manchicken here…

Howdy folks. Well, yesterday afternoon I got a voice mail from someone at Senator Durbin’s office. Today I returned their call and spoke with a fella named Josh (withholding last name). Josh did his best to be considerate, professional, yet politically deceptive. Most of my questions were met with either more questions, or with ambiguous answers that under no circumstances could be considered definitive… EXCEPT that he did tell me that Senator Durbin is a big proponent of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.

So I got a little curious and did a little digging. As it turns out, Senator Durbin is in bed with several enemies of freedom such as Comcast (opponent of net neutrality), AT&T (compliant to NSA wiretapping and currently lobbying for unfair competition with cable companies), and AOL Time/Warner (one of the largest enemies of freedom, using the DMCA to silence free speech and using DRM to violate fair use rights of users) to name a few. Each of these corporations has donated a significant amount of money to the Senator’s 2006 campaign. According to opensecrets.org, AT&T has donated $24,725, Comcast donated $5,000, and $1,000 from AOL Time/Warner. Oh, and let’s not forget the $75,724 donated by Kirkland & Ellis, LLC… one of the largest “intellectual property” law firms in the world.

This brings one question to mind for me… I’ve got nowhere near even the $1,000 that AOL Time/Warner is on the record as having donated that I have paid Senator Durbin, so what incentive does he have to look out for my best interests? Zero. When you’ve got elections bought with money, and fascist organizations like Kirkland & Ellis paying the Senator so that they can continue to profit from restricting the general public the people are screwed.

Senator Durbin’s people made it very clear that they won’t tell me the real position of the Senator on these issues until he’s already voted on them. That leads me to the conclusion that the only way I can tell what he’s going to do is by looking at what he has done. According to his staffers, Senator Durbin voted in favor of the DMCA of 1998, a law that violates my right to write the software I want or even make fair use copies of my own media without paying huge licensing fees for codecs and signing non-disclosure agreements.

I encourage you all to contact the Senator’s office at (202) 224-7104 and let them know about your feelings on this issue. It’s really hard to get someone to actually pay attention long enough to extract an answer from them, but hopefully if folks actually let them know their feelings on the issue, they’ll care. It’s unlikely, but worth a shot.

So, kudos on Senator Durbin’s team for crawling out from under their rock and calling me back, but shame on them for selling out our freedom and privacy.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 14:43 and is filed under Politics, Ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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