ARTS & FARCES internet

No way am I ready to support Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, but his call yesterday for comprehensive re-regulation of American business certainly got my attention.

Best of all, Dean cited the need to protect workers as one of the main reasons to exert regulatory controls on corporations. According to the Washington Post report, Dean listed “utilities, large media companies, and any company that offers stock options” as fair targets for re-regulation. Dean also favors broadened unionization rights and strengthened transparency requirements for corporations.

Calling for a “new social contract for the 21st century,” Dean said that “in order to make capitalism work for ordinary human beings, you have to have regulation. Right now, workers are getting screwed.”

Dean’s awakening to the need of corporate reform and regulation is something of a reversal. As governor of Vermont, Dean was a fairly strong advocate of deregulation in general.

The full text of Dean’s Houston speech, “Enron Economics,” is available on his Howard Dean for America website.

Wow. Some pictures really are worth a thousand denials....

Answering the timeless question: Spit or swallow?

Time Warner’s flagship corporate editorial product, Time magazine, has apparently censored itself in a blatant attempt to re-write history and curry favor with the administration of Bush II.

The Memory Hole is reporting that Time has removed an essay authored by Bush I and Brent Scowcroft entitled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.” The essay originally appeared in the 2 March 1998 issue of the weekly and has been removed from the publication’s website archive. Even more telling, the table of contents for the issue makes no mention of the essay. It’s as if, in the Time Warner universe, the article never existed.

A one sentence excerpt from the disappeared Bush-Scowcroft article, makes clear the reason Time tried to erase history:

“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.”

The Memory Hole reprints the entire essay, along with a graphic image of the actual page as it appeared in print.

Former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson—husband of the CIA agent that was outed by columnist Robert Novak—appears to have gotten his sweet revenge. Earth Island Journal has published a report by U.S.A.F. Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) that outlines 50 “stories of strategic influence” that were created from whole-cloth by the Bush White House to beat the war drum for the Iraq occupation. The 56-page report was reportedly leaked by Wilson, and while Earth Island Journal published only a four-part overview of the full document, it should be more than enough to trigger a congressional investigation.

Very highly recommended.

Call it the doctrine of pre-emptive litigation. EFF has filed a lawsuit against Diebold, Inc., the manufacturer of an electronic voting machine that is said to be “unverifiable.” When a citizen votes, there’s apparently no way to tell that the vote has been recorded. To make matters worse, some computer security experts believe that Diebold’s voting machines aren’t trustworthy, allowing a single voter to cast multiple votes and votes already cast to be changed.

Steven Levy, reporting for Newsweek, for example, cites Johns Hopkins professor Avi Rubin who has examined the device’s source code with his students and concluded that “the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour…. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities.” Rubin published a paper (.pdf) on the results of his investigation of the Diebold device and concluded that the system was “far below even the most minimal security standards.”