| Subject: Digital Rights |
Author:
max broker
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Date Posted: 15:30:52 06/09/03 Mon
David Bowie, who, six years ago, sold $55 million in bonds collateralized by future royalty payments on his catalogue of music is now seeing the value of these bonds deteriorate due to free-music activists swapping music on-line.
The struggle to expand and defend the public's property is scoring some significant gains against abusive privatization of the public's property by copyright terrorists like Bowie, Disney, and Microsoft.
Monopolist Microsoft, as we see here, has been forced by free-software activists to slash the price of their products, just as the music cartel has been forced to do.
Should we decry the loss of private wealth by these individuals and corporations? (well, in Bowie's case, he took the money and ran, it's the bond holders who are dealing with the problem, and presumably the pension accounts who hold these bonds); The answer is no.
The hallmark of a good economy is in its ability to sustain a population, while defending and expanding the public's property. This would be in accordance with Adam Smith's outline for a productive economy and its analog to nature as a model, as described in, "Wealth of Nations" the defining capitalist textbook that has buttressed all economic thought since the Enlightenment.
These companies who practice a form of capitalism that shrinks the public's wealth are financial terrorists wielding, as Warren Buffet recently called them, "Weapons of mass financial destruction."
It's in everyone's interest to shrink these companies influence as expediently as possible. I'm not counting on Americans to help in this regard, just as I would not expect a heroin addict to support the elimination of heroin dealers. The responsibility falls primarily on Europeans and Asians. Will they step up to the plate?
Look; It's not hard to make money, as ExxonMobil does, by selling priceless tracts of Earth's bio-system for fractions of a penny on the dollar. If you had a free supply of Faberge eggs, and sold them for $1 each, you could make money too. ExxonMobil (XOM:NYSE), with its abuse of the public's trust in using government money to maintain unregulated drilling, refining, and shipping structures is extracting and/or destroying irreplaceable, priceless bio-assets (the Faberge eggs), and selling them cheap to SUV-crack heads in America, and American-swine wannabes elsewhere for pennies on the dollar.
What's hard would be for the people in America to have enough humility, spirituality, and grace to demand from their corporate handlers less egregious private profits selling alternative energy sources in a way that does not shrink the public's property, but defends public property, and possibly even expands public property as Napster-clones and free-software (Linux) does.
The time has come for public property to expand and be defended at all costs, and the American private wealth machine is getting in the way.
All efforts to derail this destructive juggernaut emanating out of Washington D.C. are welcome. Some more than others. Karma Banque offers a non-violent means out of the mess America has created. But in the absence of sufficient supporters to make the KbQ system work, the 'chemotherapy' option afforded by radicals seems like an acceptable alternative when you consider that it might stop the cancer of American values and pollution from spreading further.
In no way should the U.S. system, as it is currently iterated, be allowed to continue. As long as it dos, Americans will find themselves in the cross hairs - and justifiably so.
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