tv [untitled] March 20, 2012 11:30am-12:00pm EDT
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you're watching live from the russian capital before we get to the. headlines breaking the deadlock russia says it's ready to u.n. action on syria endorsing the peace plan put forward by the world bodies envoy to the country but moscow warns it will continue to oppose any trough that forces an ultimatum on the syrian government. dozens of killed and over one hundred injured in the latest spate of violence across iraq just one day after the nine of us three of the start of the u.s. led invasion that comes ahead of a key arab league summit to be held in the country's first since the american troop
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withdrawal in december. and thousands of construction workers in the u.k. struggling for employment demanding justice after learning they were placed on a secret blacklist supported by the police they believe they were singled out for whistle blowing about safety issues on building sites for my colleague bill daughters here in half an hour's time but next to max and stacy discussing the world's all fever in the report. i am max kaiser this is the kaiser report we got a frickin mania but this apple computer stuff stacie max and the share price is soaring i saw a tweet from lo and behold it was max kaiser is it any coincidence that computers they do over seventy percent of the trading like to buy one of their own a.p.l.
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on the nasdaq anti-human bigoted algo yeah well you know the thing about the sample computer i see that there's people in america other divided two camps one group computers the other group guns. now there's a lot of similarity here it depends on how you view the future on folding either it's a technical glocks or all nirvana where the more computer power you have enduring hand the more processing speed and pixels you have in your hand the more power you have warts of dystopian nightmare of food and energy shortages where the more magnum the more bullets the more gun strength you have the bigger the glock in your hand the better but i don't see these two co-existing it's either going to be one or the other obviously in the case of the copyright cartel hollywood the or i a the m.p.
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a they're fighting tooth and nail to make sure that people that the computer power in their head is neutered they don't want people with that power to create and distribute and fund independent of the curve in our police system so that's their enemy. of the guns go that's the enemy there is human nature thousands and thousands of years of difficulty and trying to organize people based on the size of their guns well you know we are talking about alcohol because it's become. the biggest corporation in the world the share prices are soaring and the i pad three was released and the interesting thing is wal-mart to sell new i pads at midnight before apple stores so yes on friday wal-mart stores were open eight hours before apple stores were open to selling the i pad so this is interesting in light of the fact that wal-mart has reported bad earnings quarter after quarter for the last during the recession because people couldn't even afford the everyday low prices
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that wal-mart people at wal-mart were lining up at midnight to buy baby formula with their food stamps allotment now is this a case where people are confusing apples apple sauce with apple or their products to feed their baby or are they buying apple computers confusing one with the other and if so why would somebody who is broke living in a tent somewhere in the woods be lining up to buy an i pad three perhaps that's a way to you know rejig inflation numbers they rejig manufacturing to say that working at mcdonald's was actually a manufacturing job because we manufacture hamburgers perhaps it's a stealth stimulus program where they reclassified it they just put on the receipt apple product and maybe people thought it was like a fruit. well i've no doubt that people are using their food stamps to buy apple products that would be of government subsidy for the corporation apple computer and
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it would be unsustainable because to create these food stamps hundreds of billions of dollars worth of course is the same thing as a program of quantitative easing it's money printing and this is debasing the currency it's not for nothing but the price of gas in dollar terms has never been higher the price of gas in euro terms has never been higher or in british pound terms so all this money printing that's going on whether it's food stamps or quantitative easing or. cash for clunkers or some other program it is contributing to rising inflation which is of course an economy killer now we saw perhaps a clever way for apple to continue to sell products but look at this headline maxim america gaps targeting of broke young hipsters the huge as flawed apparently gap has now launched a new advertising campaign targeting eighteen to thirty four year olds but according to w s l chief executive officer wendy lead men she said there is
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a notion among retailers that young shoppers are more resilient and will come back sooner the reality is that they don't have money to spend and retailers aren't paying enough attention to this almost a quarter of eighteen to thirty four year olds don't make enough money to cover basic needs such as rent car payments and food i don't know who's buying these computers so couple of interesting trends first of all we know that this newest generation coming up are putting money into apple products ahead of buying cars. so they're not really competing with passion of the gap competing with cars the the american dream as it's portrayed in movies for example from the one nine hundred fifty s. onwards is you own a car you have freedom and that's tantamount to the american experience that's now changed now it's an i pad gives you the freedom to socialize to realize your
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aspirations so the car sales are being cut into by apple sales now as far as retail sales and gap clothing sales here you have an interesting dichotomy where again the question is i pad or guns you know as you go forward there's going to be this split in society where there's going to be those with their i pads on one side of the equation the dividing line and then those with their guns on the other that's where the war will take place well also you know i when i go into the apple store and i do go there often i only see baby boomers i only see people well over the age of thirty four those are the people buying i pads and mackintoshes and i think that's what you see in the share price as well is the baby boomers themselves be flexing themselves they see themselves buying now well you know here's what we could pedia founder jimmy wales has recently said probably at the south by southwest festival where all the sensors are hanging out that pretty soon everyone
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in the world backs us to every piece of information ever created in the history of the world on their i pad now again it's power and the question going forward is will intellectual power trump the power of the gone you know and i think that in the you see this happening let's see it played out in greece for example obviously that in greece the government should have underwritten the dissemination of a free laptop and internet access to every single person in the country if they wanted to see growth but instead they poured all their money into one. procurement to fight this fake war with turkey and other so-called enemies and to impose austerity measures to pay for that war so they chose guns over information they chose war over society over civilization which rose plutocracy and called parker see over democracy and we'll see that being played out around the world country for country well let's go back to this gap story because they say that appealing to
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under thirty four year olds can no longer work for retailers because college costs have soared resulting in student loan debt of about eight hundred sixty seven billion dollars in the fourth quarter of two thousand and eleven about twenty three percent higher than credit card balances also in two thousand and nine households led by those younger than thirty five had sixty eight percent less wealth and such households in one thousand nine hundred eighty four which is also max the beginning of what we talk about here all the time the massive deregulation on the financial markets so as a result of that you see under thirty five year olds now sixty eight percent less wealthy than the same age group in one thousand nine hundred four and at the same time they've got access to incredible power because the cost of processing speed in bed with social networking is dropping toward zero down the pay some part of curve
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but i would say that in my own case i belong to buy my stocks at the gap i buy them into low max you can even afford to buy stocks this customer they say doesn't pay for product and they might not turn into a forty five and fifty year old who will retailers need to worry about how to build a relationship with this consumer so we see this from what you were talking about hollywood and technology these people download stuff for free. partly because that's their whole life they can even they can they don't have money whoa you know that's right they don't have my. and that's what setting up this conflict between intergenerational problems like this setting up a conflict between two opposing technologies one from the current century. and one from a century you know gone by a hundred years ago hundred fifty years ago the gone from the chinese century in fact for thousands of years i think chinese invented gunpowder the chinese make i
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pads this is why the chinese are becoming the dominant force in the twenty first century now remember we've determined that since one thousand nine hundred four and deregulation all of the financial wealth has gone and concentrated into the hands of the baby boomer generation at the cost of the under thirty five so now look at this chart that accompanies this headline will student debt add to america's fiscal woes with a pair of new laws in two thousand and three in two thousand and ten congress fundamentally changed the student loan market making the u.s. government the sole supplier of federal student loans rather than just the ultimate guarantor itself this does not affect the government's net debt because it requires assets the student loans which carry a market value this new direct lending does however add to the gross debt held by the public the one point four trillion dollars in direct federal student loans will be outstanding by two thousand and twenty will amount to roughly seven percent of
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gross that no new student loan is a huge bubble that will pop if you have to understand the economy in the u.s. and the economy in the g. twenty nations it's like a lot of lamp gives you a lava lamp work that blob of wax you know it forms the base and. look up to the top and then it disseminates back down to the bottom so now we've got the student loan blog it's working its way to the top of the bubble chart apple stock is working its way up the top of the bubble chart and the market pops whether it was the crash of eighty seven of the edge of right after a crash of a dot com crash or the mortgage crash apart. and then it goes back to the bottom and the cycle repeats itself it's a global law the lack of common me that's the entire basis of the economy and it's fueled by zero percent interest rates which are not going to ever change because the european central bank will just expanded their balance sheet by three trillion euros their votes went to thirty trillion euros the federal reserve bank will expand its balance sheet to thirty trillion dollars bank of england will spread its
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trillion trillions of pounds record to prove same thing it doesn't matter if the money is becoming just tokens in a global game called reality bill that has no accountability whatsoever but it's just basically this lava lamp economy that people picture right onto and ride for all it's worth and if you don't get in the right place at the right time you're out there living on the edge of the person in the woods in the current well there is one positive spin on how you can possibly make some income in the spinal headline what isn't for sale so you know all these students struggling with their student debts according to this article market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore a leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price tag society basically you can buy anything shocking things but you can also sell anything you can sell space on your forehead to display commercial advertising i mean ten thousand dollars a single mother in utah who needed money for her son's education was paid ten
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thousand dollars by an online casino to install a permanent tattoo of the casinos web address on reform head temporary tattoo ads or unless max yes well i mean goldman sachs i'm sure will start selling some kind of techno gizmo widget that you wedge into your brain that will divide your right left hemisphere so that your thoughts are making a market with each other and buying and selling your own thinking in a way that generates fees for goldman sachs but makes you intellectually impoverished but we don't have a course called high frequency trading. wow another that's what i'm like and pay for all right stacy ever thank so much for being on the kaiser report thank you not go away much more coming why stay right there. with. technology innovation. developments.
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coverage. sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's some other part of it and realize that everything you say. i'm sorry is a big. welcome back to the report i'm nice guys are trying not to go to los angeles and talk with thomas cole naki lead singer guitarist and songwriter streetlight manifesto thomas welcome to the kaiser report thank you i thomas on your website you recently wrote streetlight manifesto proudly itself explain it's a very complicated situation obviously i'll try to sum it up we are like a lot of other musicians out there frustrated with the way that that
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a record label and record industry in general has been treating us and you know obviously our concern is to be our priority is to be successful as a band and it's not to get a record on any sort of charts nor is it even to sell x. amount of records which seem to be the goals of the record labels both large and small you know independent and major labels so we figured since they're going to be screwing us over and then you know having us sending their lawyers over at us i have a time we try to dissent publicly we're going to go. allow and pretty much try to be the first band to sell zero records so we kind of announced a boycott we asked our fans to not buy our records to well i guess i have to be very careful about what words i choose now but to find ways to listen to us that there may be alternative to the mainstream in terms of walking into a store buying a cd or going to i tunes and buy music you know our our priority as musicians is to
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get people to come out to the shows and support the touring process to support us playing our music live because that's the only way that bands can ensure that their money actually gets to the band that's trying to make a living out on the road right well the recording industry association of america has become the turn in the punch-bowl they are doing your fans they're suing customers they're acting like complete. nightmare and they're making all people in the business look bad but it's already way that you can disassociate yourself and the musicians somehow cut this a lobbying group the recording industry association of america i can they disassociate themselves and fire them as a lobbyist because they're making all the musicians look like idiots that's a little bit above my head you know i'm just a lowly musician so you know we're kind of working with what we have which is you
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know the power of our social media and whatnot and the power of our websites and the power of our music i honestly don't know i've never met anyone that works for the our i am and i really don't care what they're doing i don't agree with them suing anyone obviously and i just you know the irony kind of blows my mind that they're suing the one suing our fans or suing people in general on our behalf when we have absolutely no interest in anyone being sued if a majority of independent musicians had their way we would cut them out entirely i would think it comes down. to musicians right music at this point in time with technology where it is for the most part a lot of us record our own music you know we can get distribution deals or we can just use the internet a kind of music out there what it comes down through is everyone's everyone's freaking out you know the ship is sinking all of the all the rats are freaking out because their cushy little lives are kind of in danger they're going to find new jobs at the end of the day the only people with jobs theoretically and this is kind
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of funny to say musician having a job of their own people with with positions after everything settles are going to be the musicians and the fans for the most part and they're just you know they're kind of flailing because they know they're their planes crashing right now. comedian louis c.k. recently he put his concert video on his own website for free basically he asked people all to donate five dollars fifty for a download that was completely free of digital rights management technology without any f.b.i. warning without a r i am a or m p a a nonsense that we made over a million dollars in one week. this is obviously as you've been talking about here it cuts out the middleman the labels shouts out the parasites so is this kind of what you're talking about that if you go directly to the fans you can make money touring you can make money through donations you can make lots of money right you don't have any problem making money you just have
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a problem giving money away to these parasitical labels right well what it comes down to is as musicians we have offend base and kind of the understood agreement is that you know if we can make money from our music we can stay on the road and we can stay in the studio and we can continue to make music that's kind of the unspoken agreement between any musician comedian or whatnot and their fan base and that's pretty much exactly where everything's headed where it comes straight from the artist to the to the consumer for lack of a better word to the fans or the person who wants to. experience what that person is creating unfortunately we're in a situation where we still have an archaic record contract with a record company who i can't. i can't possibly support them i would never say anything to compliment them i'm trying to i'm trying to political here so as not to get any more letters from lawyers you know who you are. so the point is we're trying to take it straight to the fans like everyone else and the middle guys
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the business guys the guys in the corner offices with the giant t.v. screen giant computer monitors looking at numbers and reports and whatnot they're kind of they're shaking in their boots and you know. it's making everyone comfortable but in a couple years i'm sure this will be settled and we can get on with our lives making music it's interesting that ten years ago david bowie saw the writing on the wall and he sold forward all of his catalog for cash up front fifty million dollars or so i think it's dissipated that the catalog value would be shrinking as you know the internet became huge and he also told the industry that look the musicians will adapt their creative they'll always make money you guys the labels are in trouble and so david bowie see this you get the proper recognition is having really seen this whole thing coming and
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actually cashed out of the last possible moment this is maybe ten or twelve years ago your thoughts yeah i think he's definitely he's in the right mindset and you know i can't stress enough how in my opinion you know things that it's a cataclysmic change right now you know everything's falling apart but for the musicians and for the fans it's a good thing you know it's kind of a year zero situation where everything is going away and we're going to start from scratch and you know the important thing is it is that it's a it's a changing situation and it changes all the time obviously social media has a has a huge part of it you know anything that pretty much connects you know the musicians and the fan base is you know is the is the future let's talk about copyright for a second because the heart of this debate of course is the copyright debate now to frame this debate let me give some post sides of the argument here on one side
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you've got the labels and the copyright cartel trying to extend copyright perpetually they've done this for decades so now you've got lifetime plus seventy years for copyright and they argue that they need to protect this property on the other side of the argument. are those who say that there is no such thing as intellectual property going all the back to thomas jefferson who was arguing this during the creation of the constitution saying you cannot put property value on an idea it's a detriment to society as a whole so you have a case to be made for there adding absolutely no copyright value because unlike land which has a clear title change you can you know who's own the land over years with an idea with a song with an artistic work there it's impossible to give it credit de sion or a title change it's impossible because these ideas are owned by the public domain and should return to the public domain but where do you weigh in on this copyright
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idea should there be zero should there be perpetual your thoughts yeah i mean you know being the artist the musician. i'm not really concerned with copyright a song is a song it's a you know it's a combination of chords and a melody laid over it it's the actual physical media that they're copywriting and what they're selling and in in a perfect world in a world where you know the artists get what they want it's you know i don't really care about selling this piece of plastic or even you know i'm not really concerned with how many one dollar units we sow on i tunes of you know a digital representation of a song the song is song as a song it means something to someone and you know what the way we make our living is from playing those songs live not you know not live thinking of them but the way we make our money is by playing those songs live at a concert so i'm not really concerned with copyright obviously there have to be some laws down so you know joe schmoe can't rip off you know lyrics or you know
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a song a whole from another band but you know in terms of the actual physical media being copyrighted by the record labels i'm completely for the diminished the abolition of that right so the abolition of copyright law would be bad. officials artists and the industry as a whole because you can still perform live whereas those people in the industry who rely on gatekeepers are one thing they came out of the not napster case of course was that judge one of the judge determined that the c. sellers were in collusion and price fixing so that kind of behavior was was against the the industry's all so let me ask you about the sopa stop an online piracy act and other laws that could be they would see illegal downloading things decades in prison they are i and argues that these laws are needed to protect young artists like yourself so once again the question is these ugly laws that are written by
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guys who don't know the arctic monkeys from baboons you know they're arguing that they need to protect you are do you feel protective absolutely not i think it's kind of hilarious you know you've got all these these guys in the background with their suits and whatnot and they're all you know you've got to save the kids got to save the musicians you know what you're doing is screwing over the musicians and the truth is it's just screwing them over so they're they're making a big deal out of it and they're throwing us in front of them and say you know it's making more altruistic like you're screwing over the bands you live and the truth is you're not screwing over the bands you love but you know in my opinion piracy gives you an option to try before you buy there's a lot of crap being put out nowadays and you know if i want to download an album illegally and check it out listen to it a little bit you know it's not it's not that different from going into a store and listening to it you know i'd a cd sampling station or whatever and then if i don't like it nine times that i
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don't like it and i throw it away if i like it i actually go and i buy the cd or i buy you know some format of it of the music to support that artist and to kind of you know put my foot down and say i'm supporting us artists and you know we're all for that we're all for any one type. in our music and then deciding hey if they like it you know they can support the band and the best way they can or the best way that we all agree what we all agree on is the best for the artist which is to come for the show which is to buy the cd from the musician at the show which is to buy a t. shirt you know which is to wear that t. shirt and support the band in that way not to support this are you know this archaic system of a bunch of. bags and office is we're just like oh you know or you know we're we're all going to work with the music industry is failing it's not failing it's not going anywhere it's just you are you're screwed thomas called on you that's all the time we have thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you all right that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me maximizer and stacy herbert i was on my desktop an alkie it's going to send me an email please just add has
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