Law

Free Choice Act

The Employee Free Choice Act passed the house vote, now it is going to the senate. If you are a US citizen, please go here to tell your senator that they should pass this important bill!

Why is this important? The standard method (NLRB elections by secret ballot) are much more prone to coercion by management:

During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose.

More from Kevin Drum.

From the Working Families website:

Sign the Petition: Tell Congress It’s Time to Support the Employee Free Choice Act

Today, 60 million workers in America want to join unions. But employers routinely block their efforts—and our laws are too weak to protect them. It’s time for Congress to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to make their own uncoerced decisions on whether or not to form a union. Please sign the following petition urging members of Congress to support this important legislation.

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Aura

In his classical work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote that modern technology would free art from its “aura”:

for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

For a while it seemed as if history had proven Benjamin wrong: if nothing else, the aura associated with “original” works of art seemed to have increased over time. Just think of the huge prices being paid at auctions for various paintings. However, the internet seems to have brought us into an era that the Dadaists only dreamed of: the era of the remix, of collaborative art, of fan fiction, etc.

So it is ironically fitting that the biggest news story about artistic aura would involve that dadaist classic: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal which Pierre Pinoncelli smashed with a hammer last year. This work was the ultimate attack on aura, and yet having been “voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals” it has itself acquired that aura. Pinoncelli’s attempts to smash it is a fitting tribute to the idea, as much as it is an affront to that aura. The Pompidou Centre center claims he destroyed the “value” of that work, while Pinoncelli claims to have added to it.

In the digital age remixing art leaves the original intact; but “the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.”

Aura is dead, long live aura.

Posada

A known terrorist enters the United States and the department of Homeland Security only arrests him after a Miami-based NY Times reporter points it out to them. They charge him with the minor crime of “illegal entry” and then “lost” all the evidence relating to his case … Did I mention that this terrorist was trained by the CIA and that the CIA had been warned in advance of his plans to blow up a Cubana Airlines plane? Or that George Bush Senior was head of the CIA at the time?

Well, all that is just the beginning, because now they are also trying to get copies of the remaining evidence from the NY Times reporter who broke the story in the first place. I’m sure they just want to put that evidence in a safe place …

More here and here.

Algorithm

Did you know that a secret government algorithm assigns you a “risk score” every time you fly in or out of the country? That have no way of knowing your own score or of challenging it? That this score will stick around on file for 40 years?

The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

Hmmm, I ordered a vegetarian meal, sat in the aisle seat … no wonder they gave me a difficult time at San Francisco International… (Although a colleague who was similarly questioned a little more than usual thinks it is because they can’t distinguish between Taiwan and Thailand, the latter being a known source of drugs.)

Alternative Interrogation Techniques

There are two important stories about the use of “alternative interrogation techniques” by US forces which deserve to get more attention:

First, the suicide of Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, a 27 year old mormon translator who “died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation methods used on prisoners.” What I find especially troublesome is that we will never know what drove her to suicide:

Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.

It is bad enough that we are engaging in practices so awful they drive a young woman to suicide. Even worse that even the parents will never know what those techniques are.

The second story shows how the efforts to keep our own crimes a secret are impacting the judicial process: Majid Khan is being denied access to a lawyer because he was tortured. That’s right, his having been tortured means that he is now in possession of highly sensitive information which would threaten US security were it to be leaked. That sensitive information? The “alternative interrogation methods” which were used on him!

(These stories were found via Ethan Zuckerman and Kevin Drum, respectively.)

Gruesome

This really is gruesome, so don’t read it if you don’t want to spoil your day. Still the recent murder of five children in a home in Hualien has confounded investigators, since the house was locked from the inside, with no other apparent way out …

Stupid Shoppers

This is a general shout-out to all the stupid people out there: Thank you! Thank you for buying your memory from Apple (or purchasing a black MacBook), thank you for drinking from the mini-bar at hotels, thank you for bidding more on eBay than Amazon charges, thank you for buying your airline tickets from a travel agent, thank you for getting that additional product insurance offered at the local computer store, thank you for generally wasting money out of laziness and ignorance!

Why? Because you are subsidizing me! As the NY Times reports, customers like you (hell, you probably don’t read blogs) subsidize savvy consumers:

For example, you see an offer for a room at Nontransparent Hotel for $75 (which costs the hotel $100 to provide). The guy checking in behind you also rents a room, but will rack up $70 in fees from the minibar, the phone and garage parking (all of which cost the hotel $20 to provide). You, on the other hand, were not tempted by the minibar, used your cellphone for calls and took public transportation to the hotel. The other guy subsidized your room.

Smart consumers now have a strategy. They should go to the company offering the discounted product even if the company has loads of hidden fees. The sophisticated consumer then exploits the company by taking the below-cost product and shunning the fees. “It’s a perpetual battle between the firm that fools consumers into paying fees and the smart consumer who can avoid them,” Mr. Laibson said.

One shouldn’t be too smug, however, it seems that it is getting harder and harder to spot the hidden fees, and even “sophisticated consumers” are more and more likely to get duped.

Hewlett-Packard does not tell consumers the price-per-page cost of its printers on its Web site, for example. You have to hunt for the information and do the math yourself. Hotels in South Florida rarely tell you while you are making reservations or checking-in that you will face a $25 “resort fee,” which is ostensibly imposed to cover your use of the pool and deck chairs …

Even the most sophisticated people find it hard to game the system when it comes to fees. In earlier research, Mr. Laibson and two colleagues, James Choi of Yale and Brigitte Madrian of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, learned that even the most knowledgeable people make really dumb decisions even when provided all the information.

Unfortunately, the chances of any kind of government regulation to enforce honesty and transparency is highly unlikely in the current political climate.

Never Again?

This is so important that I can’t believe the NY Times wants you to pay to read it. So here it is: Kristof’s latest article on Darfur … and Chad.


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Contract!

We are happy to announce some very exciting news …

Today we signed a contract with Documentary Educational Resources (DER) to distribute two of our films: Acting Like A Thief, and Mahasweta Devi: Witness, Advocate, Writer. It was Shashwati’s film about Mahasweta Devi that got us involved with these issues, and because of Mahasweta Devi’s long time commitment to DNT rights, the two films make an excellent package for schools. DER is one of the foremost educational and anthropological film distributors in the world, and we are thrilled to have them promoting our work!

One of our biggest concerns in signing this contract was that Acting Like A Thief continue to be available as a free internet download for individuals and activist organizations, especially within India where people are unlikely to be able to pay for the DVD. I argued that there have recently been a number of examples of books and films being offered for free over the net, where such free distribution actually boosted sales rather than hurt them. I was very worried that a well established institution like DER would not be willing to experiment with such new distribution models, but we were very lucky. They assured us that the film would continue to remain a freely available internet download for individual users. We couldn’t imagine finding a better company to distribute our work!

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