Near Lincoln Center. Call for details. 718-230-0315. That's 718-230-0315. This has been a public
service by WBAI on behalf of the Healer Within Project.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI in New York. The time is just about 8 o'clock,
and that means it's time once again for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call. It couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
We do have a show to do tonight. I'm sorry. I like to get involved in that at some point.
It's been a fun week. Nothing spectacular happened. I mean, we haven't been hit with
any new injunctions, but we're still waiting for the judge's ruling on the previous one.
For those who have just tuned in for the first time in many weeks, we're being sued by the Motion
Picture Association of America for telling people how DVDs work and other horrible things like that.
And they want us to take down our links. The links are still up. The links are still there,
and you can still find information and programs on decrypting the encryption and other evil,
horrible things that corporate America is very afraid of these days.
Well, Bernie, anything exciting happen in your week?
Well, no more obvious surveillance by the Secret Service, so that's always a good thing.
What became of that? Did they ever explain why they were tracking you down?
No. My attorney felt that probably, well, almost certainly he said it was my crashing their party
at the Hotel Brittenhouse here in Philadelphia when I dropped in on their security briefing.
It wasn't so much you were crashing their party. You just wanted to be included.
Hey, I just walked in. I didn't say law enforcement personnel only. It was
an open room. There were drinks and lots of drinks and food, and I just walked in.
How many drinks were there?
Lots.
Wow. That's something. Well, if they show up at H2K and come into our nice open room,
which I guess you got to pay to get into, but still, it's open once you do that,
we won't be calling them trying to find out what they were up to. It's a free country.
I wouldn't be dropping by their workplace and making denigrating comments to their employer,
but they probably wouldn't pay any attention to me anyway.
Well, their employer would be who? Bill Clinton?
Actually, the Secretary of the Treasury, whoever that is.
Who is the Secretary of the Treasury?
I don't know.
It says it in the dollar bill.
Well, dollar bills get expired.
I have a new 20 here.
How come nobody knows who the Secretary of the Treasury is?
I'm sorry. I'm not up on this stuff.
Well, I'm not blaming you. I don't know. Bernie doesn't know. Bernie, you should know.
Well, I should know.
They probably have your face on a dartboard up there.
Oh, Robert Rubin. I did know that. I just didn't think.
Oh, Jerry's black sheep.
Robert E. Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury.
How about that? Those are two people that went different ways.
Jerry Rubin went his way and Robert went the other way.
Very different ways.
Yeah. All right. Well, we have some interesting things.
I was down in D.C. actually. I was down in D.C. over the past
couple of days for the demonstration.
Oh, that little thing with the...
That little thing, yeah.
Yeah, what's going on down there?
I imagine, Isaac, if you were listening to the mainstream media, you probably got a
totally different view as to what really happened down there.
But it was quite a good experience, I think. We had about...
I would estimate, I'm not very good at counting people, but certainly a lot more than the
10,000 that they were saying, more like 20,000 to 30,000.
Because I've been in stadiums where it's filled to the max with 50,000 people.
And it looked like we had about that amount because it was going down the streets,
filling up parks, taking over the entire city.
And there were a lot of people there.
It's amazing. Every time I go to a rally in D.C., every time, and I've been doing this
for a while, they always undercount by a huge amount, by like half.
I don't know why they do it, but they always do.
And you'll see the differences in crowd estimates always vary widely depending on
who you're talking to.
But what were you down there for?
This was the protest against the International Monetary Fascists, known as the IMF.
I always thought the F was for fund.
You might be right about that.
I've always thought it was fascist, but I could be wrong.
One man's fund is another man's fascism.
Yeah, I'll have to look that up.
That would make a lot more sense.
I always wondered why they called themselves fascists.
I figured they were just kind of like spitting in our faces.
All right.
Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.
Yes.
But it was really kind of gratifying to see so many people show up from all different
parts of the country, all different walks of life, and just basically people that care.
Because this is something we here in America don't have to worry about, you know, third
world debt and conditions overseas and things like that.
To see so many people who obviously cared enough to show up and risk some great personal
injury.
I didn't see any particular misdeeds by the cops when I was there, but I did see quite
a few on TV when I was looking at what they were doing to people.
And it was, you know, really overusing force quite a bit.
You know, spraying people with all kinds of horrible things, hitting them in the head
with nightsticks.
And these guys, they were pretty much just, you know, lying down in streets and walking
down, you know, where they supposedly weren't supposed to go.
Well, they closed half the city down.
So you really weren't supposed to go anywhere.
The first night, though, they arrested a total of 1,300 people.
The first night, and I heard this from a bunch of people who were part of it, they arrested
600.
And the reason they did that was because there were people on the street who met a police
line and the police said, turn around and go back.
So they turned around and went back.
But there was another police line that suddenly formed when they did that.
So they got pinned in.
And then they all got taken away on buses.
And the interesting thing was, they had these...
It was a trap.
These elite buses, elite bus company.
I'm not kidding.
The name of the company was elite.
Yeah.
Okay.
And the reason why I knew that these buses had something to do with the cops was because
every time you saw a police motorcade or a bunch of cop cars, there was a big elite bus
following them.
And I saw this bus go behind police lines.
And apparently that's the bus they use to either transport the cops or transport the
prisoners.
I'm not sure.
Was it one of those buses, Emmanuel, that had air conditioning and televisions in it?
It looked like one of the things you take cross country.
Yeah, it looked very comfortable.
It's kind of strange.
Not the kind of bus you'd expect to be taken away to the gulag in.
So they take you to where?
Where do they take these people?
Well, I know as of today, I talked to some people down there today, as of today, they're
still waiting down there for some people to be released.
And this wasn't reported on the news, wasn't even reported on Pacifica.
But they were pepper spraying people today outside the federal courthouse.
And that's kind of amazing.
Federal marshals were pepper spraying people.
So everybody got into the act down there, all kinds of different law enforcement.
The security guards were pepper spraying.
Did you know security guards can pepper spray people?
That's probably why they carry it.
I had read one account in the mainstream media, so it may not be true, that the whole pepper
spray thing started by one police officer who, or maybe it was a fed, I don't know,
a marshal, whatever, accidentally threw one thinking it was a smoke grenade.
But in fact, it was a pepper spray grenade or whatever it is, CS or CN, whatever they
call it.
So do you know if that's true or not?
I heard the same claim that it was an accident that they threw it.
Like these accidental incendiary devices they threw in Waco, accidentally.
There's a lot of accidents going on in law enforcement.
So I'm not at all surprised.
I thought it was going to be something as humorous as, you know, somebody went and got
a taco and had to, you know.
Squirted when they bit into it.
Right.
Okay.
Anyway, best wishes to the people down there.
Hopefully things will work out okay.
And you know what's interesting about all this?
When you're watching it on the media, I didn't see a single politician condemn the protests.
They're learning.
They're learning that if they do that, they get a lot of backlash now.
Well, November is coming around.
Uh-huh.
They don't want to offend anybody.
So the protest did make a difference.
There's no question about that.
So that's where I was over the past few days.
Didn't the delegates get sneaked in ahead of time?
Yeah, that's the thing.
And for all the reports you might hear about, you know, how demonstrators failed to stop.
Of course, you're going to fail to stop something that big.
You just can't, you know, bring it to a...
I mean, Seattle was one thing.
They were totally unprepared in Seattle.
Washington was a bit more used to this kind of thing.
But they certainly had an effect on the way things went.
And people couldn't get to their meetings in a timely way.
They had to sleep on the floor of the IMF building or whatever and get there at six in the morning.
So yeah, they definitely were aware that we were out there.
And that's the important thing.
Well, it's kind of hard to miss.
It's amazing what you can miss if you try.
If you close your eyes and keep them shielded, you won't see what's around you.
So a lot of people try that.
But at this time, it didn't work.
I have a quick IMF question, Manuel.
I might not know because I'm not an IMF expert.
I didn't even know what they stood for.
IMF lends, like, hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries.
And invariably, these poor countries just can't pay them back.
Because sometimes it seems like they're set up to fail.
Right.
They sink deeper and deeper into debt.
It's kind of like borrowing money from the mob.
Credit card companies.
Like, they keep offering, you know, more and more credit cards when they know that you're
already in debt and that sort of thing.
Or you borrow money from the mob.
And, you know, you keep sinking deeper and deeper into debt.
And then you sink deeper and deeper into the ocean.
And that's pretty much how it goes with these guys, too.
So has the IMF ever actually tried to repossess a country?
That's a good question.
I imagine there's something in the bylaws about that.
What happens when you don't pay back the debt?
So I remember at Poland, many, many years ago, when Poland had fallen into fault of
its IMF loans, I thought, well, what are they going to do?
Like, IMF is just going to, like, seize the country?
How does that work?
They go marching in and put up their flag.
I'm not sure.
But something to look into.
Surely they have more subtle ways of controlling things.
Well, you know, something very interesting.
I did mention this when I was walking into town on Saturday.
I just decided to walk down I Street.
They name streets after letters and numbers.
Boy, it's really complicated.
Try getting somewhere in D.C.
Because they have, it's times four.
They got northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest, and all the same streets.
It makes more sense to me than New York, though.
I'll tell you.
New York's a grid.
It's easy.
How hard can it be to get one, two, three, four?
But I'll tell you something.
When you're on, you know, N Street, northeast, but you need to be on N Street, northwest,
you have to do everything twice.
You have to sort of approach the Capitol and then go away from the Capitol.
And everything sort of duplicates itself.
But in any event, this didn't happen at this point.
I was just walking down I Street.
I just stopped for a second, you know, because I just, I felt like stopping.
I was walking for a while and I just stopped and I looked to the left.
And what do you think I saw right to the left of me?
A building.
Wow.
Yeah.
There was a building there.
And what do you think that building was?
Made of brick.
Now, what do you think it was?
What kind of building?
Who was it?
Well, this is going to be very ironic.
So I would imagine it was the MPAA offices.
That's right.
MPAA, right there.
I mean, I passed by hundreds of offices, but I decided to stop there and I just turned
to the left and MPAA staring me right in the face.
I was scared.
Did you have chills running down your spine?
Well, I didn't even know they had an office in DC.
Did they have offices in every city?
And if that's the case, well, gee whiz, I guess that's where we should be picketing
then.
Of all places, that's, you know, that's their lobbyist, that's where the den of
lobbyists is right there.
That must be it.
That must be it.
This is federal legislation.
So that's where, you know, that's where the, that's where the big money flows from
that building to legislators' pockets right there.
I could have sworn I saw Jack Valenti peering out the window at me, but I might have been
overly paranoid.
Might just have been.
Might have been the security guard.
Who looks like Jack Valenti.
He looks like a security guard, doesn't he?
You just said it.
You're right.
I agree with Isaac.
Jack Valenti looks like a security guard.
I didn't say that.
Yeah, you did.
Everyone heard you.
You said that.
You're just afraid of insulting him, aren't you?
We're not going to let this die, are we?
He has a long reach, I know.
No, you're right.
He does look like a security guard.
You know, a nice security guard.
Security guards are some of the nicest people in the world, except when they mace you and
do horrible things like that.
Accidentally.
Yeah, accidentally.
Maybe this whole lawsuit is an accident, too.
Maybe it is.
I'm sure they'll feel that way in the end.
I think it's a bad dream.
Well, not for us, though.
It's been entertaining, interesting, enlightening, and we've found a lot of friends.
So thank you, Jack.
Thank you very much.
You should take a lesson from me, Isaac.
Be polite to people.
Don't insult them.
Don't call them security guards.
Say thank you to them.
Say thank you, please.
That kind of thing.
All right.
I'm going to quietly see you over here.
Continuing along here.
All right.
We have a couple of interesting...
Bernie, you probably heard about this.
The micro-broadcasting is all of a sudden in trouble.
After everything happened, after finally the licenses were about to be granted.
The low-power licenses.
What do you think happens?
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday that would void
Federal Communications Commission plans for new low-powered FM stations and substitute
its more limited approach.
The bill was passed on a 274 to 110 vote and sent to the Senate, which has not yet acted.
But both commercial and non-commercial broadcasters, including, of course, National Public Radio,
backed the bill, saying they feared the new stations could cause people to actually listen
to the radio for a change and realize what kind of crap that they were putting out.
That's the quote?
No.
Actually, the quote was they feared the new stations would cause interference.
Oh, OK.
Well, in a sense, that's the same thing.
It's interference, you know?
What's that, Bernie?
It's such a red herring.
It's a patently false argument that a 10-watt or 100-watt FM transmitter is going to cause
interference to a multi-hundred-thousand-watt signal.
There's a principle called the FM capture effect, where the stronger signal on your
FM receiver wins.
Right, absolutely.
If you're within a small sphere of coverage of a 10-watt or 100-watt station, which are
the two types of licenses the FCC was going to grant under this low-power FM proposal,
plus they had to be third-adjacent stations.
That means they had to be 600 kilohertz away from an existing station.
Which I think is too much, actually.
I really do.
It's a huge amount.
I think it is, too.
It should be second-adjacent.
I mean, there's room in New York City, even though under this, I don't think we get a
single one.
I think there's room in New York City for micro-broadcasting stations without interfering
with any of the big stations.
For our listeners, what does third-adjacent mean?
Let's say there's a station at 91.3, for instance, which is what happens to be the
frequency that Radio Mutiny used here for several years before the U.S. Marshals and
the head of the FCC Compliance Commission came in with armed guards and seized all the
equipment about two and a half years ago.
Anyway, 91.3.
Suppose a powerhouse station was 500,000 watts, half a million watts, was operating at 91.3.
A 10-watt station would have to be the third-adjacent station.
And in the United States, their odd numbers are 200 kilohertz away on the FM dial.
So what would it be?
The next station, the next slot, would be 91.3.
Then it would be 91.5.
No, no, no, wait.
You said 91.3.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.
You said 91.3 was a station.
So the next slot could be...
That's where the powerhouse...
91.3 is where the powerhouse station is.
All right.
So the next slot couldn't be 91.3.
The first adjacent would be 91.5.
Okay.
Second-adjacent would be 91.7.
Third-adjacent would be, um, nine...
Did I say that right?
91.3, 91.5, 91.7.
91.9 would be the third-adjacent that a 10-watt or 100-watt station would have to be located.
That's far away.
That's far away from a half-million-watt station.
Let's make this a little less complicated.
We're on a radio station right now.
We're at 99.5.
So according to what you're telling me, I would imagine that the next station over that could
possibly be a 10-watt station, according to these rules, would be 100.1.
Is that right?
Add six or subtract six.
Bernie, is that right?
Add 0.6 or subtract 0.6.
Okay.
So that's right.
100.1.
All right.
And the one below that would be 98.9, correct?
Sounds right.
Okay.
So yeah, that's a fair distance away, considering there's already stations around there.
I mean, if you went to 98.9, you have another station at 98.7, so you couldn't do it anyway.
The various independent engineering firms did some tests on those claims of interference,
and the only radios that had such poor selectivity as to possibly be interfered with listening to a
big station from a weaker station that was very nearby would be like a $10 clock radio.
And then you'd have to be practically in the shadow of the antenna of this 10-watt station
for it to be an issue.
So compared to the huge markets of these multi-corporate conglomerate stations,
the broadcast curve, they call it, this is like a sliver of a percent of their possible
listening audience.
Well, the thing is, the FCC itself is saying that interference is not a problem.
This is the FCC, for God's sake.
They're the people that do this kind of thing.
What does Congress know about interference on the FM spectrum?
So the whole thing is so incredibly silly.
Now, this bill reverses the FCC decision and restores the old technical requirements,
and it also bars anybody who has ever operated a microstation illegally from getting a license.
Of course, if you bar the micro-broadcasting in the first place,
it's going to be awfully hard for them to get a license anyway.
But this is great.
Representative Michael Oxley is one of the people who sponsored this bill.
He's an Ohio Republican.
He said, there is no need for additional radio stations,
especially with the risk of interference.
Now, listen to this quote.
This is a great quote here.
Have you ever heard such a wonderful cacophony of voices as you hear in this democracy?
Have we ever had more information, more kinds of media, or more outlets for our views?
Have you?
He's talking quantity, not quality.
He's definitely not talking quality.
I doubt he's talking quantity either.
There's a limited number here.
There's an awful lot of radio stations and TV stations, I know,
because I just drove from DC, and they're all over the place.
But they all play the same thing.
They all sound the same.
They all play the same thing.
And I realized, music doesn't suck.
It doesn't have to be boring.
There's a lot of good stuff out there, but you never hear it on the radio.
Why is that?
It's because the same people who pass these laws are the ones deciding what music gets played.
Here's a clear example of a monolithic entity,
this time the National Association of Broadcasters.
Basically, taking something away from the people.
And I imagine NEB and MPAA go out to lunch quite a bit.
Oh, and you call me the conspiracy theorist around here.
Well, I mean, I think they do.
They're in the same town.
Yeah, they are.
They're both into controlling intellectual property.
They're both into silencing independent voices.
That's right.
Now, I gotta say, this guy, Edward Markey, Massachusetts Democrat,
who I had a personal run-in with a few years ago,
he disagreed with Oxley, says the 1996 telecommunications law
had permitted significant consolidation of the radio industry.
It's harder and harder for minorities, for women,
for smaller voices to speak on the airways of our country.
I can't figure that guy out.
Sometimes he sounds like a complete idiot.
On paper, he seems to make sense.
In person, I don't know.
He passed some pretty egregious anti-counter bills,
as far as people whose hobby is listening to radio scanners,
listening to the open, free airwaves.
He sponsored legislation to basically outlaw
listening to most radio frequencies on the radio spectrum,
unless they were like corporate radio stations.
So you couldn't listen to your local police or fire,
that sort of thing.
He wanted to make that illegal.
Yeah, I can't figure that out.
I mean, either you're gonna be a total jerk or be on our side
and understand the technology.
But this business of saying,
yeah, people don't have access to the airwaves
and then banning people from listening to certain things,
that's just, I don't know which is worse.
I really don't.
At least this guy, Oxley,
I know he's a complete jerk all the way through.
And that's not a problem.
I understand where he's coming from.
This guy, I don't know where he's coming from.
So who knows where it's gonna go next?
I do know this-
So it's going to the Senate next,
and everybody needs to write their senators
in Washington and say,
listen, we need independent voices on the public airwaves.
That's what we gotta do.
And if this does not,
well, first of all,
I believe Clinton will veto this.
And I think the number of votes,
because he said he would.
He did?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that either.
I'm pretty sure he did.
I read it someplace.
Let me see if I can find it.
I know he's against it.
I know he supports what the FCC was doing
as far as micro-broadcasting.
I might not have it with me.
But I do know that the votes,
the votes were 274 to 110.
So that's-
How did it break down a long political line?
Does not say, does not say.
But you can probably figure it out pretty easily.
Yeah.
So I imagine Clinton will probably veto it.
I hope he does.
We'll see.
It is election year.
That's true.
Keep that in mind.
All right.
What else?
Here's some updates.
The number of people using cell phones for wireless data
will skyrocket from 3% of the U.S. online population
to 78% over the next 12 months.
That's quite a jump.
Who predicts this?
That's quite a jump there.
Who predicts this?
That's according to a new survey.
I'll find out who wrote that survey.
But the main reason for the increase
is that employers are starting to pay for these services,
according to a survey released by New York-based
Cap Gemini America and CoreChange.
They just happen to be a wireless portal provider.
Exactly.
All right.
So it could be a tad bit biased.
Yeah.
A little self-serving there.
Yeah, a little self-serving.
But currently, 33% of the U.S. online population
uses cell phones for business purposes.
Of that 33%, 11% or 3% of the total online population
use them for data applications, such as email and news.
And in 12 months, 78% of the U.S. online population
will be using cell phones for data.
Wow.
That's something.
And there's this new 3G standard
that will be coming out in probably a year,
year and a half or so, will support multi-megabit data
rates through your handset.
That would be fun.
That would be good.
That sounds exciting.
And they assume that this amazing jump from 3% to 78%
will be because businesses are paying for the access?
Did they make this same kind of announcement
when cell phones, when people were handing out
Motorola bricks?
No, everybody knew that PCS phones would be the turning
point where a lot more people would start using them.
I don't know.
I think it's become a lot more economic for businesses
to offer this kind of thing, as opposed to just offering
cell phones when they first came out.
It just comes down to the price, whether it's competing,
if it's competitive price-wise with other solutions,
then people are going to go for it.
And I'm paying $0.05 a minute for my Sprint PCS.
And that's competitive with landline,
so that's why I use it.
But if we're considerably more expensive,
then I wouldn't use it.
Right.
Heavy metal rock band Metallica has accused
three universities and the makers of a popular
internet music-sharing software of copyright
infringement and racketeering.
The federal lawsuit contends San Mateo, California-based
Napster Inc., the University of Southern California,
Yale University, and Indiana University
encouraged users of Napster software to trade
copyrighted material without the band's permission.
We take our craft, whether it be the music,
the lyrics, or the photos and artwork very seriously,
as do most artists, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said.
Why do you think the drummer said that?
I mean, he's not the lead singer, is he?
I'm surprised he was able to put together
a string of words that resembles a sentence.
Well, I'm not going to get into that,
but I am saying that usually the person
that's considered the...
I mean, I don't know if...
Maybe I'm misstating this here.
You're still kind of stuck with the Ringo thing.
Yeah, it's a Ringo image.
I mean, would you have Ringo go around
telling things about the Beatles to the rest of the world
when they made your announcements?
Would you have him saying that the Beatles
are bigger than God, things like that?
No.
You leave that to John Lennon
and the other stuff for Paul McCartney.
But anyway.
That's why I got shot.
Yeah, probably.
It is therefore sickening, according to the drummer,
to know that our art is being traded like a commodity
rather than the art that it is.
Now, that is the biggest load of crap
I've ever seen in my life.
Oh, it's art.
It's not a commodity.
That's why it sells for Tower Records
at $75 or something.
That's insane.
It's a commodity when they want it to be a commodity.
But when all of a sudden things go against them in their eyes,
it's an art form.
Come on.
I don't know.
A lot of people I know use Napster
and at least a lot of people buying records
in the first place
because it's good to have something there.
It's good to have the album covers and the lyrics
and whatever else comes besides the actual music.
It's amazing how far greed is extending here.
I mean, Napster is great.
I mean, it basically gets people talking about music.
I've only actually seen it once
and I've heard about the protocol
and this, that, and the other thing
and all the legal issues,
but I've only seen someone actually use it once.
I used it last night for the first time.
You did?
Yeah.
How was the experience?
It's okay.
I mean, it's basically the musical selection
is not as good as I would hope they would have been
to mainstream.
I was looking for things and I couldn't find them
and I looked for something mainstream
and I found it right away and I downloaded it
and I said, oh, great.
Okay, it works.
I already had the record anyway,
so it didn't even matter.
But I guess according to them,
I was infringing upon something
by listening to that in that particular manner.
Well, you can blame it on the other people
participating in the network for their musical tastes.
What's good about it is
you're talking to somebody on the net
and you say, hey, this is really cool song.
You should listen to it.
How else do you do it?
You say, yeah, go out and buy the record
and see if you like it.
And then if you don't like it,
well, that's too bad.
No, you listen to it.
You download it.
You say, hey, that's great.
I'm going to run out and get the thing
or go out and see a concert or whatever.
You know, these guys are in no possible risk
of losing money,
just like no one's going to lose money
by people knowing how to view DVDs
in other regions.
Initially when radio was a new technology,
the record companies sued
and tried to get legislation passed
to make it a crime to broadcast records over the air.
And, you know, that feeds the industry these days.
It has for decades.
Airtime.
I mean, it's the same analogy.
I don't understand why these guys don't get it.
And there's more analogies too.
VCRs, cassette recorders.
Sure.
They went crazy when all those were released
and they've benefited them in the end.
That's just a stupid little dance
we have to go through every couple of years.
Unfortunately, we're the ones dancing
with Jack Valenti right now.
Who's leading?
Except you're a lot taller than him, Emmanuel.
Well, maybe so.
Do you know he's 78?
Really?
I just found that out.
Someone sent me his biography.
He's 78 years old.
I hope I have that kind of charisma when I'm 78 years old.
But I also hope I'm right when I'm 78 years old.
He became the chairman of the MPAA in 1966.
Yeah.
Do you know he was like standing next to Lyndon Johnson
when he took the oath after JFK got killed?
And when JFK the film came out,
he launched this whole big diatribe against it
saying how it was nonsense.
Now he knew who killed JFK and all that kind of thing.
And this guy, he's connected.
He really is connected.
Oh, I'm impressed.
Jack Deep Throat Valenti.
Yeah, but he's still wrong.
All right, let's continue along here.
We'll be taking phone calls 212-209-2900.
Speaking of area codes,
front page article on yesterday's Newsday
how the 631 area code is completely confusing
everybody out there on the island.
It really is.
They say that, you know,
there have been other area codes in the past,
but this is the first time
that they actually divided it along county lines
instead of along Bell Atlantic central office lines.
So half the people should have 516
and half should have 631 and they don't.
And everyone's going nuts.
Just mayhem out there.
They also, they introduced something though
that I think is kind of interesting.
And that's the concept of mirroring.
That's where they say,
oh, Bell Atlantic, you know,
suggests that you buy two numbers,
one with the old area code,
one with the new area code.
That way you're covered either way.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose
of splitting it in the first place?
Well, it brings in more revenue.
Yeah, yeah, it sure does.
Which is why they're probably recommending it.
Unbelievable.
Okay, a day after the FBI was asked
to investigate the alleged destruction
of Falun Gong cult websites by China,
scores of other sites have been attacked,
this time by suspected Serbian hackers.
That's right.
Adidas and Viagra had their websites emptied
and replaced with Serb nationalist insignia
reading Kosovo is Serbia.
Didn't know about this, did you?
What does it have to do with hackers?
People wiping sites?
That's not what hackers do.
Someone replaced it with a message.
It's the simplest thing in the world.
Sites also registered as Slovenia.com, Bosnia.com
and other Balkan net domains
owned by newspapers and politicians.
In another attack,
the Serbian Ministry of Information
said that hackers invaded its homepages
along with other Yugoslav sites
and blamed what it called
American Albanian propagandists
for a planned and malicious action.
Most sites in the first wave of attacks
have since reclaimed their domains.
The hacked websites had all been listed
with Network Solutions,
the world's largest register.
Some would argue the only register.
Yes.
When you're a monopoly,
it's easy to be the largest.
Yes.
Their answering machine tells callers
if you are making a registrar name change
or contact modifications request,
there will be delays
while they carefully review
your request for change.
Okay, so what happened here was
they didn't even access the website.
All they did was social engineer
Network Solutions somehow
and simply get them to...
That sounds very much like
what Kevin Mitnick was saying
before the Senate.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, sure does.
Maybe he gave them an idea.
Uh-oh.
Okay, a couple of letters
and we'll take some phone calls.
I've been having a weird thing
happen on my phone line.
Bernie, maybe you can
give us some insight on this.
At 10.50 PM,
there is the sound of automated dialing
on my phone line.
I hear this when I am on the phone
or if someone calls at that time,
the busy voicemail line picks it up.
There is a click on the line,
a dialing sound,
the click as it disconnects,
a click and dialing.
I get fed up and hang up.
Beltliner keeps telling me
they fixed the problem.
They haven't.
For a while after one fix,
my phone rang in double tones
like in Europe.
They've stopped that problem
but not this computer
or auto-dialing thing.
Do you have any idea what this is
or how I can suggest
that they fix the problem?
It's been going on since January.
I tell them it's a disruption of service
and I'm going to stop paying my bill
so that may be just what I have to do.
Any ideas?
Cut the cord and throw the phone
out the window.
Any intelligent ideas?
It's possessed.
Yeah.
Well, actually, I know why
the double ring was happening.
What Beltliner does
is they assign you...
Sometimes you don't even know
that they do this.
They assign you multiple numbers
to the same line
and they have distinctive ring on them.
So you might have another phone number
with distinctive ring
and it sounds to me
like they just assign that ring
to your particular line.
Whether or not they assign
another line to your line,
that's another question.
But that's what that happened.
But I don't know about the dialing.
What do you think, Bernie?
Well, has he heard any audio
other than just the dialing itself?
Has he heard conversations,
voice, data?
Has he heard anything like that?
I don't see anything to indicate that.
Just some type of automated
dialing on the phone line.
Well, sometimes it's easier
than to get...
Either than getting the phone...
It's sometimes much easier
doing something other
than having the phone company
find the problem.
In other words,
if he has another pair
going into his house
that's not being used,
I suggest that he get
service applied to that new line
or applied to that second
unused pair in a different number,
just temporarily,
then have them shut off the first line
and then see if the problem goes away.
And if it does,
have them change that number
to that line
and see if it stays away.
Sounds like an awful lot of trouble
to go through.
Well, I said, well, frankly,
he's already gone to a lot of trouble
talking to the phone company
and they haven't...
He hasn't succeeded.
I think his line is somehow crossed
with some service
where there's an auto dialer
or something
and they're never going to find it,
it sounds like,
if they've been working on it for months.
So if he has another pair
or have them run another pair in.
Well, here's the thing.
All right.
He's getting this automated dialing
at 1050 every night.
Something is calling.
First of all,
if it's dialing,
he can record the number
and see what it's dialing.
I think that's the first thing you have to do.
Are these touch-tone automated dials
he's hearing?
Well, it doesn't matter
if it's touch-tone or rotary,
either way you can figure out
what number it's dialing.
If it's touch-tone,
he could record it
and then he could call the...
Does the 2600 still have a number
you can call and play touch-tones in?
We have our voice bulletin board,
but it's broken until we find a better one.
And if anybody out there has an idea
for a good voicemail system,
please let us know.
But yeah,
you could dial the number yourself
and see what picks up,
you know, play it from a tape recorder.
There might be something attached to the line
that, for instance,
if you have direct TV,
they go and they call out
to tell how many times you use pay-per-view.
The water authority sometimes dials out.
The meters and the...
The meters, yeah.
So there could be something on the line
he doesn't know about.
What he should probably do is...
Every night?
For every night,
I don't think a water meter
would be dialing every night at 1050.
Who knows?
Might be possessed or something.
But...
It may be crosstalk with some business
that has a fax service,
which faxes out a certain advert,
you know, an advertisement or a report
to the home office or something at 1050.
The thing is, it's easy to complain
to the phone company,
but lots of times
they don't know what's going on
and the easiest thing to do,
the most effective thing to do
is to investigate and figure out what it is.
Sure.
That's what I recommend.
Okay, one more letter.
Something you should definitely not do,
you should not do this in any circumstances,
is disconnect all the phones in his house
and apply 120, 110 volts AC
from his wall outlet to the pair.
You should not do that
because that would destroy any devices
that were on the line
that could be causing this interference.
And it could be hazardous too.
So he should not do that
under any circumstances.
Okay, well, remember where we heard that.
Yeah, I'm going to make believe
that I never heard that.
Another thrilling episode
of as the MPAA turns from this reader
or this listener here.
I was just thinking about the comment
from a caller
about the hyperlinking issue
and comparing it to buying guns or cameras,
et cetera, at one store versus another.
This may be beating
a metaphorically dead metaphor,
but why not simply DVD players?
Good point.
If I walked into any electronic store
in North America that sells DVD players,
told them I was moving to Europe
and wanted to buy a unit
that would work there,
what possible harm would they be doing
by giving me directions down the street
to a store that sells imported electronics?
None that I can see.
And so if I search the internet
for a Linux-based DVD player
and the good folks at 2600.com inform me
that they don't have such a thing,
but they might know of a place or two
where I can perhaps get one.
What about search engines
that use spiders and bots to catalog?
They must have at least
one of the mirror sites listed.
They would also be by definition
breaking the law.
Then by extension,
anyone linking to that search engine
would also be in trouble, would they not?
This issue of the linking
is 101% freedom of speech.
I don't suggest or condone
people using drugs or hiring hookers,
but should I be prevented
from talking about a news article
in a local paper
or detailing such activities?
Should the newspaper be prevented
from reporting them?
At what point does common knowledge
become censored?
This whole thing harkens back
to the days of McCarthyism.
I'm not a communist,
but if I tell someone that Cuba
or North Korea is a communist country
and you just might find communists
there, have I just committed a crime?
Then arrest the entire staff of CNN
and the U.S. State Department
while you're at it.
Or better yet, arrest the MPAA
because through their court filings
and press releases,
they've told everyone
where to find 2600.com
and by extension, the DCSS code.
This whole thing is completely screwed up
and these people should not be allowed
to abuse the court system in this way.
If anyone is in contempt of court,
it's the MPAA.
Signed, Stephen.
It's well written.
I like that.
Yes.
How can something be more than 100%?
I'll leave you to think about that
while we take some phone calls over here.
Speaking of percent,
I have a percentage controversy here.
Go ahead.
I just have an advanced script
from President Clinton
who was to make a speech today
in a whirlwind tour
of the California, New Mexico and Chicago.
He was scheduled to announce
that the U.S. government will tax
all long distance calls
to give American Indians
or Native Americans
subsidized phone service.
And the amount he's saying
that we should be taxed is 0.4%.
So 0.4%, if this goes through,
0.4% of everyone's long distance bill
will subsidize
Native Americans phone service.
Now, I have mixed feelings about this.
How do you feel about this, Isaac?
That sounds like an incredibly large amount.
0.4% is four tenths of one percent.
Learn your math, it's not 40%, it's 0.4%.
Think about the amount of dollars
in long distance
that goes through this country every day.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, totally.
OK.
I added it up today,
where the company I work,
we spend about $5,000 a month
in long distance.
That's $20 a month.
So it's $240 a year
that we'll be spending on this new tax.
From one company.
And I like Native Americans.
I mean, whatever.
But, you know, is this appropriate?
Well, I think, you know,
I think a lot should be given,
but maybe not in this way.
Why don't we just give them AT&T
or something, you know,
make it a Native American company.
I'd like that.
That might get them on some even keel.
What do you think?
Let the corporations pay, you know.
I'm still working on the 101% thing.
Well, 0.4% of the entire nations.
I don't know.
We should we should
somebody figure out
what the national long distance
industry adds up to every year.
And I'm sure it's, you know,
trillion dollars a year
or some huge amount.
We should see what 0.4% of that is.
And it sounds like
with that kind of money,
I'm guessing that you could buy
every Native American
T1 line for that much.
I like to do this, right?
I could take the existing tax
that we're already paying
because God knows
we're paying enough tax.
All right.
You take the existing tax
and you cut whatever it is
we're spending it on,
you know, that the latest
in bombs or whatever.
And if you devote that to them,
there's still a war tax
we're spending, we're paying.
There's still there's still taxes
on our on our phone bill
that goes to the Defense Department
to finance the Vietnam War.
They never took it off.
Oh, dear.
It must be an oversight.
Well, Vietnam turned into,
you know, Gulf War.
I'm sorry, the Gulf conflict.
Vietnam ended in 1973.
The Gulf War was 1991.
Yeah, well, that's a good
distance in time.
Well, we're still bombing Iraq.
So I guess every day we bomb Iraq.
It's somebody somewhere all the time.
All right.
Let's take some phone calls.
I'm sure our listeners have some views
on these many issues we've raised.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, actually, I was listening
to what you guys are talking
about MP3s and and Napster.
And I'm a big fan of it.
But I think the analogy
is a little bit different
than what happened
when either video cassettes
came out or tape decks came out.
Give an example.
You take Real Player 4
and you get the there's a plugin
that you can get from Adaptech,
which lets you download your CDs,
download your MP3s,
and then burn your own CDs in the fly.
So what you were talking about earlier
of, you know, saying,
hey, why don't you try out
the song online and you listen to it?
Why would I go out and buy a CD?
I'm going to download the remaining
songs from the CD.
I'm going to burn it for about
a dollar a copy,
which is what a blank CD cost me.
Well, OK, I can answer
that with a couple of things.
First of all,
CDs are too expensive, obviously,
and they don't need
to be that expensive.
You're getting a blank CD for pennies.
You're able to make a copy.
And as well, you should.
CDs should not be costing,
what, $15?
How much do they cost to buy a new CD?
That's what a new one costs, sure, $15.
It's insane.
And the other thing is that, you know,
there should be something in the CD
besides just the music
that would enable you
to enjoy it more.
Lyrics, pictures, whatever.
Yeah, sure.
But that's what any
of these other programs do.
It's just a matter of time
before they start sharing
the added features of the CDs.
A lot of them are coming out now with that.
But I think we're looking at something
very different here, I think.
And I think that the music industry
almost has to go up in arms.
Now, I've burned a lot of CDs
in the last few days.
I think I've burned 15
sort of assorted music CDs
of things that I downloaded,
you know, over my home DSL line.
And I really, I've probably taken
a big chunk of change
out of the industry.
Maybe I wouldn't have gone out
and bought those CDs
in the first place.
But now if somebody comes over my house
and wants a copy of a particular
Eric Clapton CD or Madonna,
I'd burn it for him again
for just, you know,
about 89 cents a CD.
Now, if the record companies
price things more reasonably,
there would be no reason for you
to have to go to that trouble.
Well, what's reasonably?
What would a reasonable price
be for a CD?
A couple of bucks.
Three, four dollars.
What's wrong with that?
Now you rent out the recording studios.
You employ the individuals
to do the distribution.
You pay the artists.
You do all the things
that a record company must do.
And how much do these artists make?
Maybe that's what it boils down to,
is that they make
these phenomenal salaries.
Some of these artists
make absolutely nothing
because they release their works
directly to MP3.
Those artists are not the ones
who are complaining.
The artists who are complaining
are the ones who make
millions of dollars.
They're the ones that are upset.
But the ones who don't
make any money at all,
they're happy to have people
copying their music
and listening to it
because that's how
they get to be known.
But that's an issue of their choice.
They've released it in a format
which can be passed around
to their listeners
and freely enjoyed.
Whereas the other ones,
the artists who are selling their works,
their copywritten works, mind you,
these things are being passed around
and they're not receiving
the royalties on their art.
I like the idea of there being a choice.
I like the idea of there being
two kinds of musicians,
the commercial musicians
and the artistic musicians.
They've always been there.
Well, they haven't been easy to listen to.
I mean, how do you buy a CD
from a band
that doesn't have any distribution?
Now there is distribution.
Now you can distribute yourself.
You can get things out on the net.
There have always been like tape chains.
Yeah, tape chains.
Okay, great.
But good luck, you know,
finding that in the middle of Iowa
or something.
You know, this way
you can download things anywhere.
I think MP3 is a very different concept though.
I mean, I can put onto my hard drive
my entire CD collection,
let's say 400 CDs.
I've got twin 20 gig hard drives
and that allows me to put
currently about 4,600 MP3s.
Now, if I were to share all of them,
I would be sharing the work
of probably two to 250 artists,
probably somewhere in the area
of 350 to 450 albums.
But that's where it gets to be interesting,
where you are going out
and sharing this music with other people.
If you're simply encoding these things
onto your own system for your own use,
there's very little that can,
you know, that can be argued with it.
And you could even find out
if I were encoding it or not.
But once I take that computer
and I put it up on a DSL line,
what am I doing?
The term is trafficking.
Aren't I doing something wrong?
I'm sorry.
Aren't I doing something wrong at that point?
Yes, I believe so.
See, I have mixed feelings about this.
I mean, I think a large part of
when you write something,
when you record something,
you want people to hear it.
You want people to be able to share it.
So I think if you're really interested
in getting your music out,
that's the best way to do it.
Now, you know, there are many other ways
that successful artists are able
to make money at this.
And, you know, record contracts,
obviously a one concert tours,
all kinds of things.
There's many different things.
But I think the most important thing
for a new struggling artist
is to get heard in the first place.
And that's the most important thing.
That's what I'm disappointed with Napster
because it tends to just be
the commercial artists.
And I'd like to see it used more
for the people who are struggling,
who are new,
so that you can really trade music.
Because think of it,
you don't need the record companies anymore.
We can do it all ourselves.
You don't need the commercial radio stations.
We can do it all ourselves.
Yes.
Well, the next trend,
you guys have to look out for
is what happens when we finally get good
optical character recognition software
and a person's able to share books.
And I can put up a copy
of the Stephen King series
after scanning it in.
And people can easily exchange that,
which would be a much smaller file size.
Oh, they're already going nuts
about this kind of intellectual property issue.
Yeah.
And it's not quite as common yet.
But I have a feeling in the next two years
when we get some actually really good OCR
software for the individual,
we're going to start seeing that happen a lot more.
But here's the thing.
Digital books are going to be sold.
They're already being sold now.
You can buy digital books,
but it's going to become more common very soon.
And then that's what's going to be
much more easily shared.
But you will never see somebody,
well, you might,
but I think you will always see people
on the subway reading paperback books
because it just happens to be
the convenient form of carrying things.
You always want to go out and buy a newspaper
rather than read it online
because it's more convenient.
Until such time as we generate technology
that winds up being essentially
the size, thickness, and weight of a piece of paper.
And you can simply compress
your entire newspaper into that.
I suppose.
And if newspapers can't come out cheaper than that,
then I guess they'll...
Then they're going to lose.
But that becomes a market force issue
as opposed to a bunch of people
trading in somebody else's property.
It's an interesting question.
And I'm sure one will be talking about
for quite some time.
Okay.
Thanks for the call.
Have a good night, guys.
You know, the other thing is,
it's very hard to...
What are you whispering?
Never mind.
It's really hard to prevent something like this too.
You have to understand,
computers are designed for this kind of thing.
So the only way to prevent it is to legislate it away.
And I don't think that's going to work.
Well, it's already been legislated away.
But it's still happening.
What do you think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is?
And we can see how popular that is.
It makes provisions for instances like these.
Right.
But there is no way to enforce it except selectively.
You know, you can't monitor
what everybody is transmitting over their DSL lines.
They're going to go after the people
who are making large amounts of money off of this.
And I guarantee you,
they will spend more money doing that
than anybody makes doing this.
At which point it becomes a very bad business decision
for the record company
or whoever happens to be distributing this media
to be pursuing it legally
and instead try to find some other way
to be going about this.
I'd like to hear from other artists too.
I'm sure not everybody agrees with Metallica,
but we'll just have to see.
David Bowie has been coming out a lot for MP3.
He's been releasing a lot of his stuff straight to MP3.
I don't believe he's living like a pauper, is he?
No, he's not.
He can do that.
Okay.
But it's, you know, it comes down to...
Why can he do that and Metallica can't do that?
Because Metallica chooses not to,
just as you have the choice not to listen to Metallica.
If you want to listen to Metallica,
you are going to have to pay a fee.
This is just one of the facts of life.
That is how they choose to do business.
And if you wish to do business with them,
you will meet them on their terms.
Doing business with Metallica,
that just strikes me as funny.
All right, let's take some more phone calls.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, this is Ray from Queens.
I don't know if you guys saw the special.
They had a piece on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago,
and they were talking about cybercrime.
And the thing they mentioned is that how different terrorists...
For example, if I were to launch an attack on the United States
and reroute it to different countries like Canada or something,
the very important point they made was that
if there was such a war that this would be the only war
that the military could not defend us against.
And they talked about different examples of power grids going down.
And they had drills in which the Department of Defense
had practice drills, and they would download hack tools off the net.
And I don't know if you guys saw this.
This was on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago.
I must have missed this one.
I got a call, and I caught the end of it.
Their contention is basically correct,
that the military cannot defend against this
because it is not an attack against the military force.
It is an attack against the private infrastructure.
These nebulous terrorists would be going after the power grids.
Well, who runs the power grids?
Individual companies who have boards of directors and investors and customers.
Who are they going to go after?
The telecommunications companies who are, in fact,
companies who have boards of directors, investors, and customers.
I mean, this isn't an issue of military against military.
This isn't an issue of infrastructure against infrastructure.
And the DoD isn't charged with that kind of protection,
nor can they be, because these are privately held public utilities.
Interesting term there.
Privately held companies who have to institute their own security programs.
And, I mean, as much as you can do is give them guidance.
That brings into question the posse comitatus provision of,
I believe that's the Constitution, is it not?
Where the military is forbidden from performing domestic law enforcement duties,
which they're starting to do anyway, but, you know, they get around all this.
Well, it's only the Constitution.
You can step over that anytime you want.
Hey, thanks for the call.
And let's take another phone call over here.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, hi.
Yeah, regarding the World Trade Organization demonstration,
I was wondering, I've seen some literature from some of these,
from the populist right, as opposed to the corporate right.
And a lot of their, they also are opposed to the World Trade Organization.
They talk about the new world order and the global plantation, that kind of stuff.
I was wondering, were there any representatives of the,
let's call them the populist right there, or was it mostly left-wing organizations,
or who was there?
From what I could see, it seemed predominantly left.
The only right-wing sentiment I saw came from a frat house,
where they held a sign out the window saying,
the Secret Service protects your way of life.
How could a veteran be in a fraternity house?
I don't understand that, but there was a veteran of something.
You're saying they were supporting the World Trade Organization.
I'm saying that there's a segment of the right, the populist right,
that is against the World Trade Organization.
No, I hear that, but I did not see anything like that.
I'm sure it was there, but I didn't see it.
You know, to really get some action on this, it seems like,
rather than look at the media fiction of the left versus right,
maybe it's time we started looking at it as a top versus bottom problem,
and make some new alliances that might help things.
Like, you talked about the FM transmitting the low power,
and how NPR was against it.
Well, a lot of people, BAI listeners, probably think of NPR
as a very reliable source of information,
but they're really the government station.
It's been a short wave.
Listen to another radio station in another country on a short wave,
and you'll see how accurate NPR and our domestic news is.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you mean how inaccurate.
That's what I mean.
You're being facetious, but...
Exactly.
Okay, well, thanks a lot.
All right.
I don't think this is a WTO he was talking about.
He kept saying WTO, but we were talking about the IMF.
Well, yeah, but they are closely related,
as far as who is opposed to it and the kinds of demonstrations.
Well, I continue to question just what these demonstrations accomplish.
Well, what do you mean?
What any demonstration accomplishes?
No, well, what, for instance, Seattle and DC,
what was the end result of the demonstration?
Well, we're talking about it, aren't we?
I mean, basically, it brings things to the forefront in culture.
Okay, so it's to the forefront.
What is being done?
It's called a demonstration for a reason.
You're demonstrating something to the public.
Okay, and what has the public done?
The public is not motivated.
The public is actually getting the news straight from,
and they're just seeing a bunch of cops shooting tear gas canisters
at a bunch of demonstrators,
and the demonstrators are throwing the tear gas canisters back,
and it makes really great sensationalistic news.
But when it comes down to it,
what legislation is being passed along these lines?
Does anyone even understand what the IMF does?
Who is the IMF?
Why are we against this?
The demonstration really has not brought forth any concrete points
that this is why the IMF is wrong in what it does.
Well, you're impatient.
You're impatient.
I understand.
You want to see a change now.
You want to see things.
No, I don't want to see a change now.
I want to see at least some kind of degree of public education
where there seems to be a result.
But you want people to be discussing this,
and you want it to be moving ahead a little faster than it is.
I share your frustration, Isaac.
I do.
It takes time, though.
First, it has to be brought up.
You know, people didn't even know what the WTO was a year ago.
Most people had never heard of it.
Now everybody knows what it is.
No, they know three letters, WTO,
and they know a bunch of demonstrators were demonstrating against it.
What does the WTO do?
Well, okay.
WTO, you have IMF, World Trade Organization,
globalization of all kinds of corporate interests
and policies that override local laws and national laws and things like that.
Nowadays, that has pretty much become what most people understand the WTO as being.
Whereas a year ago, most people just had never even heard of the WTO.
They really didn't even know what that was.
Now people realize that it's fundamentally unfair,
that it hurts poor nations.
It even hurts our nation.
And I think they'll take that into account next time something like this happens.
And I think a lot of people showed up at the IMF protest because of the WTO protest.
It was a lot bigger for that very reason.
Well, what do you propose we do to stop the WTO?
I think more demonstrations like this definitely help.
And what is it going to do?
It gets people talking about it.
It gets people elected who believe in certain things.
It becomes an issue.
OK, so it becomes an issue for election and legislation.
Isn't that what you're talking about?
Obviously, it has to become an issue first for it to actually, you know,
It becomes an issue when you talk to your representatives
and actually go about pursuing it as legislation.
So you're encouraging people to talk to their representatives?
I'm encouraging people to talk to the representatives.
I don't think folks need to be laying down in streets about this.
Well, that's the whole civil disobedience theory there.
But what does it get?
Where does it get you?
It gets you gas shot at you.
Sometimes you have to stand up to authority in various ways to get an effect.
And sometimes you should become that authority.
OK, well, that'd be great if we just took over the buildings.
But I don't think it's that easy.
You don't take over the buildings.
You simply get elected.
That's one of the great things about this system.
But here's the one stumbling block to getting elected.
You've got to get people to vote for you.
And the only way to do that is to get the issue out there in front of the people
so that they understand what's going on.
You're not going to get yourself elected by standing there and having a bunch of police
officers club you.
I think, you know, not that I recommend doing that, but it certainly does sway a lot of opinion.
I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, this is what the WTO does.
This is very briefly why, or not necessarily briefly, but concisely, why we are against.
And people have been doing that.
People have been doing that.
If you listen to WBAI, you hear that all the time.
Then repeat one sentence for me of why the WTO is bad.
I thought I already did.
No, you kind of said, well, you know, the unfair to bet, you know,
poor nations and a lot of people working in sweatshops and this, that and the other thing.
Where is the connection between the WTO and sweatshop workers?
Well, I mean, look, we only have a minute left.
It's kind of a tall request to put on me to explain the entire intricacies of the WTO.
Exactly.
But if you're going to capture the public's attention, you need to bring it down.
I'm trying to make is that information is, is widely dispersed.
And all you have to do is listen and you will hear it.
All right.
Go to the Pacifica website, listen to some of the back issues of, of, of the news.
Listen to, go to the independent media center,
Indymedia.org, and it's all explained right there for you.
You know, it's very simple.
Read newspapers.
It's there as well.
Well, I would prefer people do the investigation for themselves.
Right.
Well, I'm saying, you know, if you're really interested in this,
you definitely should have these answers because they're out there.
I do have these.
And I'd love to do it.
I'm presenting the questions on the air.
Okay.
But you're presenting it with one minute left.
And I, you know, it's a very complicated issue as to what's wrong with WTO and the IMF and,
and all kinds of other nasty things that are out there.
But the important thing is, the important thing is that people are finally talking about it.
And that's what the demonstration accomplishes.
It gets it on the news.
It gets people to, to be discussing it much in the way we're doing.
Well, homework for the listeners.
Investigate who the WTO is, what it does, and why is it quote-unquote bad.
Send us email, oth2600.com.
Tell us your feelings on the WTO, what you have learned,
and what you think we should do about it, and how it relates to this show.
Because, you know, we have lots of things that we're talking about.
I'm sure, you know, the MPAA controversy is related to this in various ways.
Certainly the mentality is the same.
Bernie, any closing remarks?
Because we are out of time.
There's not enough time for me.
Thanks for this 15-minute conversation about this.
We have no time to even say goodbye.
So we're just going to play the music.
Good night.
April 30th, 1975.
The war in Vietnam is over.
Sunday, April 30th, 2000.
On the 25th anniversary of the victory of peace, a day of celebration and rededication.
Join Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Humberto Brown, Ngo Vinh Long,
and others from 1230 to 530 p.m. for an afternoon teach-in
as we explore our history in order to strengthen our work today.
And at 630, come to a celebration.
Join performers Patti Smith, Yellow Peril, Viney Burroughs,
and see presentations by the Vietnamese ambassador to the UN, Dave Dellinger, and others.
It all takes place at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue at 30 West 68th Street in Manhattan.
A teach-in is free.
There is.