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Operation Payback Shuts Down IFPI Site
newtley writes "Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) website is down. Not coincidentally, there's an Operation Payback post addressing the Pirate Bay crew's lost sentencing appeal: 'Dear IFPI, MAFIAA and other parasites, The recent verdict in the Swedish Appeal Court (ThePirateBay spectrial) provoked this statement from Operation: Payback. We emphasize our statement with a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack aimed at the IFPI's website.'"
The pie is growing, but the wealthy are taking the vast majority of the increase:
The wealth disparity itself is a problem, but worse is the corrosive effect this wealth has on our political structure: those with money and influence are increasingly able to purchase government policies that further increase their share of the pie even at the expense of the total size of the pie. It's a positive feedback loop: more wealth leads to more power, and more power leads to greater wealth. This feedback is why I'm so dour about our prospects: the cycle seems impossible to break.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
This is a very dangerous kettle of fish that is being passed around here. I really don't want to reach my hand in, but here it goes anyway.
The previous poster about FDR (being a crook) is absolutely correct. Even a cursory examination of the impacts of his political policies during the depression reveals that unemployment skyrocketed after the formation of the new deal, and that living conditions took serious turns for the worse. Further, he enacted the atrocity that is the federal reserve bank, against the bitter pleas of more sensible men at the time, due to strong influences from foreign powers. (The run-away inflationary cycle of which is what is at least partially responsible for the banking failures of the past few years.) In addition, he created an executive order that seized all privately held gold, and transferred it to government coffers to back the new deal.
The multitudes of destitute people made for a very willing public, eager to be saved from the outcome of their own panic. (the 1930s bank crash resulted from panicked crowds making runs on banks. The natural way that banks make money is by lending more than they have in the vault, and depending upon interest payments for the returns on investment. If everyone makes a run on the bank, the bank will be caught with its britches down, and default on its extended credit. At the time there was no protecting agencies like the FDIC, since there was no national reserve bank. [yes, I called it an atrocity, I'll get to that later.] Because of this the banks of the era HAD to be more sensible in their loaning practices. Despite this, the bank scare caught them at a disadvantage, So, as a matter of consequence, the bank and loan industry crumbled under its own debts, resulting in a massive deflationary spiral, leaving millions unemployed, and many more homeless as people with mortgages got foreclosed on by banks desperate to pay off their debts to remain solvent. Essentially, a substantial amount of the currency that was PREVIOUSLY in circulation, was now stuffed into wealthy people's mattresses. As such, there was a dramatic currency shortage. (Deflation.)
These people were desperate, and would have eagerly accepted a deal from the devil himself. They got pretty much that with FDR and his new deal.
The federal reserve bank.
This new agency had been tried before. It was successfully eliminated by Andrew Jackson, under the incarnation of the "Central Bank". Andrew Jackson is the ONLY president in the history of the united states to pay off the national debt, by halting all deficit spending, paying off it's debts, and dissolving the bank's charter to make more loans. This prior president had some rather choice words to say about it in fact.
** ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government
**
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
**
"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."
-- amongst others.
So then-- What is the federal reserve bank, and what does it do?
The federal reserve bank codifies lending practices (in general a good thing), but by design creates exponential inflati