As thousands of demonstrators marched in European capitals on Wednesday to protest recent austerity measures, officials in Brussels proposed stiffening sanctions for governments that fail to cut their budget deficits and debt swiftly enough. ("Workers In Europe Protest Austerity Measures", New York Times, 9/30/2010)
Oh, do the super-rich hate the sound of "class struggle." Dare to utter the words and they'll reach for their red-baiting paint guns and spray you silly with invective. It's un-American. It's socialistic. It's an insult to democracy and freedom.
But try as they might, they can't paint over the reality, which the new Fortune 400 listings make so clear: Wall Street billionaires have more money than they'll ever be able to use--at a time when more than 29 million of us don't have that most basic necessity, a full-time job. A hidden class war got us to this point. It's not hidden anymore.
Once upon a time there was a tangible connection between the plutocrats and the rest of us. Carnegie, Mellon and Rockefeller built sprawling enterprises that employed tens of thousands of workers (even if they did treat them brutally). But today's billionaire financiers, about 100 of whom are on the Fortune 400 list, have a tough time explaining how their money-making schemes produce any jobs at all. Very few of us have a clue about how they even make their money.
But we are clued in to the way our society is splitting apart. What's good for the Wall Street tycoons is not good for America. The wealthy may loathe hearing about "class struggle," but we're in the middle of one -- and it's a doozy.
Back in the 1800s (and onward), "class struggle" meant the economic conflict between the interests of working people and those who owned "the means of production." But that construct proved too rigid to describe a complex modern economy. Companies are often run by managers who aren't owners. Most middle managers and supervisors also are workers, not owners, though they may identify with upper management. In glamor industries like Hollywood and sports, some workers are far richer and more powerful than the managers and owners. And many workers are "owners" through stock purchases made individually and through their pension funds.
"Class struggle" also doesn't capture the symbiotic relationship between workers, managers and owners. Yes, we fight over everything from plant shutdowns to job safety and health care benefits. But we also have common interests - workers want to keep their jobs, and for that they are dependent upon "owners." Instead of class struggle, we often see workers lobbying alongside owners for policies that might keep their industry afloat. This worker-boss connection is often much stronger than any sense of broad class solidarity among workers across the country. Most of us define ourselves as middle class, not working class, and we don't see ourselves at war with the business owners.
Until now. The financial crisis is squaring up a new class struggle: The handful of financial elites versus the rest of us. Where's our common interest? What's good for them (a $10 trillion bailout) costs us jobs and public services, and deepens the public debt. Financial elites have effectively hijacked our economy and there will be hell to pay to get it back.
Beginning in the mid-1970s the twin policies of financial deregulation and tax cuts for the super-rich laid the groundwork for the rise of financial industry billionaires. We were told these policies would fuel an enormous investment boom that would cause all boats to rise. Not quite. Income certainly gushed to the top fraction of one percent. But then we entered the financial industry Twilight Zone: The super-rich accumulated so much money that they literally ran out of investments in normal industries that produced real goods and services. Wall Street, now a deregulated Wild West, rode to the rescue by creating all manner of new paper investment opportunities. Instead of buying a piece of a factory or company through stocks and bonds, you bought derivatives. Or you gave your money to hedge funds where you could "earn" outsized returns with little risk -- just what the super-rich craved. Unfortunately, the entire enterprise was built upon layer after layer of leverage. The result was an unstable upside-down pyramid of "structured finance" balancing on a very narrow base of real tangible assets.
All of this worked just fine until it didn't. You know the rest of the story. When housing prices stopped rising, these paper assets - the CDOs and all the rest - went up in smoke, incinerating the rest of the economy in the process. (Please see The Looting of America for an easy-to-read account.)
On their long way up, financial industry billionaires grabbed our economy by the cojones-- and they're not letting go. Here are a few of the indicators:
- Financial sector profits dramatically increased in the past several decades, peaking at over 40 percent of all corporate profits just before the economic collapse. Now the industry's profits are chugging back up again.
- After the inevitable crash, the financial sector and its investors had all the political clout they needed to ensure their swift rescue by the government. Instead of paying a hefty price for wrecking the economy with their bad bets as dictated by free market principles, they got bailed out at taxpayer expense.
- The 2010 financial reform bill did not break up financial institutions that were too big to fail or too interconnected to fail. It also didn't rebuild the Glass-Steagall Act's wall between investment banks and depository banks. The six largest banks are now bigger than ever.
- Congress rejected our calls for a windfall profits tax or financial transaction tax to help pay for the financial sector's catastrophic damage to our economy. Instead Wall Street elites are again reaping enormous profits, leaving 29 million unemployed and underemployed people in the dust.
- To pay for our rising public debt we're being told to tighten our belts so that they don't have to tighten theirs.
Economists assure us that the financial sector's role is to prudently move excess savings into investment. But that's not how Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, the largest private equity funds and the largest hedge funds are raking in their billions. Their real cash cow is their secretive daily practice of "proprietary trading" -- the equivalent of gambling in a rigged casino. This has nothing to do with investing in industries that might put our people to work. So our paltry economic growth is generating financial industry booty, not jobs.
Our billionaires might want us to think of them as great statesmen working to help our nation prosper and grow. But in reality, they're busily siphoning off our nation's wealth -- and blocking all efforts to regulate or tax their destructive behavior.
Wall Street's class warfare doesn't just target workers. While many top multinational corporate CEOs are in league with the big financiers, most of the medium and small business owners now struggling to find the capital to stay alive have few friends on Wall Street. Workers, supervisors and middle managers alike now live in fear that they'll lose their jobs -- and it's all because of the financial shenanigans on Wall Street. You don't have to be a Marxist to know that we bailed out the very people who wrecked our economy. You'll find precious few defenders of Wall Street anywhere in America.
This new class struggle will soon begin playing out on some new battlefields. The weight of the U.S.'s massive debt (created by the financial crisis and our failure to tax the super-rich the way we used to) will be put on our backs. The financial elites, along with their richly funded think tanks and compliant political hacks, will tell us to privatize Social Security, reduce its benefits and extend the retirement age. We'll be told we must cut funding for schools and health care services. We'll have to live with a crumbling infrastructure and a deteriorating environment -- because, well, the money just isn't there.
But if we call for raising taxes on the super-rich to prevent these dire developments, they'll bring out their paint guns and scream "socialism!" -- and threaten us with more economic catastrophe. Of course, they can fly their private jets over our collapsing infrastructure and send their kids to private schools. And they have no worries about jobs, health care or retirement, since they and their families have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. Talk about a class struggle!
The Wall Street billionaires utterly refuse to accept any blame for our economic woes. They simply can't believe that their billions came from fatal flaws in our system rather than from their own genius. They'll fight to the end to convince us and themselves that they are indeed God's gift to our economy. (Wouldn't you if you had a billion dollars?)
It's time to make them pay their fair share for the damage they've done. That will help finance the massive jobs programs we need to put our people back to work. Of course, the super-wealthy can afford to pay. Only their pride will suffer.
In truth most of us would prefer to duck this fight. We just want to find a job, or keep the one we have, be with our families and cope with what life throws at us while enjoying as much of it as we can. We don't want to go to war with the richest people in the world, even though we greatly outnumber them. But we can't avoid this battle--it's coming to our doorsteps. The Dow may hit 12,000 but unemployment will haunt us for a decade to come. We can't afford the brutal cuts to retiree benefits, healthcare or education that they're pushing on us.
It will take a lot of time and effort to figure out how to fight back and win. But don't despair. As the old union song suggests, the toughest question always is "Which side are you on?" In the new class struggle, that decision has already been made for us.
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
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Yep! Twitter is gonna make a fortune off your drunken night at Chili's
Posted by: ZuDfunck |
October 18, 2010 1:45 PMLet's see. . . you use a free service and then want them to promote your restricted material and give you the profits. . . hmmm... yeah, I would like that deal also.
This really sounds like much to do about nothing. Let me see, I have a photo that I want to sell at some point but show it off on twitter. How can I do that without loss of my property? Well, maybe make a low res thumb of your image and upload that with slight modifications, like a watermark, then the original image is still yours to do with as you please, isn't it?
I don't know but this sounds a bit ridiculous. How many problems would arise if such services allowed everyone to copyright everything they submit? Well, when you think of it it's really funny. . . people complain about every company suing every other company over patents and how those sofware patents shouldn't be allowed yada, yada, but WAIT!!! when it comes to my precious picture that I'm going to upload via a free service. . . I WANT IT PROTECTED!
Posted by: gpeasy |
October 18, 2010 1:55 PMThis article, and all of the other articles that this stemmed from, contains a fundamental misunderstanding about the definition of "Content" in the context of Twitter. Twitter's "Content" is the 140 characters and any metadata stored and served by Twitter. Anything that requires a URL to access (i.e. a link shared on Twitter) is not considered "Content" in the context of Twitter's ToS (from http://twitter.com/tos "any information, text, graphics, or other materials uploaded, downloaded or appearing on the Services (collectively referred to as 'Content')").
This may become an issue if Twitter were to—say for example—buy TwitPic or create their own Photo Sharing tool. And yes, there is potential legal concern with the way that their Media Pane system works in the #newtwitter UI design, as it does state "appearing on" but for their license to apply to the content of their Media Pane, it would require that the license from the service allowing their content to be displayed to be sub-licensed. Prior to the Media Pane in #newtwitter, I would have said this is a complete non-issue. Now, it's just something to "watch" and, if you're really worried about it, don't use services that work in the Media Pane.
tl;dr: This article is vastly misleading. "Content" is the text in a tweet and anything you upload directly to a Twitter website, not to a third-party service or your own servers.
You should know better, RWW.
Posted by: Michael Owens |
October 18, 2010 1:57 PMThis is a significant development for professionals, and it's worth noting to the general public. I wonder how often the people at Twitter might acutally take advantage of this...? The web seems to get more "open" every day, something we all need to be aware of.
Posted by: David Perdew |
October 18, 2010 1:57 PMThis is about lawyers and their constant need to prove value to their clients (whom they charge absurd hourly rates to).
A number of lawyers take this approach (non-exclusive license; right to reproduce, sub-license, etc.). Other, more reasonable lawyers take more of the BasecampHQ approach to managing data on behalf of someone (albeit, under paid accounts).
If Twitter ever tried to resell a photo that was uploaded, they would (most likely) run afoul of a range of Copyright Laws while they try to uphold their T&C which are one-sided and were never reviewed by their User's attorney's in a fair and reasonable negotiation. Additionally, if a Minor uploads photos, without parental consent, good luck appropriating those under their T&C.
If Twitter had strong management, who had more experience, they'd fire the lawyer who wrote the T&C and say, "thanks, bye." Then, go find an attorney who's more forward thinking.
Posted by: Bob |
October 18, 2010 2:04 PMI agree with @MichaelOwens on this, mostly a non-issue. From the TOS,
"...information, text, graphics, or other materials uploaded, downloaded or appearing on the Services (collectively referred to as “Content”)."
So it looks like photos you upload to Twitter (your profile pic and background image) can be used by them, but your linked photos are not uploaded to Twitter so they don't count as "Content" in the TOS.
The only gray area I see is photos appearing in the media pane, since the definition of content includes "appearing on the Services," so avoid using twitpic and the like and there is no issue.
tl;dr +1 to @michaelowens' point
Posted by: aaron.pk |
October 18, 2010 2:27 PMSo, if my photo is hosted at my paid Flickr account and it's labeled "All Rights Reserved" but I send a link to my photo to Twitter... who owns it now?
Posted by: Erin |
October 18, 2010 2:32 PMSeriously? This is a surprise to anyone? People share pictures on Twitter (and third party pic services) because they want the world to see it and SHARE it. Professional photos aren't posting their masterpieces on TwitPic.
Posted by: Russ Hill |
October 18, 2010 2:39 PMMichael Owens said much what I came to say so I won't repeat him.
Based on the false logic of this article, you are implying that if I share a link to a NY Times article, Twitter can use the content from that article to their hearts content. Obviously false.
Anyone can put anything they want into a TOS but that doesn't mean its legal.
Posted by: Jmartens |
October 18, 2010 2:43 PMI am not an expert on this topic, but I believe companies (like Twitter) need to have clauses like this in the TOS to protect themselves from copyright violations. They need the freedom to copy, modify, and reproduce contributed content as well as the right to move it around in on their servers. Technically wouldn't Twitter be violating copyright if the original author didn't approve of how their content was being used, displayed, or modified by Twitter? I was given this notion from different company's rep that deals with online content distribution. Although, the way companies word their TOS make many people worry about losing control of there IP.
Posted by: bobsbag |
October 18, 2010 3:32 PMI don't believe this is as casual as some of the comments indicate; nor, is the Post so off-track.
Twitter are acquiring both photo and video developers to bring this all in-house.
To @bobsbag's point -- yes, Twitter need some non-exclusive publication right, within the boundaries of their service (even extended to the future to some degree); or, even a self-extending license based on a User not deleting files. What Twitter do NOT require is an unrestricted License coupled with the ability to sell, transfer or in any manner profit from the direct licensing of content (they can sell ad space around it and use it for promotional purposes).
Now, yes, anyone would be a fool to post anything on nearly any "free" service out there if they intend to use it commercially themselves. But, I'd look to Flickr's T&C for a better model than what Twitter provide. There are a slew of alternatives out there, only a high paid lawyer will tell you they "must have these draconian T&C."
Posted by: bob r. |
October 18, 2010 5:33 PMObviously false.
Anyone can put anything they want into a TOS but that doesn't mean its lega
Posted by: ogame |
October 18, 2010 8:30 PMSorry but their is no way that this can be legit or enforced. adding a URL to a permalink that contains an embedded image and/or download links to higher quality versions of that image (or other media) does not give Twitter the rights defined in the ToS. Even if this were the legal intentions by Twitter's lawyers and business executives, I have to assume that this would not hold up in a court of law... that is if the terms are not properly modified before a case were to ever get that far.
As for the issue of displaying media on the #NewTwitter Right Side Column used for presenting supplemental meta data, media and eventually ads..... This is not really an issue since only official content partners can use this real estate and those services ToS already apply. I have been waiting for over a month (contacted contentpartnerships@twitter.com) to learn more about the content embedding situation. I'd assume that their would be a whitelisting process and then twitter would utilize common tech to fetch and display media from approved domains (oembed, link rel & meta tags). Ideally, Twitter would also pull in License info when specified and content creators would use preview/watermarked versions of their media for display inside Twitter.com while reserving the high quality media as separate embeds/links on the URL/page.
Posted by: sull |
October 18, 2010 9:19 PMThe problem is people don't try to understand legalise, and try to understand the tech terms for the same. Now lets look at the part of the ToS he has quoted.
use, copy(copy from photo sites to display them within twitter, pic may be copied to cache), reproduce(retweet), process, modify and adapt (reduce 2mb pic to may be 100kb before displaying it), publish (just in case someone decides to print a twitterfeed from a browser?), transmit (send across the internetz), display (duh!) and distribute such Content (retweet!)
"You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use"
You know, people use Twitter API and I think that's what they are talking about here. So please stop freaking out, really!
If there's a newsworthy pic you have taken, the agencies will contact you and not twitter. Do they really think Twitter would employ somebody to handle silly requests from media like this? Really?Posted by: | Balu | |
October 19, 2010 12:08 AMNon-issue.
This is a standard language to protect company from people who would upload stuff onto a content distribution service and then sue the same service for copyright infringement. Check Yahoo's, for example:
"With respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted or made available."
Posted by: twitterer |
October 19, 2010 12:30 AMWell, Twitter can use the photos, and they can even sell them further. So if they appear on magazine covers, tough luck.
However, for use in advertisements, pictures of people need a model release. So there are limits to what the images can be used for. But in general, yes. Twitter (and Facebook) can do pretty much what they want or dare with the content they are sent.
Most of the legalese is there to make the actual service possible, but eg. Twitters ToS goes beyond that.
Posted by: Tarmo Toikkanen |
October 19, 2010 12:39 AMThis might be beneficial for twitter but I don't think that general public would like this. This seems disturbing to any pro photographers who tweet their photographs.
Posted by: street bike accessories |
October 19, 2010 2:18 AM
reputation management
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