How Hollywood studios promote movie piracy on the Internet

It's good to see that despite people's demonstrated willingness to pay for Internet movie access, Hollywood continues to promote the cultural socialism of free Internet sharing of traditional movie theater fare.

The winner in online movies:
not just on price, but selection

Now you'd think someone like me with access to four video streaming services would long ago have abandoned downloading with torrents, but I've found it impossible. Two categories seem to be especially hard to find in the official channels: the most popular and the most highly regarded.

Let me give three recent examples.

• Return of the King. Turns out none of the LOTR movies are available either on Amazon video or Netflix for streaming. On Amazon you can buy them, on Netflix you can get it on DVD or Blu Ray if you pay extra for those options.
• Casablanca. It's 75 years old, for fuck's sake, but only if you're lucky will you find an official "legal" stream ... for $4. It's not even on Netflix DVD. But with more than 500 seeds, it takes only a few minutes to arrive with bit torrent. And it's one of four classic MGM best picture winners on a $4.99 DVD from Turner Classic Movies. Go figure!
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. No, not the movie of more recent vintage but the 1979 mini-series where Sir Alec Guinness portrays the weariness of a life-long dutiful functionary who has spent his career amidst the rot of a has-been empire. He is charged with rescuing a spy agency reduced to a disdained junior partner by one of its offspring and played like a Stradivarius in the hands of a maestro by its enemy. He portrays the character with such droll dignity that his victory at the end becomes that much more humiliatingly hollow.

If it were a few masterpieces and a few items from the content most in demand, Hollywood might perhaps get away with it. But when it's the bulk of the inventory, and especially the good stuff, and you split it up among a maddening array of services, what you're telling people is to stick to the Pirate Bay.

Take, for example, Best Picture Oscar winners. Right now on Netflix there are three from this century, and five from the last one. And that includes DVD's, not just streaming.

That not only pisses people off, if you check Amazon and YouTube, you'll see there are only a few available for paid streaming even though on Amazon you'll find 4- and 5- picture collections of Oscar Winners for a Hamilton, and a Turner Classic Movie collection that includes Casablanca for $4.99. (There's a bunch more awesome collections of old MGM classics from Turner).

The Cinema Cartel has yet to learn the lesson that the Music Monopoly Mafia wound up having no choice but to learn (from Steve Jobs, BTW). Which is, make it faster and easier to download and more convenient to play, and cheaper won't matter. Yes there were a handful of holdouts, most prominently the Beatles, but now that they and remaining classic rock holdouts have come on board, Taylor Swift's resistance and Adele's more limited 1-album hold back don't matter.

That's why the competition in on line streaming movies & video has moved to original content, because the traditional studios are doling out their material with an eyedropper and that is not enough to attract subscribers. 

The studios have effectively transformed what started as distribution services like Netflix and Amazon into competitors who are increasingly unwilling to pay top dollar for other people's video when they can use that money to create exclusive content for their subscribers. 

Looking at fake news about insanely high homicide rates in U.S. cities

Univision's web site has a report claiming that four U.S. cities are among those with the highest homicide rates in the world. The statistics are based on FBI reports, but are computed by some group in Mexico despite the insistent and express warning by the FBI against the procedure followed:

The data user is, therefore, cautioned against comparing statistical data of individual reporting units from cities, counties, metropolitan areas, states, or colleges or universities solely on the basis on their population coverage or student enrollment. (The emphasis is as presented in the original).

Why? Well for one reason, the original source of homicide data is often a coroner's office; but these are frequently county offices. City boundaries are not the same as county ones, and even if the city's police department is the one reporting the figures, these may well be from a broader area.

But even if totally "accurate," using population statistics doesn't work. A city of 300,000 could easily have a million people in it every weekday. And local political subdivisions in the United States are often arbitrary and fragmented.

In Atlanta, where I live, there are --depending on who is counting-- between five and thirty-some counties and scores of cities. These cross county lines, counties divide neighborhoods and your house might be partly in one county, partly in another. Talking about crime rates might be meaningful or might be a discussion involving a completely arbitrary area created a century or more ago for gerrymandering purposes or to exclude Blacks and that we have inherited even though it simply has nothing to do with the real world today.

A Mexican group used to that country's system of municipalities might not understand this, but a journalist in the United States needs to.

This is why the FBI only computes homicide rates for standard metropolitan statistical areas and NOT individual cities or counties, and warns that even state rates may not be meaningful (because major metro areas cross state lines).
I can't imagine that the writer even bothered to check the original source of the information, which took me about three minutes. If he would have done so, in addition to seeing the strongly worded warning not to do what his source was doing, he would have seen that the statistics for the supposedly most dangerous city, St Louis, MO, made absolutely no sense if handled in this way. By that measure, the city of St Louis itself supposedly had a homicide rate of 59.3 in 2015, making it one of the most dangerous in the world. But the metro area had an overall rate of 10.5, a bit high but not extraordinary, and if you calculate the rate for the metro area outside the city limits only, you get 4.3, even lower than the U.S. national average of 4.9 per 100,000 population. It makes no sense that the murder rate drops more than 90% by crossing the street to get outside the city's jurisdiction. I know that data journalism is really hot right now, but it is no substitute for common sense.

Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

On Friday night, March 31, "Our Revolution" and several local activist groups hosted a rally in Boston that was also heavily promoted on line and made available through YouTube.  It was very clearly and sharply a declaration of war on the Democratic Party establishment, with the explicit aim of changing the Democrats from "a party of the liberal elite" into one of the "working class," as Sanders expressed it.

The beginning of a social-democratic party in the USA?

The event started with brief remarks from the local groups that co-sponsored the rally including Latino immigrant rights organizations. They were followed by Elizabeth Warren, who began by saying she was there to introduce Bernie but proceeded to make a very substantial political presentation.

She outlined around 10 platform points: health care as a right; debt-free access to college; a living wage of $15; support and promote unions; protect and expand social security and Medicare; we are a nation of immigrants; Black lives matter; women must control their own bodies and democracy is not for sale. Not sure I got all of them but those were almost all. The one point that I would have expected but did not hear was a call for a public works infrastructure program.

She stressed fighting the Republicans through activism and protests. And she clearly identified as being part of the same movement as Bernie (which she did not do a year ago during the primaries) as well as recognizing his senior status, so to speak. So she was very clearly projected as the second most important leader and spokesperson for the Sanders "Our Revolution" movement, which is a very significant development.

Bernie's speech was a call to qualitatively transform the Democratic Party. "We need a Democratic party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class." And, yes, he said working class.

He emphasizes that Republicans didn't win the last few elections, Democrats lost them by being so out of touch with working people that many ended up voting for Trump even though they disagree with cutbacks in social services and giveaways to the corporations and the rich and favor legalization of the undocumented and single-payer Medicare for all.

He spoke on many of the same issues introduced by Warren, but clearly, the open, brazen call for a fight to take control of the Democratic Party away from neoliberals like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer was the central message.

Bernie has now projected "Our Revolution" as, in essence, the start of a different party even while operating in the Democrat framework by counterposing the idea of a working class party to a party of the liberal elite.

A lot of my Marxist friends will say Bernie is crazy in trying to transform  into a working class party this giant political apparatus intimately intertwined with the moneyed class and the state at all levels.  
And some will even say that Bernie is playing the part of the Judas goat leading people back into the two-party-system trap.

I do not believe the latter criticism makes sense politically nor is it fair to Sanders and his friends.

But at any rate, I think that Marxists need to recognize the movement towards something akin to a social-democratic party that the "Our Revolution" faction of the Democratic Party represents, and figure out how to relate to it.

#BurnBabyBurn: protesters torch Paraguay's capitol building

The issue is one that has come up time and again in Latin America: the re-election of public officials, especially the President. Now it is Paraguay's turn.

Every flame breaks another chain so burn, baby burn.

From the 1950s until 1992, that country was governed by General Alfredo Stroessner. He took power in a coup and through spurious elections that the OAS never had a problem with, stayed in power for 35 years. 

In 2008, as part of the Latin American "pink tide," Fernando Lugo, a somewhat progressive former Catholic Bishop, was elected president, only to be overthrown by a 2012 parliamentary coup. He was literally charged, impeached, convicted and thrown out of office in less than 24 hours.

Diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks showed right-wingers had been consulting with the U.S. embassy for years about this plot. A 2009 dispatch from the embassy to Foggy Bottom foretold what actually happened as a "dream scenario" of the right:

Find a 'cause celebre' to champion so as to change the current political equation, break the political deadlock in Congress, impeach Lugo and regain ... political relevance.... [The] dream scenario involves legally impeaching Lugo, even if on spurious grounds.

Horacio Corales, of the "Colorados," Stroessner's former party, took over the presidency in 2013 following elections held to legitimize the coup. But now he wants to be re-elected to another five year term so he needs to eliminate the constitutional ban adopted after Stroessner was driven from power.

A clandestine Senate session this week that narrowly okayed the amendment detonated an explosion of rage. And when government forces attacked the crowds, the people seized the capitol building and torched it. 

Complicating the picture, at least as seen from as far away as I am, is that apparently the Lugo supporters backed the amendment so he can run again while some right-wing opponents joined progressives in these protest that wound up offering up in a sacrificial rite the local temple of what has to be biggest con of all times, an American, French, or British style parliament. 

More than half a century ago, Fred Stanton, a revolutionary socialist and singer-songwriter penned a little ditty he titled "Burn, baby burn," after a slogan the mainstream press attributed to participants in the Black urban rebellions of those days.

Several more verses follow this first one in the PDF file.

I don't think it has ever been recorded (except in my memory and perhaps that of a few others who heard it in those tumultuous days) but it was published (under his pen name) in Broadside magazine, which promoted and spread the protest song movement. And it is now on the Internet.

The verse that sums it all up is the last one that I've copy pasted on the left, but of course, you have to add the chorus:

Burn, baby, burn Burn, baby, burn

Every flame breaks another chain So burn, baby burn

Even back then, a lot of my political associates in the Young Socialist Alliance thought I was an ultraleft maniac because of my instinctive reaction to explosions of rage like this. "Hassan the Assassin" some jokingly called me in the Berkeley YSA. (The YSA was the youth group associated with the Socialist Workers Party. I left the SWP long ago; I believe Fred is still a member).

And I don't even want to think about what these or many other comrades would think of me today: with half a century of experience, I should have learned the wisdom of correct, patient tactics at the service of a long-term strategy. And I think that mostly I have, but not when it comes to cases like this. I would plagiarize Wordsworth to explain myself only changing a word or two:

My heart leaps up when I behold
   Flames that climb into the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
   Or let me die!

It would have to be Wordsworth because his verses about the years of the French Revolution capture my own sentiment about the the privilege of growing up in the 1960s: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!"

And I will not turn my back on the 60s, not the love and not the rage,

I think it is a good thing, a wonderful thing, for politicians to be reminded that if they game their "democratic" processes to defy popular sentiment, when the people finally get fed up with it, they have other ways of enforcing their will. #BurnBabyBurn

The Trump war on sanctuary cities: so many lies, so much bullshit

I guess it was predictable enough when Trump's approval rating started getting dangerously close to freezing after the Trumpcare debacle.

Someone opened whatever sarcophagus they store this mummy in and trotted out former Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, by the grace of God and the slaveholder's constitution, Attorney General of the United States.

With the Great Leader's approval in free-fall, down five points in three days according to  Gallup, the Trumpeteer staged an immediate immigrant-bashing rescue operation.

Some states and cities have adopted policies designed to frustrate this enforcement of immigration laws. This includes refusing to detain known felons on the federal detainer request or otherwise failing to comply with these laws. For example, the Department of Homeland Security recently issued a report showing that in a single week there were more than 200 instances of jurisdictions refusing to honor ICE detainer requests with respect to individuals charged or convicted of a serious crime. These—the charges and convictions against these aliens include drug trafficking, hit and run, rape, sex offenses against a child, and even murder.

But refusing "ICE detainer requests" is not against the law. A detainer is informally called an "immigration hold" and is a fill-in-the-blanks and tick-the-boxes form telling jailers, let us know when you're letting this person go so we can be there to pick them up and if we're not, please hold on to them. The form itself says,

IT IS REQUESTED THAT YOU [emphasis added]; 

[ ] Maintain custody of the subject for a period NOT TO EXCEED 48 HOURS, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, beyond the time when the subject would have otherwise been released from your custody to allow DHS to take custody of the subject....

Note the word "requested".  The very definition of the word says you can agree or refuse. Otherwise it is an "order."

And then note the other very peculiar detail (in bold and ALLCAPS in the original):

for a period NOT TO EXCEED 48 HOURS

That is based on a cop swindle: because the courts have given them a hard, cast-in-concrete requirement that they bring anyone they have arrested to a judge within 48 hours so the cops can prove the arrest is legal, it means you can get away with illegal arrests provided you let them go before the 48-hour deadline.

What the courts have told them in several recent cases is that it just ain't so: just because you only have 48 hours to show you followed the law doesn't mean you can violate it for 47 hours and 59 minutes.

The federal courts have made it clear that even for an elected local sheriff with an immigration hold in hand, there is no 48-hour escape clause nor "the feds made me do it" excuse. If you were supposed to let someone go but you didn't do it because the immigration cops asked you to keep them locked up, that is a new arrest, and a local jailer who does that is liable for damages under civil rights law unless there is good probable cause.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals (covering Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and the Virgin Islands) ruled a local sheriff who held someone who turned out to be a U.S. citizen (as he had insisted all along) was liable for damages (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars) for false arrest. Even if all the sheriff did was accede to the request of the immigration cops. The Feds also had to pay, BTW.

That is why after all the blah blah blah from Sessions, when he got down to the actual threat to punish so-called "sanctuary cities" he said they better obey section 1373 of the U.S. Code ... or else!

You'd think that Section 1373 is the one that sets up ICE immigration detainers, but that is not the case. Here's the text of the operative part:

... [A] Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.

But in reality, there are no "sanctuary cities" that violate this law. And note the reference to "the Immigration and Naturalization Service." That government department was abolished by the 2001 Patriot Act. It was split in two, with the immigration cops going to DHS, and immigration and citizenship services remaining in the Justice Department.

The language is old because the provision comes from Bill Clinton's catastrophically reactionary and repressive 1996 immigration law, but section 1373 is a relic. Today the exchange of information takes place automatically via the Internet between local cops, the FBI and the Department of Homeland security. Nobody in any local government gives or denies access to information about immigrants that have been arrested: it is all automated.

So what does the actual wording of Session's specific, formal requirement about federal funding and section 1373 actually say?

Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip.

There is no new rule, regulation, memorandum, guidance, letter of understanding or anything else, mostly because a rule Obama already put in does exactly what Session threatened to punish you for. You have to say you comply with 1373 to apply for federal funds. Big fucking deal.

Sessions' little session with the press was a farce, with him earnestly promising to defend the American people by vigorous use of the doohicky on the framerstan that wards off the dire peril of grumph ... whether the alpha centaurians like it or not!

Which brings us to the real crime here: not murder, child molestation, rape, assault or using a false ID.

The real crime is making terroristic threats. Trump has, time and again, been threatening to come down on immigrants like the ton of bricks he would have bought to build his wall except he can't because Congress hasn't given him the money.

He "ordered" the hiring of 10,000 more jack-booted border patrol thugs in his January executive order on immigration. Except that even in his pie-in-the-sky budget from a couple of weeks ago he asked for only a thousand, or 10%. For his $20 billion border wall, he requested $2 billion, also 10%. He also executive "ordered" 5,000 more goons for interior enforcement, like kidnapping high schoolers waiting to go to school at the bus stop, snatching people who dutifully show up for a court hearing and so on. The budget says gimme 500, again 10%.

What's going on? Trump's real immigration program is exactly the same as the 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney: self deportation.

In terms of so-called "enforcement," Trump's real program is not much more or much less than what Obama already did, only he wants ICE to do it with a lot more growling and meanness. The one significant change is that where Obama was arbitrarily cruel, Trump wants to be systematically cruel.

But the idea is to simply terrorize the immigrant community, and especially from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, so people flee back to their home country or at least, stop coming.

It can't possibly work: the five, ten or fifteen beheaded corpses that show up in Mexico's state of Guerrero every Monday are much more convincing than the bleating coming from the Animal Farm on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But it would be nice is if the so-called "adversarial" press began to do its job.

How did I discovered that Jeff Sessions' legal threats against Sanctuary Cities were bullshit?

I used a super-secret, hyper-confidential, Jedi master initiate technique that only those who trained with Obi-wan or Yoda himself could possibly have suspected even existed. I went to --brace yourselves-- "google.com" (incredibly and heroically brave as it may sound) and ... I then leaped into the abyss by typing "U.S. Code Section 1373".

One of the people that trained me as a journalist was a man name Joseph Hansen, editor of a weekly publication called Intercontinental Press. Something he impressed on me and that has served me well for four decades is never to take someone's word for it; check the original sources, and if not available, don't rely on just one secondary source when several are available.

Today it is extremely easy to check original sources and multiple sources. Yet journalists no longer do this. And I don't mean for the Alatoona Fishwrapper, but supposedly top-class outfits like The New York Times, the Washington Post, AP and Reuters.

So we get mistakes like reporting that Sessions finally put teeth into Trump's original executive order on immigration. Not so. The original Trump order from January 25 has exactly the same empty provision as Session's Monday announcement: "

... [T]he Attorney General and the Secretary, in their discretion and to the extent consistent with law, shall ensure that jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373 (sanctuary jurisdictions) are not eligible to receive Federal grants....

Moreover, even the quickest read of a Trump "Executive Order" shows they're really just press releases in Oval Office drag. For example, the immigration one grandiloquently proclaims that by the authority vested in him and so on he "hereby declare[s] the policy of the executive branch to be" and then comes the rest of the order.

"Policy" is not an action but an aspirational description of goals and how they might be achieved, but actually proclaiming a "policy" in and of itself does absolutely nothing. And, except for one, all of Trump's executive orders that I've read are like that: proclamations of aspirations, not instructions for specific actions.

The one exception, of course, was the Muslim ban, but the courts are taking care of that.

.

Trump got played, bluffed and rolled ... by a small faction of his own party!

The Donald says it was a learning experience.

On Thursday night, the House Republican's freedom caucus extracted so many concessions from President Trump and House Speaker Ryan that Friday morning, so-called "moderates" realized voting for TrumpCare would be political suicide. So they pulled their promises to vote for it.

He bluffed ... and lost.

Then the Freeedomites delivered the coup de grace by saying they still weren't going to vote for it, dooming the measure and calling Trump's "now or never" bluff.

With no real reason to cast an unpopular vote, more "moderates" bolted, and looking at the humiliation of losing by a  double-digit margin despite a 22 vote majority in the House, Trump folded.

You can tell the real state of affairs by this: Speaker Ryan said he deferred to Trump's decision to pull the bill, and Trump confessed to having taken Ryan's recommendation to withdraw the proposal.

Since 2011, protected from any consequences by a guaranteed veto from Obama in the White House, the House Republican majority voted 67 times to get rid of Obamacare.

But when it became a real vote, not just a press release, the outcome was no vote on account of no guts.

'No evidence' means that we didn't mean to wiretap Trump's people ...

So now what everyone with an IQ above freezing already knew has been confirmed: Under Obama, the government did intercept and monitor electronic communications by Trump's people. That from House Select Committee on Intelligence chair Devin Nunes who said Trump's team was "incidentally" wiretapped.

How could that have been? Well ...

• They wiretap everyone, and • The FBI was investigating the alleged Trump-Putin connection

Attacking Trump for saying Obama had him wiretapped is idiotic because Trump & Co.'s electronic communications were intercepted and monitored, which is what "wiretapped" means.

Obama was president and was responsible for what the government did. Moreover, Obama knew about the specific investigation and acted on that basis (deciding not to make a big deal about the supposed Russian election hacking but instead telling Putin privately to cut it out).

Now, this idea that Trump is Putin's stooge is ridiculous.

What is going on in is a fight over foreign policy: should the United States take its distance from Western Europe, while adopting a less confrontational tone towards Russia, and a more aggressive one towards China?

That's what Trump wants, and why Trump would want this isn't hard to figure out: the German-dominated European Union is a competitor to the United States on everything from automobiles to airliners. Russia doesn't compete nearly as widely and presents opportunities for U.S. investment, which is why the head of the biggest U.S. oil company is Trump's secretary of state. Like, could Trump have made it any more obvious?

But the domestic side is also important. Trump is feeding raw meat to a hungry base. Trump's followers don't care whether Obama personally gave the order and used the word "wiretap." Obama knew in general that everyone was being spied on, he knew specifically that Trump and his people were a focus because of the Russia-election investigation, even if the U,.S. spooks were too polite to brand them a "target." That's good enough, and not just for his base but many others, to say that Trump's charge about Obama spying on his campaign is essentially true. And don't take comfort in poll numbers that say many/most people don't believe the head of the House of Orange .. I mean the louse with the head of orange.

Trump doesn't need high approval percents, he needs intense and enthusiastic support from his base, and that is what he is getting. He means to change things and for that he needs the battering ram of an enthusiastic, mobilized movement, not simple passive acquiescence, even if from a majority.

The mainstream neo-liberal Democrats are using this "Lying Trump" trope to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton and cover up popular disgust with what used to be called the New Democrats, i.e., Clinton, Obama, Emmanuel and their ilk. It was the Russians who got Trump elected, they want us to believe.

Bullshit: it was Hillary that got Trump elected.

It is true that she won the popular vote, but ... of her three million popular vote margin, more than four million came from California. She lost the other 49 states by a million votes. Worse, factor out New York also and she loses the other 48 states by three million votes.

And she lost them against fucking Donald Trump! The most unpopular presidential candidate ever since polling was invented! How unpopular? Even more disliked than fucking Queen Hillary.

So why did she win the overall popular vote? Because two decades ago the Republican Party in California committed suicide by tying their fate to the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. As a result, they are now basically dead there, holding no statewide offices and reduced to a small minority in the legislature.

I mean, it was like if they had run against the Irish in Brooklyn or Boston 100 tears ago. Sure, shit all over the Latino community and then try to get elected in a state without a single major city with an English name. So that's why Hillary swept California by four million votes. The Democrats could have run Attila the Hun without hurting their margin of victory.

But elsewhere, all over the country, millions who had voted for Obama just could not bring themselves to come out for Hillary last November. Millions who voted for Sanders in the primary wouldn't vote for her in the general, even if her opponent was Trump. And, worse of all, millions who voted for Bernie in the primaries voted for Trump in the fall because they were so fed up with the unending gusher of bullshit from our political class in Washington.

And --this the Democrats share with their Republican brethren-- they are desperate to avoid discussion of any real issues, like the health care mess, the minimum wage, or ending the American forever wars in Asia and the Middle East.