This is a clear example of Fascism in action.

The #1 Bookseller uses the Justice System to guarantee it's success when the marketplace alone does not. I wonder if the Justice Department had an impulse to step in and preserve competition in the marketplace -- or if it went away when money changed hands.

So in this case, the Justice department swoops in to punish the one group preventing Amazon from owning the ebook market as a monopoly.

I love WalMart prices folks, but Amazon was going to own this whole game. WalMart prices go up, you'll notice, in areas where there are no other big competitors. If the #1 Bookseller has cheaper books and doesn't have the Agency Model -- then how the Hell is Apple price fixing?

Apple's prices sucked and most people were not going to buy from them unless they had plenty of money and liked the convenience. They had no other "retailer" they were fixing prices with. Now, you could say the Agency Model itself is price fixing (it is, in a way) but that would mean it would be the booksellers setting prices for all the outlets.

The judgement in this case is exactly opposite of what was threatening the marketplace. It's either Amazon's capturing the market with low prices or the book publishers forcing the price higher -- so they blamed Apple who colluded with nobody but the publishers own pricing model???

Reducing the governments "size" isn't the issue. Most of the money collected is used for real things and goes into the pockets of real people -- like retiring or sick folks. Do we have to point out that we've got roads and electronics now and that "infrastructure" is more involved than clearing a path for a horse to poop on?

We need transparent government and no secret is a good secret. If something cannot be explained to the public -- it should not be done. We need real representation and election reform.

The problem is not the size -- it's the corruption. You translating this issue into your pet libertarian solution has nothing to do with the actual problem. Wealth disparity and representation; Everything flows from that. If I don't have money my vote is pointless.

Reduce the Federal Government and who builds the roads and redistributes the wealth? The States won't because they will compete with each other to give the wealthy and business a "better deal." The marketplace won't, because without enforcement and regulation, money always pools and you end up with one company providing all of one good or service and maximizing scarcity, not efficiency.

Government gets it's power from the Citizens IF there is representative Democracy -- if there isn't -- then government tends not to give a fuck what the population wants. That's the same here as it is in Russia.

"After Snowden" -- people didn't call me a conspiracy theorist for saying what Snowden revealed. That's the main difference for me.

I'm sure someone might also notice that a lot of dart boards have pictures of a billionaire or banker on them, rather than Saddam Hussein or Bin Laden.

We've grown up a bit and the same old tricks won't work again.

True that.

I still note how the Democrats and Republicans are so divisive, but when it came to the "Military Enabling Act" (I forget it's official name) well, the Dems and Reps got together late on a Friday night and passed a bill that could make a person "not a citizen" based upon suspicions of un-American activity.

We all get swept up in the rancor of the Dog and Pony show, and behind the scenes, Congress can show quick, bi-partisan coordination. If it helps you and me; then it's going to be controversial. If it empowers them and helps their benefactors -- it happens quickly and without a fight.

When deciding how many Hammers to buy, or Security State looks at the theoretical number of nails, rather than the number of hands that might hold the hammers.

It could be worse; they could catch on that the world contains screws and bolts.

The only one who should feel better about this is people selling equipment to the TSA and our enemies who want to do us harm.

I called this -- we all probably "called this". The TSA has hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions in their database. They added needles to the search for needles in haystacks and we are surprised the missed one?

And failure means a bigger budget. The guard falls asleep on the job? He doesn't get fired, they give him a machine gun. I hope he feels refreshed whenever he wakes up. Tell the bad guys to tip-toe because Johnny TSA needs that beauty rest.

The NSA is too busy gathering data to extort and sell info to industrial espionage being used to preserve the status quo. I'm pretty sure while our military uses drones to swat people like flies, we have never been more vulnerable in terms of security and and more hated as a country.

There are more assets going after Snowden and Julian Assange than Al Qaeda -- which is an organization that conveniently shows up in countries we want to liberate of resources for a multinational. Or maybe it's our help liberating resources that creates the terrorism. It's such a chicken and egg dilemma.

It's not actually that stupid. As a job seeker, I've been worried about this for some time. You basically give someone the "keys to the kingdom" to put your resume and contact info online. It's a lot of exposure. I've seen the same job advertised for months and months on end -- can they find nobody qualified -- or are they fishing for info? It's hard to tell legitimate from crook today, because there isn't that much distinction in behavior.

I had a call from a company that does contract consulting for a larger "allegedly more legitimate" company -- and they wanted my social security information before even having an interview - on the phone. I asked if there were a way to have a face-to-face without handing out the SS data -- nope. I also asked the parent company and they said; "yes, this was standard." I don't want to work for a company that makes this practice standard -- but then again, I do want to work at some point.

How do I know there isn't another person doing work right now from India using my name? That's the thing -- you aren't stealing money from a job-hunter -- you are stealing their identity and qualifications and providing cheap labor. The company can look the other way and pay less, and the "alleged crook" can make a buck with labor and the American worker gets screwed.

With a little imagination, I can think of a lot of ways to make money posting jobs that never hire and gathering information from job seekers. Now someone hacking the system to steal my data -- that's only a new added risk for me it's not that much worse than the current system to hunt for a job.

I have to say this again; the "media industry" has not FAILED to extract money from people. The #1 show may be represented better by BitTorrent however -- rather than what shows people can watch based on a subscriber package, so that the allocation of funds for content providers may be very wrong.

But people spend what they can afford to spend on entertainment -- and they don't spend more than that in most cases.

There are a lot of poor people barely scraping by right now -- and you are not going to get them to pay $80 a month for a cable package. You are not going to get $14 for a DVD. For people with money, they just settle for shelling out money and don't worry about it.

If the entertainment industry wants to get a larger share of money - they can tax the supermarkets and drug companies -- because people are spending money on food and medicine instead of $14 DVDs.

Maybe genetic engineering can produce a turnip that has actual blood in it, but the entertainment PROVIDERS damn well knows the truth -- they just don't want to distribute the money to content CREATORS in an equitable manner.

And the Job Creators don't want to waste their profits on hiring Americans -- so there won't be an increase in entertainment spending. This should be a no brainer.

>> Honestly, the Government might as well spend money on free entertainment rather than the NSA --- because if they actually do stop all piracy, then people who have nothing to do will probably start getting politically active and protesting. Maybe they'll even vote. That would really fuck things up for the bread and circuses department.

Obama has been unable to make most of his Federal prosecutor appointments and it's been clear that as much as 7 times more investigations occur on Democratic appointments and politicians. While we have the IRS scandal, Republican connected 401C charities were investigated less and stopped less.

We also have minorities targeted more often by random drug sweeps and stop and frisk in certain parts of the country - and that results in more arrests of minorities.

Your chance of using a "Stand Your Ground" law is something like 384 times more likely if you are caucasian than you are a minority.

If Republicans and Caucasian established people never get investigated and handled with kid gloves -- then apparently that should mean it's not a crime if you are a caucasian Republican. Let's not pretend we are living in a society that is rapidly falling apart because of different standards of justice.

With how commonplace it is for Republicans fundraisers to embezzle, moralists to molest, and budget hawks to feather with pork, it's important that "Democratic party affiliation" be mentioned, because otherwise we'd assume it was just another Republican and "patriotic Americans" would just carry on and ignore the story.

I'm in favor of prosecuting crooks with power, no matter their affiliation. Bold type on Republicans? Really? People would think that was the average weight of a font if we did that.

Yes, conceptually sound. IN practical terms -- absolute Public Relations marketing material.

The stock market for the most part does not lead to capital investments. Venture Capitalists firms are as often involved in predatory capitalism. Futures contracts don't stabilize prices for farmers, they create profits and scarcity in grains and now in oil.

And it's incorrect to say that Housing defaults caused the crash in 2008 -- banks were over-leveraged so a slight default in highly profitable sub-prime loans created a situation where they owed more than they owned.

If you accept everything at face value the comment makes sense. If I just believed the brochures and the macro / micro economics I took in college --sure, sounds good. Just like that sage serious stuff you see on all the financial shows if you don't pay attention that the hot stock pick is being promoted by someone who gets money on trades.

Stocks and Hedge Funds are activity to generate profits for people who sell stocks and mega institutions who do more trade in a second than you have in your entire lifetime. The algorithms that select buy and sell opportunities are looking at volatility and vectors -- not the value of the company or what it will do with that brand new widget. If you had to start a company by selling shares of stock today, you've got more luck with Kickstarter than you do with a Venture Capital fund -- the benefit of the Stock Market is like saying that Meth has a month of high productivity and then there are a few downsides but we won't go into that. The Stock Market does not promote good companies over bad ones. Good companies can get ahead but it's totally despite whatever goes on with their stock.

The 2008 Market Crash was NOT CAUSE BY REAL ESATE -- any more than a horse running around a track causes people to lose money betting on the ponies. The Sub Prime loans were often "sub prime" because someone was taking advantage of a home-owner with a higher interest rate -- people with good credit have a hard time with that, and people at the margins have a much harder time with that. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, before they were sold the Republican idea of the free market, did a good job getting loans back by not charging a high fee -- the default rates were only slightly higher than the average for the nation.

At the peak of all this "default" it was about 8% -- so what happened? The repeal of Glass/Stegall is what happened. Banks were overleveraged betting on Credit Default Swaps. They were able to use these as deposits because they had "property" somewhere in the title, and then use factoring to act like this was an asset and issue more money to buy more credit default swaps (this is why banks USED TO BE prohibited from speculative investments).

The problem was entirely one of high finance and fiscal discipline with people who got all the benefits and none of the responsibility.

The problem with finance in America is too many yokels go around spouting this "free market / finance BS" -- because they made some money selling people Financial Services. Financial Services may make a lot of money for a few people -- but it does squat to produce anything of value or empower anyone who is actually working for a living.

You start making some sense again when you talk about the velocity of money; "circulation is reduced because people are using the money to pay down debt." The big problem is that the distance between the Fed and the people with Big Pockets is shorter. If you just handed everyone in the country the trillions going to prop up the banks, you would have many more transactions -- and thus, the "velocity of money" would go up. "Velocity" is a medical term so that people can charge you more for saying; "more buying and selling".

Don't feel like I'm just picking you out -- you aren't worse that most people I hear talk about Finance - Hell, almost everyone talking about finance is brainwashed by people in finance.

I'm sure the people who used to sell religious artifacts also had a lot of important information on the value of the virgin Mary's milk.

Hopefully this case will never meet the supreme court. It's either going to happen at the state -- or not at all.

God knows we don't need the mostly fascist SCOTUS to rule that the needs of the status quo outweighs the rights of the many -- again.