Nice priorities, Mr. Holder (and you Democratic Senators, too)

Up to a third of war veterans in this country have had their homes foreclosed on since 2008. Not one of the top figures in the financial crisis that has brought us three years of recession has been prosecuted. But don't worry, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the case...
...of people burning MP3s and quoting news articles in blogs:

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder urged Americans to fink on their neighbors and report intellectual-property offenses like popping or hawking unapproved pharmaceuticals and downloading music and movies illegally.

The announcement at the White House came as the Justice Department kicked off a public campaign against intellectual-property theft, which like all successful wars against societal scourges, will have public-service announcements on MTV.

“Fortunately, we can all be part of the solution. Anyone who suspects an IP crime can visit cybercrime.gov, fbi.gov, or iprcenter.gov to report suspected offenses,” Holder said. “The public’s proactive attention to these issues can help us to disrupt the sale of illegal goods; to prosecute the individuals, gangs, and international criminal organizations that profit from these activities; and to stop those who would exploit the ingenuity of others for monetary gain.”

So far there’s no word on what kind of reward you’ll get for reporting your teen sister for using an app to turn a Miley Cyrus YouTube video into an MP3, but surely you’ll get at least a Scouting badge for your loyalty to Big Content and the American Way.

And it isn't just Eric Holder.

Have you ever embedded a music video that's posted on YouTube on your blog? Have you ever excerpted an article, as I just did above? For that matter, have you ever VISITED YouTube?

Your blog, this blog, even right-wing blogs, plus YouTube, and many other sites could be shut down under the sledgehammer that Congress is wielding as part of the Intellectual Property Protection Act, which is being voted on this week.

I'm disgusted to say that among the sponsors of this bill are the following Democratic Senators, ALL of whom should be receiving e-mails from everyone enlightening them as to the implications of what they are about to pass:

Charles Schumer (NY)
Dianne Feinstein (CA)
Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)
Chris Coons (DE)
Richard Blumenthal (CT)

The full name of this travesty is "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011." It sounds fine on the surface, right? The creative endeavors of others SHOULD be protected. Hell, I get plenty pissed off when I see my blog posts reposted in full on other blogs without attribution or permission. But this is a case of wielding a sledgehammer where a scalpel is required, and is reminiscent of those days when Dick Armey would talk about kids being able to hack into Pentagon computers with the V-Chip, or Ted Stevens explaining the internet as "a series of tubes" (and yes, THIS is still the best YouTube video ever made).

The bill appears on its surface to address foreign servers from delivering copyright-infringing content, but the implications that appear to have not even been considered by the bill's authors (or worse, perhaps they have been, have been identified by the Center for Democracy and Technology (see report PDF), and include:

• creating a notice-and-cutoff system that allows private parties
  to trget a website’s financial resources
  
• altering DNS results in a way which, if done as required under the bill, can compromise cybersecurity
  
• force ISPs to patrol ALL user traffic
  
• tag many if not all social media sites as infringement facilitators
  
• any claim of infringement, by any individual, could cause a site to be taken down. Imagine Catholic League head Bill Donohue's lawyers having a field day with this.
  
• 
  

The IP protection has NOTHING in it about fair use. Under this bill, everything from counterfeit medications to one-minute clips from last Sunday's Family Guy to snippets of articles from newspapers would be fair game. I recognize that there is a consumer protection aspect to this as well as protecting the interests of Big Entertainment. But there are ways to protect legitimate interests without running roughshod over kids sharing the latest Rihanna video on Facebook and on blogs whose function is to entertain, inform, and comment. And shame on any Democrat (and yes, I'm also talking to YOU, Mr. Franken) who is too lazy or cowardly or craven to understand the difference.

Funny...when it's health care for children, accountability matters a great deal

Remember Graeme Frost? He's the Baltimore seventh grader who spoke out in favor of the federal Children's Health Insurance Program because the program helped pay for his recovery from a devastating car accident -- and found himself the youngest person ever to be swiftboated by the lunatic right. They were perfectly OK with going after a twelve-year-old whom they thought didn't "deserve" to be in the program, but when anyone makes an effort to put ANY kind of accountability behind the billions -- probably trillions before it's all over -- of federal money being shoveled into the coffer of banks that are failing due solely to the mismanagement and greed of their executives, it's Scream Bloody Murder time, especially now that Barack Obama has decided that if banks are going to spend federal bailout money on junkets to Las Vegas* and on stuffing more tens of millions into the pockets of the very executives who ran their banks into the ground, perhaps a little accountability is in order.

How much health care or roads or schools could $143 billion have paid for?

Aren't you glad that we gave AIG a $143 bailout for luxury junkets for the company's salespeople and fat bonuses for its executives -- and the company is probably going to go belly-up anyway?

A number of financial experts now fear that the federal government's $143 billion attempt to rescue troubled insurance giant American International Group may not work, and some argue that company shareholders and taxpayers would have been better served by a bankruptcy filing.

The Treasury Department leapt to keep AIG from going bankrupt on Sept. 16, and in the past seven weeks, AIG has drawn down $90 billion in federal bailout loans. But some key AIG players argue that bankruptcy would have offered more structure and greater protections during a time of intense market volatility.

AIG declined to comment on the matter.

Echoing some other experts, Ann Rutledge, a credit derivatives expert and founding principal of R&R Consulting, said she is not sure how badly the financial system would have been rocked if the government had let AIG file for bankruptcy protection. But she fears that the government is papering over the problem with a quick fix that was not well planned.

"What we see now are a lot of games by the government to keep these institutions going with a lot of cash," she said. "This is to fill holes in companies' balance sheets, and they're trying to hold at bay the charges that our financial system is insolvent."

The deal that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York pressed upon AIG was intended to stop any domino effect of financial institutions falling because of their business ties to AIG. The rescue allowed AIG to provide cash to huge banks and other players who had invested in rapidly souring mortgages insured by the company.

Early this year, investors had begun privately demanding that AIG pay off its billion-dollar guarantees. But in mid-September, when the demands for cash reached a public crescendo, AIG had to admit that it didn't have enough cash on hand to meet the obligations.

In the first weeks of its federal rescue, AIG has used the loan money to post collateral demanded by these firms, sources close to those deals say.

"No one else benefits," former AIG chief executive and major shareholder Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg wrote to AIG's current chief executive on Thursday. "Unless there is immediate change to the structure of the Federal loan, the American taxpayer will likely suffer a significant financial loss."

Another concern is that in this depressed market, AIG, and the taxpayers that now own 80 percent of the company, will lose coming and going.

Anyone who believed that this bailout was anything other than a way of getting entrenched incumbents in Washington -- yes, Democrats as well as Republicans -- through the election, was an idiot. With absolutely no guarantees that the bailout of the company would do anything to keep it from collapsing, and no accountability whatsoever as to what the company would actually do with the money, this money -- our money -- was shoring up an expensive beach house with toothpicks in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

Barack Obama's talk about tax cuts is at this point disingenuous. He is not going to be able to cut taxes. I understand why he has to do it; he remembers the ghost of Walter Mondale saying at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, "President Reagan will raise your taxes and so will I. He won't tell you; I just did." And we all know what happened to him.

Neither is John McCain if elected -- if he were being responsible -- except that John McCain will do it anyway because the giant, insatiable maw of the preposterously wealthy cannot be satisfied with anything less than continued feeding with the lifeblood of this country's future:

McCain won't tell you this is why he's cutting taxes for himself and his friends. He'll tell you it's to "grow America." He'll come out with the old canard that "rich people create jobs." And there are plenty of Americans who'll believe it, because we've been trained to salivate at the word "jobs." But it's not about you, or me, or jobs. It's about greed. It's about the black hole at the center of every so-called "free marketeer" who thinks that if you just shovel enough cash into that hole, they'll be happy and throw a few pennies your way.

But this is where we are today, thanks to the Bush family and their cronies, who ALWAYS believed that the world was a private fiefdom for the benefit of their family members and friends, to John McCain, who supported policies that fed this notion and became one of those friends so he could benefit, and to spineless Democrats who have been too lazy or too frightened to articulate the reality that Ronald Reagan was wrong -- you can't have everything you want and it's all free if you just give the already wealthy even more.

Meanwhile, Circuit City, that wonderful company that fired all its store employees who actually knew something and replaced them with low-wage people unable to answer technical questions, is finding that their strategy backfired on them. The company is expected to announce over 150 store closings today -- and it may not even wait around till Black Friday to see how sales go that day. I don't fault the people working their now for taking jobs that were available, and I'm sorry that they're going to lose them. But this is yet another case of colossal mismanagement at the top -- and you may rest assured that those who made these decisions will suffer not one whit, and will be well taken care of out of the inevitable liquidation of the company.

Even the most well-run companies are struggling in this economic environment, and I'm not saying that poor performance is always a function of bad management. But like households that have some money socked away for lean times, well-managed companies are in a position to weather the vagaries of the business cycle. But AIG played with fire and got burned, and Circuit City made a bonehead, supply-side, penny-wise and pound foolish decision, and both companies deserve what they're going to get -- except that those who brought them to this state aren't the ones who are going to find themselves unable to afford so much as an oven-stuffer roasting chicken for Christmas this year.