data analysis can look to platforms provided by companies not manufacturing seeds and pesticides to ensure they receive unbiased advice.

The digital agriculture revolution does not have to follow the patterns of the past. Farmers’ access to their own farm data must be protected to ensure it can be used to bolster the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Digital agriculture must bolster farmer independence rather than increase corporate control over farmers and our food system.

For more information regarding digital agriculture, see Friends of the Earth (US) full report, Bayer-Monsanto Merger: Big Data, Big Agriculture, Big Problems. The report details the myriad ways in which digital agriculture has the potential for gross corporate abuse of farmer data and how the combination of seeds, chemicals and data into combined platforms will increase corporate control.

Jason Davidson is the Food and Agriculture Campaign Associate at Friends of the Earth (US). He supports the Bee Action Campaign. Jason worked on the campaign as an intern before joining Friends of the Earth as staff.

Prior to Friends of the Earth, he interned at Climate Reality Project and served as a research assistant in the Geography Department at George Washington University.

He holds a B.A. in Geography with a minor in Geographic Information Systems and American Studies from George Washington University.

The post AgtechTakeback | Digital Consolidation – Entrenching Agrichemical Companies & Industrial Ag? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Spanish-language cartoon Tiranía (Tyranny). Superstition sits on the throne, advised by a priest and a devil by Claudio Linati, 1826. Wikicommons. Public domain.

Xnet (https://xnet-x.net/en/), an activist group working for civil rights in the Internet, is the founder member in Spain of the #SaveYourInternet coalition, which has among its participants groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), European Digital Rights (EDRi) and others. We have come together to organise a campaign to inform the public about the hidden dangers of the new European Copyright Directive.

With the approval in the European Parliament of the final text of the Copyright Directive, which will be definitely put to the vote in a very few months’, the European Union has lost a historic opportunity to produce copyright legislation adapted for the Internet in the twenty-first century. What the European Parliament will finally vote on is a technophobic text, tailor-made for the interests of the copyright monopolies which, moreover, doesn’t guarantee the right of authors to have a reasonable standard of living as a result of their work.

If the law is eventually passed, it will be used for wholesale curtailment of freedoms and more censorship, in keeping with the bizarre idea that anything that doesn’t produce hard cash for the major players – which doesn’t mean authors! – has to be prohibited and eliminated.The amount of money the real authors receive in the end is zero or almost zero.

This is a tragedy for workers in the domain of culture who (with a few, brave, and praiseworthy exceptions) have once again been frivolously incapable of informing themselves about the real state of affairs. They have passively swallowed the version fed to them by their masters and, avidly playing the victim, have become the chief mouthpiece of freedom-killing propaganda without the slightest understanding that this is not going to enhance their rights but will do away with the rights of everyone.

Alarm bells started ringing almost two years ago when we discovered that, rather than being a proposal for an obsolete copyright law, the directive is being used as a Trojan horse to introduce surveillance, automatic data processing, government by opaque algorithms, and censorship without court orders, etc.

This threat to such basic rights as freedom of expression and access to culture and information lurks in ruses which are mainly hidden in two articles of the Directive:

Article 11: no link without a licence

Article 11, otherwise known as the “Linktax” article, has created a new economic “right” for magnates of the written press. This ‘right’, moreover, implies indefinitely restricting the possibility of citing the press online.

If this seems absurd, arbitrary and counterproductive, we invite you to read the proposal itself. This is an ambiguous text, described by the jurist Andrej Savin as “One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.” Given its muzzy formulation, the safest response for any platform will be not to link to any media publication without explicit permission.“One of the worst texts I have ever seen in my 23-year-long career as a law scholar.”

This perverse measure will be the equivalent, on a European scale, to the “Google tax”, which is already in force in Spain and Germany. Even its promoters were soon to regret it, when Google shut down Google News in Spain after it was approved. The Google tax is paradoxical and those responsible for initiating it know very well it won’t work in Europe. For example, Xnet revealed that the big German publishing company Alex Springer was paying itself – having linked up to pay itself – in an outlandish pretence that “everything’s fine”.

Where are they trying to go with this? What sense is there in this move by the press barons to push laws which prevent you from linking up to their content, disseminating it, and commenting on them? Is this just a mix of ignorance and greed, or something like shooting yourself in the foot?

There is certainly something of this involved, but we believe that this is a mix of ignorance and greed which, in the end, means cutting off your nose to spite your face (when you’re trying to damage someone else’s face). With laws like this, the press barons can engage in legal harassment to the point of closing down social aggregators and communities like Meneame or Reddit, eliminating any new competitor, consolidating their monopoly, and thus becoming the lone voice on the Internet, the only ones who speak. In short, they are aspiring to become a new kind of television.

Article 13: no uploading content without a licence

Platforms – from medium-sized providers of services storing subject material through to the giants of the Internet – will be considered responsible for any copyright infringement committed by their users, and they are bulldozed into taking preventive measures. In other words, this isn’t a matter of eliminating content but directly preventing people from uploading it.

Of course, nobody is forcing them to do anything. They are simply being made responsible for material uploaded by their users. It’s like a car salesman being held responsible for crimes committed by people who buy his cars. This can only end up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship.This can only end up with algorithmic upload filters being applied to absolutely everything or, in other words, prior, automatic, and massive Internet censorship.

Recently, YouTube prevented the pianist James Rhodes from uploading one of his own videos in which he is playing Bach. This kind of “error”, which always favours privatisation of the public domain, is the everyday reality for all authors who use YouTube.

And this isn’t just about the “errors” that lead to the privatisation of the public domain. It is about the difficulty or impossibility of uploading on the Internet any kind of derivative work: parodies, memes, remixes, fandom, satires, and so on or, in other words, the very essence of culture, political freedom and freedom of expression.

Repeating the medieval experience of the invention of the printing press

This whole setup, which looks like a science-fiction dystopia, an impossible attempt to lock the doors when the horse has bolted, or an exaggeratedly grim prophecy being spread by concerned activists, is already being implemented today on big platforms.

At present, there are two options:

The Spotify model

 In this case, the platform would acquire all national and international licences and then make all contents available unidirectionally in such a way that users can’t upload content. Even so, in the case of Spotify, one of the few giants with the resources to do this today, paying the copyright monopolies has raised its overheads so much that, despite its commercial success, its medium-term sustainability isn’t guaranteed. If this is the situation of Spotify, it’s not difficult to imagine what will happen to medium-sized Internet companies.

This model has another defect which is obvious to most artists. The amount of money the real authors receive in the end is zero or almost zero.

The Facebook/Google model

These new Internet monopolies refuse to share the cake with the old copyright monopolies and therefore opt for large-scale, automatic filtering of all content. They will find it easier to adapt to Article 13 since now they will only need to apply the filtering mechanisms before uploading takes place.

This technology, besides being opaque and exclusive, is very expensive. Since it will be obligatory, it will also mean that these giants are very unlikely to have competitors that have any chance of prospering.

Google has spent approximately 100 million dollars to create the technology that has so far enabled it to respond to copyright claims coming in from only 1% of its users.

The effect which these arbitrary regulations will have on free Internet conversation, on diffusion of culture and information, and access to them will be devastating.

Whose rights are at stake?

Authors’ rights (Droits des auteurs→ copyright) are important. But what are these rights? And which authors have them?

Any democratic proposal seeking widespread consensus and aspiring to guarantee the decent employment of authors without jeopardising the basic rights of citizens would need, finally, to take a bold stand against the copyright monopolies and management entities which are suspected of abuse when not directly investigated, tried, and condemned, as we succeeding in doing with SGAE (the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers).

It should also take as given the fact that the concept of the author or medium has changed in the last twenty years. Since the earliest days of Web 2.0, the content generated by users has evolved from being an interesting social experiment to the digital reality in which we are immersed day in day out.

In a society like that of Spain, for example, content generated by entities which were once “big” media now account for less than 5% of Internet traffic. The EU must respect citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal content generated by the elite.The EU must respect citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal content generated by the elite.

No single company, medium, or author has written Wikipedia, or turned the Web into the repository of gazillions of videos, or generated hundreds of millions of tweets per day. We – the people – did this. The Internet doesn’t belong to them.

The threats skulking behind the Copyright Directive are part of an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle and embark on an inquisition that would allow the oligarchs to take control of the Internet. Our politicians and big company bosses are envious of the Chinese model.

Open architecture

The initial idea of the fathers and mothers of the World Wide Web and the Internet, as we know it, this idea of an open architecture for sharing links without restriction, was crucial to its success. And it would be radically undermined if the directive is approved.

Now the EU wants to create an Internet with a licence. And since we are a civilised society, they can’t call it censorship so they say “copyright”.

In the final vote, all the power and wealth will be on one side. We, the people, who are on the other side ­– in favour of freedom of expression, an open Internet, and copyright laws adapted to the twenty-first century, which will enable authors to make a decent living and not have to scrabble for crumbs dropped from the table of the Internet moguls ­ – will be vilified, slandered as thieves, hackers and pirates, and absurd allegations will be made against us.

This situation has happened before. And what it most clearly evokes is the relationship between the invention of the printing press and the censorship of the Holy Inquisition.

Inscribed in pen and ink. “Spanish Inquisition” by Thomas Rowlandson (1756 – 1827). Wikicommons/ Google Cultural Institute. Some rights reserved.

What is the responsibility of artists and (left) political parties?

The vote has not yet been cast. We have a few months to get everyone to understand the magnitude of the danger. We can win this battle. We have already won in extremis in other situations like the fight for net neutrality and ACTA, and we can do it again.

What would help:

• –  Artists who will step forward and say, “NOT in my name”.

• –  A clear, effective, and non-opportunist stance from the left in favour of an open Internet and freedom of expression.

The left instead tends all too often to cultivate a technophobic position which contributes towards censoring narratives. The case of Spain is paradigmatic. The PP (right-wing party) and PSOE (“socialist” party) voted and will vote in block for whatever the Copyright Monopolies and the SGAE tells them to vote for, which is to say what most favours control and censorship.

But the example of the left-wing electoral alliance Unidos Podemos is also instructive. They joined the SaveYourInternet campaign at the last moment in order to coopt these citizen-activists. The next day, one Anova and two Izquierda Unida members of parliament abstained from voting and nobody in either party as much as batted an eyelid. It would seem that none of our politicians take these basic rights very seriously.

We citizens who are active in battling for civil rights on the Internet will meet our obligation and fight the good fight. We’ll stop this attack on the Internet and democracy sooner or later, with or without the help of the “artists” or the “parliamentary left”, but not without bitterly calling attention to the dangerous future that is looming for freedom of expression and information, and our other freedoms in the new context of the digital age in which, again and again, the tool is being destroyed and the messenger killed in order to preserve a status quo that must not continue.

Heretics brought before the tribunal of the Inquisition, Seville by F.Moyse, 1870. Wikicommons. Public domain.

Photo by Madame Etepetete

The post The EU call it copyright, but it is massive Internet censorship and must be stopped appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growing influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon on commercial and political life. Stoller argues that these large firms have too much power over our options as consumers and creators as well as having a large impact on our access to information.

About Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He was a producer for MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, and served as a writer and actor on the short-lived FX television series Brand X with Russell Brand. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Header photo by GrungeTextures

The post Matt Stoller on Modern Monopolies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Open Source Imaging Initiative aims to “to develop an MR scanner that is affordable to build, operate, maintain and repair by providing full, freely available technical documentation that follows the standards of open-source hardware.”

At Activist Post, Brian Berletic (“EpiPen goes from $300 to $30 to $3 with Opensource and 3D Printing,” Oct. 11) notes that, compared to the superficial political outrage and posturing over the EpiPen, “perhaps more effective was a DIY biohacking group’s demonstration of turning an ordinary store-bought autoinjector into a functioning EpiPen, called an “EpiPencil.” This prototype costs $30-40 to make; but replacing the store-bought plastic parts with 3D-printed ones could lower the cost to $3. The design is not yet shelf-stable for extended and requires further development, but offers exciting possibilities.

Berletic notes that such open hardware projects “represent the surest means of holding corporations and governments accountable, not by begging them to do what they should already be doing, but forcing them change their behavior or face being displaced from markets by cheaper, opensource alternatives and eventually, an entirely alternative paradigm.” While activism may mean participating in projects, people also engage in activism when they “roll up their sleeves and create with their own two hands the change they want to see in the world.”

Johnson (“Counter-Economic Optimism,” Rad Geek People’s Daily, Feb. 7, 2009) stated the same principle back in 2008 in regard to copyright law. While copyright laws written by the proprietary content and software industries might be more draconian than ever, he said, the situation on the ground was more favorable than ever to people who wanted to ignore the laws and copy protected content.

If you direct your hopes and efforts into legal reform, “you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections.” This is only to be expected “because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them.” Lobbying and legal reform efforts have a huge effort-to-payoff ratio.

The cost-benefit calculus is much better for circumvention. “A law that cannot be enforced is as good as a a law that has been repealed, and that is where we’re headed, faster and faster every day, when it comes to the intellectual monopolists and their jealously guarded legal privileges.”

Imagine federations of neighborhood cooperative clinics sharing open-source MRI machines and other devices, using open-source versions of EpiPen, O2 cannulas, IV tubing, etc., printed in neighborhood cooperative machine shops, and pirated versions of drugs under patent printed in DIY Bio labs — all for a tiny fraction of the present cost of healthcare inside the corporate-state monopoly framework, and funded by the kinds of working class mutuals that flourished in the 19th and early 20th century.

When the state does fund healthcare, as with Medicare Part D and Affordable Health Act subsidies, its approach is to leave all the state-enforced capitalist monopolies (patents, practitioner licensing cartels, entry barriers and restraints on competition among giant bureaucratic hospitals) and simply help the poorest to purchase healthcare at the enormously inflated monopoly price. But it’s the monopoly price of healthcare itself — embedded rents on “intellectual property,” licensing, and bureaucratic overhead — that’s the problem in the first place. And the state will never do anything about this problem because enforcing the artificial property rights the propertied classes extract rents from is the main thing states do. Plus the managerial bureaucracies of state regulatory agencies and giant corporations are basically run by the same people, shuffling from one institution to another and back.

Governments, corporations and other large institutions will never truly represent us or be accountable to us. We need to create horizontal, cooperative institutions of our own that serve us, instead of bleeding us dry.Photo by Niels Heidenreich

The post Open Source Revolution Circumvents Capitalist Monopoly appeared first on P2P Foundation.