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Bill Would Tie Financial Aid To Anti-Piracy Plans
theodp writes "The MPAA is applauding top Democratic politicians for introducing an anti-piracy bill that threatens the nation's colleges with the loss of a $100B a year in federal financial aid should they fail to have a technology plan to combat illegal file sharing. The proposal, which is embedded in a 747-page bill, has alarmed university officials. 'Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid — including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy,' said university officials in a letter to Congress. 'Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry's proposal.'"
So no worries right ? After all they're socialists. Using the governments power to mandate good behavior is very un-social right ? And forcing centrally made decisions upon everyone in the country is very unlike the democrats, right ? Oh wait ...
Don't worry democrats won't let you down (*cough*)
This is shocking. I really mean that in the full sense of the word. This has completely and totally shocked me. It's not necessarily the actions the media-industry that have disappointed me; that was no surprise and this sort of behaviour is totally expected of them.
It's the out-and-out corruption of the people who hold office. They don't even try to conceal the fact they're bought and paid for. It's completely obscene. There is no way that any rational politician would draft such a proposal.
What the hell do you do about it? Like the United Kingdom [1] you have a first-past-the-post system of electing government. What this means is that you have two parties who exchange power at regular intervals with very little prospect of a third, forth or fifth party getting in to the running.
In my view, this is no improvement whatsoever on the aristocratic feudal system that the whole American enterprise was meant to fix. In the United Kingdom the Catholic aristocracy and the Protestant aristocracy fought for political supremacy down a number of centuries.
You might have different names for them, "Republican" and "Democrat", and their values are different to our aristocrats but the mechanics are fundamentally the same. I mean, you're on your second aristocrat from the Bush family and you're likely to get your second helping of from the Clinton family. Without wanting to flame-bate: Does that sound like the American dream to you?
Once you have accepted the difficult fact that you are under the thumb of two aristocratic bodies then corruption is essentially impossible to eliminate without a revolution. Corruption just comes at twice the price.
How we fight them? I am not an expert on the political structure of the United States, but could the recent Real ID rebellion be expanded in to a more protracted battle? I broadly think that the threatening the cut of funds to a state to ram through some policy decision from Washington offends the nature of the Constitution. If the forefathers wanted an Omnipotent Congress they would have adopted a Parliamentary system like our own.
In a sense, Congress has exploited a hole in the Constitution via a broad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce clause and using the stick of withholding funds to pressure state legislatures.
I think the states are the solution to this problem but it will require radical swift action to succeed.
Simon
[1] - I want to preface it with this comment with this - our country is no better and everything I say here can be said of the United Kingdom.
We already knew that the MPAA would want something like this, and that they are willing to draft congressional bills. We also knew that plenty of politicians, including democrats, are owned by them.
This is only a proposal.
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That is a deep observation. I've been noticing this more and more lately, and also something else which is related. By giving the bill a false name, when the vote comes to the floor the media can accuse the people who vote against it of voting against "College Opportunity and Affordability." They did the same with the SCHIP bill-- vote against the bill and you're automatically tagged as "against health insurance for poor children," even though you may have been voting against it because it would hurt the current health insurance system (or the economy) in general. This is so blatantly cynical it is sickening, and it rings vaguely of 1984 newspeak.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
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I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
For those keeping track, the PATRIOT Act was only 342 pages (PDF warning) - and wasn't really read by anyone who signed off on it because it was long, had a nice name, and there was a sense of urgency to pass it.
I get the feeling that with more than twice the pages and a nice name attatched to it (College Opportunity and Affordability Act), this will get a similar reception. "Oh, well, it has a nice name - and it's far too long to bother reading and understanding... Plus, if I vote against it I'll be mentioned as voting against opportunity and affordability for students!"
Sad, but true.
Isn't that how it works?
Hey, I hear some congressmen are taking bribes. The next time that happens, let's seize the assets of every congressman and garner their wages for ten years to come.
Ooh, and all this can go away if the Universities pay Audible Magic. Now, they wouldn't have anything to do with the current RIAA shakedowns, would they?
If you think democrats are socialists, you have some really screwed up vision of what it means to be a socialist. From a european view, the democrats are right wing, just a bit shy of being extreme right wing (neo-nazi). Republicans would come dangerously close to extreme right wing.
The most liberal democrat would still be considered a right-winger.
A true socialist believes in universal healthcare, a minimum wage that you can support a family on, maximum working week, state funded education for everyone, unions (not US style unions), equality, taxing the rich to support the poor.
Not exactly stuff the democrats seem to care about. No, not even hillary.
To be fair, the US is a totally different culture then western europe. You made your system work, we made our system work. One of the biggest culture clashes is that neither side seems capable of understanding that the other side LIKES their system.
If you tell the swedes that they are insane that they have their working population support a segment that could work but doesn't, they wouldn't understand what you are on about. They think their welfare system makes for a nice place to live in. If you told a working american that X% of his taxes went to a career student the ceiling would hit the roof.
The french LIKE their huge goverment system.
One of the most serious errors you can make in the world is to try and force your countries system on another (Oh yeah, Iraq is a very definite example of this.)
But even so, allowing democrats to be called socialists is going to far, just because they make up the US political left, does not make then socialist. By european standards they would definitly be on the right end of the spectrum and be dangerously close to the far right.
Far right is NOT extreme right, it is the difference between being loving your country, and hating foreigners.
IF the US has a problem (IF, it is kinda like saying, Oh Bill Gates is no longer number 1, he is in trouble, I would like to have his troubles) it is that its two party system has resulted in people having a choice between a moderate right winger who leans a bit to the left and a moderate right winger who leans a bit to the right. The end result is that whichever you pick, you get a compromise candidate who is always a rightwinger trying to appeal to both leftish right wingers and right wing right wingers.
That doesn't leave a lot of room for trying a new direction. The dems can't go to the center, for fear of alienating the right wing, and the republicans can't go to far too the right for fear of alienating the moderates on their side.
From a EU perspective it is often very hard to spot the difference between US presidential candidates.
But make no mistake, none of them is a socialist. Read up on what it means and you might see why the US can never go for it. It ain't in your countries culture. An american would recoil at the state providing for him from grib to grave. In the EU, we thing that is nice and exactly what we have goverment for.
(Please note I am being very generic here, so please don't tear my head off because you live in the US and are a communist or you live in the EU and want bushes baby).
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In all cases the problem is how government and business mixes, because they should at least try to maintain some semblance of separation. For foreign stuff they will usually try to claim its for the benefit of both local and american "industry" in a general sense, rather than for the benefit of just one specific company (even if its a lie people don't tend to notice cos it happens abroad, or they ignore it cos they get cheap products as a result). In this case though, the extortion is domestic, with a specific private industry leveraging their business goals onto public institutions via manipulation of federal legislation. Having industry write the laws they want in this way doesn't just undermine the basic concepts of democracy and accountability, it leads long term to a stagnant and non-competitive economy (cos the big industries write laws to stifle competition). In that sense it is actually not in the general interests of industry to be able to write their own laws, because it will lead to even the law-writing industry being uncompetitive on the international stage.
Clear out your headgear, this isn't about GWB. For that matter it not really about any particular political party. It's about a corrupt system where rich people are allowed to buy politicians.
Of course the Democrats are going to be in on this one--they are owned by the electronic media, as the Republicans are owned by big oil. So, don't get on ole George; he's just doing what his masters want, just as the Democrats will do what their masters want.
The problem is that the reason they can name things like this is because the media does not call their bluff.
Media is only 'title-deep', as it seems. What the politicians are doing is a cost/benefit analysis. When the media is so broken, that a blatantly obvious example of Orwellian doublespeak does not get immediately called out as such, with all the consequences, public shaming, carrier-ending weight of a media shitstorm then the media is terribly broken and generally the people shouldn't rely on the media as much as to receive a single, simple factual information like yesterday's date. When the media is so bent that the elephant in the room does not get called out by definition it HAS TO resort to falsifying and lying to cover up the fact that the elephant is in the room.
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