'Cause I'm left-handed

Transparency is a core value of open societies, but it isn't to the sort of Ayn Rand price-on-everything universe that the Bushists (and Alan Greenspan) profess to love as long as it doesn't hurt their cronies.

Corporations, of course, may use Rand-like laissez-faire rhetoric, but they really just want the playing field tilted in their favor. That's why all copyright law for the past at least twenty years has been destructive of public rights and fair use. Digital rights management, enabled by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, gives them everything and the rest of us, whatever's left.

Even techies are noticing IOKIYAR

Ed Foster writes:

In medieval days, a peasant could be executed for stealing a crust of bread, while the lord of the manor could abuse every peasant in sight without fear of legal retribution. Does it strike you that we seem to be reverting more and more to a similar society, one in which the punishments no longer fit the crimes?

The wingnuts love zero tolerance. It matches their angry and vengeful God.

But, to serve the limitless greed of Republican crony capitalists, it gets worse.

Even if we were to believe the exaggerated estimates the various copyright industries put forth for how much they lose to piracy each year, is it as much as the Enrons, Worldcoms, Adelphias, etc. cost us the economy? Notice also that while Congress is mandating increasingly severe punishments for the copyright equivalent of petty theft, it can't be bothered to do anything serious about crimes like identity theft that are costing millions of citizens billions of dollars. With powerful lobbying from the RIAA and MPAA, federal law enforcement agencies have no problem getting funding for enforcement of copyright crimes, but individuals who've had their bank accounts cleared out by a clever phishing scam have nowhere to turn.

There are many other examples: the bankruptcy bill, the way drug enforcement imprisons the little fish while it catches and releases those with something to trade, attempts to end overtime, the end of the billionaire playboy tax, tax reductions that prefer investment to labor, the effort to end Social Security, media emphasis on sensational crime over much greedier financial misbehavior, the continued destruction of unions, and on and on.

So, fellow peasants, had enough of droit du seigneur?

Originally posted on DailyKos.