Bono (Not That Bono) Would Like To Head The RIAA

A semi-anonymous reader writes "In a suprising display of confusion over what 'public service' really means, Rep. Mary Bono wants to fill the shoes of departing RIAA chief exec Hillary Rosen while also forming a new congressional caucus on piracy and copyright issues. Political watchdog groups in Washington questioned the idea of someone being a possible job candidate for the music industry's lobby and also a founding member of a caucus focused on some of the industry's most important policy concerns. Has anyone formed a lobbying group specifically to advance the position of us little people?"

Comments

Doesn't matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone formed a lobbying group specifically to advance the position of us little people?

It doesn't matter. Such a group would be (at best) marginalized and ignored, or (at worst) brutally repressed.

Here's Noam Chomsky:

They had their own newspapers. In fact, the period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s. In the 1850s, the scale of the popular press, meaning run by the factory girls in Lowell and so on, was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were independent newspapers -- a lot of interesting scholarship on them, if you can read them now. They [arose] spontaneously, without any background. [The writers had] never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone else; they developed the same ideas. From their point of view, what they called "wage slavery," renting yourself to an owner, was not very different from the chattel slavery that they were fighting a civil war about. You have to recall that in the mid-nineteenth century, that was a common view in the United States -- for example, the position of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln's position. It's not an odd view, that there isn't much difference between selling yourself and renting yourself. So the idea of renting yourself, meaning working for wages, was degrading. It was an attack on your personal integrity. They despised the industrial system that was developing, that was destroying their culture, destroying their independence, their individuality, constraining them to be subordinate to masters.

There was a tradition of what was called Republicanism in the United States. We're free people, you know, the first free people in the world. This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of the labor movement all over, and included in it was the assumption, just taken for granted, that "those who work in the mills should own them." In fact, one of the their main slogans, I'll just quote it, was they condemned what they called the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self." That new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people, they regarded it as a violation of fundamental human nature, and a degrading idea.

That was a strong, rich American culture, which was crushed by violence. The United States has a very violent labor history, much more so than Europe. It was wiped out over a long period, with extreme violence. By the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that's when I personally came into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. By now, it's forgotten. But it's very real. I don't really think it's forgotten, I think it's just below the surface in people's consciousness.

Re:Yeah right

[StillDocked]

Well, yes. There are a number of advocacy groups that work for everyone's benefit.

For instance, the ACLU, or more to the /.'s heart, the EFF.

They lobby on the behalf on us (read: the little guys and girls in geek land) and work to protect the rights that are being grabbed from us.

List of RIAA member labels

[CaptainTylor]

Well...it would be hard to track that, but here is a list of the labels that ARE members:

RIAA Members

(Yeah, I know, I'm such a karma whore.)