Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged power →  View Popular

1. The settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over orphan works, even though it has no claim to their copyrights.

5. Its guidelines for pricing will promote Google's commercial interests, not the good of the public, through the use of algorithms created by Google according to Google's secret methods.

6. It favors secrecy in general, hiding audit procedures, preventing the public from attending meetings in which Google and the Registry will discuss library matters, and even requiring Google, the authors, and publishers to destroy all documents relevant to their agreement on the settlement.

By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP [Association of American Publishers], and the AG [Authors Guild] are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.

This digitizing process could be subsidized as part of the Obama administration's economic stimulus, and the overall cost, spread out over ten to twenty years, would be manageable, perhaps $750 million in all. Meanwhile, Google and anyone else would be free to exploit the commercial sector. The national digital library could be composed from the holdings of the Library of Congress alone or, failing that, from research libraries that have not opened all their collections to Google.

Nationalism has long been a hallmark of the UAW and the entire AFL-CIO apparatus. In order to undermine class-consciousness and tie workers to the interests of the Big Three, the UAW has promoted the lie that workers in the US can defend their interests by increasing the competitiveness of their “own” companies and opposing the struggles of workers in Mexico, Canada, Europe and Asia.

That the Serbian government not only listens to such proposals, but enacts them is an embarrassment. The government of Serbia flaunts its disregard for its own citizens

UNICEF estimated that at least 1,600 infants and children under the age of five have died since the coup last June—13 a day—attributing the dramatic rise in the death rate to the near collapse of the public health system. The agency added that the 1.8 million children attending public schools have been effectively denied an education because of school closures.

My sense is President Obama may have underestimated the resistance he would encounter on many of these issues–and the political cost of taking the steps he thought he wanted to take.

The message, quite overly, is: if you are pissed, you are in a minority. The country has moved on. Things are getting better, get with the program.

What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic
drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class
victims — and so they started eating each other, using the
exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest
of the country.

Then, on March 11th — around the same time that mystery
Nostradamus was betting $1.7 million that Bear was about to
collapse — a curious thing happened that attracted virtually
no notice on Wall Street. On that day, a meeting was held at the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York that was brokered by Fed chief Ben
Bernanke and then-New York Fed president Timothy Geithner. The
luncheon included virtually everyone who was anyone on Wall Street
— except for Bear Stearns.

There was nothing to prevent that broker — let's say he
has only a million shares of IBM total — from making the same
promise to five different hedge funds. And not only could brokers
lend stocks they never had, another loophole in the system allowed
hedge funds to sell those stocks and deliver a kind of IOU instead
of the actual share to the buyer.

This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a
publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked
short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don't
actually have, flooding the market with "phantom" shares that, just
like those Island Rubles, depress a company's share price by making
the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.