JUST READ about a small tractor manufacturer in Alberta, Canada that is making the kinds of tractors that everyone I know would like to have, one which has no computer tech in it that makes you, in effect, a renter of a tractor you paid for, in full, because John Deere or some other big name in tractors put such proprietary computer code in it which you have to buy back to fix the damned thing. All farmers who own such equipment are, in a way, tenant farmers. Anyone with any experience of tractors know that a farmer spends a good deal of time having to fix a tractor or, if they'r unfortunate enough to have one new enough, paying a tech working for the company they bought it from because no one else is authorized to fix it and you can get into a lot of trouble if you bypass that crooked monopoly. I hope that the Alberta company, or others taking their cue from them, start making tractors for smaller scale farmers who don't have a hundred thousand or so to drop on buying their tractors. Things are tough enough for farmers without that problem.
The same goes for car manufacturers and everything else that crooked, billionaire acquired companies have done to turn ownership into subscription, one of the reasons that I'd never have owned a Mac and one of the reasons I dumped Windows after one of their Windows 10 mandatory "updates" that completely crashed my computer, that of all of the other Windows users I talked to the same day. And that was before the Windows 11 subscription enslavement of Windows users.
Looking at the rumblings around Linux these days, I get the feeling that big-tech is trying, through controlled politicians here and elsewhere, trying to thwart and destroy the alternatives to the big tech operating systems and freeware. California's "Age verification" legislation has supposedly good goals of protecting underage computer users, though it's an absurd idea and about as easily skirted by the minimally savvy computer users under the age of 16. What it really does is place ruinous burdens on Linux operating system developers who are generally doing it for nothing with minimal to no resources, and Linux developers of low cost or freeware applications. Buffy Wicks, the California Assembly member behind the legislation, who allegedly wrote it, has taken lots of big tech oligarch's campaign money, as well as those from such scams as the "charter school movement."*
I don't think it's paranoid of Linux developers and those of us who use Linux to be deeply suspicious of such legislation, which I will bet most of the legislators voting on it gave minimal attention to. All they had to hear was that they'd be tarred with not "protecting children" and that was enough for them to vote for it. You can be certain that when the financially interested corporations and their oligarchic owners and their hirelings among lawyers and PR flacks and other associated liars are planning things like this, if they can wrap it in "protecting children" or "free speech" (ha!) or other knee jerk words, they can get politicians to vote for them out of fear of what their next campaign opponent or some troll farmer can spread about them. These days they don't have to farm trolls, they can do it with bots.
But I'm not going to point out that the biggest reason for all of the dirty money pushing dirty laws, such as those that don't allow farmers to fix their own tractors or get independent - and far less expensive - technicians and mechanics to fix THE TRACTOR THEY BOUGHT TO OWN is the Supreme Court's corruption of a. making corporations "persons" with all rights and privileges of, you know, real, natural, limited People and b. such things as making money = "speech" one of the biggest reasons that PACs and Super PACs have corrupted our law and our politics to the extent that it has. If that original clean-elections legislation passed more than fifty years ago had stood, the oligarchs might have come up with other means of corrupting our elections - they still had the original corruption of Sullivan that invented the media's "right to lie" - but the ones that dominate us now wouldn't exist or, at least, wouldn't dominate as they do. As Buffy Wicks' career shows, if you have billionaires and multi-millionaries and they can give freely, the politician can pretend they're not taking dirty money but getting it from the oligarchs directly.
Did they write the legislation she introduced, what is their motive for doing that? Does anyone really believe it's going to protect children from online porn and hate speech and online crooks? That is apart from the corporations that have their hand in the pocket of anyone who, in reality, rents their software or equipment.
*Here, from the East Bay Democratic Socialists' FAQ about her.
What does Buffy mean when she says she takes no contributions “from corporations”?
Buffy’s campaign is awash in corporate cash. That includes money from the bank accounts of:
- Corporate billionaires (like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman)
- Corporate employees who make concerted donations (like Ron Conway and other employees of SV Angel)
- Corporate trade associations (like the California Association of Realtors)
- IEs funded with corporate cash (like “Govern for California”)
That’s why the audience at the October 2 League of Women Voters debate broke out in laughter when Buffy said “Jovanka and I are, I think, two of very few candidates in the state of California who have chosen to take no corporate money in this race.”
What Buffy actually means is that she hasn’t taken money directly from the bank accounts of corporations. Her website makes a far narrower claim: “I have not accepted contributions from corporations in our campaign.”
That’s a dodge—as The Atlantic explains, “more of a political maneuver than anything else.” Like many corporate Democrats who have begun rejecting checks from corporations and their PACs, Buffy isn’t “actually rejecting corporations’ resources”—as this website illustrates in detail.
We don't think it matters much whether a donation comes from a corporation’s checking account or its CEO's personal bank account. We're concerned about the billionaires spending big to change the outcome of our elections, and about what policies—anti-worker, anti-tenant, anti-patient or anti-student—they hope Buffy will support in their interests.
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