As we gear up to make a fresh assault on the copyright cartel and expand the public domain with PirateMyFilm, it is worth taking a look at this campaign we ran in The Ecologist magazine a few years back.
The campaign tried to help activists, environmentalists, etc. expand the public domain by first cleaning up the toxic slick in financial markets. The right wing tried to shut this campaign down, of course, by smearing it in the press; falsely accusing us of instigating market manipulation. But they ended up with egg on their face as their crony legal friends over at Washington Legal foundation, after looking at Karmabanque wrote an opinion that basically gave the green light to combining boycotts with short selling to pressure companies to amend their public domain threatening ways.
Link to legal opinion (PDF) …
We had outsmarted them using bastard capitalism- financialism - to undo the damage wrought by the bankers and brokers operating behind their unregulated financial curtains. Unfortunately the activist community never jumped on this opportunity for reasons I have discussed many times, mainly, they thought that any strategy that utilized markets was somehow a net gain for the corporations even though the clear purpose of the campaign was to pressure a net loss in the form of a dropping stock price.
The charge of instigating market manipulation got me interested in exposing real market manipulation so we made some documentaries for Al Jazeera, including “Rigged Markets,” a film that exposed how the SEC was doing nothing to stop naked short selling, a technique of counterfeiting stock to drive down the price in such a way that the film posited was creating systemic risk similar to what we saw in 1929. Within a couple of years both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were destroyed by hedge funds manipulating and colluding using naked short selling – as we explained in our film – to wipe out these companies and set the stage for the global financial meltdown we are all familiar with.
So what is naked short selling?
This is an excellent three part video series explainingg:
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part one
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part two
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part three
Market manipulator Camer spills the beans on himself:
http://www.thestreet.com/video/index.html?clipId=1373_10329438&channel=Cramer+On+Demand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fpEgurO-ec
Don’t boycott Coca-Cola! It has many uses you didn’t know about!
I have still not been able to find out what the “Total Cumulative Debt per Person” is for many nations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT7MAjfykq8
You may want to embed this, to help the process along.
My research to date thus far has found that no existing governmental or intergovernmental entity that tracks this important economics number.
From the GAAP accounting perspective, how can you not use this “Cumulative Debt per Person” number when it comes time to derive Governmental (and Corporate) bond ratings — or even run of the mill Consumer credit ratings.
If the US cumulative debt per person number I have found thus far is correct — all US residents should have a credit rating of 360 [scale 350 ... 800].
The cumulative debt per person in the USA is 700,000 USD per person and around 2.21 m USD per household.
Complete Coca-Cola Product list:
http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/brands/product_list_a.html
(Click on the bottles to view brand names.)
Max: consider these two exerpts from your above piece:
>The right wing tried to shut this campaign down, of course, by smearing it in the press<
> the activist community never jumped on this … they thought that any strategy that utilized markets was somehow a net gain for the corporations<
What do you and the activist community have in common? You are both driven by prejudice: you against the ‘right wing’ and the activist community against ‘corporations’. The result is that you each cause your own isolation, lose support from potential allies, and fail to achieve your objectives
I’m watching the Frontline PBS documentary “Inside the Meltdown” at the moment and in its account of the demise of Bear Sterns it doesn’t raise the issue of naked short selling at all. It attributes the falling stock price to creditors fears over Bear Sterns’s exposure to toxic subprime mortgage securities. Is the mainstream media’s attribution of the cause of the crisis in subprime misdirected ie. more emphasis should be given to illegal activities of oligarchical hedge funds?. The 3 part Youtube video you post here implies Bear Sterns were financially pretty sound before the attack by naked short sellers.
Great Mark Thomas documentry for channel 4 nov2007 about coca cola worth a peek. not available on 4od anymore bu here is link to torrent dl.
http://www.mininova.org/tor/1192024
Interesting, but what was Lehman Brothers (and Bear Stearns for that matter) doing? They are big players and know the game really well. Couldn’t they have protected themselves or exposed the culprits? Max: can you elaborate on this.