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![]() Don't steal your own documents! Big government went after Mr. Aaron Swartz because he refused to pay the 9¢ per "page" fee for documents for which my and your taxes had already paid. The pages should have been freely available, this, especially when the job for the distribution of those pages was assumed by Mr. Swartz, thus eliminating the need for the gov. to perform that labor. By imposing the fee, those with means continue to afford to pay millions for documents which otherwise belong to the citizen already. That sizes of electronic documents are limited to the size of paper documents makes no sense; The 8.5" x 11" (or x 14") size is a vestigial legacy from the paper era when the printer could print pages of that size only. Now the size of electronic document has nearly no limits. This means that it is reasonable to expect that the fee should be no more than 9¢ if all of the downloaded documents were downloaded in one fell swoop. The charge of 9¢ per page means that big gub'mnt is engaged in a fraudulent practice which Swartz correctly combated. Before his death at 27 years of age, Mr. Swartz was the people's representative; He worked for the people. He was another one of those rare individuals, a visionary in the field of the expansion of freedoms via information technology, working for our side, the good side, at a time when the US has an over-abundance of bad people working in behalf of the bad U.S. Congress and for its freedom-hating National Security Police State Apparatus. I suggest that the people begin to look for, and publicly extoll the virtues of, similarly heroic individuals, those who work outside of the security state and outside of the US Congress, since the latter two work for the people less and less, and, worse, work to undermine the people, such as when they enthusiastically and with prurient glee passed the U.S. Patriot Act which indeed replaced the U.S. Constitution. Then the Congress even passed something worse, the two NDAAs which institutionalized the making of each individual in the U.S. a terrorist suspect, thus subjected to indefinite detention, to being locked up in a Pentagon-run brig, without the Writ of Habeas Corpus, as well as declaring martial law which, pre-911, was illegal. Now it's legal. These are instances of the gov. passing laws to benefit the gov. by strengthening its rights, which was not the original intent, instead of benefiting the people by strengthening their rights, as was the original intent. So, why are we paying the gov. via voluntary income taxes to make itself stronger while making us weaker? It should at least perpetrate injustices and illegalities with someone else's money, not ours. In response to "Internet Prodigy Behind RSS, Reddit Ends Life" Read more at http://ktla.com/2013/01/12/internet-prodigy-behind-rss-reddit-ends-life/#xe0kyBgB7XEdjq4R.99." KTLA 5, 12-12-2013 ![]() John Dingler in a Cossack hat in his studio in Winter. • Money is a form of free speech, this, according to the USSC decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, 2012. Because corporations have more wealth of money than non-corporate people have, and more media power to express it, they have more free speech rights than normal people. This is a major economic disparity that gives primacy to the corporate person over the real person. Should the USSC ever find that real people are corporations, and the gov. confiscates uber-gains from corporations and disburses it back to real people, then real people would at least have speech rights equal to that of corporations. Until this happens, real people will continue to have less rights, they will thus remain second class citizens in a nation run by first class corporate people. As someone already had said, it's time to began discussing the confiscation of hoarded wealth, from real people and from the corporate person; No one should be allowed to stockpile a disproportionate amount of America's wealth. Wealth is defines as media access, land, money, privilege, connections to the powerful, and the network that ties these together. Alternately, states and federal laws should prohibit a corporation to exclude from its charter a method to disburse its disproportional amt. of wealth to those who have the least. This is called good corporate citizenship, and it should consider this to be the privilege to operate within the greatest country on earth, the United States of America. In response to "Corporations and execs need penalties that hurt." Los Angeles Times |
AuthorJohn Dingler, MFA, U.C. Irvine, hails from Italy. He is a full time artist working from a very cool studio building in Riverside, CA. Archives
July 2013
On Good Citizenship
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