Kenosha News

The Great Dr. Robert Shapiro will be on CNBC tomorrow, giving you the rundown on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's trip to China.  Tune in at 11:10 a.m. ET, when he'll be a guest on "The Call."

If you'd like to bone up beforehand, check out the speech Secretary Geithner gave today at Peking University (or "BeiDa," to we alums).  

There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

You can see the gulf in the world that Obama is trying to bridge when you compare the shock that some in Washington feel when they see Obama actually trying to stop illegal West Bank settlements and the latest poll from Egypt:

As president of General Motors when Eisenhower tapped him to become Secretary of Defense in 1953, ?SEngine Charlie? Wilson voiced at his Senate confirmation hearing what was then the conventional view. When asked whether he could make a decision in the interest of the U.S. that was adverse to the interest of GM, he said he could.

Then he reassured them that such a conflict would never arise. ?SI cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.?

Wilson was only slightly exaggerating. At the time, the fate of GM was inextricably linked to that of the nation. In 1953, GM was the world?"s biggest manufacturer, the symbol of U.S. economic might. It generated 3 percent of U.S. gross national product. GM?"s expansion in the 1950s was credited with stalling a business slump. It was also America?"s largest employer, with over 460,000 employees. Its blue-collar workers received (in today's dollars) $60 an hour that year in wages and benefits.

Today, Wal-Mart is America?"s largest employer, the majority of whose employees receive just over $10 an hour. And General Motors is filing for bankruptcy. Wilson?"s reassuring words in 1953 now have an ironic twist. There will be little difference between what is good for America and for GM because it is soon to be owned by U.S. taxpayers who have forked out more than $60 billion to buy it.

But why would U.S. taxpayers want to own today?"s GM?

The answer, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

by Mark Silva

On the eve of President Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he will deliver an appeal for mutual understanding, the Arab world has heard from another voice: A recorded audio-tape attributed to Osama bin Laden, fugitive leader of al Qaeda, accusing Obama of fomenting "hatred'' with military action in Pakistan.

The purported broadcast of bin Laden's words, aired by the Arab-language Al Jazeera satellite television station as Obama was arriving in Saudi Arabia today, stood as a stark reminder of the hurdles that the United States still faces throughout the region.

While the president is intent on "resetting''' U.S. relations with the Muslim world in his planned televised address from the campus of Cairo University in Egypt, some of the long-elusive sponsors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults against the United States remain at large and refocused on overturning the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I don't think it's surprising that al Qaeda would want to shift attention away from the president's historic efforts ... to reach out and have an open dialogue with the Muslim world,'' Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, said as the president was holding private meetings with the king of Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, son of a Saudi family that gained enormous wealth in construction and built the royal palaces of the late King Saud, became involved in the militant Jihadist movement in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that nation. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was confined to house arrest, and left the country in the early 1990s - his Saudi citizenship publicly revoked in 1994.

If Obama's mission in the Middle East has a clear purpose, the administration maintains, so does the timing of al Qaeda's message.

The tape's broadcast follows comments from al-Qaeda's second- in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Egyptians to shun Obama and contending that the "torturers of Egypt" and "slaves of America'' had invited the American leader to speak in Cairo.

The administration has attempted to draw a contrast between an al Qaeda in hiding and an American leader taking a high-profile stance with his appeal to the Muslim world.

"You have, you know, the leader of the free world speaking from one of the great cities in the world, and you have, you know, bin Laden speaking from an undisclosed... location,'' said Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs. "That speaks volumes in terms of the contrast.''

Eli Saslow, the young Washington Post reporter best known for his giddy promotion of Obama?"s "glistening pectorals," touted Obama as a "powerful new ally" against "Islamophobia" on the front of Wednesday?"s Style section. The protagonist of Saslow?"s story, Aida Mansoor of Hartford, Connecticut, tries to educate an apparently (and painfully) bigoted America about Islam. This is where Obama comes to the rescue:

Her attempts at cross-cultural connection can sometimes feel futile, Mansoor says, but her energy this year has been fortified by a powerful new ally: President Obama, a Christian who has promised unprecedented outreach to the Muslim world. More than 85 percent of Muslims in the United States approve of Obama's performance as president, according to a recent Gallup poll, which is his strongest endorsement from any religious group.

"What he says could go a long way toward dispelling the myths," Mansoor says. "For a long time, Muslims have been the bad guys in this country. There is so much hate and misunderstanding, and he might be able to help the world overcome some of it."

Before Obama hosts his global diversity seminar, Mansoor begins her local equivalent.

The assumption behind the Post story is that America has a long way to go to be properly "educated" that Islam is a peaceful religion. The headline was "As the Myths Abound, So Does Islamic Outreach." Will knowledge defeat ignorance? The Post's headline inside isn't optimistic: "Explaining Islam to? Americans: It's Not Any Easier These Days."

The Post doesn?"t ask: is it possible that Muslims can exaggerate the harshness and everyday commonality of "Islamophobia" among Americans? Saslow brings his story right around to how the 2008 election displayed "the worst of Islamophobia" in the United States:

After Abdul-Karim [Mansoor?"s imam] finishes his introductory lecture at the library, Mansoor plays a series of media clips compiled during the past year. The 2008 presidential election, Mansoor says, revealed the worst of Islamophobia in the United States. "Anytime you turned on the TV, they were saying, 'You know, maybe Obama is a Muslim,' " she tells the class. "Well, first of all, he's not a Muslim. But more important: So what if he was? What's wrong with that?"

Mansoor turns out the lights and starts the projector, which the class takes as a cue to relax.... One of the census employees closes his eyes as Mansoor plays the first sound bite, from a broadcast of Michael Savage's radio show:

"We have a right to know if [Obama's] a so-called friendly Muslim or one who aspires to more radical teachings," Savage says.

Then comes a clip of Sen. John McCain at one of his campaign rallies, responding to a woman who asked whether Obama was Arab: "No ma'am," McCain says. "He's a decent family man, citizen."

Eventually, Mansoor finishes with a video of an experiment conducted by a television station. The clerk at a bagel shop pretends to refuse service to a Muslim woman, and the camera focuses on other customers' responses. Three customers congratulate the clerk for taking a stand against "un-American terrorists." Several others leave the store in protest. One man, moved to tears, tells the clerk, "Every person deserves to be treated with respect, dignity."

Mansoor stops the tape and turns on the lights. She's crying. The attendees set down their pens and cellphones. They're watching now.

"This always brings tears to my eyes when I see it," Mansoor says. "This is what we face every day. Every day. Maybe it gives you a little bit of an idea what it must feel like. What are your reactions?"

Nobody speaks....

Finally, Lillian Ruiz, the human-relations director, raises her hand.

"I think we need to stand up like we did in the 1950s," Ruiz said. "You watch things like this and it makes you want to just fight back and do something, because it's so sad. Obviously, discrimination is still very alive."

"Yes," Mansoor says. "Yes. Thank you."

That's how the article ends. America's stuck in the 1950s, and Muslims are the new blacks.

Here?"s where the whole story turns on fiction: Saslow is writing about a February 26, 2008 episode of ABC?"s Primetime: What Would You Do? in which actors playing an obnoxiously bigoted clerk and an offended Muslim woman try to nudge unsuspecting members of the public into action. The "Islamophobia" is exaggerated for ratings and to make a liberal point against discriminatory attitudes. ABC?"s John Quinones, the host of these "thought experiments," explained:

QUINONES: The young woman in our experiment is an actor. But for this woman, discrimination is all too real. Nohayia Javed [ph] helped us design our experiment. Although born in Chicago, she says she's constantly characterized by fellow Americans as the enemy.

JAVED: They always start off with, 'You're a terrorist. Osama-lover. Towel-head. Camel jockey." On and on.

Fellow Americans "always start" with terrorist accusations? They?"re "constantly" attacking Muslims with harsh ridicule? At what point do ABC and The Washington Post acknowledge this kind of harassment might not be a constant occurrence?

In that 2008 segment, Quinones acknowledged "At the end of the day, 13 people stood up for the Muslim woman, while six sided with the clerk. But the majority of the bystanders, 22, did or said absolutely nothing." Because twice as many expressed offense, Quinones placed all the blame on the bystanders, so that the vast majority looked like they needed an Islamic training seminar.

PS: Here's what gets left out of the sympathetic story: does Islamic outreach always ring true? A newspaper account of another Aida Mansoor event in Connecticut features Muslim convert Ingrid Mattson uncorking this whopper:

The most common misconception about Islam is that it is oppressive to women. Muslim women, like women all over the world have often had to struggle to enjoy their natural rights, but Islam is most often seen by them as a source of strength in advocating for their rights.