Big Business

Big Business seems to have its hands in everything these. They are advertising things that should never be advertised, like pharmaceuticals. Your doctor should be the one who tells you what drugs you need to take. Not some TV or Radio commercial. This practice should be banned, but it won't, because these large drug companies have too many politicians in the pockets.

Stock Market Bloodbath and Greenspan’s Retreat

By Mike Whitney

03/05/07 "ICH" -- - The contagion in the global markets is spreading like a brushfire and the shakeup that many of us have anticipated for over a year appears to be unfolding. Whether this is the “Big One” or not is irrelevant; a major downturn in the stock market will expose many of the systemic vulnerabilities in America’s “matchstick” economy and, hopefully, trigger greater congressional involvement.

Last night Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell for a fifth day in a row wiping out 8.6 % off the value of shares since hitting a seven-year high a week ago. The market declined by 3.34 percent to 16,642.25 points -- its biggest one-day fall in nine months. (CNN). The mood in the market is decidedly grim and normally enthusiastic investors are quickly dumping over-inflated shares of popular stocks.

It’s a bloodbath and it’s bound to carry over into US markets where the damage could be considerably worse.

The catalyst for the global correction is the growing strength of the yen and its effects on the “carry trade”. Americans will be hearing a lot about the carry trade in the next few weeks as well as other unfamiliar terms. In fact, we’re all about to get a crash course in sub-prime loans, hedge funds, derivatives and the “global liquidity crisis”. These are the main factors involved in what appears to be the beginnings of a major stock market flameout.

In the next few weeks, we’re going to hear industry mandarins and banking chieftains blame everyone else for the disaster they’ve created. Overstretched and underpaid Americans will be blamed for not saving their paltry wages and people with poor credit will be assailed for taking out loans they had no realistic chance of paying back.

But the real culprits are Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve. These are the guys who engineered the lethal “low interest” policy (after the dot.com meltdown) and flushed nearly $10 trillion into the flagging economy. Greenspan created the biggest equity bubble in history and put America’s economic future on a treadmill to oblivion. Recent gains in stocks have been predicated on margin debt, shaky hedge funds, and a plethora of cheap money that has nested in the market; all of these are directly related to Fed policy.

The Fed increased the money supply at such a furious rate over the last 6 years that it's inevitable that a certain amount of it would wind up in the stock market. That tells us that the skyrocketing market had less to do with growth (GDP) and confidence, than it did with the bundles of cheap greenbacks Greenspan sluiced into the system.

The American economy is built on a mountain of debt and an ocean of red ink. The masterminds at the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury think they can stem the tide of economic Armageddon by keeping the printing presses well-lubricated and running at full-tilt; flooding the market with worthless scrip.

Perhaps, they can! (As I am writing this the market has magically jumped from negative to positive territory!)

But is anyone taken in by this charlatan’s game? Institutional investors are not scarfing up teetering US equities after an Asian freefall! Something else is going on here and it stinks to high-heaven.

“Faith based” policy has its limits as we’re finding out in Iraq. The men who control the economic levers can only achieve so much with smoke and mirrors. They can prime the pump and churn out the fiat-money faster then anyone imagined, but eventually, reality will set in and the market will begin its inexorable march into the void.

Greenspan anticipated this crackup. Hell, he probably oiled the presses himself. That’s why he ambled off into retirement on a high-note leaving the rest of us to clean up his mess. He knows that Bernanke’s cheery braying on Capital Hill will amount to nothing; just like he knows that Paulson’s baling-wire approach to the economy is doomed to failure.

The “Maestro” has left us all in a major pickle. The stock market is flat-lining, the recession is bearing down on us like a laser-guided missile, and Dear Alan is slathering on the sun-block at his favorite resort on the Riviera.

Ciao, Alan.

Scientists breaks Light Speed Barrier

Scientists have finally exceeded the speed of light, causing a light pulse to travel hundreds of times faster than normal.

It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it.

The experiment is the first-ever evidence of faster-than-light motion.

The NEC Research Institute lab

The result appears to be at odds with one of the basic principles of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, that nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, about 186,000 miles per second.

However, Lijun Wang, one of the scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., says their findings are not at odds with Einstein.

She says their experiment only disproves the general misconception that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

The scientific statement "nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light" is an entirely different belief, one that has yet to be proven wrong. The NEC experiment caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to go faster than light.

For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapour of laser-irradiated atoms that boost the speed of light waves causing a pulse that shoots through the vapour about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum.

Light travels slower in any medium more dense than a vacuum, which has no density at all. For example, light travelling through glass slows to two-thirds its speed in a vacuum. If the glass is altered, the light can be slowed even further.

The NEC team produced the opposite effect. Inside a chamber, they changed the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal.

When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, the pulse reconfigured as some component waves stretched and others compressed. As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the original pulse.

The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward in time.

The NEC researchers published their results in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Colorado to use inmates to fill migrant shortage

Tough laws passed last year against illegal immigration have created a need for farmworkers.

DENVER — Ever since passing what its Legislature promoted as the nation's toughest laws against illegal immigration last summer, Colorado has struggled with a labor shortage as migrants fled the state. This week, officials announced a novel solution: Use convicts as farmworkers.

The Department of Corrections hopes to launch a pilot program this month — thought to be the first of its kind — that would contract with more than a dozen farms to provide inmates who will pick melons, onions and peppers.

Crops were left to spoil in the fields after the passage of legislation that required state identification to get government services and allowed police to check suspects' immigration status.

"The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn't go out of business," state Rep. Dorothy Butcher said. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work.

Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses.

The inmates will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid by the farms. The cost is subject to negotiation, but farmers say they expect to pay more for the inmate labor and its associated costs than for their traditional workers.

Advocates on both sides of the immigration debate said they were stunned by the proposal.

"If they can't get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restrictions on immigration.

Ricardo Martinez of the Denver immigrant rights group Padres Unidos asked: "Are we going to pull in inmates to work in the service industry too? You won't have enough inmates — unless you start importing them from Texas."

Farmers said they weren't happy with the solution, but their livelihoods are on the verge of collapse.

"This prison labor is not a cure for the immigration problem; it's just a Band-Aid," farmer Joe Pisciotta said.

He said he needed to be sure he would have enough workers for the harvest this fall before he planted watermelons, onions and pumpkins on his 700-acre farm in Avondale. But he's not thrilled with the idea of criminals working his fields.

"I've got young kids," he said. "It's something I've got to think about."

Pisciotta said he hoped the program highlighted what he viewed as the absurdity of Colorado's position — dependent on immigrant labor but trying to chase migrants away. He said the people leaving were not just those who entered the country illegally.

"Some of them have said, 'We think our paperwork is in order, but how about if it's not and we get caught on a glitch,' " he said.

Ever since the Democratic-controlled Legislature took a tough turn on immigration, the new requirements have worried those in the country legally and illegally.

Immigrant advocates allege that some sheriffs have authorized deputies to pull over Latino drivers on supposed speeding violations and ask them whether they are in the country legally.

And more stringent requirements put into effect last year made it harder to get a driver's license. Numerous U.S. citizens, including the daughter of a state legislator, were refused licenses because they lacked proper proof of citizenship. A judge has since ruled that the requirements must be revised.

Social service agencies say they have discovered few illegal immigrants on public assistance since the laws were passed.

Immigrant and business groups agree that the heated rhetoric has led to an exodus of Latinos — though no one is sure how many. Businesses including carwashes and construction firms have complained of a worker shortage.

Is the CIA counterfeiting dollars and blaming it on North Korea?

"Super notes" -- forged U.S. dollars of such high quality that even experts have trouble detecting them -- have taken on an almost mythic status among national security watchers. Supposedly, they're part of a plot to undermine confidence in the U.S. economy, and at times they've been called an act of war.

Their origins have tended to shift with the political winds; it was said that they originate in Iran, some have speculated that they come from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon (where they were supposedly produced by Syria) and lately the consensus has been that they're part of a sinister North Korean plan. Others have accused Israel of printing them.

But according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a respected German paper, their source may in fact be far closer to home than most people suspected [Translation by Watching America] …

The American secret service, the CIA, could be responsible for manufacturing the nearly-perfect counterfeit 50 and 100-dollar-notes that Washington pins on the terror regime of North Korea. The charge comes after an extensive investigation in Europe and Asia by the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung of Frankfurt, and after interviews with counterfeit money experts and leading representatives of the high-security publishing industry. […]

The administration of George W. Bush officially accused Pyongyang of the deed in the autumn of 2005, derailing Six-Party Talks on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Since then, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have increased considerably. America charges that North Korea is financing its rocket and nuclear weapons program with the counterfeit "Supernotes."

North Korea is one of the world's poorest nations and lacks the technological capability to produce notes of such high quality. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, North Korea is at present unable to even produce the won [the North Korean currency]. The sources, which do not wish to be identified, allege that the CIA prints the falsified "Supernotes" at a secret facility near Washington to fund covert operations without Congressional oversight.

U.S. officials have not responded to the story

RIAA Trivia

Question: What online service did the RIAA claim should be shut down because it has no legal use, and is primarily used to share illegal files?

Answer: The World Wide Web (circa 1994)


History

Few people remember this, but in the early days of the web, the RIAA proposed shutting down the web. That's right; if the RIAA had its way in the early 1990's, the web as we know it would cease to exist. No Yahoo.com, no Slashdot, no P2P, no online banking, no web based email.

The RIAA claimed in the early 1990's that the primary purpose of the web was for students to pirate music. At the time, I remember them making statements stating that web and internet services such as FTP were used primarily for sharing music illegally. They even accused the burgeoning web of being used primarily for illegally sharing music.

General Public Believed Downloading Any Music Was Illegal

In the mid to late 1990's, the general public believed that downloading music was illegal. If you walked into a public place and said "I download music from the Internet", everyone would believe you were a music pirate engaging in a criminal act. There is a large base of free public domain music (often just as good as commercial music).

How did the public come to believe this? From news stories and statements made by the recording industry. They did not educate consumers that there is a difference between legal and illegal music; they led the public to believe that all downloadable music was illegal by claiming that online music services offered at the time had no legal use, or by stating that file sharing is primarily for illegal use.

RIAA Prevents Digital Audio Tape Distribution

That's right. Thanks to the RIAA, we never had music on digital audio tapes (DAT) for our home stereos. Only analog cassettes. The RIAA prevented companies from distributing music on a superior tape format because they claimed that it would just be used for piracy.

"As a consortium of hardware manufacturers developed the R-DAT (rotary head digital audio tape) format, the RIAA and similar international groups tried to encourage the adoption of copying safeguards. Unable to reach agreement with the manufacturers, most labels did not release any prerecorded software in support of the format when it was introduced to consumers in 1987."

Source: http://www.riaa.com/issues/audio/history.asp

We never had general consumer distribution of digital audio tapes becuase of the RIAA (and similar groups). We never got past analog.

Note that they did not prevent CDR's from being produced, which clearly are used for a wide variety of essential applications.

What else would they be opposed to? HDTV (if they owned video rights, they would be)? Digital Music?

The Web Was Small

Back then, there were reportedly only 100 web pages in the world. No one talked about web "sites" back then, they were just pages. Yahoo was 1 web page with less than 100 links. Word of mouth made Yahoo popular.

Most people went to USENET to spend their leisure time. Everything you get out of a blog or any other news source was posted in USENET.

FTP was used for file storage. This is of course before the P2P sharing networks. So anything that was in any way pirated or illegal was stored on FTP sites.

Since the web had a nicer interface, people slowly started to use the web for linking to files on FTP (and later HTTP) sites. This is when the RIAA started complaining about how the web was used for sharing illegal files, and they argued that since the web had no legal commercial use, it should be shut down.

HTTP vs P2P

Everyone knows that the only difference between HTTP and Peer 2 Peer is that HTTP is 1 centralized peer transmitting to another, while P2P is multiple decentralized peers transmitting to another. What is the legal significance of one single origin point vs multiple origin points? Absolutely none. There is absolutely no legal significance whatsoever in the technology used by P2P networks.

Any service can be used to transfer files. At this time P2P has many benefits over HTTP, mainly in improving transfer times when a single pipe is overused, and adding redundancy at the expense of consistent distribution. P2P is the future of the web; all web sites will benefit by one day using P2P technology.

The DNS system is a perfect example of how multiple peers are used as remote services. Yes, DNS data may not be consistent from server to server, but it added critically needed redundancy and reliability.

Akamai uses multiple peers, spread globally, to improve delivery performance of its clients web sites, much like P2P networks.

Failed Business Models

Before the invention of recorded media, the only way for a musician to earn money was at a live performance. When recorded media was invented, everyone thought it would be the end of the performance industry. New business models had to be formed to permit recorded media.

Now, we have the ability for consumers to acquire and record onto their own media. This requires that the music industry create a new business model to deal with advancing technology; stifling technology is not the answer. It is not the consumer's fault that the RIAA has not developed a new business model to permit consumers to use the latest technology.

Conclusion

The RIAA is absolutely, positively wrong in claiming that P2P networks do not have a right to exist. P2P networks (such as Akamai) have proven their worth as DNS servers and global caching servers. Stifling P2P network growth will only stifle technological advancement and commerce.

Related articles:

September 26 1992:
"DAT has been slow to gain ground because (1)
there hasn't been sufficient support for the medium up to now (but in
discussing the shortcomings of the minidisk, Sony has reaffirmed its
support for DAT as a high end medium) and (2) That obnoxious SCMS
system which the RIAA extorted into the machines. "
source

Dec 21 1993:
"the National Music Publishers Association has filed a class-action lawsuit against CompuServe for copyright infringement on behalf of 140 Music Publishers. The main focus of the suit is Compuserve's MIDI Forum. The suit defines every download as a single infringment, and by seeking $100K in damages for each infringment, the damages would amount to over a BILLION dollars should the suit be successful. "
source

May 15 1993:"I'm not surprised at all. I expected something like this to happen, and
predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get legislation passed banning
sale of used CDs in the US. "
source

2006:
"Lawyer: RIAA wants to shut down the Internet"
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/8177.cfm

2006:
"RIAA Legal Ruling Could Shut Down The Internet"
http://infowars.com/articles/ps/internet_riaa_ruling_could_shut_down_net.htm

News not fit to print

Last weekend, I wrote here about the history of US government attempts to suppress information. My case study was the Kennedy Administration's successful effort to delay publication of the New York Times' story about CIA planning for the Bay of Pigs disaster. (Since then, several generations of Times editors have publicly regretted that decision. "Our biggest failures," Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote last year, "have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After the Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco.") Yet in these last two days, the Times has acceded to Bush Administration requests to withhold information from the American public. In yesterday's edition, the paper of record reports that it was "asked to withhold any mention of [Cheney's] trip until he had left Pakistan." What conceivable national security purpose was served by swearing the press pool to secrecy about this trip? And doesn't accepting these ground rules play into the hands of a hyper-secretive Vice-President whose signature contribution to our security has been misleading us into a disastrous war and carpet bombing our constitutional system? The secrecy does expose a national security problem: the "war" on terror is a rank failure and Pakistan is not the stable country that White House talking points try to sell us. Here's another instance of White House pressure. A front page article in Monday's New York Times --providing conditional evidence of Iranian weapons in Iraq--acknowledges that the paper acceded to Bush Administration requests that it withhold specific details about the weapons. As the Times reported: "In the course of the detailed briefing on the Hilla discovery, Maj. Marty Weber, an explosives expert, said that most of the E.F.P.s in Iraq use C-4 plastic explosive manufactured in Iran. At the request of the Bush Administration, The Times is withholding some specific details about the weapons to protect intelligence sources and methods." Hours after the story appeared, Congressman Dennis Kucinich issued a statement -- "The New York Times Plays into Bush Administration's Hand." "The White House," Kucinich says, "is up to its old scams again: Providing information by anonymous sources ..... This time, however, they added another trick to their bag: providing the information and prohibiting the Times from publishing it.....The New York Times should not print unsourced, unattributed assertions and then voluntarily hide the details from the American public..." The paper, he went on to argue, "is playing into the Administration's hand and providing further justification for an attack on Iran."