Its a matter of degree... compared to the Wall Street scumbag buying his twelfth McMansion, or the Oil Exec dropping half a billion dollars on a yacht the size of a third word country, this guys a veritable Mother Teresa.
Darlin', I'm only a skip ahead of you... and I enjoyed all these guys too, though I was a wee tot at the time... So many great performers are still making great music. This era was particularly hard, because so many were lost to chemical habits. The survivors though have active lives as artists you need to make a list of maybe your top 20 favorite performers and see what they've been doing since the 60s. You might be pleasantly surprised of the amazing body of music that never made it to the top 40 machine. That and if you're willing to wind through independent music sources, there are some amazing young'ns carrying on the traditions. Don't let the sterile flavorless pap that is popular music today make you think for a moment that nothing good is happening.
There are so many fine indie groups now, and their music has variation, its clever, slick and honestly grittier and more intelligent than the homogenized, pasteurized, sanitized for your convenience white bread musical sewage they crap out of the radio these days through the roboplayers that are 99% of the stations airing today. I have a large network of friends of diverse age and culture. So I can find some sweet new grass band, get a msg to check out some nuevo flamenco, then listen to a classical rock band like Cosby Stills and Nash on their website. All my favorite bands now out of the media spotlight are still making amazing music to be had online. Music is alive and well, you just can't hear it through a Clear Channel Station. So stop trying. If you find a good station.. in the Bay Area we have KFOG, real people, real music, then enjoy, otherwise go hunting, the wilds are full of great performers to be cherished and enjoyed.
That's the point... the corporate powers will just keep moving it out further and further until its life plus the time to the universe's heat death. This is three card monty with the future. If you have a burning pain in your rectum its because a CEO somewhere is raping you, and you might consider that he hasn't even bothered to send you roses.
This is STUPID... I can go over to Spotify for free this very second and listen to nearly anything my heart desires. Then when I hear something I just love, I listen to the whole album, and I find damn that's wonderful and I BUY IT because I want it in high fidelity. Or its a piece of rancid wombat feces and I flush it. I buy tremendously more music this way, try things I would never consider buying then go wow, that's not bad and a sale is made that wasn't ever gonna happen.
So the media moguls don't give a flying fsck about selling content. They care about controlling access and creating artificial scarcity so they can bleed the public. That is all, there is no sane argument to the contrary, no meaningful defense, no "But, what about..." There are only two futures, the Spotifys will inherit the earth or the current Media Moguls will legislate free (as in liberty) access into oblivion.
You have to understand the mentality... they've been raping and robbing artists for a hundred years. So when you're dealing with cheats and criminals, all they can see is when they aren't getting paid its a crime and you must be cheating them. Its called projecting and its as common as sunrise. Problem only exists when these scum bags buy laws codifying and ultimately imposing their criminality on society.
You missed something, what part of they still want the $25 for the pirated copy plus damages for circumventing their business model is unclear. In the eyes of purveyors in this society today... you are an end-looser. A guy in China ate a bowl of spicy soup that burned a hole though his stomach because the restaurant was able to shave a few pennies off of the more expensive chili paste by buying a cheap chemical substitute, that just turned out to be lethal. To the modern corporation you are simply a resource to be bled dry and discarded (at both ends of the buy and sell equation.) Your labor is bought wholesale, and sold to users by the corporation at retail. You buy other services and products from corporations at retail prices for which they buy or manufacture for wholesale or less. Labor is a commodity, they buy life insurance policies on you hoping you'll die and make them a windfall. When profit supersedes humanity, the final use of human beings is predictably inhumane.
I don't think so. I think its way bigger. I think they want to have the right to control all media. They want to own "The Absolute Right" to control the traffic of all IP. This means draconian punishment for listening to/viewing owned media today, but in the future means that they will need to be paid every time you hear, or watch, or use, or make physical items from, or create Intellectual property (including the future IP involved in producing 3D printable goods.)
This is just one of the many corporate wars on what will be possible in the future. We will either build a robust free (as in liberty) system of trading IP not produced by the bankers, or our heads will be fitted with meters from birth and we'll never escape our indebted servitude. We'll either be exalted to the stars or die in the dust of our own greed and petty avarice. So while most people (52%) just regurgitate the stupid they're spoon fed at the theaters while they watch that 10 minute COKE commercials that they paid $15 to see, people with a measurable brain wave and an interest in something other than Jersey Shores, will mourn the loss of Aaron Swartz, and work diligently to preserve a future in which life is worth living.
Spoken by another American waving a flag and mouthing empty platitudes who hasn't bothered to see the world or even find out were the United States now rates on all the vital statistics. On healthcare we suck. On child and infant mortality, we suck. On education we suck. On criminal justice we suck HARD. On public violence, we suck. On the issues of human rights, the state of our Constitution and compliance with international codes of conduct... we suck. On the growing collapse of the social safety net, and its immediate impact or the poor, the young and the elderly, we suck. On the disposition of our mentally ill, or reintroduction of released prison convicts into society, we suck mightily. On the fact that between a fifth and a quarter of our workforce is unemployed and nearly a third underemployed (and that number will rise due to ObamaCare), we SUCK! On the obliteration of our middle class, we suck. On our responsibility to a sustainable global environment, sweet Jebus we suck.
None of this is inherent, or indicative of America's future, simply the state of affairs our nation is now confronting. We do have more licensed drivers, more license private pilots, more accessible resources, and a stronger work ethic than most nations on the planet. We need to dissolve the Federal Bank. Default on the loan and begin the process of restructuring our debt. Spend the next generation paying off that debt while we rebuild our nations infrastructure not for the 21st but for the 22nd century. We need to make science and engineering 10,000% cooler than hip hop. We need to thank the big corporations for sharing and pour everything we've got into new business development. We need to get our pudgy fingers out of the world's pie, because it ain't none of our business being the world's police. We need to stop dumbing our kids down and stop televising brain draining crap. We need to put humanity above profit and integrity above personal acquisition. Do that, and our future has never been brighter.
Tickling the tail of the dragon is stupid and usually ends up making a crispy critter. Orange is big in France and is smooching the French Governments derriere. The internet impinges on sovereign states and their corporations more every hour and sooner or later, Google will be able to network around, over and/or through Orange. Were I Orange, I'd play nice right now, so when the time to start thinking about how Google is going to bang me like a tin drum, I could rely on a strong and healthy collaboration between us. The old model, alpha male, pissing contest of business is ridden with prehistoric primate DNA, and the modern business machines that are represented by the likes of Google will use technology to overcome ape made obstacles.
I remember working for high tech companies where the men in charge were brought in from other industries. Almost to a man, they were clueless. The tiny few that were successful assumed that only the most basic fundaments of business needed to be addressed beginning with strong customer relationships, and the rest was going to be invented from whole cloth. ISPs grounded in telecommunications from the last half of the last century have succeeded by imposing draconian limits on their customers and eating the value created by advancing technology (as opposed to passing the savings on to the consumer or truly investing in dramatically better infrastructure.) They're going to be squeezed between two walls, competition by technologically superior opponents and the growing inability to compete because they prefer to manipulate the system at the level of state laws and regulations rather than invest in superior technology. This is the insanity and ultimate failure of reckoning by quarterly profits, in effect short term gain vs. long term success.
So Google will pay, until one day they stop paying... one day very soon. Then Google will provide superior free or at least very cheap services that push Orange and their ilk right off the map. Too bad, so sad... au revoir
If I discovered 30% of the meet in my burger was lobster, I wouldn't be the least bit upset, just confused. I would be equally upset if I had discovered it was 100% beef, but that they used only cow rectums, snouts and bladders to make my hamburger. The issue is the issue of being cheated.
By the way, we need to request that Turkey give us all their wheels and sources of fire in exchange for pretty stones we'll happily provide them. When they ask why, we tell to just ask us again in 20 years, if they still can.
Yeah, like a device that warns others not to go around putting devices in your head!
So, uh, where was your brain chip manufactured?... China... cool... Can you read this Chinese word out loud for me? Why? Just, cuz. Nihau?... BACKDOOR INITIATED SECURE DATA DUMP PROCEEDING...
We currently live in a Corporate Sponsored quasi-totalitarian State with a long running reality program televised from its National Capitol called CSPAN. The occupants of the twin house bicker and feud and fulminate over all kinds of ridiculous trivialities in a loud and desperate attempt to distract the general populous from discovering that their nation's formal process and guarantees of liberty have been flushed into the Chesapeake.
This is because the Executive Branch has been given virtually unlimited power, created a nearly complete parallel government answerable to nobody, and stuffed the Supreme Court with political toadies committed to handing over the keys to the Kingdom. Watching this slow motion coup over the last 30 years (which is not to say that the process hasn't been happening for a great deal longer... eg. Roosevelt and Johnson, just that the last 30 years have been a virtual free-fall) has been nothing less than tragic. Without a near complete overhaul, starting with cutting the executive branch right back to the Presidents eyebrows, removing the rights of PERSONHOOD from corporations, in fact pruning corporations back to their original life span of 20 years and separating commerce and state completely, putting back structures to ensure a free and unmolested press, yanking back the reins on the federal police and intelligence agencies with sufficient force to cause whiplash and pimp slapping D.C with the U. S. Constitution repeatedly until it shapes up and flies right, I see little hope for this American Experiment.
It is the government that must stand bare naked before the people that the power or government might not be abused. A nation that forces its people to stand bare naked before their government is a nation of slaves with ungrateful masters.
As other will certainly point out, the prosecutors will appear to do their best, fail and shake their heads saying we gave it our best shot, when in fact no real attempt has been or will be made to hold any of these people to account. There are many good reasons, but the best is that this is a small circle of very well connected people. They look out for their own because when you live at the top you need to lock arms and and fight together to keep the top tiers safe for those in power.
These people have the law makers in their pockets. What makes you think that they can't just make a call and ask for it to all get cleaned up. Then surprise, it all is. When James Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, Chase testified before Congress this last summer about misplacing $5 billion, the Congressmen seemed... I don't know, a little creepy. Licking his shoes to a spit polish, kissing the wrinkles out of the ass of his slacks, perhaps the worst was when they dog piled to form a human sofa for the CEO to sit on (with the new junior members at the bottom.) All the while gently fondling his thighs. It made me deeply concerned that our representatives like James better than they like the rest of us Americans. Face it. Our government is now predicated on serving those who pay for holding office not for those who vote. That make our representative people who represent the wealthy and powerful. Therefore, knowing on which side their bread is buttered, the chances of a member of that population suffering the laws the rest of us must abide by is vanishingly small.
Dude... you gotta stop watching "As the Telecom Turns"... that soap opera is completely unbelievable. Personally I find "All My VOIP" way more entertaining.
This doesn't explain where clear and obvious fraud was perpetrated by banks selling what they new were bad stocks to their customers while at the same time betting against those same stocks to increase their own bottom line. Still nobody went to jail, committing obvious acts of fraud, with documented testimony from witnesses and still nobody goes to jail.
FACE IT... bankers are like Hollywood stars... unless you actually arrive at the scene and film them sawing someone's head off... they don't go to jail.
No they don't. Trickle down has never made sense. Its what George H. W. Bush called "Voodoo Economics" and wherever it had been tried before lead to uncontrollable "Boom - Bust" cycles terminating in economic collapse. This is not a new theory and is directly attributable to the "Panic of 1896". Paul Krugman said "The specific set of foolish ideas that has laid claim to the name "supply side economics" is a crank doctrine that would have had little influence if it did not appeal to the prejudices of editors and wealthy men." You can read more here, and the results of the 32 year experiment that is supply side are now in. IT FAILED MISERABLY. It gutted the middle class. It drove all the wealth in the nation to the top 0.001% It corrupted our government. It destroyed our economy. It has nearly destroyed the American way of life. Adam Smith warned of wealth concentration and the danger of losing the middle class and here we are facing that warning head on.
Because the OWS are simply looking to not be raped any more, and the folks on Wall Street are dedicated to raping us bloody... see that is a fundamentally different point of view, a fundamental difference in motive. People who don't want to rape pass laws that look like chastity belts. People who are dedicated to rape pass laws that look like a picture book derived from the Marque De Sade's diary. If you look at the laws that exist today, and the fact that the banks have forged millions of mortgage documents and committed fraud on a level that would make Lincoln's statue do a spit take, and STILL nobody is doing time at the gray bar, I assert our laws and their enforcement leans a wee bit towards the sadist... yes? no?
How about we just remove the Government funnels, tubes and hoses that pump every loose penny into the pockets of the wealthy. I would settle for a level playing field. Oh, and the fact that the wealthy now control 99.9% of the nations wealth... if we could just break that up as a one off (level playing field?), so there's a little capital down here where they pumped out everything including the oxygen?
If I had to opt for short term fixes... I'd go with; Flat tax without loop-holes? Its not fair i.e. progressive, but its better than what we have now... and that goes for corporations too, set it at... lets say 15%. Give a special boost for small to medium business with an extra goose to new entrepreneurs. Bring back Glass Steagall. Take away the rights of "People" from Corporations. Separate Corporation and State. Push sustainable energy resources like our heads are on fire... if Germany and China can do it, then the rhetoric coming for the fossil fuel industry is just more smoke up our collective asses (sustainable energy includes cutting edge nuclear.) Harvest the plastic in the ocean, a great idea is to use it to build floating cities. Legalize sex, drugs and rock n' roll... then free 80% of the people from prison and invest in schools, real schools, where they teach the truth and actually inspire people to arrggghhh! THINK. Teach people that religion is fine, but its not a substitute for physical reality. For that matter, the whole fantasy as political view, ontology, sociology or financial system... enough already, the only thing that ever trickled down needed to be cleaned with toilet paper. Let's have public service announcements explaining to the people from the planet Mongo. that global climate change and evolution are done deals, and all there is left to do now is decide how we're going to address them. Tax sex, drugs and rock n' roll, to make the sex trade clean and safe, the drug trade adult and safe, and shut the MAFIAA up once and for all, this is all you're getting, leave the people alone, they get to figure out what fair use is without you're wet dreams of public rape being any part of the future of music or motion pictures (and if you don't like it, I'm certain there are thousands of other artists who'll only be too happy to take your place at the feeding trough.) Last, patents are good for five years... from the day of the first product sold and vanish after five years if you don't release a product... no software patents, death to patent trolls. There, I'm sure this will mess up thousands of things but it would fix the worst of what's killing us today. YMMV.
And obviously you don't remember how many corporation and their officers got sued for cooking the books by their stock holders. The courts were clogged for several years.
I'm gonna do this real fast, so with any luck, we can all put this to bed once and for all. George isn't the worst human being alive. He isn't bright. He's not retarded either. He is a criminal, involved in criminal conspiracies (the majority of evidence points to Dick Cheney as the primary perpetrator in most cases, but George was right there in the thick of it.) George ignored critical warnings on National Security leading directly to 9/11, instead George was setting the record for the longest summer vacation by a President in History, while Dick Cheney and the Bush Cabinet were desperately trying to revive the Star Wars Program from the 80s so Dick could funnel billions of dollars into Halliburton. George was involved in multiple national deceptions leading to a completely pointless and disastrous war in Iraq. He gutted the Bill of Rights, burned down the Geneva Convention, and sequestered innocent Americans to far off countries to be tortured to no particular value for National Security. He knew precisely what Catrina would do to New Orleans (he was in an emergency National Security Council meeting going over the projected impacts of the storm shortly before storm fall.) He let the disaster in New Orleans happen without aid or intervention. To this day, there is no reliable count of the number of people that died in the flood. What is available is that tens of thousands of poor people lost their homes forever and that wealthy property speculators have made billions of dollars snapping up their property at pennies on the dollar. This my friends was a cynical land grab, foisted on the backs of the poor who the government saw as a problem, and this was their solution. The property values of the 7th ward are now dramatically up. I could go on ad nauseum, but it should be absolutely clear that this administration was little more than a criminal syndicate and that we had 8 years of corporate hit men running our nation. The fact the George might or might not be an imbecile seems frankly unimportant in the face of the damage he did. I don't care if he's stupid, I do care that he broke my country, obstructed justice, destroyed two cities, and crashed the economy not once, but twice. George W. Bush is the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. We will pay for his disasters for at least another generation. Personally I hope he's a genius so he can fully appreciate what a toxic flow of human sewage he and his entire administration were. Oh, and for those who need references, ping me, I have about 4,000, The most amazing thing was that his crimes are so well documented and like the Bankers on Wall Steet, instead of sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff, they walk the streets, free men.
Actually this would be the class of millionaires that became such by stumbling out of a "Jackpot" womb, and there are more than a couple of those... ask Paris Hilton.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a matter of degree... compared to the Wall Street scumbag buying his twelfth McMansion, or the Oil Exec dropping half a billion dollars on a yacht the size of a third word country, this guys a veritable Mother Teresa.
Darlin', I'm only a skip ahead of you... and I enjoyed all these guys too, though I was a wee tot at the time... So many great performers are still making great music. This era was particularly hard, because so many were lost to chemical habits. The survivors though have active lives as artists you need to make a list of maybe your top 20 favorite performers and see what they've been doing since the 60s. You might be pleasantly surprised of the amazing body of music that never made it to the top 40 machine. That and if you're willing to wind through independent music sources, there are some amazing young'ns carrying on the traditions. Don't let the sterile flavorless pap that is popular music today make you think for a moment that nothing good is happening.
There are so many fine indie groups now, and their music has variation, its clever, slick and honestly grittier and more intelligent than the homogenized, pasteurized, sanitized for your convenience white bread musical sewage they crap out of the radio these days through the roboplayers that are 99% of the stations airing today. I have a large network of friends of diverse age and culture. So I can find some sweet new grass band, get a msg to check out some nuevo flamenco, then listen to a classical rock band like Cosby Stills and Nash on their website. All my favorite bands now out of the media spotlight are still making amazing music to be had online. Music is alive and well, you just can't hear it through a Clear Channel Station. So stop trying. If you find a good station.. in the Bay Area we have KFOG, real people, real music, then enjoy, otherwise go hunting, the wilds are full of great performers to be cherished and enjoyed.
That's the point... the corporate powers will just keep moving it out further and further until its life plus the time to the universe's heat death. This is three card monty with the future. If you have a burning pain in your rectum its because a CEO somewhere is raping you, and you might consider that he hasn't even bothered to send you roses.
This is STUPID... I can go over to Spotify for free this very second and listen to nearly anything my heart desires. Then when I hear something I just love, I listen to the whole album, and I find damn that's wonderful and I BUY IT because I want it in high fidelity. Or its a piece of rancid wombat feces and I flush it. I buy tremendously more music this way, try things I would never consider buying then go wow, that's not bad and a sale is made that wasn't ever gonna happen.
So the media moguls don't give a flying fsck about selling content. They care about controlling access and creating artificial scarcity so they can bleed the public. That is all, there is no sane argument to the contrary, no meaningful defense, no "But, what about..." There are only two futures, the Spotifys will inherit the earth or the current Media Moguls will legislate free (as in liberty) access into oblivion.
You have to understand the mentality... they've been raping and robbing artists for a hundred years. So when you're dealing with cheats and criminals, all they can see is when they aren't getting paid its a crime and you must be cheating them. Its called projecting and its as common as sunrise. Problem only exists when these scum bags buy laws codifying and ultimately imposing their criminality on society.
You missed something, what part of they still want the $25 for the pirated copy plus damages for circumventing their business model is unclear. In the eyes of purveyors in this society today... you are an end-looser. A guy in China ate a bowl of spicy soup that burned a hole though his stomach because the restaurant was able to shave a few pennies off of the more expensive chili paste by buying a cheap chemical substitute, that just turned out to be lethal. To the modern corporation you are simply a resource to be bled dry and discarded (at both ends of the buy and sell equation.) Your labor is bought wholesale, and sold to users by the corporation at retail. You buy other services and products from corporations at retail prices for which they buy or manufacture for wholesale or less. Labor is a commodity, they buy life insurance policies on you hoping you'll die and make them a windfall. When profit supersedes humanity, the final use of human beings is predictably inhumane.
I don't think so. I think its way bigger. I think they want to have the right to control all media. They want to own "The Absolute Right" to control the traffic of all IP. This means draconian punishment for listening to/viewing owned media today, but in the future means that they will need to be paid every time you hear, or watch, or use, or make physical items from, or create Intellectual property (including the future IP involved in producing 3D printable goods.)
This is just one of the many corporate wars on what will be possible in the future. We will either build a robust free (as in liberty) system of trading IP not produced by the bankers, or our heads will be fitted with meters from birth and we'll never escape our indebted servitude. We'll either be exalted to the stars or die in the dust of our own greed and petty avarice. So while most people (52%) just regurgitate the stupid they're spoon fed at the theaters while they watch that 10 minute COKE commercials that they paid $15 to see, people with a measurable brain wave and an interest in something other than Jersey Shores, will mourn the loss of Aaron Swartz, and work diligently to preserve a future in which life is worth living.
Spoken by another American waving a flag and mouthing empty platitudes who hasn't bothered to see the world or even find out were the United States now rates on all the vital statistics. On healthcare we suck. On child and infant mortality, we suck. On education we suck. On criminal justice we suck HARD. On public violence, we suck. On the issues of human rights, the state of our Constitution and compliance with international codes of conduct... we suck. On the growing collapse of the social safety net, and its immediate impact or the poor, the young and the elderly, we suck. On the disposition of our mentally ill, or reintroduction of released prison convicts into society, we suck mightily. On the fact that between a fifth and a quarter of our workforce is unemployed and nearly a third underemployed (and that number will rise due to ObamaCare), we SUCK! On the obliteration of our middle class, we suck. On our responsibility to a sustainable global environment, sweet Jebus we suck.
None of this is inherent, or indicative of America's future, simply the state of affairs our nation is now confronting. We do have more licensed drivers, more license private pilots, more accessible resources, and a stronger work ethic than most nations on the planet. We need to dissolve the Federal Bank. Default on the loan and begin the process of restructuring our debt. Spend the next generation paying off that debt while we rebuild our nations infrastructure not for the 21st but for the 22nd century. We need to make science and engineering 10,000% cooler than hip hop. We need to thank the big corporations for sharing and pour everything we've got into new business development. We need to get our pudgy fingers out of the world's pie, because it ain't none of our business being the world's police. We need to stop dumbing our kids down and stop televising brain draining crap. We need to put humanity above profit and integrity above personal acquisition. Do that, and our future has never been brighter.
Tickling the tail of the dragon is stupid and usually ends up making a crispy critter. Orange is big in France and is smooching the French Governments derriere. The internet impinges on sovereign states and their corporations more every hour and sooner or later, Google will be able to network around, over and/or through Orange. Were I Orange, I'd play nice right now, so when the time to start thinking about how Google is going to bang me like a tin drum, I could rely on a strong and healthy collaboration between us. The old model, alpha male, pissing contest of business is ridden with prehistoric primate DNA, and the modern business machines that are represented by the likes of Google will use technology to overcome ape made obstacles.
I remember working for high tech companies where the men in charge were brought in from other industries. Almost to a man, they were clueless. The tiny few that were successful assumed that only the most basic fundaments of business needed to be addressed beginning with strong customer relationships, and the rest was going to be invented from whole cloth. ISPs grounded in telecommunications from the last half of the last century have succeeded by imposing draconian limits on their customers and eating the value created by advancing technology (as opposed to passing the savings on to the consumer or truly investing in dramatically better infrastructure.) They're going to be squeezed between two walls, competition by technologically superior opponents and the growing inability to compete because they prefer to manipulate the system at the level of state laws and regulations rather than invest in superior technology. This is the insanity and ultimate failure of reckoning by quarterly profits, in effect short term gain vs. long term success.
So Google will pay, until one day they stop paying... one day very soon. Then Google will provide superior free or at least very cheap services that push Orange and their ilk right off the map. Too bad, so sad... au revoir
Companies should only be paid more for sucking less.
I presume this is the punchline to the riddle "How are corporations different than prostitutes???"
So what (in the sphincter O Hell) is Microsoft playing at...
Ease up a bit Captain, goin' on three years now and Microsoft ain't had nothin' twixt her nethers weren't run on batteries!"
Who put the horse in the hors d'oeuvres
If I discovered 30% of the meet in my burger was lobster, I wouldn't be the least bit upset, just confused. I would be equally upset if I had discovered it was 100% beef, but that they used only cow rectums, snouts and bladders to make my hamburger. The issue is the issue of being cheated.
It needs to cover both evolution and devolution.
By the way, we need to request that Turkey give us all their wheels and sources of fire in exchange for pretty stones we'll happily provide them. When they ask why, we tell to just ask us again in 20 years, if they still can.
Even better: put a hardware device in your head.
Yeah, like a device that warns others not to go around putting devices in your head!
So, uh, where was your brain chip manufactured?... China... cool... Can you read this Chinese word out loud for me? Why? Just, cuz. Nihau? ... BACKDOOR INITIATED SECURE DATA DUMP PROCEEDING...
How much would getting your head hacked suck?
We currently live in a Corporate Sponsored quasi-totalitarian State with a long running reality program televised from its National Capitol called CSPAN. The occupants of the twin house bicker and feud and fulminate over all kinds of ridiculous trivialities in a loud and desperate attempt to distract the general populous from discovering that their nation's formal process and guarantees of liberty have been flushed into the Chesapeake.
This is because the Executive Branch has been given virtually unlimited power, created a nearly complete parallel government answerable to nobody, and stuffed the Supreme Court with political toadies committed to handing over the keys to the Kingdom. Watching this slow motion coup over the last 30 years (which is not to say that the process hasn't been happening for a great deal longer... eg. Roosevelt and Johnson, just that the last 30 years have been a virtual free-fall) has been nothing less than tragic. Without a near complete overhaul, starting with cutting the executive branch right back to the Presidents eyebrows, removing the rights of PERSONHOOD from corporations, in fact pruning corporations back to their original life span of 20 years and separating commerce and state completely, putting back structures to ensure a free and unmolested press, yanking back the reins on the federal police and intelligence agencies with sufficient force to cause whiplash and pimp slapping D.C with the U. S. Constitution repeatedly until it shapes up and flies right, I see little hope for this American Experiment.
It is the government that must stand bare naked before the people that the power or government might not be abused. A nation that forces its people to stand bare naked before their government is a nation of slaves with ungrateful masters.
As other will certainly point out, the prosecutors will appear to do their best, fail and shake their heads saying we gave it our best shot, when in fact no real attempt has been or will be made to hold any of these people to account. There are many good reasons, but the best is that this is a small circle of very well connected people. They look out for their own because when you live at the top you need to lock arms and and fight together to keep the top tiers safe for those in power.
These people have the law makers in their pockets. What makes you think that they can't just make a call and ask for it to all get cleaned up. Then surprise, it all is. When James Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, Chase testified before Congress this last summer about misplacing $5 billion, the Congressmen seemed... I don't know, a little creepy. Licking his shoes to a spit polish, kissing the wrinkles out of the ass of his slacks, perhaps the worst was when they dog piled to form a human sofa for the CEO to sit on (with the new junior members at the bottom.) All the while gently fondling his thighs. It made me deeply concerned that our representatives like James better than they like the rest of us Americans. Face it. Our government is now predicated on serving those who pay for holding office not for those who vote. That make our representative people who represent the wealthy and powerful. Therefore, knowing on which side their bread is buttered, the chances of a member of that population suffering the laws the rest of us must abide by is vanishingly small.
Dude... you gotta stop watching "As the Telecom Turns"... that soap opera is completely unbelievable. Personally I find "All My VOIP" way more entertaining.
This doesn't explain where clear and obvious fraud was perpetrated by banks selling what they new were bad stocks to their customers while at the same time betting against those same stocks to increase their own bottom line. Still nobody went to jail, committing obvious acts of fraud, with documented testimony from witnesses and still nobody goes to jail.
FACE IT... bankers are like Hollywood stars... unless you actually arrive at the scene and film them sawing someone's head off... they don't go to jail.
No they don't. Trickle down has never made sense. Its what George H. W. Bush called "Voodoo Economics" and wherever it had been tried before lead to uncontrollable "Boom - Bust" cycles terminating in economic collapse. This is not a new theory and is directly attributable to the "Panic of 1896". Paul Krugman said "The specific set of foolish ideas that has laid claim to the name "supply side economics" is a crank doctrine that would have had little influence if it did not appeal to the prejudices of editors and wealthy men." You can read more here, and the results of the 32 year experiment that is supply side are now in. IT FAILED MISERABLY. It gutted the middle class. It drove all the wealth in the nation to the top 0.001% It corrupted our government. It destroyed our economy. It has nearly destroyed the American way of life. Adam Smith warned of wealth concentration and the danger of losing the middle class and here we are facing that warning head on.
Because the OWS are simply looking to not be raped any more, and the folks on Wall Street are dedicated to raping us bloody... see that is a fundamentally different point of view, a fundamental difference in motive. People who don't want to rape pass laws that look like chastity belts. People who are dedicated to rape pass laws that look like a picture book derived from the Marque De Sade's diary. If you look at the laws that exist today, and the fact that the banks have forged millions of mortgage documents and committed fraud on a level that would make Lincoln's statue do a spit take, and STILL nobody is doing time at the gray bar, I assert our laws and their enforcement leans a wee bit towards the sadist... yes? no?
How about we just remove the Government funnels, tubes and hoses that pump every loose penny into the pockets of the wealthy. I would settle for a level playing field. Oh, and the fact that the wealthy now control 99.9% of the nations wealth... if we could just break that up as a one off (level playing field?), so there's a little capital down here where they pumped out everything including the oxygen?
If I had to opt for short term fixes... I'd go with; Flat tax without loop-holes? Its not fair i.e. progressive, but its better than what we have now... and that goes for corporations too, set it at... lets say 15%. Give a special boost for small to medium business with an extra goose to new entrepreneurs. Bring back Glass Steagall. Take away the rights of "People" from Corporations. Separate Corporation and State. Push sustainable energy resources like our heads are on fire... if Germany and China can do it, then the rhetoric coming for the fossil fuel industry is just more smoke up our collective asses (sustainable energy includes cutting edge nuclear.) Harvest the plastic in the ocean, a great idea is to use it to build floating cities. Legalize sex, drugs and rock n' roll... then free 80% of the people from prison and invest in schools, real schools, where they teach the truth and actually inspire people to arrggghhh! THINK. Teach people that religion is fine, but its not a substitute for physical reality. For that matter, the whole fantasy as political view, ontology, sociology or financial system... enough already, the only thing that ever trickled down needed to be cleaned with toilet paper. Let's have public service announcements explaining to the people from the planet Mongo. that global climate change and evolution are done deals, and all there is left to do now is decide how we're going to address them. Tax sex, drugs and rock n' roll, to make the sex trade clean and safe, the drug trade adult and safe, and shut the MAFIAA up once and for all, this is all you're getting, leave the people alone, they get to figure out what fair use is without you're wet dreams of public rape being any part of the future of music or motion pictures (and if you don't like it, I'm certain there are thousands of other artists who'll only be too happy to take your place at the feeding trough.) Last, patents are good for five years... from the day of the first product sold and vanish after five years if you don't release a product... no software patents, death to patent trolls. There, I'm sure this will mess up thousands of things but it would fix the worst of what's killing us today. YMMV.
And obviously you don't remember how many corporation and their officers got sued for cooking the books by their stock holders. The courts were clogged for several years.
I'm gonna do this real fast, so with any luck, we can all put this to bed once and for all. George isn't the worst human being alive. He isn't bright. He's not retarded either. He is a criminal, involved in criminal conspiracies (the majority of evidence points to Dick Cheney as the primary perpetrator in most cases, but George was right there in the thick of it.) George ignored critical warnings on National Security leading directly to 9/11, instead George was setting the record for the longest summer vacation by a President in History, while Dick Cheney and the Bush Cabinet were desperately trying to revive the Star Wars Program from the 80s so Dick could funnel billions of dollars into Halliburton. George was involved in multiple national deceptions leading to a completely pointless and disastrous war in Iraq. He gutted the Bill of Rights, burned down the Geneva Convention, and sequestered innocent Americans to far off countries to be tortured to no particular value for National Security. He knew precisely what Catrina would do to New Orleans (he was in an emergency National Security Council meeting going over the projected impacts of the storm shortly before storm fall.) He let the disaster in New Orleans happen without aid or intervention. To this day, there is no reliable count of the number of people that died in the flood. What is available is that tens of thousands of poor people lost their homes forever and that wealthy property speculators have made billions of dollars snapping up their property at pennies on the dollar. This my friends was a cynical land grab, foisted on the backs of the poor who the government saw as a problem, and this was their solution. The property values of the 7th ward are now dramatically up. I could go on ad nauseum, but it should be absolutely clear that this administration was little more than a criminal syndicate and that we had 8 years of corporate hit men running our nation. The fact the George might or might not be an imbecile seems frankly unimportant in the face of the damage he did. I don't care if he's stupid, I do care that he broke my country, obstructed justice, destroyed two cities, and crashed the economy not once, but twice. George W. Bush is the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. We will pay for his disasters for at least another generation. Personally I hope he's a genius so he can fully appreciate what a toxic flow of human sewage he and his entire administration were. Oh, and for those who need references, ping me, I have about 4,000, The most amazing thing was that his crimes are so well documented and like the Bankers on Wall Steet, instead of sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff, they walk the streets, free men.
Actually this would be the class of millionaires that became such by stumbling out of a "Jackpot" womb, and there are more than a couple of those... ask Paris Hilton.