Ralf Goergens

As reported on this blog this February, the EU members had agreed among themselves not to invite opponents of the Castro regime to diplomatic receptions at their embassies. The aim was to ‘normalize’ relations with Cuba after the arrest of 75 dissidents had led to vehement disagreement between Cuba and the European Union. Back then the EU was sharply criticized for this pretty lame behavior.

I read an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, unfortunately only available online to subscribers, which I’m not, that the German embassy tried a rather half-hearted approach to show some spine after all: On occasion of the 15th anniversary of German reunification on October 3rd, they had organized two receptions, an official one for Cuban officials up to Fidel Castro himself, and also the international diplomatic corps, and an unofficial one for private citizens, including several opponents of the regime. Quite predictably, not a single local bigwig showed up for the official reception.

According to the article, Castro has by now altogether lost interest in having good relations with the European Union anyway. His close relationship with Hugo Chavez has rescued the country from the increasing isolation it suffered after the demise of the Soviet Union. Considering the high price of oil, Chavez can well afford to be generous with Castro, while gaining some additional credibility with the international left by having him as a kind of political and ‘spiritual’ mentor. This unholy duo also is up to no good, and is trying to export communism to the rest of Latin America, as if were the 1960s all over again. More about that in some other posts.

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I couldn’t care less about Harriet Miers, and if she becomes a Justice at the American Supreme Court per se, but there is one issue where I do care a lot, and that is copy right law. Does this, by all accounts very nice Lady have the intellectual firepower to come to a halfway sensible position, when SCOTUS is ever presented with nonsense like this: (it turns out that this link doesn’t always work*, so here’s the second paragraph at least):

– Copyright term extension is a very fitting memorial for Sonny. This is not only because of his experience as a pioneer in the music and television industries. The most important reason for me was that he was a legislator who understood the delicate balance of the constitutional interests at stake. Last year he sponsored the term extension bill, H.R. 1621, in conjunction with Sen. Hatch. He was active on intellectual property issues because he truly understood the goals of Framers of the Constitution: that by maximizing the incentives for original creation, we help expand the public store-house of art, films music, books and now also, software. It is said that `it all starts with a song,’ and these works have defined our culture to audiences world-wide.

– Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

(Emphasis mine).

This from Representative Mary Bono, from a speech before the House of Representatives on October 07, 1998.

That’s right, this is not, repeat not, a joke. Sonny Bono, the male half of Sonny & Cher and later Representative Sonny Bono, had pushed through the extension of copyright protection to 95 years after the death of the originator/copyright holder. Like his widow states in the quote, he really had wanted copyright to last for ever. While this might seem ludicrous, it is no more ludicrous than the notion that it might be illegal to use the CDs you bought and own the way you want to, and that the concept of ‘fair use’ might be soon basically dead and gone. The recording and movie industries will soon have seen to that — in the European Union it is already illegal to convert the songs on a music CD to MP3-files if said CD is in any way copy-protected (I’m not quite so sure about the DMCA, though).

While paying royalties to Julius Caesar’s heirs for reprinting ‘De Bello Gallico’ probably won’t be necessary, for the new law certainly won’t be applied retroactively (I hope), I have no doubt that this ‘forever-minus-a-day’ copyright will get through Congress sooner or later. Too many Representatives and Senators are beholden to the media industry for that not to happen. If that law survives the scrutiny of SCOTUS, the United States will insist that the rest of the world should follow suit, and the round-heels running the EU will only be too happy to comply, being in the pockets of the same industry themselves.

So, to get back to my original question, does that nice Ms. Miers know how to respond properly to this kind of sophistry, or doesn’t she?

* It’s a pretty ‘longstanding’ link, so I’m surprised that it would time out now.

Frank Furedi in Spiked Online:

Being a right-wing hawk banging on the war drums myself I kind of resent the first sentence in this paragraph, but I’ll let it slide for now.

Either way, Furedi ends the article on a hopeful note, despite all the anxiety he has created so far:

In contemporary times, fear migrates freely from one problem to the next without there being a necessity for causal or logical connection….

…

The precondition for effectively countering the politics of fear is to challenge the association of personhood with the state of vulnerability. Anxieties about uncertainty become magnified and overwhelm us when we regard ourselves as essentially vulnerable. Yet the human imagination possesses a formidable capacity to engage and learn from the risks it faces. Throughout history humanity has learned from its setbacks and losses and has developed ways of systematically identifying, evaluating, selecting and implementing options for reducing risks.

There is always an alternative. Whether or not we are aware of the choices confronting us depends upon whether we regard ourselves as defined by our vulnerability or by our capacity to be resilient.

Update: I was referring to the belly-rub, of course. It seems that this isn’t obvious to people who have never owned a dog.

Update II: Thanks to Steven den Beste for pointing out that the Internet Explorer won’t display the image if I leave the ‘width’ and ‘height’ tags empty. I use Mozilla and didn’t notice myself.

It was the same with this post.

n 2002 the proposed war on Iraq was the one issue that had made it possible for Gerhard Schröder to win after trailing in the polls. In this years’ election campaign the central issue was the flat tax proposed by Paul Kirchhof, the Christian Democrats’ candidate for the Finance Ministry and former Judge at the Constitutional Court. While his personal plan was not identical with the Christian Democratic plans for tax reform, the Christian Democrats’ proposed policies for the next two election cycles would have come pretty close to a flat tax. Unfortunately their communication skills were sorely lacking, and they sent mixed messages to the public. This made it possible for Schröder to make the voters believe that a cold turkey implementation of the flat tax was imminent. He really sunk his teeth into this issue, time after time alluding disdainfully to Kirchhof as ‘that professor from Heidelberg whose plans have nothing to do with reality’, to the applause of his audiences. This hardball way of campaigning mobilized his party base once again, won most interest groups over to his side, and demoralized many of the Christian Democrats’ supporters. In Bavaria alone, 800,000 voters who had cast their ballots for the Christian Democrats in 2002 staid home this year.

Besides his aggressive, and much more effective campaigning style than that of his opposition, the circumstances also worked to Schröder’s advantage. The German tax system is arguably the most complicated in the world, and while this is a very good argument for tax reform, it also makes it very risky to talk about radical reform during an election campaign. The present system grants a myriad of tax exemptions and privileges to all kinds of groups, and for defenders of the status quo it is very easy to put a scare into people belonging to these groups, once somebody proposes reform. One of the excemptions which Schröder used to hammer Kirchhof most often about was the one for extra pay earned while working night shifts and weekends. Kirchhof wanted to abolish it, among many others, for the additional tax revenue for that measure would have made it possible to lower tax rates overall. Schröder, in fine demagogical form, claimed that nurses would be hit with higher taxes, so that doctors could benefit from lower tax rates, and that factory workers would subsidize their employers’ higher after-tax profits etc, etc, ad nauseam.

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