New Orleans  

Nonetheless, I’m loving reading all of the hype in the financial press about the Facebook IPO the other day as they went public on Wall Street.  The story in brief is that the big whoops priced the stock at a huge multiple of its revenue and profits to inflate a book value, if successful, that would have set records and valued the company at its infancy at close to $100 billion dollars.  Endless stories, many of them true, about huge cash outs and sudden gazillionaires have a huge fan base, so they were regularly stoked.

But, now they are crying like stuck pigs.  Seems there was no rush from the little guys to buy the stock and it only held the value on the first trading day with a lifeline from is bankers, Morgan Stanely, who moved in to fix the price by buying shares.  The second day of trading the stock fell off 11%, and the roars began.

The real issue is that Wall Street thought the fix was in.  They thought they had stacked the deck with the early purchases so that the “biscuit cookers” would buy in to what they had been conned to believe was a “sure thing,” and some of the little folks might make a dollar or two, but the big boys would make millions on the increase thanks to the suckers spending on the street.  Didn’t happen, captain!  So, now the Wall Streeters are screaming like stuck pigs.

My unsophisticated argument has always been that the stock market at these odds where Wall Street is the “house,” and we are the small better, is the same as going to a casino in Vegas or any other state:  a matter of luck for the small fry and odds for the big dawg.   For now Facebook seems suddenly to be case in point once again that the fix was in, but the quick killing of the little investors didn’t happen.  There’s a recession driven by Wall Street that some of the big dogs forgot to realize reduced any belief they were running a fair game.

They are not, so they need to learn to lose on these bait-and-switch things.

New Orleans

The Judge’s decision is chilling to all of us, as reported in the Times:

“Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., wrote in his opinion that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

The judge said that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over the Internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account, they relinquished an expectation of privacy.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.”

Needless to say, I added the emphasis above.  I would love to see a survey determine how many people thought when they signed up for Twitter that they were “voluntarily” surrendering all future privacy or protection from investigation of any of their speech and electronic communication via email.  I bet we could squeeze them all in a phone booth.  It would probably be easier to find a working phone booth in fact than these few folks!   They “knew or should have known…they had a lessen expectation of privacy….”  What can you say, but “WOW!”

Add that to the news in the same edition that Facebook is now following Google in submitting to 20 years of FCC inspection (though I’m not sure that means much these days?) for breaches of privacy rules and lax privacy controls as they troll and mine our data, and you start to realize that essentially everything we do – at least electronically – is open season for governmental and commercial interests.

Wikileaks may have failed in achieving its goal of more transparency in government, but as an indirect result, we as citizens may now be virtually translucent and 100% transparent!

Lafayette

Police and government officials in the UK asked Twitter if they could eliminate this nuisance of using Twitter names that were not real name, so that it would be easier for them to bust people  Twitter luckily in this case demurred.

The Blackberry people with Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada seemed from these reports to be read to fold as easily as a cheap suit to virtually any government request, which was disconcerting since so many of us are (were?) hanging on as Blackberry users and fans.  Luckily, I don’t use whatever Blackberry Messenger is, but I found myself reaching out to colleagues in Toronto with ACORN Canada pretty damned quickly after reading about their weak knees to make sure that was the case.

The Iranian government is having a bit of fun with this and offered to send a human rights delegation to London to investigate abuses, since the UK had offered to do much the same when they shut down Twitter and Facebook during protests a couple of years ago.  Ha-ha-not!

In San Francisco reputedly a bastion of both freedom and certainly speech, the BART rapid transit system has been stubbornly defending their willingness to cut off all access to the internet to block protests.  There are now reports on stalking based on pejorative tweets within the Buddhist community in the USA.

Do we really want this?  I don’t think so, and I say this as someone who has gotten a good share of flaming, threatening, and violently abusive messages over the internet transom at different times.  I worry less about those crazies than the ones hiding behind doors, if you know what I mean.  As long as there is a Delete button, I’m able to weather all of those storms with“sticks and stones” vigilance while letting the “words” roll off, like water off a duck’s back.

We have to have the ability to organize and associate, even when others go over the line.  It’s easier to say we’re sorry in such circumstances, than to imagine the lack of freedom involved in having to ask permission to be able to speak to ourselves much less our governments about our interests and issues.

Catania The four women from Palermo had been peppering me with questions throughout the organizing workshops.  Clearly they were up to something, so it was not surprising when they finally arranged to visit with me for a couple of hours to get advice on their campaign.   At the simplest they were trying to win the designation of public space in the historic district of central Palermo and shut down the square to vehicular traffic permanently to create a cultural and traditional public space.

They had created a committee of about 50 committed activists.  They had a Face Book site with about 500 of their friends and FB “friends.” They had won some initial skirmishes on this issue over the year or so of their fight by getting the City Councilors to move their dozen parking spaces from this area to another not far away.  The Greek Orthodox and one other church had agreed to support them, though other businesses in the area had not been won over.  They had done several public events including a whole series of things in the square one weekend when they had convinced the city to give them a shot.  They admitted that they had become media darlings and got very good press.

They had done a good job with great energy.  They had a huge amount going for them.   Unfortunately they had no real base.  This problem of activists with good ideas, looking for shortcuts in the naïveté that being “right” is enough to win, and not doing the work to create real organization or a wide and deep base, seems epidemic worldwide.

These women had gotten the religion though and were committed to building a base behind their effort.  They were also anything but naïve.  The city officials may not be taking them seriously yet, but with more discussion it became clear that their agenda is deeply political and rooted in an analysis that the city administration is dysfunctional and democratically corrupt.  With a big win in the middle of Palermo under their belt, each one of them could be dangerous, and with an organization someday, they could be powerful.