Cory Doctorow's Little Brother book tour Chicago, IL May 15, & Mark Crispin Miller's 12 Step Program to Save Democracy

Little Brother, a new civil liberty/science fiction/tech work with a bold title, download or purchase in the young adult section rather than in the science fiction section in your local book store.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/14/little-brother-book.html

Little Brother book tour Chicago

Thursday, May 15:
Barnes & Noble, Chicago, IL
1441 W. Webster Street, Chicago, IL 60614
7:30 pm, Thursday, May 15, 2008

Hope to see you there!
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The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent.

We don't have to go down that road.

If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.

If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight.

If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have.

This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.

snip

I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read -- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it.

- Steven C Gould, author of JUMPER and REFLEX

I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.

Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

- Neil Gaiman, author of ANASI BOYS

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Chapter 1

This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers than included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!)

BakkaPhoenix Books: 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993

I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston."

much more to the book...
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From: Mark Crispin Miller

http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2008/05/thoughts-on-this-falling-d...

Thoughts on this falling dusk
see (below) post: Dusk on Planet Earth

Let me add that, if and when the planet dies, and as we're thinking back, in our last moments, on how it came to be, we can all pin the blame for it primarily on the media.

Why did this nation let things slide so catastrophically throughout the last eight years? How did America succumb to the control of a regime of theocrats and corporate oligarchs, devoted to an ideology of ecological destruction?

It was not We the People who decided on that course, for We the People did not vote for Bush and Cheney. As we (or some of us) have known for several years, it was Al Gore who won that race; and Gore would not have let the planet keep on getting hotter and more toxic. He surely had his faults, but he was not indifferent to the planet's health.

But when Gore tried, as he did for a while, to push the point that he may well have won, the media lambasted him, and ordered him to do the "gracious" thing, and go away (just as the gracious Nixon had so memorably pretended to do twenty years before). And then the media continued to legitimate Bush/Cheney's illegitimate regime. When they discovered, in November of 2002, that Gore, in fact, had won the vote in Florida, they misreported it, declaring that the final count confirmed Bush as the nation's duly chosen president.

And ever since, the media has kept on propagating the canard that Bush was properly elected in 2000; and, since '04, they've kept on saying Bush was duly "re-elected," even though that claim is groundless, while there is, by now, a vast archive of solid evidencethat Bush and Cheney stole that contest, too.

Of course, the media was not alone in forcing Bush on all the rest of us. It was the GOP, the Supreme Court included, that ran the coup--and the Democrats, including Gore himself, who let it happen.

It was the press, however, that helped kill all popular resistance to that coup, and shut off national discussion of what Bush et al. had done. And even now the press keeps shutting down all national discussion of what Bush et al. are doing to prepare to hijack yet another presidential race. (It isn't just the mainstream press that's shut off such discussion, but the lefty press as well.)

This is why we're in such trouble now--and why we can no longer let the media dominate our politics, which rightfully belongs to us.

MCM

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http://www.alternet.org/story/85080/

Dusk on Planet Earth
It Isn't Morning in America Anymore - It's Dusk on Planet Earth

By Bill McKibben, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on May 12, 2008, Printed on May 12, 2008

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.

.........

Please consider taking the following to upcoming Conventions. Because if things remain the same....they will remain the same.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mark_cri_080130_a_12_step_progra...

January 30, 2008
A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy
By Mark Crispin Miller

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak-and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn't there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America's first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race-and we can't win, because it's fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).

Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.

It isn't just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.

With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.

Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don't have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner BEFORE WE even know if the election was legitimate, they PRE-DEFINE all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of "sore losers."

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.

Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.

Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don't.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID's at the polls.

As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.

We're under surveillance everywhere else, so why not?

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday, requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.

No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).

Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment--and disenfranchisement--for all repeat offenders.

"Three strikes and you're out" would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.
***

This comes from Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a new collection of writings by the major Election Integrity people, which IG Publishing will be bringing out in early April.

Authors Bio: Mark Crispin Miller is the author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, which is now out in paperback from Basic Books, with over 100 pages of new material. He may be reached through his blog at markcrispinmiller.com. A movie based on his off-Broadway show, A Patriot Act, is available on DCD at patriotnation.us

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Every Wednesday from 8-9 PM ET, Voice of the Voters radio
This week which can be accessed from online Archived Voice of the Voters! programs can be found at www.voiceofthevoters.org

http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2008/05/earnhardt-keyssar-mcm-on-v...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
-Earnhardt, Keyssar, MCM on "Voice of the Voters"
"We the People": The Constitution, Our Vote & Election 2008 Part II
Obstacles to A Vibrant Democracy
Identifying & Addressing Needed Change

Special Guests:
Alex Keyssar, Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
Mark Crispin Miller, New York University Media Studies Professor
David Earnhardt, Emmy-winning producer/director

Voice of the Voters!
Wednesday, May 14, 8-9PM ET

1360 AM Greater Philadelphia & on the Internet www.voiceofthevoters.org
Archives and podcast available next week
Professors Alex Keyssar and Mark Crispin Miller explore provocative questions as to whether our Democracy is becoming more or less healthy and vibrant .....and the challenges we must address.

Have we been we heading in the right direction since 2000 or are matters growing more worrisome?

What is our Constitutional Right to Vote and how does it effect our "Democracy"?

What impact does the Constitution have on state regulatory/administration election processes and the "Party" system?

What impact could procedural barriers like voter ID laws have on voter turnout and Party control?

Is voter turnout a good measure of the health of our democracy? What would be?

What changes are most needed, why?

Where is the epicenter for change? What are key inhibitors?

In a separate segment:
Filmmaker David Earnhardt has been on the road with his feature-length documentary UNCOUNTED. He'll tell us tales from the road and, more important, what has changed in the world of American elections since he made the film in 2006. If he were making the film today, what would he have to include?

UNCOUNTED will be shown at the County Theater in Doylestown, PA on Tuesday, May 20 at 7:00pm. For more information email
votingintegrity@aol.com.

Voice of the Voters! is hosted this week by Mary Ann Gould and Lori Rosolowsky.

Listeners can call in questions live at 856-227-1360 and submit
questions in advance at the Voice of the Voters! Website. Internet.
Access also at http://wnjc.duxpond.com/

Archived Voice of the Voters! programs can be found at www.voiceofthevoters.org

Guest Bios:

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History
and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the
excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His
1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in
Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. His book, The Right
to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American
Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Keyssar is coauthor of Inventing America, a text integrating the
history of technology and science into the mainstream of American
history, as well as coeditor of a series on Comparative and
International Working-Class History. In 2004/5, Keyssar chaired the
Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on
Voting and Elections. Keyssar's current research interests include
election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of
poverty.

Mark Crispin Miller's newest book is entitled Loser Take All: Election
Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy 2000 - 2008. Miller is professor
of media studies at New York University and the author of the book:
Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for
his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of
democratic media reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of
TV, Seeing Through Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war
propaganda.

David Earnhardt, Producer/Director/Writer An Emmy-winning
producer/director of 31 years, David has produced a wide range of
television and video productions including documentaries,
entertainment programs, and educational videos. His work has been
recognized with numerous Emmy, Iris and Telly national awards. A
national documentary on children's rights, a biographical documentary
about jazz legend Helen Humes, and a comedy special featuring an
up-and-coming Jay Leno are among Earnhardt's many credits.

After seventeen years in television, Earnhardt started a new phase of
his career in 1993 with Earnhardt & Co., which has grown to be one of
Nashville's most prestigious production companies. Originally
co-founded by David and Patricia Earnhardt in 1993, the company
specializes in high quality video presentations for a variety of
nonprofit organizations. Longtime creative professional Mac Pirkle
joined the firm as a partner in 2002 - and the company was soon after
renamed Earnhardt Pirkle, Inc., acknowledging the strength of their
partnership. Earnhardt Pirkle has produced projects for more than 250
clients and has won more than 60 national awards in its 14-year
history. Mac Pirkle and Patricia Earnhardt are executive producers of
UNCOUNTED.

Coalition for Voting Integrity

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