CFAA == Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Nominee For Attorney General Tap Dances Around Senator Franken’s Question About Aaron Swartz

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Wed, Feb 18th 2015 11:31am

While there have been many egregious CFAA cases, one of the most high-profile, of course, was that of activist Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for downloading too many research papers from JSTOR from the computer network on the MIT campus. The MIT campus network gave anyone — even guests — full access to the JSTOR archives if you were on the university network. Swartz took advantage of that to download many files — leading to his arrest, and a whole bunch of charges against him. After the arrest, the DOJ proudly talked about how Swartz faced 35 years in prison. Of course, if you bring that up now, the DOJ and its defenders get angry, saying he never really would have faced that much time in prison — even though the number comes from the DOJ’s (since removed) press release.

Swartz, of course, tragically took his own life in the midst of this legal battle, after facing tremendous pressure from the DOJ to take a plea deal as a felon, even as Swartz was sure he had done nothing illegal or wrong. Since then, there have been a few attempts to update the CFAA to block this kind of abuse, but they have been blocked at every turn by a DOJ that actually wants to make the law even worse. This includes the White House’s latest proposal for CFAA reform, which would actually make more things a felony under the CFAA, and could drastically increase sentencing for things that many of us don’t think should be a crime at all — such as tweeting out a list of worst passwords on the internet.

Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has done his best to ignore or downplay any suggestion that his Justice Department abused the CFAA in going after Swartz. And it looks like his likely replacement is trying to do the same.

Senator Al Franken questioned nominee Loretta Lynch about Swartz and the CFAA (.pdf) and got back a response that is basically her avoiding the question. She doesn’t say anything about Swartz, but goes off on some FUD about the dangers of malicious hackers and how the DOJ needs the tools to fight spyware. She then claims that the newly proposed CFAA changes are okay because they only increase the possible maximum sentences, but not the minimums, leaving things up to the discretion of judges (and prosecutors).

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This is such a total braindead law enforcement view of things: that if only there were greater punishment it would scare the “bad people” out of doing what they’re going to do. That’s never really worked, and especially not in this area, where the law is being abused to go after people who don’t think they’re actually doing anything wrong.

Second, it just plays up the FUD that “bad stuff is happening” so “something must be done.” But it ignores how vague the law is and how it’s wide open to abuse. A good law enforcement official would ask for clearer laws that more narrowly target actual bad behavior, rather than celebrating a broad and vague law that can be, and is, widely abused just to rack up more DOJ headlines and “victories.”

How Trade Deals Boost the Top 1% and Bust the Rest

Robert Reich

Monday, February 16, 2015

Suppose that by enacting a particular law we’d increase the U.S.Gross Domestic Product. But almost all that growth would go to the richest 1percent. 


The rest of us could buy some products cheaper than before. But those gains would be offset by losses of jobs and wages.

This is pretty much what “free trade” has brought us over the last two decades.

I used to believe in trade agreements. That was before the wages of most Americans stagnated and a relative few at the top captured just about all the economic gains.

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The fact is, trade agreements are no longer really about trade. Worldwide tariffs are already low. Big American corporations no longer make many products in the United States for export abroad.

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To the extent big American-based corporations any longer make stuff for export, they make most of it abroad and then export it from there, for sale all over the world – including for sale back here in the United States.

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In fact, today’s “trade agreements” should really be called “global corporate agreements” because they’re mostly about protecting the assets and profits of these global corporations rather than increasing American jobs and wages. The deals don’t even guard against currency manipulation by other nations.

According to Economic Policy Institute, the North American Free Trade Act cost U.S. workers almost 700,000 jobs, thereby pushing down American wages.

Since the passage of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, America’s trade deficit with Korea has grown more than 80 percent, equivalent to a loss of more than 70,000 additional U.S. jobs.

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The old-style trade agreements of the 1960s and 1970s increased worldwide demand for products made by American workers, and thereby helped push up American wages.

The new-style global corporate agreements mainly enhance corporate and financial profits, and push down wages.

That’s why big corporations and Wall Street are so enthusiastic about the upcoming Trans Pacific Partnership – the giant deal among countries responsible for 40 percent of the global economy.

That deal would give giant corporations even more patent protection overseas. It would also guard their overseas profits.

And it would allow them to challenge any nation’s health, safety, and environmental laws that stand in the way of their profits – including our own.

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Global deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership will boost the profits of Wall Street and big corporations, and make the richest 1 percent even richer.

But they’ll bust the rest of America.

How Third Way Trade Agreements Study Distorts Via Omission to Pave Way for TTP and TTIP

By Kenneth Thomas, Naked Capitalism

Posted on February 17, 2015

Third Way (h/t TPM), a Democratic pro-trade think tank, has released a new study, “Are Modern Trade Deals Working?” It examines the various “free trade” deals the U.S. has signed since 2000 to conclude that 13 of 17 have led to an improvement in our goods (not including services; see more below) trade balance with the countries involved, giving a net improvement over the 17 agreements studied of $30.2 billion per year.

I did a similar analysis of this very question (though in less detail than the Third Way study) in 2012. Unlike the Third Way report, my post included all U.S. free trade agreements (rather than starting in 2001 like Third Way) as well as the effect of the 2000 agreement for Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) with China. So, compared to the Third Way study, my post includes the FTAs with Israel, Canada, and Mexico, but did not consider the Panama FTA, which had not yet come into effect when I posted. My conclusion was essentially the same as Third Way’s, that the effects of the agreements on our trade in goods were usually positive, but of small size (the effect of the Israel FTA was also small). Because the Third Way study begins in 2001, however, it omits the impacts of NAFTA and PNTR with China. However, as my post showed, they are the most important by far.

This fact is not lost on opponents of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Lori Wallach of Public Citizen Global Trade Watch told the Associated Press that “studies such as Third Way’s make a big deal out of modest trade improvements with countries like Panama, and gloss over huge trade deficits with major trading partners such as South Korea, Mexico and Canada.” She’s right.

In 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, the United States had a surplus with Mexico on trade in goods of $1.7 billion. In 1995, it went to a deficit of $15.8 billion, and in 2014 the goods trade deficit was $53.8 billion, down from 2007′s peak of $74.8 billion. This was in sharp contrast with the analysis of Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott, who predicted trade surpluses on the order of $9-12 billion through the 2000s, even as they admitted that the peso was overvalued (it collapsed in value in the December 1994 “Tequila crisis”).

Meanwhile, the balance of trade in goods with Canada went from a deficit of $10.8 billion in 1993 to $34.0 billion in 2014. Note that the U.S. had a peak deficit of $78.3 billion in 2008, which collapsed to  $21.6 billion in 2009.

In 2000, the year PNTR was adopted, the United States had an $83.9 billion goods trade deficit with China. In May of that year, the International Trade Commission (h/t David Cay Johnston) released a report estimating that the trade balance would worsen by a further $4.3 billion. According to the article, the U.S. Trade Representative and the White House both criticized this study strongly. And in fact, the 2001 deficit fell to $83.1 billion. However, in 2002 it was $103.1 billion, an increase more than four times the ITC prediction, and by 2014 it had grown to $342.6 billion.

By including trade in goods but not trade in services, Third Way is admirably the stacking the deck against its own position. It points out that the U.S. has a global surplus in trade in services of $232 billion in 2014, including a $45 billion surplus with Canada and Mexico. However, it doesn’t mention that the U.S. goods trade deficit was $737 billion in 2014, or that the country’s overall 2014 trade deficit was $505 billion, up from $477 billion in 2013.

The ultimate question is whether TPP and TTIP are going to be more like the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement, or more like NAFTA and PNTR. Considering that the TPP includes all the NAFTA countries, Australia, Chile, Japan, and six others, comprising “nearly 40 percent of global GDP,” I think it’s safe to assume that it will have a much bigger impact than the FTAs with Australia or Chile, for instance. Similarly, since the European Union has an economy about the same size as the U.S. economy, I believe the TTIP will also have big consequences.

Moreover, we have to remember that these are much more than trade agreements. Both of them have increased protections for investors, patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property, and in both of them the U.S. is advocating the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement so companies can sue governments through arbitration rather than courts, something that has proven more favorable for companies vis-a-vis both governments and consumers. So, in addition to the negative effects on U.S. workers that we would expect on the basis of the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, all signatory countries are likely to suffer from higher prices for medicine and assaults on their regulations through investor-state dispute settlement.

Well all the big breaking news came out of the Toy Group last night.

First, we have an answer to the last minute scratch of the best in breed Pekingese, Pequest General Tso-

Another midstate competitor, a Pekingese named General (Pequest General Tso) won its best of its breed competition Monday at Westminster and was slated to compete in the toy group. However, the 2-year-old dog was excused from the ring as judging began.

Dog show announcers on CNBC said the young dog was overwhelmed by the situation and his owner and handler, David Fitzpatrick of York County, opted to withdraw.

Interesting that the only source in all of Google News is from Pennlive.  Don’t people care about dog breeding any more?

The second bit of big news is that the group winner, Shih Tzu Hallmark Jolei Rocket Power is co-owned by Patty Hearst.  Yes, that one.  From Associated Press in The Guardian–

“People move on,” she said, smiling at Rocket. “I guess people somehow imagine you don’t evolve in your life. I have grown daughters and grand-daughters and other things that normal people have.”

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Hearst has been involved in the dog show world for more than 10 years. She said many are surprised to find out she’s moved on to play with pooches.

Listed as Patricia Hearst Shaw, she turns 61 on Friday and is one of Rocket’s three co-owners. She’s mostly worked with French bulldogs and one of them won an award ribbon earlier in the day.

As it turns out her daughters are cat people.

Last night’s other Group Winners-

• Hound, Tashtins Lookin For Trouble, Beagle, 15 In.
• Non-Sporting, Dawin Hearts On Fire, Standard Poodle
• Herding, Bugaboo’s Picture Perfect, Old English Sheepdog

Tonight’s Groups are Sporting, Working, Terrier, and of course Best In Show.  Coverage starts at 8 pm ET on USA.  There will be no immediate repeat except for the Pacific feed, but it will be repeated at 8 am tomorrow on USA in case you miss it.

Is it that time of year again?  I look at the snow on the ground and while it’s not quite as bad as the Blizzard of ’13 (which basically took me out for 4 days) there’s still a lot of it.  What could be better than to be in a nice warm arena with some cute doggies?

New breeds?  Sure we have new breeds, first of all the Coton de Tulear which is basically another one of those dust mop dogs, all hair with tiny eyes and nose peeking out of the fluff.  It will be competing in the ‘Non-Sporting’ group which is a catch all for the breeds who have no other purpose than to be, well… dogs.  Second we have the Wire Haired Vizla which is a Vizla with a curly coat.  They will compete in the ‘Sporting Group’.

Tonight’s coverage is on CNBC starting at 8 pm ET and will cover the Hound, Toy, Non-Sporting, and Herding Groups.  I’ll try to put up some pretty tables shortly but I’ve been busy most of the day and they don’t post the brackets until the breed judging is done (around 4 pm).

There will be a repeat at 11 pm (so pretty much immediately) on CNBC and at 8 am tomorrow on USA which will cover the final night.

Speaking of the lesser evil, while there are many things to hate Vladimir Putin for, the Ukrainian Civil War does not appear to be one of them.

One year after the fascist coup that overthrew the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych it is clear that it was engineered with at least the tacit complicity of the United States and the CIA.  Since then Russia has reclaimed the Crimean Military District (and what genius decided Russia would give up its only warm water port, Sevastopol?) and the Kiev regime has been unable to reestablish control of the secessionist Donbass region, center of most of its heavy industry and coal mining.

The attempt to quell this insurrection has been extremely costly and now Kiev is seeking financial assistance from the EU and IMF.  Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, argues that this will result in the fire sale of assets to Western Plutocrats in accordance with Neo-liberal plans for financial hegemony, but may also backfire on the very same people who instigated it.

Transcript

Ukraine Denouement – The Russian Loan and the IMF’s One-Two Punch

by Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism

Posted on February 16, 2015

The fate of Ukraine is now shifting from the military battlefield back to the arena that counts most: that of international finance. Kiev is broke, having depleted its foreign reserves on waging war that has destroyed its industrial export and coal mining capacity in the Donbass (especially vis-à-vis Russia, which normally has bought 38 percent of Ukraine’s exports). Deeply in debt (with €3 billion falling due on December 20 to Russia), Ukraine faces insolvency if the IMF and Europe do not release new loans next month to pay for new imports as well as Russian and foreign bondholders.

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How much of Ukraine’s budget will be spent on arms? Germany and France made it clear that they oppose further U.S. military adventurism in Ukraine, and also oppose NATO membership. But will Germany follow through on its threat to impose sanctions on Kiev in order to stop a renewal of the fighting? For the United States bringing Ukraine into NATO would be the coup de grace blocking creation of a Eurasian powerhouse integrating the Russian, German and other continental European economies.

The Obama administration is upping the ante and going for broke, hoping that Europe has no alternative but to keep acquiescing. But the strategy is threatening to backfire. Instead of making Russia “lose Europe,” the United States may have overplayed its hand so badly that one can now think about the opposite prospect. The Ukraine adventure turn out to be the first step in the United States losing Europe. It may end up splitting European economic interests away from NATO, if Russia can convince the world that the epoch of armed occupation of industrial nations is a thing of the past and hence no real military threat exists – except for Europe being caught in the middle of Cold War 2.0.

For the U.S. geopolitical strategy to succeed, it would be necessary for Europe, Ukraine and Russia to act against their own potential economic self-interest. How long can they be expected to acquiesce in this sacrifice? At what point will economic interests lead to a reconsideration of old geo-military alliances and personal political loyalties?

The is becoming urgent because this is the first time that continental Europe has been faced with such war on its own borders (if we except Yugoslavia). Where is the advantage for Europe supporting one of the world’s most corrupt oligarchies north of the Equator?

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IMF loans are made mainly to enable governments to pay foreign bondholders and bankers, not spend on social programs or domestic economic recovery. Sovereign debtors must agree to IMF “conditionalities” in order to get enough credit to enable bondholders to take their money and run, avoiding haircuts and leaving “taxpayers” to bear the cost of capital flight and corruption.

The first conditionality is the guiding principle of neoliberal economics: that foreign debts can be paid by squeezing out a domestic budget surplus. The myth is that austerity programs and cuts in public spending will enable governments to pay foreign-currency debts – as if there is no “transfer problem.”

The reality is that austerity causes deeper economic shrinkage and widens the budget deficit. And no matter how much domestic revenue the government squeezes out of the economy, it can pay foreign debts only in two ways: by exporting more, or by selling its public domain to foreign investors. The latter option leads to privatizing public infrastructure, replacing subsidized basic services with rent-extraction and future capital flight. So the IMF’s “solution” to the deb problem has the effect of making it worse – requiring yet further privatization sell-offs.

This is why the IMF has been wrong in its economic forecasts for Ukraine year after year, just as its prescriptions have devastated Ireland and Greece, and Third World economies from the 1970s onward. Its destructive financial policy must be seen as deliberate, not an innocent forecasting error. But the penalty for following this junk economics must be paid by the indebted victim.

In the wake of austerity, the IMF throws its Number Two punch. The debtor economy must pay by selling off whatever assets the government can find that foreign investors want. For Ukraine, investors want its rich farmland. Monsanto has been leasing its land and would like to buy. But Ukraine has a law against alienating its farmland and agricultural land to foreigners. The IMF no doubt will insist on repeal of this law, along with Ukraine’s dismantling of public regulations against foreign investment.

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A generation ago the logical future for Ukraine and other post-Soviet states promised to be an integration into the German and other West European economies. This seemingly natural complementarity would see the West modernize Russian and other post-Soviet industry and agriculture (and construction as well) to create a self-sufficient and prosperous Eurasian regional power. Foreign Minister Lavrov recently voiced Russia’s hope at the Munich Security Conference for a common Eurasian Union with the European Union extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok. German and other European policy looked Eastward to invest its savings in the post-Soviet states.

This hope was anathema to U.S. neocons, who retain British Victorian geopolitics opposing the creation of any economic power center in Eurasia. That was Britain’s nightmare prior to World War I, and led it to pursue a diplomacy aimed at dividing and conquering continental Europe to prevent any dominant power or axis from emerging.

America started its Ukrainian strategy with the idea of splitting Russia off from Europe, and above all from Germany. In the U.S. playbook is simple: Any economic power is potentially military; and any military power may enable other countries to pursue their own interest rather than subordinating their policy to U.S. political, economic and financial aims. Therefore, U.S. geostrategists view any foreign economic power as a potentially military threat, to be countered before it can gain steam.

We can now see why the EU/IMF austerity plan that Yanukovich rejected made it clear why the United States sponsored last February’s coup in Kiev. The austerity that was called for, the removal of consumer subsidies and dismantling of public services would have led to an anti-West reaction turning Ukraine strongly back toward Russia. The Maidan coup sought to prevent this by making a war scar separating Western Ukraine from the East, leaving the country seemingly no choice but to turn West and lose its infrastructure to the privatizers and neo-rentiers.

But the U.S. plan may lead Europe to seek an economic bridge to Russia and the BRICS, away from the U.S. orbit. That is the diplomatic risk when a great power forces other nations to choose one side or the other.

Ian Welsh makes basically the same argument.

Russia Creates Its Own Payment System

by Ian Welsh

2015 February 15

Much of the West’s power comes from our financial hegemony. Our ability to cut people off from loans, payments and so on.  Since this new system is Russian only, it isn’t, right now, that big a deal.

But start connecting other countries to it, say China, Iran, India and so on, and it becomes a way of breaking financial blockades.  Include some calculable financial law (less of a challenge than it used to be as New York and London courts make increasingly punitive decisions), and start lending in Yuan (with which one can buy much of what one needs in the world, since the Chinese make so much of it), and you have a fully credible financial system.

The key is to get one major manufacturing country in.  Most of the nations the West is punishing these days, financially, are oilarchies ( Venezuela, Iran, Argentina).  They need the ability to buy manufactured goods.  The obvious country is China.  If China agrees to go in, Western financial hegemony is broken.

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Even before then there are deals which can be cut.  Say Greece wants to buy Russian oil.  Russia can lend them Rubles, the use those rubles to buy Russian oil, in exchange Russia gets use of Greek ships and ports and access to the EU.

This is, then, in one sense, not a big deal.  As long as its only Russia, it’s a defensive move of somewhat limited utility.

But if it expands beyond Russia, well then, it’s earth-shaking.

Why We Should Want the Return of a Two World System

by Ian Welsh

2015 February 16

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a two-world system. If you didn’t like the deal that US was offering you, you could go the USSR.  If you didn’t like the deal Russia was offering you could go to the US.

While the US probably offered a better deal, especially in later years, you could have a pretty decent life as a client state to the Soviets.  Cuba under Castro had a higher standard of living in practically every way than it did pre-Castro, when it was an American client state.

Equally, you could play the two off against each other, looking for the best deal.  This made it harder for them to screw you over.

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So the creation of a Russian SWIFT, while woefully inadequate by itself, was a first step towards meeting one of the needs of a new bloc with rivals the West.

The linchpin nation in any new bloc would be China.  China can credibly provide development, credit and consumer goods (they make much of them anyway.)  But China will also need countries which can supply oil and raw materials: Russia, Venezuela, Iran,  Argentina, and so on.  Much of South America would rather sell food and raw materials to China (or Russia, or whoever) than to the US, because they remember, well, not being treated very well by America during and after the Cold War.

Russia’s military technology, while not as good as America’s, is good enough for most purposes, and China, as is usually the case, has vast amounts of shipbuilding capacity for those who want a navy.  America’s space program is charging forward (mostly privately) but Russia still has plenty of lift capacity for satellites, and China is working hard on its space program.

The BRICS have created their own development bank, as well, so combined with an expansion of the new SWIFT, credit which can be used to buy almost anything you want, or need, will be available.

This, my friends, is the configuration in which the unipolar moment (which has lasted two and a half decades so far) ends.

It was always going to end, for all things do, the question was how soon.  American actions have accelerated what should have taken a couple decades more, significantly, by marginalizing too many countries.  Marginalizing or destroying the occasional country was acceptable, but the number marginalized is just too high, and they have too many resources.  Combined with a great manufacturing nation, they have essentially everything they need: they don’t need the West.

And they may be wondering why they are paying intellectual property taxes (that’s what they are) and interest fees to the West, when the West clearly isn’t acting in their interest.  Why have America and Britain gain all this, when they can reap the money themselves.

Oh, there are still some areas where the West is clearly ahead, from turbines to aerospace.  But they tighten by the year, and they aren’t anything necessary any more. Virtually everything you want, save a few luxury items, you can get without America or Europe being involved.

The question now, then, is the timing and the exact events.  But the broad outline is visible and will accelerate, because it is in too many countries self-interest.

First, a recipe for Gelato–

Ingredients

• 2 1/4 cups whole milk
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 3/4 cup sugar, divided
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (recommended: Pernigotti)
• 2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
• 4 extra-large egg yolks
• 2 tablespoons Mexican coffee flavor liqueur (recommended: Kahlua)
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• Large pinch kosher salt
• 8 chocolates, roughly chopped, optional (recommended: Baci)

Directions

Heat the milk, cream, and 1/2 cup sugar in a 2-quart saucepan, until the sugar dissolves and the milk starts to simmer. Add the cocoa powder and chocolate and whisk until smooth. Pour into a heat-proof measuring cup.

Place the egg yolks and the remaining 1/4 cup sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and beat on high speed for 3 to 5 minutes, until light yellow and very thick. With the mixer on low speed, slowly pour the hot chocolate mixture into the egg mixture. Pour the egg and chocolate mixture back into the 2-quart saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. A candy thermometer will register about 180 degrees F. Don’t allow the mixture to boil!

Pour the mixture through a sieve into a bowl and stir in the coffee liqueur, vanilla, and salt. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the custard and chill completely.

Pour the custard into the bowl of an ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer’s directions. Stir in the roughly chopped chocolate, if using, and freeze in covered containers. Allow the gelato to thaw slightly before serving.

It’s hard to write about Art Music without getting trapped in the Romantics and especially the Germans and the Russians.  As I struggle to break free I look to the mild climes of Italy.

The reason the Brass players like Respighi is that there are a lot of parts for them and you don’t have to spend the concert flipping through pages of rests trying to look interested in a piece you’ve only heard a thousand times in rehearsal and to which your only contribution is an ear shattering blat at the end to wake up the audience and let them know it’s over.

Ottorino is another one of these ‘academic’ composers like Rimsky-Korsakoff and was a great aficianado of Medieval, Classical, and Baroque music and wrote a great deal of stuff that echoed their style, but he also bought into the Romantic ideal that Art should be expressive and emotive rather than formalistic and clever.

Because he was a Romantic Nationalist (though he didn’t overuse the whole ‘folk music’ trope) he was a particular favorite of Benito Mussolini and used what powers of persuasion he had to protect artists like Toscanini and scientists like Fermi from the repressive Fascist regime until his death in 1936.  

On the ship back home from Brazil, Respighi met by chance with Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. During their long conversation, Fermi tried to get Respighi to explain music in terms of physics, which Respighi was unable to do. They remained close friends until Respighi’s death in 1936.

Mistah Kurtz?  He dead.  A penny for the old Guy.

We are the hollow men.  We are the stuffed men.  Leaning together headpiece filled with straw, alas!  Our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.

Those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom remember us – if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men.  The stuffed men.

Ah.  This is the way the world ends.  This is the way the world ends.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper.

And our pointy wands strung with cat gut saw at rain wood boxes while brazen trumps blare and reeds vibrate to the complicated fingering of masters beaten by the conductor’s stick to the composer’s tune.

Is beauty truth?  What is beauty?

In the late Romantic period the Symphony was supplemented by the Tone Poem.  They were enormously popular (among the elite Art Music set) because they were revolutionary rule breaking masterpieces.

I’m sure Respighi never considered them that because they are in fact entirely conventional in form and execution.  Still, he would not have bothered writing them if they did not remind him of his experiences.  The three he devoted to Rome are quite famous and frequently performed.

Fontane di Roma

Pini di Roma

Feste Romane

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

What POTUS wouldn’t tell Ezra Klein: The scary truth about America’s new trade deal

by David Dayen, Salon

Tuesday, Feb 10, 2015 07:00 AM EST

President Obama conceded that TPP won’t live up to even a minimal labor goal when he made the rhetorical statement that organized labor wants union recognition in Vietnam or open markets in Japan, replying, “well, I can’t get that for you.” (indeed, the U.S. just dropped their effort to require Japan to open their auto markets in the deal, something that has led to the displacement of over 800,000 jobs). He says that the best possibility is to make something somewhat better than the status quo. But Obama is a terrible messenger for this message, having spent six years presiding over and passing trade agreements that fit neatly into that status quo, and of course remaining mute on the real goals of TPP: expanding corporate power over sovereign countries. And an incremental improvement won’t alter the balance of power between the U.S. and China, which Obama says is his overall goal.

But the most amazing part of Obama’s pitch on new trade deals is this statement: “Those experiences that arose over the last 20 years are not easily forgotten, and the burden of proof is on us, then, to be very transparent and explicit in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Maybe Obama didn’t realize he was talking about one of the most secretive major policy deals in recent history. Most of what we know about the TPP has come from leaked texts, with periodic bombshells like the impact on copyrights, prescription drug access and even financial regulation. The public has no access to the text, and members of Congress can only view it in the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, without staff members or experts, and without taking copies with them. The European Union recently published the entire text of a proposed U.S.-Eurozone trade agreement under negotiation, but the U.S. hasn’t come close to this level of transparency.

You’d think that, before Obama would say that his Administration must be transparent to the public in describing the benefits of free trade, he would at least share even a few lines of the text with the public. The TPP has been marked only by secrecy.

So the Administration case for the TPP is incredibly weak, based on “trust-us” arguments from those who haven’t earned that trust, who won’t discuss the real issues and who argue for transparency while hiding the true agenda. But the combination of a media that generally depicts anything with the word “trade” in it as a universal good, and a Republican Party hungry to reward their corporate funders, means that Obama’s arguments don’t have to be good to be successful.

Why We Should Rename TAFTA/TTIP As The ‘Atlantic Car Trade Agreement’

by Glyn Moody, Tech Dirt

Mon, Feb 9th 2015 8:54p

When TAFTA/TTIP was first announced, David Cameron said it would “have a greater impact than all the other trade deals on the table put together.” We were repeatedly assured that it would boost both the US and EU economies significantly. But when people started looking at the European Commission’s own projections for TTIP (pdf), they found that the reality wasn’t so impressive. Here’s the economist Dean Baker, in a post entitled “Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?”

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Recognizing that claims of substantial growth don’t stand up to scrutiny, boosters of TTIP in Europe have resorted to a fallback technique: anecdote. If you can’t prove something is good in general, show that it will be good for someone — anyone — and then extrapolate. Of course, that means you need to find an example of an industry that would definitely benefit from a US-EU trade agreement. An EU document on regulatory harmonization (pdf) from September 2013 gave a strong hint of which that might be.

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It is striking how the anecdotal stories about the various ways in which the automotive industry would benefit from TAFTA/TTIP have become even more widespread recently. Here’s the British MP John Healey, one of the main cheerleaders for TTIP in the UK, writing in October 2014 about the “potential gains” of the agreement. Guess which example he chooses?

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A recent video from the German industry association BDI extolling the virtues of TTIP for small and medium-sized companies uses two examples — one of which is cars. And here’s a video from BBC News which is all about the fact that TTIP will make it easier to sell European products in the US, using cars as its example. The main CEPR study on the economic impact of TTIP does, indeed, predict that car sales will increase. In fact, as Martin Whitlock has noted, that boost to transatlantic trade in cars contributes half of TAFTA/TTIP’s total projected uplift to economies.

Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension

By Maira Sutton, EFF

February 4, 2015

Negotiators have been made well aware [PDF] that there is no economic rationale that can justify this extension. The fact that they have chosen to ignore what is a clear consensus among economists points to the fact that this agreement has not been driven by reason, but by the utter corruption of the process by lobbyists for multinational entertainment conglomerates, who have twisted what is notionally a trade negotiation into a special interest money-grab. After all of the trouble that public interest advocates have gone to educate negotiators about the folly of term extension, the fact that they have gone ahead anyway is the last straw for us. We’ll now be pulling out all the stops to kill this agreement dead.

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The White House justifies TPP by claiming it will promote economic growth and create jobs. But the continued enclosure of culture under exorbitant copyright terms would have the opposite effect. Creators who want to build new culture out of the shared building blocks of the public domain have to wait ever longer and use more and more distant and obscure materials. We squander the promise of the Internet and digital tools promise to make it more possible to make, sell, and distribute creative works if we cut out the common resources artists and authors would use to build them.

The copyright term extension provisions in TPP embody everything that is wrong with the TPP’s digital policy rules, namely that the rules are put there for and by corporate interests that are privy to these secret negotiations, at the expense of users and the public interest. If TPP passes with these copyright terms, the agreement will be pointed to as a standard for “copyright protection”, when in fact, they are just the result of lobbying from big corporate interests who got such laws passed in the US. TPP is just the latest vehicle for copyright policy laundering, and now more than ever, we need to stop it all costs.

Go to Prison for File Sharing? That’s What Hollywood Wants in the Secret TPP Deal

By Maira Sutton, EFF

February 12, 2015

The US is pushing for a broad definition of a criminal violation of copyright, where even noncommercial activities could get people convicted of a crime. The leak also shows that Canada has opposed this definition. Canada supports language in which criminal remedies would only apply to cases where someone infringed explicitly for commercial purposes.

This distinction is crucial. Commercial infringement, where an infringer sells unauthorized copies of content for financial gain, is and should be a crime. But that’s not what the US is pushing for-it’s trying to get language passed in TPP that would make a criminal out of anyone who simply shares or otherwise makes available copyrighted works on a “commercial scale.”

As anyone who has ever had a meme go viral knows, it is very easy to distribute content on a commercial scale online, even without it being a money-making operation. That means fans who distribute subtitles to foreign movies or anime, or archivists and librarians who preserve and upload old books, videos, games, or music, could go to jail or face huge fines for their work. Someone who makes a remix film and puts it online could be under threat. Such a broad definition is ripe for abuse, and we’ve seen such abuse happen many times before.

Fair use, and other copyright exceptions and limitations frameworks like fair dealing, have been under constant attack by rightsholder groups who try to undermine and chip away at our rights as users to do things with copyrighted content. Given this reality, these criminal enforcement rules could go further to intimidate and discourage users from exercising their rights to use and share content for purposes such as parody, education, and access for the disabled.

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Like the various other digital copyright enforcement provisions in TPP, the criminal enforcement language loosely reflects the United States’ DMCA but is abstracted enough that the US can pressure other nations to enact rules that are much worse for users. It’s therefore far from comforting when the White House claims that the TPP’s copyright rules would not “change US law”-we’re still exporting bad rules to other nations, while binding ourselves to obligations that may prevent US lawmakers from reforming it for the better. These rules were passed in the US through cycles of corrupt policy laundering. Now, the TPP is the latest step in this trend of increasingly draconian copyright rules passing through opaque, corporate-captured processes.

These excessive criminal copyright rules are what we get when Big Content has access to powerful, secretive rule-making institutions. We get rules that would send users to prison, force them to pay debilitating fines, or have their property seized or destroyed in the name of copyright enforcement. This is yet another reason why we need to stop the TPP-to put an end to this seemingly endless progression towards ever more chilling copyright restrictions and enforcement.

En Español-

Los Indignados to Podemos: The Making of a Party (1/2)

Los Indignados to Podemos, The Making of a Party (2/2)

Loretta Lynch faces delayed vote over confirmation

By Seung Min Kim, Politico

2/12/15 12:20 PM EST

“There’s so many similarities between the Lynch nomination and the Carter nomination,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of Lynch’s biggest boosters. “And to move Carter so quickly and to slow down Lynch is very troublesome, and I think they ought to move her ASAP.”

One reason for the lag on Lynch is that after Obama nominated her in November, Senate Democrats agreed to postpone her confirmation into the new Republican-led chamber at the GOP’s request. Democrats meant it as a gesture of goodwill, and they also believed Lynch would be confirmed in either a Democratic- or GOP-controlled Senate.

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Under the committee’s rules, any senator can ask for business, such as consideration of a nominee, to be held over for one week – a practice that doesn’t have to be deployed but has become routine. Lynch is officially on the agenda for Thursday, but Republicans have already said she’ll be held over, which means a vote will be delayed until after the recess. So the next opportunity for a committee vote will be Feb. 26.

Loretta Lynch is Condoleeza Rice With A Law Degree

by Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

Wed, 02/11/2015 – 16:13

Media and political elites singled out Dr. Martin Luther King as the favored face of what they called the civil rights movement before his 30th birthday. They awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 36, but shunned and denounced him in the final year of his life when he condemned not just racism, but economic injustice at home and imperial war abroad. King’s death at only 39 enabled the US elite to construct their own useful tool, the Dreamer, who is the Martin Luther King we mostly hear about today.

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Lynch did her undergrad and law school at Harvard. She went from there to the prestigious NY firm Cahill Gordon & Rendall, the folks who represent Bank of America, Merril Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and the like.

Lynch served her first term at the Justice Department co-chairing something called the White Collar Crime Subcommittee. But you won’t hear Lynch bragging about how many white collar criminals, fraudulent bankster, predatory speculators and greedy CEOs she’s locked up. Departments of Justice under both Democrats and Republicans simply don’t much go in for that kind of thing. It seems the only thing that qualified Lynch for a “White Collar Crime Subcommittee” was her expertise in advising and defending the few white collar criminals who got close to seeing the inside of a courtroom.

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At the beginning of the Obama administration there was an urgent need for Lynch’s unique talents. Greedy speculators, banksters and hedge fund sharpies had crashed the US economy in 2007, leading to millions of foreclosures and the most catastrophic loss of black family wealth since the US began measuring it. But banking, insurance and finance had been the incoming administration’s biggest contributors. So Loretta, the “white collar crime specialist” answered the call to protect the pillagers and perps who made her career, and the Obama administration possible.

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That’s her specialty, that’s who and what she is. Loretta Lynch is the lawyer who writes the fine print on the “get out of jail free” cards the Justice Department hands out to banksters, speculators and too-big-to-jail CEOs. She’s the vicious federal DA who prosecuted thousands of poor defendants on petty drug charges eacn month, but ignored the official crimes of NYPD excepting a single case that put tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the street. Lynch sees nothing wrong with the NSA harvesting everyone’s email, phone and other communications, she has no problem with the president ordering the drone murder of US citizens or foreigners, whoever, and is not interested in lowering the prison population, curbing asset forfeitures, or restraining and demilitarizing the police.

Those who imagine that there’s some virtue in having black faces in high legal places need to ask why black lawyers who file suits against corporate polluters, who defend the victims of police torture and abuse, who represent the evicted and afflicted, who expose the abuses and war crimes of the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon are never considered for leading roles at the Department of Justice. In his day, Thurgood Marshall defended scores of people accused of capital crimes. This alone would disqualify him from the federal bench nowadays. Like Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch has never represented anyone facing eviction or dispossession. She has never sued a polluter or a violator of human and civil rights. She’s pro-death penalty, anti-marijuana legalization, and as far as we know, has never defended a poor person accused of a crime.

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But those with eyes open know who Loretta Lynch is. She’s Condoleezza Rice with a law degree. She’s a corporate fixer and enabler. She’s a vicious prosecutor and a soulless corporate operative. She’s a black woman, and likely the next US Attorney General.