Utopian bureaucracy for fat cats vs human life for us all

An article in the Register deals with the mingling of business and pleasure at work. I think it raises some interesting issues about where society in general is heading.

It seems totally unaware of this, of course, focusing instead on the apparently intractable problem of unravelling this Gordian knot and isolating private pleasure from its presumed opposite business (ie public pain??). The problem in fact is the business side, and particularly ownership and power over our work.

Remove private ownership and power, and the whole system falls nicely into order, with everyone owning everything and deciding together how to share it and (re)produce it. So let's have an end to the private appropriation of social wealth, to the private ownership of social production, and try social ownership of social production, the social appropriation of social wealth, instead.

First the article, then my comment.

The Register » Management »

The politics of email in the workplace

Mixing business with pleasure

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By Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus → More by this author

Published Thursday 19th April 2007 10:13 GMT

It's springtime in Washington, D.C. The cherry blossoms have bloomed, the tourists descended, and on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue a new "scandal" is erupting.

In the Watergate era, there was the controversy about Rosemary Woods and the 18 ½ minute "gap" - a missing portion of a taped conversation of June 20, 1972. Now in connection with "US Attorney-gate" we have a new controversy. The alleged "destruction" of electronic mail sent by employees of the White House through email servers used by the Republican National Committee. The matter raises more important issues for government agencies, companies, ISPs and others. Do I really have an email retention policy, and what emails do these policies apply to?

The US attorney controversy

The immediate issue arises out of an investigation by Democrats on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee into allegations that certain federal prosecutors were fired for improper political purposes. The US Department of Justice asserts that the firings were for perfectly appropriate "performance" reasons and that these prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President and can be fired for virtually any reason.

The email controversy arose when it was discovered that White House employees may have sent email communications about the US Attorney matter through US government computers or computer systems using email systems operated by the Republican National Committee (RNC.) Unlike most governmental emails, which as I will show have to be retained, there is generally no legal requirement that emails of the RNC be maintained. Thus, at least according to press reports, the emails in the RNC systems were "deleted" after 30 days. Or were they?

Personal vs non-personal email

The issues surrounding the controversy are not limited to the United States government. Every company that maintains a mail system has the problem of what to retain, and how to retain it. In addition to a "corporate" email system, companies may also provide employees with access to personal email. This may be through a separate exchange server, but more frequently, companies may allow employees to access their personal email through some form of webmail, either by POP3 or IMAP protocols. Most email systems allow access to email over the web, including AOL, Google's GMail, MSN, and its Hotmail service, Comcast, etc. While many companies expressly prohibit and indeed block access to personal email through their servers, there are actually legal reasons to permit such access.

Corporate or government email, coming as it does from "whitehouse.gov" or "company.com" carries with it an imprimatur of authority. It can be likened to a corporate letterhead or official government stationary. Yet people use such email for much more casual conversations then they would for a formal corporate letter. Nobody would consider whipping out company stationary to write a letter to their doctor or send a quick note to the girl scout troop leader. But an email - no problem. As a result, corporations and government agencies end up sending "official" email about all kinds of matters which do not relate in any way to official business. Indeed, it becomes difficult for recipients of email to effectively determine which communications are intended to bind the company, and which ones aren't - what the law calls "apparent authority".

Companies can deal with this problem in several ways. First, they can impose an outright ban on any kind of personal use of email. A quick note to the little league coach that Bobby is going to be late because mom has to work late is a policy violation which may result in disciplinary action.

Would such a policy be effective, workable, and enforceable? In most cases, probably not - at least not without a good deal of technology deployed around it, including "white lists" and content filters. One problem with this approach is that it is generally implemented inconsistently, and this can lead to legal problems. For example, a recent case involved a Virginia newspaper that prohibited personal use of its email system, but apparently only enforced this policy when employees used the email system for union organising activity lead to legal problems for the paper.

In that case (pdf), decided March 15, 2007, the court found that the uneven enforcement of the "no personal use" policy meant that the company could not select union activities for enforcement. The lesson is: if you are going to prohibit personal use of email, you'd better prohibit it entirely.

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(and so on...)


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Choppa's comment:


Although the piece appears to encourage clearer demarcation between public and private affairs, in fact it points to where human society is heading. The arguments for separation are all based on the society we live in now - rotting capitalism, swollen to bursting with greed and gore, but grotesquely bound here and there with useless but painful red tape. But the behaviour of the actual human beings living their lives as best they can in this inhuman environment is heading the opposite way altogether. Work as part of life, and life as part of work.

In terms of who produces the stuff we use, everything belongs to everyone, as so many parts of society are involved in the production of both the tiniest everyday objects and the hugest international infrastructure projects. We could call this the forces of production. In terms of who owns the stuff we use, well, nothing belongs to everyone and everything belongs to the billionaires. Lets call this the relations of production.


Guess what? The forces of production and the relations of production are in contradiction. Tearing each other to pieces in real but invisible conflicts all around us.



Judge for yourself whether the forces or the relations of production are more human. Judge their relative strengths, now and historically over the centuries. Which will prevail??



Hmmm...

Massacres in Virginia - and Iraq. An anarchist's reaction

CounterPunch presents:

A Momentary Glimpse into Daily Life in Iraq

Massacre at Va Tech
By SHERWOOD ROSS

At the memorial ceremony for those slain at Virginia Tech, President Bush said today he did not know what the victims had done to deserve their fate. How this nation wept as one when thirty innocent Americans perished and twenty more were wounded! There is almost nothing else on the television news but this tragedy --- not even news from the ongoing slaughter from the war in Iraq.

Here we have the sorry spectacle of the man in the White House who made the war on Iraq, where a disaster comparable to the Virginia Tech massacre occurs four or five times a day every day, leading the nation in prayer! Yet when does this man go on television to ask the American people to pray for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered in the illegal war he launched? And just as the students and teachers who perished at the hands of a crazed killer on the Virginia Tech campus had done nothing to deserve their fate, neither have the people of Iraq committed any crime to endure the unendurable they are suffering at the hands of a president who professed to be "horrified" at the events on a peaceful campus. If a South Korean student is regarded as a berserk killer for murdering thirty people what is President Bush, whose invasion to control oil-rich Iraq has cost nearly three quarters of a million lives, created four million refugees, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil?

The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. I have not gone to jail to protest the war machine, so I am no better than they and probably a good deal worse because I have given the issue some thought. How many of those parents in the audience hearing the President's words had elected to Congress men and women who voted for lax laws on gun ownership? How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president's illegal invasion of Iraq? Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our "gun culture" policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world's biggest arms peddler.

What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.

Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It's not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East "is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis" because three-million Iraqis have been "forcibly displaced" by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?

The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their "jobs" in their dreams at night?

All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as "good" people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.

America as a nation has become an organized nightmare. Yesterday, the nation woke up to the pain of the kind of killing it has been inflicting widely around the world since its fleets of bombers roared out to destroy Dresden, since it leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since it laid waste to Vietnam, since it overthrew Chile, and now since it has invaded two Middle Eastern nations in its thirst for oil. Yes, weep for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, who only wanted to study and live in peace. But weep also, America, for the people of Iraq! If President Bush cared as much for them as he cares for his own, he would have to hold four news conferences a day. He would never stop grieving.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist. For comments or to arrange for speaking engagements contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

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Choppa responds (to Stu who forwarded the piece to him):

Thanks!

Good stuff - but...

No class perspective. Democratic illusions up to here... ¨¨¨¨¨

He sees what power can do (not blind) but he doesn't see its material basis. Anarchist lack of understanding and perception of the levers of social reproduction and social change. Anarchist worship of and paralysis before the Big Gun. Like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake or a deer in headlights, he can't even call for a general strike by workers in the arms industry! He doesn't even call for a vote on any policy!!

What it boils down to is blaming the "ordinary American" for the political system and for supporting its priorities. No mention of the machinery to keep ordinary people in check. Guns in America are in the hands of the antisocial - baddies. Not a word about the cops, the scabs, the spies, the military at home. Not a word about history and the constant tug of WAR between workers and capitalists, both national and international. Not a word about the USSR (ooooold story). Not a word about US strategy against the Soviet bloc. Not even a word about Cuba or Venezuela.

In other words, too much distortion, too much garish contrast. A news item as impressionistic in its way as the Fox reports it mirrors from the other side.

Still better this than nothing!

But still - what a featureless landscape he paints between the juggernaut Bush and the berserk loner at VA Tech. An America populated by zombies and hoods.

Copyright, copywrong, humanity and piracy

Techdirt: It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070409/105456

Contributed by Carlo

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 @ 3:02AM Permalink to this story.

It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

from the untapped-demand dept

In one of its roles as proxy for Hollywood movie studios and record labels, the US government continually complains to China that it's not doing enough to stop piracy, and threatens it with the big stick of sanctions or other actions through the World Trade Organization. While these threats are usually just hot air, the US has now formally complained to the WTO, saying that Chinese laws don't live up to WTO commitments in the area of copyright protection and enforcement. But there's a second element to the complaint, which takes issue with China's heavy restrictions on the distribution of foreign content, including DVDs, CDs, books and other products. Where things get a little bit more interesting is that the original article in the Wall Street Journal, and indeed, movie studios and record labels themselves, gloss over the second part of the complaint -- when it illustrates beautifully how backwards big content thinks.

A graph in the article says that China and France are the two nations where the movie industry suffers its biggest losses due to piracy. While the dollar amounts cited are pretty certainly bogus, is it any coincidence that the movie industry sees those two countries as the biggest for piracy when they both feature some of the tightest restrictions on the distribution of foreign content? France is pretty famous for its efforts to keep American content out of its media market, while the Chinese government allows just 20 foreign films to be shown in the country's cinemas each year. It would be reasonable to deduce that it's a lack of legitimately available, attractive products that's driving the demand for pirated goods in these countries, rather than weak enforcement of copyrights. This mimics what goes on in other markets: the content industry fails to provide consumers with attractive products to purchase -- though it's generally because of poor strategy rather than government interference -- so they turn to pirated goods instead. The market for legitimate movie downloads probably provides the best illustration of this scenario. The products offered by legitimate, studio-backed sites are so heavily restricted and overpriced that nobody wants to buy them. The idea that content providers like movie studios don't understand this is reflected in the fact that they aren't pushing the government to attack China's 20-film limit, they just want to make its copyright laws more strict. It's just another indication of how the industry won't compete with free, while it protests that it simply can't. The failure in the market isn't a failure of the government to sufficiently protect copyright holders; it's a failure of those copyright holders to provide products and services that are attractive to consumers.

Reader Comments

1. A contradiction. by Terri on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:33am

   This makes no sense. If the copyright holders provide no content that users want, then why do the pirates sell so many bootleg copies of that self-same content?

2. Re: A contradiction. by MadJo on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:39am

   my first thought would be price. These bootlegged/"pirated" material is much friendlier priced than the original stuff.
   In a way consumers are already voting with their wallets. ;)

3. THis is dumb by Cleveland on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:43am

   This has got to be the worst written article ever!!
   I do agree that the gov't may be keep the film industry down on these countries. Therefore making their citizens turn to bootlegs, but that still is not an vaild reason to steal.

4. Re: A contradiction. by Anonymous Coward on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:51am

   The copyright holder want to provide the content. As it said in the story China and France drastically restrict the amount of content allowed. The demand is there and the supply isnt. Thats what is driving the piracy.

5. by [caiocesar] on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   I think this is not all true. Se the case of Brazil. It's a wide-open country, specially for foreign content. Even though it has a huge amount of pirated material being bought and sold on the streets of nearly every city.
   The real cause might be the high prices that the so called legal content arrives to stores' shelves...

6. It's True by ImaniOU on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   As an American who has been living in Taiwan for almost six years now, I can choose to either miss out on really good movies and television programs because although there are some foreign films and TV shows here, the only ones picked up are the ones that are extremely popular or do not rely on understanding the language. If it involves fart jokes, then it makes it. If it involves a lot of dialogue, then the companies here don't want to be bothered translating it so they just don't carry it. The law enforces everything has to be subtitled in Chinese, even Chinese-language media because of the different dialects all over the island. If it weren't for pirated movies and TV shows, I would be missing over half a decade of American pop culture. The quality of programming here sucks and anyone who wants more from entertainment than caricatures and bathroom humor is forced to seek out alternative means for getting it.

7. Yeah by Wolfger on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:57am

   That about sums it up. Most people are honest, and would rather pay to get something legitimate. Piracy stems from two sources: unavailability and unaffordability.

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Choppam responds:

Good article. The US govt is very self-serving in its trade policies, hates international agreements that thwart its greed and selfishness, and censors officials and scholars and scientists who disagree with it whenever it can. And it shills for the corporations like Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Money and Big ShowBiz. So it tries to put a lid on the reproduction and spread of useful ideas and creative art for the benefit of useless fat cats and uncreative boneheads.

Most people don't realize that the ability to easily and rapidly reproduce ideas and art (eg books, articles, music, shows, movies, prints, photos) is heralding an explosion in interaction and creative development among ALL human beings - that's the whole of humanity, every one of us. Regardless of borders, bureaucrats or bombs.

The reason why the corporations can't compete is that almost everybody hates them, and most people can't afford what they demand. So as soon as the useful and creative things they've stolen from humanity slip through the prison bars they try and put around them, then they find their way home - to humanity.

The oligarchy (rule by the few) and plutocracy (power of the rich) that is fomenting war and destruction today wants to corner every market it can smell out in order to charge exorbitant prices for necessary products. This system wants everybody to act like ignorant selfish money-worshipping brutes like themselves. Fortunately for us (humanity) most people puke at this idea and do what they can to stay human and share their joys and thoughts with each other. You can't make lives and ideas into private property.

Artists and scientists etc need to live. Most people that make up society realize this better than the fat cats and their governments. So let society organize a fair way to do this without the insanity of present-day copyright and patent litigation.

If big stealing (say the looting of Iraq's oil, or the slave contracts big recording companies force on most musicians, or the destruction of our air and water) is sanctioned by law and government, while small stealing is stigmatized and smeared, then the system needs to be turned on its head.

Meanwhile people will do what they have to do to feel themselves as a real part of humanity, with access to the latest and greatest productions of their fellow human beings.

A utopian view of "academia"

Kenodoxia blogs:

Silver linings

Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, whose research interests include measuring and promoting happiness, has written something in the Independent about why academia is a rewarding career to enter. His comments about projected earnings look on the generous side to me, but otherwise he makes some good points and raises some significant caveats to potential applicants for academic jobs. Still, it's nice to read something which reminds me of the positive parts of my job.

On the other hand, I'll reserve judgement on his approval of the Labour government's introduction of top-up fees. Let's wait and see whether all those £3K/year bits of funding find their way into improving teaching, research, and academic salaries. And let's see what effects it has on the number and type of student entering universities. Perhaps Economics departments will feel less of a pinch than Classics or Philosophy departments. Time will tell.

Posted by JIW at 5:43 PM

**************************

Choppa responds:

To me, his piece seemed vague and a bit odd.

"Dedication to ideas" in the academic world is nonsense, if understood in the traditional sense. There is some awareness of ideas, and sometimes maybe a readiness to discuss them, but not more. You have to be very lucky to find yourself a congenial group of idea-freaks to pursue trains of thought for days and weeks with.

"Generosity of intellectual spirit" is self-serving flattery of the worst kind, given the warnings earlier in the same breath practically to "advertise" yourself "in a self-obsessed world" and to beware that "academics are mostly keen on acolytes who are mirrors of themselves". In a world of economically driven "publish-or-die" you will only find generosity of spirit among those who no longer care, ie who have nothing to lose or nothing to gain, or are professionally suicidal. And Oswald's world is economically driven, with pay obviously related to "success" measured in publications and status. It is also intensely individualistic and exceptionalist (elitist) - "if most people like your work you can be certain that you have not done anything important", "eschew the latest research fad, and go for iconoclasm".

For a happiness researcher, he is not in the least Epicurean!

And for an economist he has a touchingly naive (or cynically duplicitous) faith that the top-up fees will trickle down (oops, he said "slowly siphon" "vital resources) into [...] higher education". As my daughter would say - "yeah, right..." Resources that vital should be funded up front, like Trident or the nuclear industry. And for me (and the "squealing" trade unions, and most poor people and wage-earners, and damn near everybody in the reviled 60s ("equal pay for unequal talent and effort" indeed, ho yus I remember it so well... :-) )) it's a matter of principle that education should be made open to all appropriately interested youngsters , not just those with "real demand" in daddy's bank account.

Finally, for now, he seems totally unaware that "school" comes from the Greek "skhole" - meaning leisure from work (ie from hard sweaty materially productive work) enabling you to devote your time and energy to the active pursuit of things that interest you, like learning, teaching, ideas, theories, art, music, whatever.

He writes "you will be an obsessive self-employed thinker". "Obsessive" I doubt, "self-employed" is a hoot, although the blend "self-obsessed" might hit the mark?? "Thinker" - well and good - covers a multitude of sins, doesn't it?

I wonder how he would react to my iconoclasm? Somehow I don't think I'd like to find out. For my money, Andrew O is himself the hissing guy in the black helmet.