Have any of you ever watched The Corporation
Because that was the first thing I thought of when I read this story about a woman being fined for 2 million dollars for illegally downloading $20.00 in songs, and then I thought about the health insurance companies last week testifying to Congress that “Yeah, we’re screwing people and we’re not going to stop and I dare you to do something.”
And then in other news, Froomkin is out, but the powers that be at the Washington Post publish a bullshit op-ed from Paul Wolfowitz (and don’t forget about his girlfriend at the World Bank, Dave) right along side their stable of neocon morons.
Ain’t America great?
Aaron
To quote Carlin:
It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.
Zifnab
Government by mafia.
You’ve got your RIAA, roughing up folks who cross their turf. The Insurance / Hospital system that demand “protection” payments lest something “happen to you” and you get slapped with a bill for the last fourteen people who couldn’t pay (maybe because they were bankrupted in the same way you’re about to be). And then there’s the media racket. Pay us to tell you what we want you to hear. :-p
It’s just layer upon layer of scam.
Death By Mosquito Truck
You been a Democrat for what, seven months now, and yer already hatin on America?
Comrade Mary, Would-Be Minion Of Bad Horse
He’s been a Deadhead longer. John’s the moliest of moles.
Comrade Stuck
Obama is to blame for it all, including Kim Jong Il’s case of diaper rash and Jerry Garcia’s drug overdose. Impeach now!
Warren Terra
Terrible documentary, which I actually took friends to see in a theater because I thought the topic was so important, and I almost never see documentaries in theaters. I can’t remember now what I hated about the movie, but it really was not effective.
I strongly recommend Frederick Lewis Allen‘s 1935 book The Lords Of Creation on the topic of corporate power and irresponsibility. Sure, the book is 70 years old but the problems it describes have only gotten worse, and as it’s apparently only rarely been out of print it’s easy to find cheap used copies – indeed, that’s why I read it, on a whim.
Cassidy
Man, I am so glad we had 500+ comments telling us how much more importnat it is for gays to marry than these poor people losing their health coverage. I was confused as the article elicited a great deal of sadness and empathy from me, but then I was able to go back and get my priorities straight.
John Hamilton Farr
Well, that’s one way to put it.
Danton
Dave? Really? Wolfowitz’s girlfriend at the World Bank is named Dave?
Woody
Also: Dos Passos USA Trilogy
edmund dantes
Don’t forget the recent rulings from the Supreme Court on DNA evidence and Age Discrimination.
Little hint they were 5-4 decisions, and if you wonder which side won the powered elite or the individuals, you haven’t been paying attention.
I’ll give you the whole “but he was a bad guy” (in the DNA case plus they chose to attack in a weird way), but I wish more people would understand that this order doesn’t just affect bad guys it affects everyone. Alas a lot of people don’t understand the true meaning of the saying “There but for the grace of God go I”. It sucks having to defend NAMBLA, murderers, rapists, etc, but if the rights and privileges can be stripped away simply because you’re a “bad guy”, you better hope you never get pegged as one.
Comrade Dread
Mother******s.
Alright. If the insurance companies are going to play it that way, Congress should tell the corporate whores among them to shut the **** up and threaten to burn the whole damn thing to the ground.
gbear
@Cassidy:
Man, I am so glad that we have straw arguments to comment on this morning.
Froomkin shouldn’t have any trouble landing a gig somewhere else, but I can’t help but think that he’s going to wind up taking a big salary cut. The Wapo may be losing money, but I bet they still have really deep pockets for their management and ‘name’ staff. I hope he does well in his next venture and that we see him again soon.
jrg
Can someone explain to be why the music “industry” even exists anymore?
We used to need the tastemakers to guide the top-40 hits, and to homogenize musical tastes because CDs take up shelf space. MP3s don’t. All these people did was assist production and manage the scarcity associated with physical media. Now, production has (at least to some degree) become commoditized due to inexpensive, high-quality digital recording, and the only scarcity left is artificial.
The music industry is a dinosaur.
Those insurance execs better wake up and smell the coffee. They are doomed, anyway, but attitudes like this will only catalyze their demise.
Shygetz
@Cassidy: As we speak, I am both typing and chewing gum. I’m sorry you find trivial multitasking such a chore.
DanF
Ya know … I seem to remember someone saying that winning the election was the easy part. “Now the real hard work begins.” I think it was that Obama fellow. There is no way in hell corporate America is going to just give away power. It has to be taken from them.
Libertina
@Warren Terra: I saw it too, and I have been on board with the point it was making since I was a kid. But it was indeed very ineffective, badly organized, repetitive and too long. The most memorable thing about the movie was how much my butt hurt after sitting through the whole thing in the theatre.
Someone needs to make a new movie about some of the same subject matter…even a couple of situations like John mentioned in this thread and juxtapose them, so that people can see how badly they are getting screwed.
Ralph Nader has been screaming this message into a canyon for decades. If only he weren’t such a kook on everything else, although, maybe dwelling on this situation is what made him crazy. I dunno.
Bill E Pilgrim
It should be illegal to download the right wing drivel from the Washington Post these days.
Talk about having priorities skewed.
burnspbesq
There is litigation ongoing in California involving rescission, and historically when plaintiffs win “insurance bad faith” cases they can be awarded punitive damages.
The position of the insurance companies on rescisson seems to me to be deeply disingenuous. They say that they rescind the coverage of people who misrepresent whether they have pre-existing conditions. But in the cases that have been publicized, the supposed pre-existing condition doesn’t seem to be a predictor of higher risk of the expensive condition that eventually crops up. And my personal experience suggests that the notion that people misrepresent pre-existing conditions is a pretext, not a real thing. I’ve changed jobs four times in the 11 years since I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and I have never been asked about it. If I have no duty to disclose, fuckers, how can I misrepresent?
Xenos
If it is too difficult, due to entrenched power and corruption in DC, to stop the private insurers, maybe the approach should be to abandon DC based reform for now. These insurers are already regulated at the state level. They need to be regulated out of business. What state governments are allowing the worst excesses by insurers? That may be the place to start.
Zifnab
@Cassidy:
Cause it’s either gay marriage or universal health care. You can’t have both, for that way lies madness.
@jrg:
Because it makes a shit-ton of money. And because music doesn’t go from guitar to eardrum without a large number of intermediaries. You’ve got your recording studios, your production companies, your marketing firms, your distribution centers, your retail outlets, stadiums and ticket vendors and third party ticket resalers, radio stations, music video producers and editors, MTV, MTV2, MTV2: Underground, Son of MTV, YouTube, MySpace, a hundred thousand music blogs, the advertisements attached to those tv stations, websites, radio stations, stadiums, and retail outlets…
The industry exists because it is big and well-grounded. And because a 14-year-old girl paying with her mother’s credit card isn’t educated enough yet to know that Britney Spears, Hannah Montana, and the Jonas Brothers aren’t actually good musicians.
Punchy
Peter Framton was a WaPo writer? Did he come alive?
The Grand Panjandrum
@Death By Mosquito Truck:
He’ll be sporting a Che t-shirt, kaffiyah and Kalashnikov by the end of the year. It’s inevitable. Happens to all the hardcore leftists. I’m just waiting for his first video of Tunch and Lily burning the flag.
cleek
he had a daily column: Show Me The Way
Captain Haddock
Froomkin helped keep me sane during the Bush years. He deserves the best — one of very few American journalists with balls.
kay
The for-profit health care-insurance industry is too big to fail.
I’m usually optimistic, but the health care delivery/insurance industry is just mammoth. They take in a lot of money acting as wildly inefficient middleman and gatekeeper.
I think we’re probably stuck with rationing. They may deign to offer some crappy overpriced “product” to appease the uninsured peons, but they’re not letting go of the cash cow they created.
Have you looked at health care industry executive salaries? Jesus. They make bankers look like pikers.
Elie
Lets disabuse ourselves of pointless innocense…life is hard and we have to fight for what is right — to help poor people and the weak and to achieve justice.
We would like to think that the corporation is just some evil entity separated from our reality and our wills, but we support it even if quietly. It is up to us to shape what comes out of our means of production. We have to move our wills into shaping not only our politics but our consumer habits. Funny how we always point our fingers at some external cause for these evils.
It starts and ends with us — our appetites, our territoriality and our competitiveness.
I of course, am innocent (smile) as I show up for my well paid job in the health care informatics arena…it couldnt be ME that is contributing to the reality that our healthcare is exorbitant and that people who need care don’t get it. Instead, the money in the system goes to paying my salary and the salaries of others like me…
It is brutal but true that change is going to have to start with all of us who scream for justice and for the system to work yet also contribute to its problems.
Do I want to give up my nice job? Well no — but I realize that I am and many others are going to have to change a lot if we are to squeeze percentage points off that massive amount we spend on healthcare for example.
I really want to get clean and get real and stop blaming from a position of false innocense. Lets figure out what we can really do and expect hard work …
burnspbesq
Of course, it may be that the insurance companies simply choose not to mess with me because I work for a law firm with over 1,000 lawyers. Screwing me over would be roughly equivalent to getting into an argument with somebody who owns a newspaper.
R-Jud
@Brick Oven Bill: Dammit, if you’d mentioned oil shale or lesbians, I would’ve had BOB Bingo!
burnspbesq
Some of the most profitable business that the health insurance carriers write is their coverage of Federal employees. GSA could be doing a lot more to drive changes in their behavior.
Bill H
@burnspbesq:
The policies you have gotten have been group policies with no exclusions for preexisting conditions. You are not at risk of having your policy cancelled. Wait until you go to buy an individual policy. You can bet you will be asked about it and you will not get a policy. If you do not disclose it and you get ill, your medical bills will not be paid and your policy will be cancelled. If you disclose it you will be placed in some sort of “risk pool” and will get a half-assed policy that excludes payment for almost every illness that you might ever get, because it might be related to your diabetes.
Notorious P.A.T.
Yes, I’ve seen it. (My dad used to work for IBM. Ouch)
If I ran the country I would amend the Constitution to make our freedoms apply only to actual people, not legal constructs.
gbear
@edmund dantes:
If there were any justice in the world, Alito would wake up tomorrow as a 87 year old man. I don’t want this guy on the court for the rest of my life. From the NYT:
Because when you’re on death row, there’s nothing you’d rather do than play games with the criminal justice system.
Comrade Dread
Or gay universal heath care. (Add your own suppository joke here.)
They had to let him go because his columns were too distorted.
burnspbesq
@Bill H:
Well, there’s your appeal to wingnuts, then: the bad behavior of health insurance carriers is fucking with the labor markets, making people reluctant to change jobs or start new businesses, and we can’t have that, now, can we?
It’s an argument that has the added benefit of being true. Not that wingnuts care about that, of course …
bago
Who knew that Scranton was in West Virginia?
Notorious P.A.T.
I’d give up my job if it would stop people from being killed for profit.
wonkie
When my mother in law dies, my husband and I are moving to Canada. Our primary motive is access to affordable health care, but I also intend to become oblivious to politics.
asiangrrlMN
My brother’s trying to get me to watch The Corporation and Sicko, (he’s a Republican who’s slowly, oh so slowly, moving towards Independent. He voted for Obama) because they outraged him so. I haven’t because, quite frankly, I’m pissed off enough. I don’t really need to stoke my anti-THE MAN fuel any further.
However, for those who have seen Sicko, is it worth watching for someone who is firmly on the side of socialized medicine?
P.S. I can’t wait for Michael Moore’s newest one on bailing out the CEOs. While the trailer plays, the ushers were walking up and down the aisle with collection cans.
To me, much of my frustration is, how much can we do, exactly? We cannot outspend big Pharma or any other corporation, even en masse. So, what do we do besides pester our Congress people endlessly?
Brachiator
Of course, this file sharing case is the poster child for Pyhrric Victory. A lone single mother gets hit with a fine that she will never pay, meanwhile in the sane universe, the record companies (and tv networks) have already caved on their former hard line against Apple, Amazon and other companies, and this case has had absolutely no impact on people downloading tunes. None. At. All.
Similarly, the insurance companies think that they are playing with a winning hand, but the game is changing and they haven’t a clue.
Well, no. The music industry is sweating bullets. Distribution centers for CDs are rapidly disappearing, cause nobody buys CDs anymore. Retail outlets? Uh, Tower Records and other stores no longer exist. Radio stations? Uh, the kids don’t listen to radio anymore, and even “the next new thing” – satellite radio is dying and will soon be forgotten. The record companies and some artists are trying to control YouTube (Van Morrison had almost all his old stuff pulled), only to find that they are shooting themselves in the foot, and doing nothing to increase sales of music.
Live performance is the last stand, but this is not nearly as lucrative as it used to be.
On the other side, though, aspiring musicians are finding that without the support of a music industry infrastructure, it is much harder to get recognition. Not everyone wants to be small, pure and indie.
And so it goes.
gbear
@R-Jud:
?? Did b.o.b. get banned and deleted again? I didn’t see a comment by him above your comment.
Xenos
@wonkie: Great idea. You won’t have to worry about wingnuts, lefty politically correct types, and backwards cultural separatists who can’t forget losing a war more than 150 years ago. Not in Canada – no way.
/snark
Maybe, like me, you will just find another country’s foibles relatively quaint and tolerable, while the same cultural and political movements at home drive me to distraction. Maybe it is just the murderous results of our (American) problems that is so distressing.
gbear
@Brachiator:
Brachiator, have you ever checked out Think Indie? The independent record stores are taking steps to stay open and are working with bands to give then a voice.
Gus
Yay, a plug for one of my favorites! I don’t know why Dos Passos doesn’t get more credit. I don’t remember his work being assigned in any of my lit classes. Maybe it’s because, as far as I know, he never equalled the quality of those three novels. I have them all in a single volume, a book I keep coming back to again and again. It captures the zeitgeist of the era pretty well.
liberalMom
We watched it last weekend! Horrifying, just horrifying.
A nice antidote is The Take, a film by Naomi Klein (of Shock Doctrine fame) and her husband, Avi Lewis. Equally horrifying corporate and government goings-on are documented, but, for once, the good guys win. It’s well worth a rental.
freelancer
Who’s gonna go halvsies on this?
Comrade Kevin
It’s Too Big To Fail.
inthewoods
With the way the healthcare debate is going, it is pretty clear that our corporate masters are in charge of both parties. I say that as a normal, non-tinfoil-hat wearing individual. I mean, really, if over 60% of Americans want a public option, why do we not have it?
Brachiator
@gbear:
Thanks for the link. I have a lot of sympathy for bands trying to get noticed. On the other hand, 80% of the staff in my office is under age 35. Those who are in their 20s don’t buy CDs, don’t purchase from record stores at all, and the others have not done so in years. One guy is actually in a band, and it’s a constant struggle for them to get any kind of notice.
AWJ
@Gus:
After writing the U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos, already disillusioned with the left, became a full-on wingnut (he was a big fan of McCarthy in the 1950s) Possibly or possibly not coincidentally, he never managed to write anything to match the U.S.A. trilogy again.
gex
It’s one thing having the corporations lobby for all the favoritism we’ve seen them get from our government. What’s more depressing is that the American voters will not vote for anyone who is not “pro-business”. 30 years of voting for corporate interests, if not way more, and we’ve really no right to complain. This is what we demanded too.
gex
@Cassidy: Really? Who said gay marriage was more important than health care? Link please.
different church-lady
Yes, it will be a wonderful thing when the music industry is dead, radio stations are dead, all music is free, musicians have no model to get paid and the only way we find out about new music is through TV commercials.
Do you people actually think before you post?
AhabTRuler
@different church-lady: Yes, because no groop has ever survived without major label support. I mean, Steve Albini is a prick, but i doubt that he would share your concerns.
gbear
A coworker and I are both in our 50’s. I used to play in bands, sometimes full time, sometimes in original music bands who had to keep day jobs to survive. I started out as a record collector so for me having the ‘product’ is as important as having the song, but my coworker gets all of his music via ‘free’ sources. Drives me nuts to the point that I don’t like lending him my CDs because first thing he does is copy them.
Of the CD’s I’m buying for myself, I’d say that only 1 in 20 of current music (not reissues) is from a major label. Most of the bands I listen to have either quit or been kicked off their major label, and have landed on labels like Yep-Rock or Matador. There is a LOT of that indie product around so I hope that Think Indie can make a go of it. The major labels can go bite a big fat fart (Take that, different church-lady!)
Qbert
My son’s 9th grade class in Canada watched The Corporation last week. If a US teacher had dared do that, the wingnuts would have burned down the school.
Agree about “The Take.” The Third World can teach Americans a lot about fighting back.
asiangrrlMN
@liberalMom: Thanks for the recommendation. Netflix has it, so I will put it on my queue.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
@different church-lady:
All music won’t be free, and musicians (good ones, anyway) will still make money. The rest of the music industry can go fuck itself, as far as I’m concerned. Am I supposed to be sad that shitty corporate-programmed radio stations, overpriced asshole ticketing firms and scummy record companies full of useless douchenozzles might cease to exist? Yeah, boo fucking hoo.
different church-lady
@AhabTRuler:
As far as I can tell, the attitude being expressed here is “eff the music industry”, not “eff the major labels.”
You really think people are going to not download/nap/torrent music just because it’s not on a major label? I’ve got personal experience with my own album to tell you otherwise.
@tripletee (formerly tBone):
Translation: “baby, bathwater — it’s all the same to me.”
DougJ
Good movie.
kth
IIRC, the Supreme Court reduced the punitive damages in the Exxon Valdez case to about a half a billion. So (if this judgment holds up), basically the courts are saying that stealing 3 songs off the internet is 1/250 as bad as destroying an entire habitat (and livelihood for the natives of the area).
Brachiator
@gbear:
To be fair to them, the younger people in my office buy most of their music online. It is interesting to see how quickly and easily they moved beyond the need to have a physical CD for their music.
There is a lot of indie product, but the problem is that it stays “indie,” compartmentalized and not breaking out of the fringe. I listen to public radio shows and podcasts featuring new bands, and am dismayed at how few of them break out of the narrow strata to which they are consigned. And even though I live in Southern California, which is thick with musicians, there are fewer good venues where they can actually play and which are affordable for a range of audience. The situation is worse for jazz, which is pretty much dying as anything other than a niche art form.
However, as dismal as the music scene is in some ways, it is interesting to see people adjust the the possibilities of new technologies.
Josh Hueco
I read the book, ‘The Corporation.’ Chilling. I also recommend ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman.’ I don’t know if hyper-acquisitiveness is listed as a mental illness in the DSM, but it ought to be.
burnspbesq
@Brachiator:
Interesting, and a bit sad. I don’t want to turn this into audiophiles vs. everybody else, but if all you’ve ever listened to is mp3’s you have only a vague idea of what real music sounds like.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
Musicians who think they actually need all of the useless cruft that has built up around the music industry – yeah, toss ’em. Smarter ones that can adapt to changing conditions will take their place.
Steeplejack
@Xenos:
All of them. That’s the problem.
I am somewhat familiar with only two state legislatures, and, admittedly, they are both Southern, but I don’t think they’re far from the norm. Think the U.S. House of Representatives but with an even lower average intelligence and a much lower “rent to own” graft price. Ugh.
mclaren
Careful, John, your love beads are showing.
I look forward to the pic of you with an afro and an AK-47 and two white women sitting on wicker chairs with a come-hither look.