“Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the US copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show the administration’s cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry’s lobbying arms, and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July. One top official even used her personal e-mail account at least once during the negotiations with executives and lobbyists from companies ranging from AT&T to Universal Music.” You don’t say. Totally did not see this coming. Major surprise. Who’da thunk?
I’m sure it was Bush’s fault too. j/k
Go look up “Citizens United” as to why the US political system it fucked.
Remember, corporations are people and are allowed to buy the government wholesale with money laundered through a “501(c)(4)” and a PAC.
It’s a 2 way street. Men of conviction can’t be bought.
It’s of extreme importance to elect people who have integrety who won’t be swayed or corrupted by people with money.
The issue with politics is not simply that power corrupts, but that positions of power tend to attract the easily corruptible. We vote for those that are most likely to misrepresent us.
We should be electing those that scream “I don’t want that job!”
We desperately need a real third party here in the US. I didn’t bother voting in the last POTUS election because I thought both candidates were worthless. Where is Ross Perot when we need him? lol
Have you considered Ron Paul? He’s the only candidate interested in reducing bank influence and ending aggressive US foreign policy. Though I don’t know specifically what his IP/Copyright policies are, I can’t imagine he’d believe in perpetual copyright, and I know he’s against violation of due process/civil rights.
Ron Paul is a Republican.
Obama campaign slogans were also awesome, until the reality of the political system kicked in once he was in office. It would be pretty much the same with Ron Paul. There is also the issue that except for a couple of stand he is correct, he is bat shit insane on a plethora of others.
The system is too fundamentally dysfunctional for people to still harbor the nonsensical notion that electing someone from any of the major political parties will change anything.
True, but difficult to do.
Anyone who seeks power is unfit to wield it.
You do know that in something like 86% of elections its the guy who spent the most cash that wins right? They don’t have to buy the incorruptible man, they can simply cheat, just look at the cheap shots called “riders” on almost every bill, say you want to give the DHS new Orwellian powers to spy on the general public but can’t get support? Simple! Stick on a rider that says something to the effect of harsher sentences on child molesters, so that anyone that doesn’t vote for your bill is committing political suicide since it will be run non stop in every outlet that you voted for reduced sentences on child molesters.
This is the US, our politics and news are not about truth, it’s about who can cheat the best and spend the most, hence the near non stop ads for companies like ConocoPhillips and BP to buy off the news networks so that they wont cover anything that would tarnish the companies image like the fact that the seal isn’t holding in the gulf or the fact that natural gas fracking is putting massive amounts of pollutants into the drinking water supplies of the nation.
Neither of these companies sell anything that requires advertising, they don’t sell direct to you, even most BP branded gas stations don’t even carry BP made gas and either way you don’t need to be sold on natural gas or gasoline since if you need it you need it, and in the case of natural gas it comes from the local municipality or worse, privately held power company.
Money talks…
Change we can believe in! LOL
It sure does. When California’s tax rates are 1% over 1 million earnings. Upto 10%… and a movie such as Avatar makes 2.5billion, I’m sure the California government are going to bend over backwards to help them out.
Just like they did when Steve Jobs wanted his new HQ building’s built, and you can watch the recordings of it where he just simply said Apple pay a lot in tax, and it’d be a shame if the california state lost the tax if they had to move their HQ.
Hollywood have california in their pocket, if it wasn’t for hollywood and Apple, they’d be in more serious money problems then they already are!
Edited 2011-10-15 04:18 UTC
Don’t try to throw it all on Apple, it’s all of silicon valley, hell, don’t remember Enron?
Like I said you can watch Jobs tell the council they pay a lot of tax.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M skip a head to 11:04
I didn’t throw it all on Apple for any reason other then the reference to the video. But sure, post the video and/or quotes from Enron with reference to paying tax and it all being about the money.
But, if you want to bash Apple for no reason other then you just don’t like them, so be it. Pretty petty if thats true though.
When did Silicon Valley move to Houston?
Yeah, I shouldn’t have posted when half asleep, when it clicked in my head it was past the edit window.
So to rephrase, it’s a problem of massive deregulation nation wide across all industries, the citizens united decision was just another symptom of the revolving door in politics where they either come from or go to the companies that have paid them off, just look at Cheny and Haliburton.
Either way, it’s not just Apple, but pretty much every company, a few of the ultra rich have even come out complaining that their taxes are too low, just check the stuff that Warren Buffet has put out on the subject, theres nothing you can say that can disprove his data, even though the faux “news” shills try to call him a communist hippy even though Buffet is a ruthless capitalist that has enough money to buy their very lives.
Isn’t Joe Biden pretty much sponsored by all those guys?
I always assumed the Obama campaign picked Biden because of the financial support he would gain from the RIAA/MPAA.
With “Hollywood” Joe Biden as the Vice President what did you expect? He was Hollywood’s shill when he was in the Senate and I never expected him to forget who’s pockets his hands were in to when he became VP.
Obama cozying up to its major donors? Quelle surprise!
LOL, a liberal friend of mine told me recently that Obama was the best Republican president we’ve ever had
The US is the primary producer of content, and US companies are the ones most ripped off by pirates. So the US government has an interest in vigoursly enforcing copyright law. I might also add that the President himself made his wealth from his two books, so he himself is a content creator and would have sympathy toward content creators that don’t want their content ripped off. Those that want to give their works away for free via Creative Commons or whatever are free to do so. But that doesn’t mean that ever other content creator should be forced to give their stuff away too, or that they should be forced to just accept a situation where their stuff gets ripped off with impunity.
As a creator, I don’t hate copyright. But removing the rule of law and the “innocent until proven guilty” principle to enforce copyright is insane. Copyright is a two way street. An agreement between creator and society. If the creators want anyone to take them seriously, then maybe they should stop screwing with the law. Copyrighted works ARE supposed to make it into the public. Yet we haven’t see any in many decades thanks to the industry. Further, copyright law say NOTHING about making a profit. Why is it that Hollywood has no competition? Maybe because they are gaming the system? And you want to protect these people? This isn’t some poor author we are talking about here. These laws are only for the mega corporations.
Ron Paul guys, he’ll bring back the real and sane capitalism.. Its about time that corporatism dies and that we get rid of corporations control of government!
The whole world needs it!
Worldbank = worlds biggest mafia
Yes, Ron Paul, because he’ll let the free market decide that you have no free speech! Hope you like flat-top mountains and flammable water! because the free market has decided that we should become a toxic waste dump instead so that they can make more off the free market health care!
what we got now is corporatism not capitalism!
we need a currency that is not fiat currency, and a lightweight government.
Looks like you guys have no idea what real capitalism could be like.
Read about Thomas Jefferson’s thought of an ideal world, and you’ll see what I mean! At least read through his many famous quotes… He warned us about this corporatism leading to fascism long long ago!!
One example:
He saw it fu(king coming, and you guys are still in denial.. Wake up sheeps!
The cure, or at leas the best way to get closer to a better world is give power to Ron Paul.
Ron Paul tells the truth, nobody else does.
Thomas Jefferson
Or not.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp
Ironic, Capitalism is by definition irrational and insane. It is based on a metric which has no correlation with physical reality (insane) and operates of abstract subjective expectations (irrational).
That “rational and sane” Capitalism I am sure is stored right next to that mythical true Scotsman people from Aberdeen have been looking for the past millennia.
Capitalism is the worst of all possible economic systems, except for all of the others. 🙂
It doesn’t matter which party you pick from, you’re getting the same thing, because it’s the system itself which is FUBAR. A campaign system based on donations/bribes from corporations to get their guy in office. Guy/girl who raises the most money usually wins the game. Kind of like the game Monopoly.
Until we have a system where multiple parties can be on equal footing in an election, with the same amount of funds to spend out of a special fund, and NO campaign contributions at all, we can expect the government to be the same. Naturally, the various camps would have to account for penny spent, and things like food at Joe’s diner come out of their own pockets, not from the people. This Democrat/Republican system where the other parties are largely for laughs has failed, and it needs balancing out. It also need to be under much tighter restrictions.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/obama-raises-more-tha…
See here, the President (and all presidents do it) is busy collecting campaign contributions even now, so much of his attention is actually focused on running the country?
Edited 2011-10-15 00:00 UTC
Yes! We need to have federally funded elections and instant runoff voting! Also voting should be mandatory and a holiday to maximize turnout.
We also need to get rid of the electoral college as it only made sense before there was radio, ever since the majority of Americans had TVs it should have been completely abolished in favor of true majority elections.
Lastly, no more voting machines!
The way tax payer funded elections work is every candidate gets the same amount of cash, and is entitled to the same amount of exposure as every other candidate in all media formats, the candidate must receive at least say 10% of the votes to not have to pay back the money spent, if that candidate should use up all of his provided funds he can not receive any more, nor can he use his own personal income to pay for the campaign. Punishments for violating these terms should be very harsh and should rise anally with inflation, going as far as criminal charges should the violation be egregious enough.
IRV is basically you can vote for multiple candidates on the ballot, weighted 1ist, 2nd, 3rd, etc, those votes added up will determine the winner, thus allowing you to pick a 3rd party candidate without “throwing your vote away” by not picking the lesser of 2 evils.
Love approval voting / instant runoff. +1
Hate federally funded campaigns because it is trivial for the major parties to rig such an election. Like this:
How many non-D and non-R candidates received 10% off the vote in the past 100 years, even with heavy financial backing? A handful at best (remember, Lieberman and Murkowski won RE-election after being booted from the ticket by radical wings of the D and R parties, respectively).
So the major parties need only provide huge buckets of public campaign funding to raise the stakes until no other candidates are financially able to roll the dice. Would you run knowing that failing to garner a magic number (10%) would leave you financially devastated for the rest of your life? Or if you allow bankruptcy to remove the debt, then every indigent has a huge incentive to run, enjoy the high life at the public trough for a year, then declare bankruptcy and move on.
Admirable goal, but you need to think through the consequences.
But do try again. There’s certainly a LOT of room for improvement! 😀
Well thats the whole thing about leveling the information playing field as well as allowing more then one vote per ballot, 3rd parties have won higher seats before, usually after an established party implodes.
The biggest cash dump would be TV ads, so ban the campaign ads forcing only interviews. Either that or it does something like what you said and fringe candidates just lose their money as what has happened with the Nazi party in New Zealand who could never break 1%, least thats what I’ve heard from the Kiwis.
Democans and Republicrats are opposite sides of the same coin. One wants to take from the middle class and give to the poor. One wants to take from the middle class and give to the rich. That’s where the distinction ends.
Imagine the three classes in three concentric rings with thicknesses determined by population – The rich, the poor and the middle class… in the middle, of course. Now remove the middle class – that’s where we are headed.