Businesses have been encouraged by our government for years now to go into China, and the motivation was NOT to bring them our freedoms, but to take away their money. Now, the shit has hit the fan, because Yahoo, no doubt like other companies dancing to China’s tune, provided info that got a dissident identified and imprisoned for 8 years.

There will be hearings in the House this week. But as Steve Guillard correctly noted, there are only two choices here, and one of them is the right one.

I am a heavy user of various Yahoo services, and I recently contacted the company with my outrage over their release of search information to US spying agencies. Now this. I will be paying attention to the hearings, and seeing what Yahoo does about this. But things don’t look promising.

It will be a big hassle to move dozens of listserves to another service, to say nothing of my SBC account for internet access and several Yahoo mail accounts, but I will not continue to support Yahoo if this isn’t handled appropriately.

My message to Yahoo: Get out of China.

Oklahoma’s red flag waves again, thanks to my friends and OK Greens co-conspirators, Rachel Jackson and James Branum. They have developed and are selling t-shirts (maybe later other products?) that are based on the now-banned agrarian-socialist flag that symbolized the state from 1911 to 1924.

As I told James, I think the forbidden nature of this shirt is its biggest marketing angle. The law against it is stupid. I would like to see a huge group of folks wearing the flag-shirts descend on the Capitol for a press conference and rally.

If you’d like to get a shirt, you can order through the web site, www.redflagpress.com (or jmbzine.com/redflagpress if that doesn’t work). A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Green Party of Oklahoma.

The Left Coaster: Burning the Flag Burning Amendment

What I do care about is the desecration of the Constitution. Only once in over two hundred years has this country stupidly used the Amendment route to ban a behavior. Our overarching law is all about defining rights that cannot be taken away by legislation, expanding those rights to include all of us and protecting us from unequal or unjust application of laws. The rightwingers who see Constitutional Amendments banning abortion, same sex marriage and whatever else in the world that they don’t like as the remedy for their intolerance and bigotry that will not pass Constitutional muster in legislation are people who do not revere the Constitution. Their understanding of it is as distorted as their reading of the New Testament.

Not a Good Day for Innovation, Customer Rights and Free Speech

The Grokster file sharing decision was the most notorious of the ones handed down today. But the court also came down on the wrong side in the so-called “Brand X” matter, saying cable Internet access providers companies don’t have to provide access to third party ISPs. They own the cable, so they get to decide what data gets sent, in what order.

Given that there are only two “broadband” providers in most communities — if that many — this is an invitation to a media consolidation that makes the current one look pale. The decision, which ratifies Congressional and FCC failure to address the open-access question in a way that promotes freedom of speech, is a gift to the cable/phone duopoly. They will abuse their power, because history shows that’s how they work.

Do you care? Or are you a sheep, baa baa, ready to be just a consumer of the crap Hollywood feeds you? Are you willing to let the phone and cable companies dominate tomorrow’s media, having built “their” networks on the backs of monopoly deals with government that they now leverage to capture entirely new markets? Baa baa.

If you care, fight back. Call, and especially write, your member of the U.S. House and U.S. senators. Tell them that the law is now grossly out of balance in the hands of the entertainment cartel and data duopoly. They won’t pay much attention if you’re the only one who calls, but they may begin to wake up if enough people care.