It is an end of an Era: No words can really describe the impact of the sad news on the morning of August 26th, 2009 of the passing away of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. President Obama described him as the greatest Senator of our times. That he was certainly, but to me he stands out as the icon of decency & the best friend of the small guy in this land of the mighty and the powerful. He has been aptly described also as the liberal leader of the Senate and haunted bearer of the Camelot torch after two of his brothers fell to assassins’ bullets.

I have most vivid memories of his gracious mannerisms, his kindness and his ever encouraging smile which prompted everyone who met him to open up with candor and trust in him. I first met him in the Senate on the recommendation of Professor Galbraith of Harvard nearly a quarter of century ago as the emissary of the then Prime Minister of Pakistan to the US Congress. The date was 24th September 1986 as on the next day the Pakistan Prime Minister Junejo was scheduled to meet President Regan and I had to fly to London to call on my Cambridge colleague from Magdalene College, the Duke of Gloucester. As a result of my conversations with Senator Kennedy, I advised the Premier as an Advisor to postpone this meeting with the President by a day as, at that time, important matters relating to the then upcoming Geneva accords were in the offing, and Islamabad had still to clear up various matters relating to its nuclear policies with the State department in the post Soviet period in Afghanistan. True, these matters were to be dealt with by the Foreign Minister; he seemed, however, too busy to do anything in this regard on account of his own pending elections in UNESCO in Paris but which were conducted by him from his suite in the posh New York Hotel at that time.

Then later, in the fall of 1989 when I joined the Harvard faculty, I met him again. I was simply astonished that not only did he recalled our previous brief meeting but he asked me pointedly: “How is the Prime Minister?” Thereafter I had the privilege of meeting him several times. He was always to my mind, the real icon of decency and the truest friend of the smallest guy around. No wonder he said that, while he knew he would not become the President of the US, it did not matter as he was solely interested in public service, which he could render without any strings of office.

By not hankering after offices, he is reminiscent of the perhaps the best well known figures of modern times of this particular class…I mean Mahatma Gandhi—the epitome of goodness, decency and always a friend of the underdog in civil society. How many modern, state level politicians and leaders of any nation can even pretend to lay claims to such distinction? None in my submission. I also regard him to be a spiritual equivalent of Martin Luther King as he shared the same idealism that King often spoke of when he wanted the realization of a “dream.”

In nearly half a century the in the Senate, Kennedy was associated with 10 presidents, including his brother John F. Kennedy; during this stint of public service he compiled a long list of legislative achievements on health care, civil rights, education, immigration and more. His work especially in the Judiciary Committee would stand in a lofty category of honesty which should be the bench mark of integrity of even the best judges in the world. In the recent judicial crisis in Pakistan during the Fall of 2007 and the Spring of 2008, I met him a couple of times as he wanted to be kept informed of the developments in regard to this matter.

In sum, he represented in Aristotelian terms the perfect human rights advocate of the American civil society and indeed polity. Those who knew him have thus lost a genuine friend and they would mourn for him as I do now for along time to come.

He did try to run for White House, but lost his bid in the 1980 nomination process. More than a quarter-century later, he handed to then Sen. Barrack Obama an endorsement at a critical point in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, explicitly saying that the young contender was similar to President Kennedy. Given the close race in which Obama was involved with Hilary Clinton, Kennedy’s support for the current President was pivotal.

Not merely to the American public, but to the world at large, Kennedy was known to all simply as “Ted.” He remained for everyone the best known surviving son of America’s most glamorous political family, a relentless campaigner for what we consider as noble and good as human beings.

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the statement said. “We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all.” “An important chapter in our history has come to an end. Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time,” Obama said.


Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1962, taking the seat that his brother John had occupied before winning the White House; he served longer than all but two senators in American history; following his unsuccessful bid for US presidency in 1980 for nomination of the Democratic nomination to President Jimmy Carter, he bowed out with a stirring valedictory statement that has echoed across the decades: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

Even Republicans could not but admire the stance of Kennedy on several key social issues. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan said in a statement that her husband and Kennedy “could always find common ground, and they had great respect for one another.” She added that she considered Kennedy “an ally and a dear friend. I will miss him.” Similarly Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose wife, Maria Shriver, was Kennedy’s niece, praised “the rock of our family: a loving husband, father, brother and uncle.” Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said that both the Kennedy family and the Senate have “lost our patriarch” and vowed Congress would renew the push for the cause of Kennedy’s life, health care reform.

May the vision of Kenndey for a prosperous, gracious, just and a gracious America be fulfilled!

He felt it was necessary in order to assure that traditional 18th Century constitutional civil liberties would remain protected against modern technological threats.

On March 26, 1991, Professor Tribe (now a Obama administration advisor), in his keynote address at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (Burlingame, California), proposed the following to be the 27th Amendment:

“This Constitution’s protections for the freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly, and its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and the deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law shall be construed as fully applicable without regard to the technological method or medium through which information content is generated, stored, altered, transmitted or controlled.”

He proposal and its rationale was later published in The Humanist, Sep/Oct 1991, pp.15-20,39

I just submitted a proposal urging that this finally be implemented – at least by statute and regulation if not by Constitutional Amendment – via the Obama administration’s http://change.gov/page/s/techagenda .

If enough people advocate the same and pass the word to all their friends, perhaps someone in the new administration might actually give it serious consideration.

–jim; Jim Warren; jwarren@well.com
founder & Chair, First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy
Hansville WA ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Warren

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

Astute analysts on Pakistan are generally astonished that despite the lapse of four months since the February 18 elections, there is no substantive change in the federal governments outlook, image or composition. Indeed even major policies, both domestic and external, remain the same. The NYT in a recent powerful expose on Pakistan, dated June 24, says quite accurately that there is “a leaderless drift in Pakistan four months after the elections.”

To begin with, the country’s top officials are unchanged; attorney general, an arch supporter of the Musharraf dictatorial elements, is still there as have been the Governor Sindh and, until lately, of Punjab as well. All the premier Ambassadors of the country, like that at UN in New York and in Geneva, are still unchanged; indeed the former Ambassador in Washington has just moved a step closer to the seat of power in Islamabad by being made the National Security Advisor. With same faces, little can one expect of true index of a representative government in harness in Islamabad.

Politically, Nawaz and his PML-N, despite being a coalition partner of the PPP led government, has no clue about what is going on and admittedly is never consulted on any major issue. More recently, both the ANP and indeed the JUI said they were considering withdrawing from their participation in the coalition. Even the PPP does not really know what is going on. All the real and established PPP leadership did not have much rapport with the current supremo Zardari until the untimely passing away of Benazir thereby creating a strange kind of consequence. No one in the government, including the PM, really is in a position to take any decision since that prerogative ostensibly only vests in Zardari who is often abroad when crucial decisions are needed within Pakistan.

———- snip

Please read the full essay here.

Other Columns by DR FAROOQ HASSAN

NRO: Musharraf’s proxy war
Impeaching the president
Musharraf following Fujimori
NRO prevents judges restoration
Restoration resolution

Posted by: Jock Gill

In the US right now an acute debate with single focused and one sided objective is going on about how to ensure that the president is ‘persuaded’ to have the forthcoming election fundamentally free from his personal grasp and junta’s influence. This is on account of the fact that without a single exception a very major newspaper predicts that such rigging will be in evidence and indeed inevitable! This one sided public outcry has produced a spate of seminars, public addresses and also testimony in the congress, that such an eventuality is certain to create a havoc in the public trust in institutions of political change in that country.

There is a total crackdown on the press and lawyers and the activist members of the civil society. The chief justice continues to be under house arrest. The president of the Supreme Court Bar and two former presidents continue to be imprisoned since November 3. There are scores of other political leaders who have also been arrested. Such clamp down on the press and the judiciary is to curb terrorism? Actually those who have been arrested are progressive, secular minded people and law-abiding citizens.

I have addressed several important seminars myself. The major was at Harvard a couple of weeks ago when I to spoke to about a hundred professors of university faculties and distinguished diplomats in this country. Then, this week in Washington, I addressed this topic at the most exclusive and prestigious American Society of International Law. The lawyers’ and judges audience was appalled at the idea of how it is possible that a person himself can condone or validate his wrong doings against the constitution.

——- snip:

Read all of Legitimising the illegitimate.

Note:

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).

A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions
How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants

Cambridge, Mass.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled an idea for bridging the technology divide between rich nations and the developing world. It was captivating in its utter simplicity: design a $100 laptop and, within four years, get it into the hands of up to 150 million of the world’s poorest schoolchildren.

World leaders and corporate benefactors jumped in to support the nonprofit project, called One Laptop Per Child. Mr. Negroponte, a professor on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hopscotched the world collecting pledges from developing nations to buy the laptops in bulk.

But nearly three years later, only about 2,000 students in pilot programs have received computers from the One Laptop project. An order from Uruguay for 100,000 machines appears to be the only solid deal to date with a country, although Mr. Negroponte says he’s on the verge of sealing an order from Peru for 250,000. The first mass-production run, which began this month in China, is for 300,000 laptops, tens of thousands of which are slated to go to U.S. consumers. Mr. Negroponte’s goal of 150 million users by the end of 2008 looks unattainable.

Why am I not surprised that the premature death notice of the OLPC project was published in the Neo-Colonial paper of record? Simply put, they had to do it. The old guard knows their days are numbered. They have sworn not to go gently into that good night — at least not until they cash out. The new guard is still young and has yet to take over. We are, consequently, in the midst of a very messy but interesting transition – one ripe with opportunities.

The entrance of the old regime cartels into this very thin, as in zero, margin territory of One Laptop Per Child is more about protecting their business and social models of citizens as one dimensional consumers than anything else. They are fighting against the tide of the rampant Open Source and Peer-to-Peer alternative reality to their world view.

In the end, OLPC will win simply because it puts the power to “fix it” and “grow it” in the hands of the users at the edges — NOT in the hands of a centralized “expert other” from away and NOT on the edge. Two questions: 1] Is the platform “good enough” to motivate users to change and take responsibility; and 2] Will the young people be given enough time and support so that they are in fact empowered to prove the power of this new model? Will the support package promote peer-to-peer independence or will it reinforce the old colonial notion of dependence on “other experts”? Will, in the end, the support function insist on imposing the gross limitations of the old economics of every transaction a billable event — ala the cell phone cartels?

This will be an intreresting proof of concept that each of us being a Producer, Distributor, and Consumer is more powerfully advantageous than each of us merely being a consumer. If I am right, OLPC will seed the Peer to Peer Power revolution in politics, economics, and much else — hopefully including spectrum management.

For more on this, see my post: Framework for a New Economics & a New Politics: The P2P Power Economy

In the end, the OLPC could be the anti-Colonial model. Microsoft and Intel, with all of their faults and imperfect knowledge, surely represent the neo-colonial model of power. They have become the 20th century re-incarnations of the East India Company we fought a revolutionary war against.

This is going to be very interesting to watch.

The general is plainly wrong when he maintains consistently that there is democracy in Pakistan! In his conception of democracy there is the consolidation of offices of the army chief and the presidency. Even more bizarre is the realisation that in any living democratic country these two offices are really powerless to determine the outcome of any contentious matter involving political issues. These are after all politically non-significant jobs; one is a ceremonial post the other one being one involves merely professionalism. Yet in Pakistan these positions have acquired a significance which is impossible to deny.

General Musharraf has fundamentally become quite transparent. He is further fooling nobody when he says that every thing is done according to the constitution. His conception of a constitution is the document through which his rule became personalised. Through his self-serving and self-crafted ‘legal instruments’ he stayed on as the head of the country’s armed forces for nearly a decade as well as a head of state since the day he engineered a coup on October 12, 1999. No wonder his immensely talkative once Information Minister and now in-charge of running the nation’s railways said on November 01 that the constitution is like a nose of wax that should be moulded as one pleases.

Now we are told that he would leave the army position ‘if’ he is ‘elected’ as president; factually this would be for the third time whereas the constitution under Article 44 (2) provides that none can keep this office for more than twice! Most astonishingly he is insisting that he took such decisions in national interests.

———-snip

Read the whole column here.

Various people have asked me for some of the background information on the Doninger Appeal widget that is currently appearing on the left side of the Greater Democracy page.

Last spring, Avery Doninger, junior class secretary at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, CT was working hard to organize an annual battle of the bands at her high school. There had been complications around the venue to be used. The school had a brand new $2 million auditorium that the students wanted to have the concert in.

At a student council meeting, a few days before the scheduled concert, the students found out that the auditorium would not be available as had been planned for. There were some bureaucratic issues about who would oversee the students using the equipment in the auditorium.

Avery, along with three other students did what we as activists applaud. They reached out to the voters and taxpayers. They sent an email to the parents of as many of their friends as they could find email addresses for and asked them to contact the school.

Yet many of us know that government officials don’t always react properly to being contacted by the people they are supposed to serve, and that this can be even worse with school officials.

Avery was told by school officials that as a result of the email, the band festival would be cancelled. The response is also what you would expect from a passionate teenager. That evening at home, she wrote an entry using a few choice words in her Livejournal.

It was later when the school administration found out about the blog entry that things took a turn for the bizarre. They spoke with Avery’s mother and Avery’s mother counseled her in Avery’s use of language and ways of dealing with frustration and intransigent officials.

At this point, the school went beyond what is reasonable. They forbade Avery from running for re-election as class secretary. They confiscated T-shirts that students wore to school to support Avery. They placed false information in students’ disciplinary records about the event. When Avery won the election on write-in votes, the school discarded her votes and named the second place candidate as the winner.

When confronted about this by Avery’s mother, the remained intransigent so Avery’s mother took them to court for violation of Avery’s civil rights.

The initial motion was filed in the Connecticut courts, but lawyers for the school got it moved to the U.S. District Court in New Haven. Judge Kravitz, a Bush appointee and close friend of Justice Roberts heard the motion for preliminary relief. I blogged about these hearings in the Connecticut section of my blog, Orient Lodge. If you want more details, please stop by.

Forty-five minutes after hearing the end of testimony, Judge Kravitz issued a thirty-four-page ruling, denying Avery’s request for preliminary relief. The case is now headed to a full trial in the District Court. In addition, an appeal of Judge Kravitz’ ruling has been filed in the U.S. Second Circuit.

This sort of legal action costs money. This is where Poets, Writers, Bands and all of us come in. This coming Sunday, there will be a fundraiser in Litchfield, CT called Poets and Writers for Avery. The event will include bands from the rescheduled concert and noted writers and poets, including Wally Lamb.

I’ve posted the event on Eventful, Upcoming, MyLeftNutmeg and written about it on Orient Lodge.

Any Greater Democracy readers in the area are encouraged to attend. This should be a great event. Even if you can’t attend, please show your support in other ways. Contribute what you can. If you have a website of your own, please add this ChipIn widget. If you are on Facebook, please join Team Avery.

If you believe that we should be able to express our feelings on personal blogs at home without schools punishing us for it, if you believe that every vote should be counted, then you should stand with Team Avery.

Thanks, and I hope I see a bunch of you in Litchfield.

It strikes me that the Jena Six situation, an event that happened on December 04, 2006, is a leadership opportunity the Democratic party should have taken up more PRO-actively. It is part and parcel of the ugly racist legacy nurtured by the hateful and divisive “Southern Strategy” of the GOP. Why are we not hoisting the GOP on their own petard?

For whatever reasons, this is being framed by the media as a ‘black thing’. The Democrats should reframe it as a ‘citizens with equal rights under the law’ thing. What are we waiting for? It is way past time we took ourselves out of the box the GOP has so well crafted for us.

In 1992, the Clinton campaign used the slogan: “Speed Kills”. The campaign attacked within the news cycle. See The War Room. Fifteen years latter, what are James Carville and George Stephanoupolis saying about the Jena 6?

It appears to me that the Democrats are, for what ever reasons, sitting back too long and waiting for the Republicans to take the initiative. This forces our party to then be re-active and look WEAK. Score another one for the GOP. Are the Democrats waiting for “The Magic of the Market” to somehow solve this clearly non market problem?

Where are the deep values of our Democratic party that would have us act with speed, with informed confidence, and with vigor to such events as the case of the Jena 6? Why are we not a street fighting party that forces the GOP to react to our initiatives and to our values? Why are we not putting the Republicans on the defensive for their role in exploiting the worst aspects of the American experience with their divisive and racist Southern Strategy? Why does the Democratic party tolerate the GOP’s politics of inequality and fragmentation – both racial and economic?

Perhaps this better describes my frustration and feelings of shame. Shame that we are failing to grasp sterling opportunities to creatively lead the country back to some semblance of the core values we have struggled to affirm in the past: Back to some reasonable approximation of “Justice as Fairness”, “equality of opportunity”, and united into something greater than the sum of our parts.

For me, it is a very sad day that, in the face of the blatant racism revealed in the Jena 6 case, our party’s leading presidential candidates were not the first to speak out in a timely and pro-active manner on our party’s values.

Bobby would have been there. Martin would have been there. What about Clinton? Obama? Edwards?

National Public Radio covered the story on July 30 of this year. So why did our party’s leaders wait until the mid-September 2007 to make their comments on a case from 2006?

What, for example, has the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Judicial Committee,VT’s Senator Leahy, had to say about the Jena 6?

I strongly suspect voids in our moral vision and intellectual structures are behind our failures to grasp the leadership on the Jena six event. These voids, how else to describe them?, also appear to explain, to a large degree, our inability to curb and discipline the school yard bully who stole the presidency, twice, started an unjust war, wrecked the constitution, destroyed the balance of power, bankrupted the country, corroded our civil liberties, politicized the civil service, and created a “Wealth Friendly” political philosophy resulting in the most inequitable distribution of income in the Industrialized world. Have we too lost our way shopping in the fog at the mall, entertaining ourselves to death with celebrity fetishism?

If we can not respond forcefully to these insults, what can we do? This is no time for make nice and for playing patty cakes. These are desperate times and call for vigorous moral action to get us back on the main road. Do our elected officials not realize this? Are they that out of touch with the citizens?

We need the gumption and moral fortitude to lead, not simply react to scripted GOP strategies. If we can not show this strength, we do not deserve, we have NOT EARNED, the privileged of being the party of the majority and the party in the White House.

Can you tell I am a very frustrated voter? Can anyone out there explain to me just what the Democrats are waiting for while the country we worked so hard to create falls apart before our very eyes?

Corporations are the dominant force in modern life, surpassing even church and state. The largest are richer than entire nations, and courts have given these entities more rights than people. To many Americans, corporate power seems out of control. According to a Business Week/Harris poll released in September 2000, 82 percent of those surveyed agreed that “business has too much power over too many aspects of our lives.” And the recent revelations of corporate scandal and political influence have only added to such concerns.

Where did this powerful institution come from? How did it get so much power? In Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, author Ted Nace probes the roots of corporate power, finding answers in surprising places.

A key revelation of the book is the wariness of the Founding Fathers toward corporations. That wariness was shaped by rampant abuses on the part of British corporations such as the Virginia Company, whose ill-treatment killed thousands of women and children on forced-labor tobacco plantations, and the East India Company, whose attempt to monopolize American commodities led to the merchant-led rebellion known as the Boston Tea Party.

(Via Jim Warren. Thanks, Jim.)

See also Thom Hartman’s 2002 book: Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights.

August Monday, 20, 2007

When Pakistan’s history is being written objectively there is little doubt that it would signify one of the most remorseless power tussles between the civilian and military rulers on the one hand, and the secular and religious forces on the other.
As such as the country reaches it 60th birthday this week, it is not only generally counted amongst ‘failed states’, substantively the country has been unable to become a democracy, a theocracy or an ideological republic as its history and the Constitution proudly claims. What we do witness is the emergence of an insatiable desire within the top echelon of the establishment with a ceaseless whim to transform and keep the country under permanent military rule.

A non-elected authoritarianism is inherently not acceptable in the contemporary world. But we have in this country an echo of a song in which all our military rulers, Ayub Khan, Yahya, Zia and now Musharraf have consistently contributed their tunes; that unity of command is a good idea and that political leadership is corrupt and avaricious. We are also told to accept unhesitatingly the further innuendo that this military format leads to “stability” in the country. I am afraid both these hypotheses are false and nothing could be far from the truth! Today this nation is more divided and agitated against their prevalent political system and rulers in particular than in its entire previous history with bombs and blasts becoming a daily occurrence.

Read the whole column here.

Dr. Farooq Hassan, D.Phil.;
BA (Juris),MA,M. LiTT (OXON);
DCL (Columbia),DIA(Harvard);
Sen.Adv.Sup.Ct. (Pakistan),
Barrister at Law (UK),Attorney at Law(US).