Anti-MINUSTAH protesters peacefully marching.

Here’s a round-up of some of odds and ends that I haven’t gotten around to posting until now.

First, there’s this piece for Haiti Liberte: WikiLeaks Reveal: Expecting Civilian Deaths, US Embassy Approved of Deadly Attack on Crowded Haitian Slum. The article describes how a top Embassy official agreed with private sector leaders like Reginald Boulos, who now holds influence over Haiti’s reconstruction, that MINUSTAH should attack Cite Soleil knowing full well that innocent Haitians would be killed by the “peacekeepers” during the operation.

For more on the Port Salut abuses, there are these interviews I did with Democracy Now!, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and if you speak Spanish, this Uruguayan media outlet. The five soldiers accused of abusing Johnny Jean in the video are reported to have been jailed in Uruguay pending sentencing. 17-year-old Rose Mina Joseph, who was pregnant with a Uruguayan soldier’s child when this was published, gave birth to a healthy boy a few days ago. She told me yesterday she hasn’t been able to reach the father in Uruguay to tell him yet, but that when they last talked he said he’d seen an article about her.

Amnesty International issued an action alert that you can participate in about the eviction threat to Camp Mosaic, which I reported on a few weeks ago. And this interview with Dr. Renaud Piarroux about cholera and its origins in Haiti is well worth reading.

Finally, I’d like to shout out this heartfelt and insightful reflection from Sebastian Walker, Al Jazeera’s post-quake Haiti correspondent (check out his new film), especially this part: “I would have liked to stay in Haiti forever. If you spend any significant time there, you will believe, as I did, that Haiti deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper, every single day. It is a permanent, urgent and unjustified humanitarian tragedy.”

I feel the same way.  To me, it’s not just the humanitarian tragedy that makes Haiti worthy of front page coverage every day, but the extraordinary way that tragedy is politically and internationally maintained.  There are stark political choices (some examples) that keep Haiti mired in this state which implicate a wide range of powerful groups in Haiti and across the globe.  Sebastian’s team did a great job of exposing many of them while listening to and projecting the voices of ordinary Haitians.

This contrasts with some recently sloppy reporting by the Associated Press.  An anti-MINUSTAH protest march last Wednesday was completely peaceful from the start, when it was confronted by MINUSTAH soldiers in a jeep, very nearly until it reached its destination in Chanmas. When the march arrived near the palace, Haitian police immediately began launching tear gas canisters, to which the protesters responded by throwing rocks.  This can be observed in a video I produced.

The Associated Press team was not present at that time, to my knowledge.  I saw them walking down towards the protests hours later, after many of the demonstrators had left and only a small band of rock-throwers remained.  But the AP wrote that protesters had “fled into” the camps in Chanmas (they may have since improved the language from the original article), which I did not observe (one resident of the tent camp told me he did not blame the protesters for the tear gas).  The AP did not even mention the peaceful march.  And today, another AP article reduces all recent anti-UN protests in Haiti to “rock-throwing.”  I already pointed out some serious flaws in their initial reporting on the Port Salut abuses.

They should do better. Update: One of the AP’s photographers may have been present as the march itself reached Chanmas.

Or is living with swarms of mosquitoes and an overpowering stench in the area an acceptable level of suffering for Haitians? They’re resilient people, after all.

Interviewed in the video is Dantes Eseck, whose house is directly across from the UN peacekeeping base (there are two different bases) in Port Salut. His house is visible on the left at the 16 second mark. He’s a painter and his wife is a teacher. I wasn’t able to show in the video, but the manhole seen at the beginning is one of several spaced out evenly with connecting pipes along a dirt road leading to the base, and not further.

Check out this photo gallery to get a better view.

I had to look up anophele and filariasis. And please forgive my rough translation of Dantes, though it’s essentially accurate.

Below is a MINUSTAH spokeswoman’s official response. Here is the UN’s response in New York.

II. WASTE MANAGMENT SYSTEM

Whenever there is a technical problem related to sanitation and waste management issues, being in Port Salut or in other areas of Haiti, MINUSTAH discusses them with the local authorities, with whom it coordinates all necessary efforts in order to solve it and keep improving the sanitation and waste management system. Important surveillance measures also exist and inspection teams are regularly dispatched to the field to monitor/test the waste and sanitation systems.

MINUSTAH is not the only player in this chain of waste management. There are several other actors, including the companies in charge of garbage, waste collection, the local authorities, the state of infrastructures in the country as well as the riverine population.

MINUSTAH is currently in the process of installing water treatment plants in its bases, in order to be fully independent in the whole chain of waste management and be able to control the process for A to Z.

The demonstration took place on Friday (struggled to find a decent Internet connection to get the video online until today). A friend of mine got sick and we had to leave Hinche (in Haiti’s Central Plateau) for Port-au-Prince just before they were to burn the seeds in symbolic protest.

Mark Hare, an agronomist from Ohio who’s worked with Mouveman Peyizan Papay for years, explained how Haitian farmers will be roped into a dependence on hybrid Monsanto seeds. Monsanto released an indignant statement responding to the protest the day it took place, insisting the donated seeds won’t hurt Haitian farmers in any way. Further reading here and here.

I didn’t get into it much in the video, but most of the marchers I spoke with also slammed Haitian President Rene Preval for “doing nothing” in response to the earthquake and accepting the seed donation. Wearing straw hats stamped with “Down with Preval” and “Down with Monsanto,” the peasants (young kids, old women, wiry farmers alike) marched from the MPP’s headquarters in Papay for nearly three hours past mango trees and fields to the larger town of Hinche. As they began rallying in the town’s public plaza, I had to go.

I’ll continue following this issue closely, but in the meantime, check out Al Jazeera English’s report looking at the controversy over the seeds.

This is a short video looking at IDP camps in Cite Soleil, Grand Goave, and Chanmas where people still have almost nonexistent shelter. The UN shelter cluster claims they’ve provided shelter materials to 75% of Haiti’s 1.3 million displaced people. Most people I talk to believe that’s an overestimate.

The Cite Soleil camp featured in the video, in particular, I know has received nothing in months. I’ve gone back several times. Last time kids were digging mini-trenches with sticks and rocks to divert the rain. It’s down the street from the Doctors Without Borders clinic.

Red Cross spokesperson Alex Wynter has said the rains are expected to double from March to April and are likely to include continuous downpours for days on end. We haven’t had any of those yet. Last night it rained fairly heavily, but only for about twenty minutes.

Thanks to the New Media Advocacy Project for their video documentation of rained-out camps in March. And to Jerry.

Update: Below, I’m posting three recent reports from Al Jazeera English’s Sebastian Walker, the best TV journalist in Haiti and one of the few still here.

I accidentally uploaded my video to another YouTube account where I usually post hip-hop songs. Oh well.

Update: Also big thanks to Valparaiso for adding Japanese captions to the YouTube video! Check out his Caracas Cafe blog for continuing independent coverage of Venezuela, Honduras, and Haiti (in Japanese).

Finally sorted out some video editing problems last night. Here’s a dispatch I completed a few days ago, focusing on an aid distribution near Cite Soleil last week. In Cite Soleil, Chanmas, Grand Goave, Tabarre, Leogane – almost everywhere I go – people are dismissive of UN peacekeepers and the Haitian government, while hopeful that US troops will help lead a robust aid and reconstruction effort. Many of them also ask for the return of ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was pushed out in a 2004 US-backed coup.

Will US troops live up to the hopes some quake survivors have placed in them? Only listening to Haitian voices over in the coming months will tell. I’m returning straight to Haiti after the School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico next week and plan on being here long after most journalists have left.

Many thanks to Chantal of The Haitian Blogger for help with translations. Some of it I did myself, so if any Creole-speaking readers spot errors please alert me.

Below, a quick video shot Tuesday of Canadian soldiers in the heart of Cite Soleil, showing how NOT to do aid distribution. I saw much worse later that day. More video on the way, as long my computer works.

This dispatch begins at 10pm the night of the Tuesday’s earthquake, and resumes the following morning after I caught some sleep in an open bus abandoned in a downtown Port-Au-Prince street.  More to come.

Update: Here is a written piece published at Inter-Press News Service. Video of Moliere‘s burial coming later.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17, 2010 (IPS) – Millions of dollars in aid are pouring into Haiti. Another head of state visits each day. The misery in Port-Au-Prince dominates the news nearly a week after the 7.0 earthquake struck the heart of this island country.

What has changed on the streets of Haiti’s capital city since the tremors? The Haitian people have mobilised, while foreign aid efforts continue to stall.

More tents have been erected in the roads where Haitians gathered, away from crumbling structures. In the public squares across from the collapsed national palace Saturday, a young couple explained that the yellow tent overhead was given to them by a wealthy Haitian.

That area, called Chanmas, seems an ideal place to distribute aid to the thousands of people sitting and sharing food and shelter in orderly fashion. But people said no aid workers had stopped by to give them anything the whole day.

Two U.S. Navy helicopters flew overhead in opposite directions while they talked with this reporter. Earlier in the day, hundreds of U.S. soldiers could be seen walking back and forth inside the airport.

As of Sunday, the United Nations reported that humanitarian relief is still being bottlenecked at the main airport and roads remain blocked with debris. Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said that one of its planes carrying essential medical supplies was not permitted to land at the airport.

“Despite guarantees, given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic,” the group said in a statement Sunday. “All material from the cargo is now being sent by truck from Samana, but this has added a 24-hour delay for the arrival of the hospital.”

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is also working with Haitian authorities to set up a land corridor to bring in relief from the Dominican town of Barahona 130 kilometres away.

With the dead still being counted, and thousands missing, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said that 100,000 deaths “would seem a minimum”. The country’s interior minister reported that some 50,000 bodies have already been recovered.

European Union ministers called an emergency meeting for Monday to determine the costs of the massive reconstruction that will needed in coming months. The United Nations has already issued an appeal for 562 million to aid Haiti – even before the earthquake, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

The 562 million would target the estimated three million Haitians affected for a period of six months, with half of the funds being earmarked for emergency food aid, and the rest for health, water, sanitation, nutrition, early recovery, emergency education and other key needs.

But in many parts of the devastated capital, there was little evidence of outside assistance.

In the suburb of Santo, dozens of Haitian men organised a digging and rescue operation on a pile of rubble. A huge orange Caterpillar bulldozer sat nearby, stationary. Heavy equipment from the Haitian construction company CNE is all over the city.

At the collapsed parliament building in downtown Port-Au-Prince, a bulldozer retrieved the bodies of politicians lying in the street.

Supporters of Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, dragged the stiff and dripping body of a high-profile party organiser named Bob Moliere into a wheelbarrow. They followed the bulldozer 200 yards to a grassy area by the sea and dumped his body into a four-foot-deep grave they had dug minutes earlier.

Marianne Moliere, now a widow, looked out at the dipping sun with tears streaming down her face. “There is no life for me because Bob was everything to me. I lost everything. Everything is destroyed,” she said.

“I’m sleeping in the street now because I’m homeless. But when I get some water, I share with others. Or if someone gives some spaghetti, I share with my family and others.”

She clutched a manila folder with photos of her dead husband. One of them showed him shaking hands with former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The men had no idea that Aristide, pushed out by a coup in 2004, had issued a statement from exile in South Africa asking that he be allowed to return to Haiti immediately.

Told the news, they started smiling and talking excitedly with one another.

Moliere won his freedom from the post-coup regime in Haiti only three years ago after a full year in detention. The nearby grave remained open for the moment, a small mound of loose brown soil waiting to cover up Moliere’s stiff right arm pointing at the sky.

My on-the-ground report for Inter-Press Service is up: read here.  Narco News too.  I also spoke with Pacifica’s Flashpoints Radio and again with the BBC and PBS Newshour.  Also Russia Today.  (Narration in video is unclear at one point – the man in the truck had not died yet.  Don’t know if he lived.)

Update: (from Galen Herz, in Austin, TX) Ansel was interviewed again by PBS’s NewsHour about possible violence in Port-au-Prince and other relevant topics.

Text of latest report is below.  It was difficult for me get my mind in a clear state to write it.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 15, 2010 (IPS) – The roof of Haiti’s national penitentiary is missing. The four walls of the prison rise up and break off, leaving only the empty sky overhead.

The gate to the jail in downtown Port-Au-Prince is wide open; the prisoners and police are all gone. Bystanders walk freely in and out, stepping over the still-hot smoldering remains of the facility’s ceiling.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday afternoon broke it to pieces.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or not alive,” said Margaret Barnett, whose son was a prisoner. “My house is crushed down. I’m just out in the street looking for family members.”

“Where is the help?” she asked. The former government employee spits the question again and again, hands on her hips. “Where is the help? Is the U.N. really here? Does America really help Haiti?”

In the absence of any visible relief effort in the city, the help came from small groups of Haitians working together. Citizens turned into aid workers and rescuers. Lone doctors roamed the streets, offering assistance.

The Red Cross estimates that 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s earthquake, with some three million others left homeless and in need of food and water.

At the crumbling national cathedral, a dozen men and women crowded around a man swinging a pickaxe to pry open the space for a dusty, near-dead looking woman to squeeze through and escape.

The night of the quake, a group of friends pulled bricks out from under a collapsed home, clearing a narrow zig-zagging path towards the sound of a child crying out beneath the rubble.

Two buildings over, Joseph Matherenne cried as he directed the faint light of his cell phone’s screen over the bloody corpse of his 23-year-old brother. His body was draped over the rubble of the office where he worked as a video technician. Unlike most of the bodies in the street, there was no blanket to cover his face.

Central Port-Au-Prince resembles a war zone. Some buildings are standing, unharmed. Those that were damaged tended to collapse completely, spilling into the street on top of cars and telephone poles.

In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren’t seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists.

“Only in the movies have I seen this,” said 33-year-old Jacques Nicholas, who jumped over a wall as the house where he was playing dominoes tumbled. “When Americans send missiles to Iraq, that’s what I see. When Israel do that to Gaza, that’s what I see here.”

Late at night, Nicholas heard false rumours that a tsunami was coming and he joined a torrent of people walking away from the water.

Nobody knows what to expect. Some people said Haiti needs a strong international intervention – a coordinated aid effort from all the big countries. But there was no evidence on the streets of any immediate cavalry of rescue workers from the United States and other nations.

“My situation is not that bad,” said Nicholas, “but overall the other people’s situation is worse than mine. So it affects me. Everybody wants to help out, but we can’t do nothing.”

Haitians are doing only what they can. Helping each other with their hands and the few tools they can find, they lack the resources to coordinate a multi-faceted reconstruction effort.

U.N. agencies and humanitarian organisations on the ground are struggling to help survivors of the quake, but many are hindered by large-scale damage to their own facilities, as well as lack of heavy equipment to clear rubble.

Logistics remained the main obstacle on Friday, according to news reports, with damage to the main airport, impassable roads and problems at the docks continuing to bottleneck the outpouring of international relief workers and basic supplies.

The United Nations is issuing a flash appeal Friday for more aid as part of a coordinated immediate response and long-term reconstruction plan.

A popular radio host here reminded everyone that the strength of the Haitian people cannot be underestimated, posting on his Twitter: “We can re-build! We overcame greater challenges in 1804″ – the year Haiti threw off the yoke of colonial slavery in a mass revolt.

As the days tick by and the bodies pile up, it will take bold vision and hard work on that scale for Haiti to recover from Tuesday’s tremors.

Click the (HQ) high quality button or view on Youtube. Thanks to Youtube users dc2video, girwainet, and atrhasis, for uploading the footage used in this video. And of course to the journalists in Korea who captured it all.

Cross-posted to current.com.

Previously: Podcast interviews with Korean Metal Workers Union member and author Loren Goldner.

The Good

Al Jazeera English’s Teresa Bo has been reporting from Haiti for a few months. Back in May I drew on her report from a Port-Au-Prince factory for a Daily Texan column criticizing U.S. policy on Haiti. Bo’s observation, missing from other press reports, that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke to an audience of Haitian workers in a language they did not speak (she was translated into French, not Creole) was illustrative of American indifference to the poor majority in Haiti. Here’s her latest report.

This is the definition of good journalism – giving voice to the most voiceless while unrelentingly skeptical of institutions of power, from the government slow to confront patriarchy and rape down to a slum hospital charging patients for treatment. The story features women’s voices and political context. And it doesn’t try to project a simplistic narrative of good and bad onto a complex story.

The Bad

On Sunday night 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley profiled Wyclef Jean, a superstar hip-hop artist originally from Haiti.

Jean is a talented musician with an amazing life story, certainly a great subject for a profile. But this was poor and morally bankrupt journalism on so many levels.

CBS flew a camera crew to Haiti to follow Jean around. Pelley didn’t interview a single Haitian or offer any political context to help explain the scenes of rampant poverty. The destabilizing role of U.S. foreign policy in Haiti for decades goes unmentioned. Pelley says “the developed world is tired of Haiti,” yet Haiti’s (illegitimate) debt was just forgiven by lenders and international donors have pledged millions in new aid. Viewer js11411 on the 60 Minutes website makes important points about Pelley’s word choice and line of questioning.

Still, Pelley makes a show of it. He assumes a faux-critical stance towards Jean, repeatedly and condescendingly acting as a counter-point to Jean’s hope for Haiti. This elicits a series of predictable soundbites from Jean about giving the kids a chance, etc..

In fact, there are serious questions one could ask of Jean. Why in 2003 did he speak out in support of U.S.-backed paramilitary forces overrunning the countryside? Why did he blame President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for the violence? (Jean’s uncle, Raymond Joseph, became an ambassador for the de facto regime that oversaw the massacre of Aristide supporters in the 2004 coup’s aftermath.) What about the recent elections boycotted by most Haitians? What does he think about U.S. policy towards Haiti, especially the glaring lack of temporary protected status for Haitian migrants?

Pelley could have asked about the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti. Instead he states “U.N. troops have been there since 2004 to ease political violence.” In June the U.N. force fatally shot a young man at the funeral for Father Gerard Jean-Juste. The troops are unpopular in many of the slums they police – if anything, they’ve escalated political tension in the country.

But those questions don’t abide by Pelley’s slavish devotion to spinning an apolitical rags-to-riches tale, the kind of story better suited to daytime television. He even exaggerates Jean’s influence, saying Jean single-handedly stopped a Cite Soleil gang war. Not according to Rolling Stone’s 2005 article on Jean: “. . .the peace lasted only for the duration of his visits.”

As viewers of the corporate media know, journalists love these stories, from your local news station up to the national news networks. We see them often. There’s nothing wrong with profiling famous people with incredible, transformative experiences. But this report, like many others, suffers from sloppiness with the facts, willful ignorance of structural political realities, and the exaltation of one person who struck it rich in America.

The viewers of the award-winning 60 Minutes, whose Sunday program was seen by 9 million people, deserve more honest, penetrating journalism. (For an alternate example of 60 Minutes’ best work, see this report on Israel/Palestine.)

The Ugly

Let’s keep this short. “What Haiti Can Teach Us About Honduras” in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Sounds fascinating.

Unfortunately it’s the Ugly of American journalism: naked right-wing propaganda. In some ways it’s less dangerous than the Bad, because most folks know it when then see it. While The Bad masquerades as rigorous journalism by prestigious outlets like the New York Times and 60 Minutes, the Ugly is regularly found on Fox News and the WSJ opinion page, usually blaming liberals and Democrats for the world’s ills. But every now and then it pushes its way into the mainstream discourse (birthers, anyone?), so it’s worth addressing.

Writer Mary O’Grady (pictured), a defender of the Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, commits too many errors and distortions in the article to debunk here, but this DailyKos diary and Haitianalysis article will do most of the job. She condemns Aristide as bloody despot in his first term – but he was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2000 in fair elections. He was “chased out of the country for a second time in 2004″ – but he was flown out on a U.S. jet surrounded by American soldiers. She ignores the waves of political violence that followed both coups against Aristide and the ongoing repression of supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. In short, she’s willing to overlook the violent excesses of post-coup regimes when elected leftist leaders are removed from power.

How do we undermine the Bad and the Ugly, and encourage the Good? Media justice. Supporting projects that strengthen independent and community media, like the Allied Media Conference. Breaking down the stigma against foreign-backed outlets like Al Jazeera, and spreading their English language channel to more screens. Exposing right-wing propaganda and false objectivity every time. And reporting from “where the silence is,” from the bottom up.

One final note: If CBS can upload David Letterman videos to YouTube on a daily basis, why can’t they maintain a 60 Minutes channel? Somebody ripped and uploaded the Wyclef Jean piece in two parts because CBS doesn’t provide it. Not only is it a lost chance to monetize content, it’s a no-brainer if Pelley and his crew feel their work has value, care about Haiti, and want their story to be seen by as many people as possible. Plus they could use the money; parent company Viacom’s profits are falling ever faster.

On June 30, while I was on a mountain in Chile, one of the top 100 most-trafficked websites on the Internet was sold by a group of Swedish geeks to a corporation for $7.8 million. The Pirate Bay as we know it, under constant fire from governments and their patron corporations, is gone after almost six years of defiantly coordinating the sharing of data and culture on a massive scale among users from all over the planet. (Complete coverage at TorrentFreak.)

It’s not clear why the sale happened or what Peter Sunde and the rest of the crew will do now. But it likely had to do with the Bay’s founders being sentenced in April to a huge fines and jailtime. The presiding judge just happened to be a member of several traditional copyright lobbying and trade groups, it was revealed, but there will be no retrial.

So it’s worth revisiting Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons, a talk given in March at Seattle University’s Law of the Commons Conference. The speaker was Eben Moglen, one-time Supreme Court law clerk, now Columbia University professor and award-winning director of the Software Freedom Law Center.

I watched Moglen’s talk a few weeks ago and was blown away. Speaking without notes, he comprehensively packages together a crucial set radical truths about power, technology and society in sixty minutes. Richard Stallman is better known, as the face and founder of the Free Software movement, but he’s an uninspiring (disgusting at times, actually) public figure. Let’s pay more attention to Moglen, who’s collaborated with Stallman over the years, from now on.

20 key points that stood out for me, without Moglen’s eloquence and context, are below. The video too.

Wikisource transcript

1. Until now, the most important reality and fundamental injustice in every human society was their wastage of human brains. The answer to “How many of the Einsteins who ever existed were permitted to learn physics?” is “almost none.”
2. The free software movement exists to address this problem. In digital form knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, i.e. whatever the initial cost of a piece of knowledge, infinite additional copies of that knowledge can be distributed without significant additional cost.
3. Put another way: “If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay?”
4. The goal is to eliminate ignorance, the deprivation of knowledge from vast swaths of humanity. The free software movement strives to prevent the embedding of biases and controls in networks at the invisible technical level through software.
5. The network is composed of pipes, merely moving the data from point A to point B, and switches. Switches are computers, running on code. Microsoft has always sought to monopolize the switches, which enable control of the network.
6. The key to maintaining a free, copyleft, and non-monopolized commons is to require that whatever is appropriated – copied, modified, etc. – is put back into the commons. Thus the GNU Public Use License and Creative Commons license family.
7. The results so far of the free software movement are promising. Free software is “embedded irrevocably” in all developed societies – not exclusively, but the powerful and well-funded monopolists cannot displace it.
8. Networks are a commons. Facebook and 3G cell phone networks are examples of faux commons controlled by benevolent autocrats who, through branding, try to remain invisible.
9. Google, with the new Google Voice, will give you free phone calls, thus upping the pressure on telecommunications corporations, but they’ll also track and data-mine all your communications, as they do with all their services.
10. Software aside, network services could be centralized and the data-miner, who wants good relations with governments and advertisers, may find some reason to not want every Einstein to learn physics.
11. Moglen doesn’t see advertisements when he surfs the net. If you use Firefox like him, you’re two clicks away from using Adblock. Moglen’s friends at the Mozilla Foundation are paid millions of dollars every year by Google not to bundle Adblock with every Firefox install. Getting the picture now?
12. “We’re a non-utopian political movement. . .The crucial operating premise of the free software movement as a revolutionary politic is: proof of concept, plus running code.” The movement is based on models that can be built now and demonstrated.
13. On Wikipedia: Wikipedia’s by-the-minute coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was far superior to that of the major news media. And it has done a better job of preserving the Encyclopedia Britannica than the Encyclopedia Britannica, whose quality deteriorated as it was thinned down for mass consumption.
14. “If it takes a loan sharking thug like Carlos Slim to keep The New York Times in business, then something is wrong at The New York Times; it’s not our problem. A great deal of worry is presently being cast on the question of “How are we going to save newspapers?” with no real question being raised on the question of why we should.”
15. The oligarchic textbook publishers, too, are dying. Do-it-yourself book scanners with OCR will soon drive the nails into their coffins, and there will be zero public sympathy for their plight.
16. Part of the core strength of free software is that it has become indispensable to capitalists and the institutions of power (the extent to which system admins and servers worldwide rely on Linux).
17. The global recession is an opportunity: to point out the folly of centralizing ownership, to stress the need for sharing, to demonstrate a concrete alternative with, for example, a Linux distro on a USB thumb drive.
18. On Apple: “Nobody has yet fully documented what everybody who isn’t part of the cult understands, which is that nobody has ever had more contempt for customers than Mr. Jobs. Nobody.” Zing!
19. We need to realize, collectively, the extent to which the good things in life rest on the economy of the commons. If you use Youtube instead of your TV, or RSS feeds instead of the newspaper, inform your congressperson.
20. What will happen to investigative journalism without the old media? We’ll pay for it because we like it, with the middleman cut out.

When I say ‘radical technology truths’ in the title, that is not to literally endorse every point made above. But I think there’s a good chance each one of them approximates the truth. What do you think?

Re-published at Infoshop News.