American Censorship

We are not our ancestors. The United States of today is not the United States that won its independence in the 1780's, that forged its governing document in 1789, and that existed until just after World War II. The government of the United States does not function like the original did, because the Constitution did not envisage a bloated and bureaucratic executive branch, a corrupt Congress whose members represent whoever has the most pull and wealth rather than the hundreds of thousands of people in each district or state, and a judiciary that interprets the Constitution according to whim and pulls laws out of thin air.

As yet another proof of the truths above, I present congressional hearings on the passage of the Complete Legalization of American Censorship Act (CLOACA), by whatever name this bill is given. All sorts of organizations across the political spectrum stand against CLOACA, from the ACLU, the ALA, the EFF, to libertarians and Ron Paul, to the Canadians (their IP addresses will be affected), … to practically everyone except the entertainment industry, its entities and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That last, the USCoC, is so much a sock puppet of the entertainment industry that the technology companies are abandoning it: Apple already left; Yahoo! is leaving; and Google and the Consumer Electronics Association are getting ready to bolt.

And yet, in the face of this blatant and shameless violation of the First Amendment, the House Judiciary Committee refuses to admit the obvious truth that it is stacked in favor of CLOACA. It lies when the committee (through a publicist) claims that the hearings are well-balanced. Why does it lie?

Let's face facts: the Judiciary Committee is simply too afraid to hear from those who oppose the bill, because we have the facts, the public and the law on our side. And when you're trying to ram through a bad bill, Congress has no time for anything like that. So it sticks its head in the sand and pretends that's the way the world really is.

It is time to stand up to the cowards in Congress. Write your representatives and ask them to put a stop to this attempt by the entertainment industry to create a Great Wall of America and thereby to make us fools and hypocrites before the world.

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As for the hearings themselves? They were a farce of ignorant self-righteousness.

[Michael] O'Leary of the MPAA smirkingly took on his (largely absent) opponents by saying that [CLOACA] critics were engaged in hypocritical hyperbole and were pro-piracy—as though the long history of the US content industries had just disappeared down the memory hole (Jack Valenti, anyone? The VCR as Boston Strangler? The reason Hollywood is in California at all? Rampant 18th and 19th century book piracy? Attacks on HDTV? Attacks on the DVR? Attacks on MP3 players?)