____/ Mark Kent on Friday 24 August 2007 18:38 : \____
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> ____/ [H]omer on Friday 17 August 2007 22:17 : \____
>>
>>> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>>>
>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>> | Microsoft has hired lobbying firm Patton Boggs LLC to do work on
>>>> | "competitive issues surrounding Google/DoubleClick [sic] merger."
>>>> `----
>>>
>>> Why is lobbying even a legal practise? It's insane. It's legalised
>>> corruption. Corporations should have only one opportunity to influence
>>> politicians, and that's at the ballot box - like everyone else.
>>
>> Well, when political funding comes from corporations, even the ballot box is
>> no fair process. The whole political system is motored by the dollars. A
>> reform is needed.
>>
>
> It's much worse than that, though. How many professorships are
> "industry" funded? How many research grants are "industry" funded? How
> much science isn't science at all, but thinly disguised PR obtained for
> industries by lobbying and PR firms?
Microsoft does a lot of this and it appears in that "Jihad Evangelism" memo
from Iowa (many pages of it). I shared it in Groklaw recently and the guys are
dissecting it. grouch, who runs the main mirror of the exhibits (edge-op),
could finally confirm that many memos that PJ had no record of are real. He
had a full wget log so he grepped it for me and did the diff.
> The first step required here is to clean up academia, properly, and once
> and for-all. There should be *no* private sponsorship of academics -
> all funding should be untainted, and not linked to particular academic
> works or to particular scientific outcomes.
Indeed!
> The second step is to have better guarantees of indenpendence in the
> media; the UK is quite good here, except in newspapers; the US is just
> dreadful. Most European countries are similar to the UK, I think.
>
> The third step is to force lobbyists to publicise who they represent.
> Politicians should be required to demonstrate that they are providing
> equal access to all. It could be worthwhile to put caps onto lobbying
> companies in terms of the number of clients they can represent, say, or
> something similar.
It might never happen, but the least one can do is try.
> The forth step is to do the same thing with analysts, who have, in many
> cases, become just fully private clones of the "bought and paid for"
> academics.
The Burtun Group did an anti-Google Apps study which they published a couple of
days ago (something along the lines of Google Apps hurts your career
prospects). I spent some minutes trying to find proof that Microsoft provided
funds for this 'study'.
> This is all in desperate need of cleaning up.
>
> (cue waterskidoo troll shouting "paranioa, conspiracy" and so on).
She attacked [H]omer, so she'll need to earn back the trust. Feeding scum (with
a proven track record) like 'Hadron' and 'DFS' while attacking altruism is
inexcusable.
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Useless fact: 85% of plant life in in the oceans
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
run-level 2 2007-08-06 21:07 last=
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