As we gear up to make a fresh assault on the copyright cartel to expand the public domain with the cartel busting finance and technology architecture of PirateMyFilm.com, it is worth taking a look at a campaign we ran in The Ecologist magazine a few years back.
Boycott Coca Cola
The campaign tried to help activists, environmentalists, etc. expand the public domain by first cleaning up the toxic slick in financial markets. The right wing tried to shut this campaign down, of course, by smearing it in the press; falsely accusing us of instigating market manipulation.
But they ended up with egg on their face as their crony legal friends over at Washington Legal foundation, after looking at Karmabanque wrote an opinion that basically gave the green light to combining boycotts with short selling to pressure companies to amend their public domain threatening ways.
Link to legal opinion of Larry Ribstein; Washington Legal Found. (PDF) ...
We had outsmarted them using bastard capitalism- financialism - to undo the damage wrought by the bankers and brokers operating behind their unregulated financial curtains. Unfortunately the activist community never jumped on this opportunity for reasons I have discussed many times, mainly, they thought that any strategy that utilized markets was somehow a net gain for the corporations even though the clear purpose of the campaign was to pressure a net loss in the form of a dropping stock price.
The charge of instigating market manipulation got me interested in exposing real market manipulation so we made some documentaries for Al Jazeera, including "Rigged Markets," a film that exposed how the SEC was doing nothing to stop naked short selling, a technique of counterfeiting stock to drive down the price in such a way that the film posited was creating systemic risk similar to what we saw in 1929. Within a couple of years both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were destroyed by hedge funds manipulating and colluding using naked short selling - as we explained in our film - to wipe out these companies and set the stage for the global financial meltdown we are all familiar with.
So what is naked short selling?
This is an excellent three part video series explaining:
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part one
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part two
Hedge Funds & Global Economic Meltdown, part three
The lessons I learned from the boycott-short-sell Coke campaign were that the tools of the market can be co-opted to fight against the market monopolists. Hopefully the copyrights! freedom fighters will embrace this approach more openly than the greens did with the Coke campaign.
for more info: maxkeiser.com