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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Implications of Stoneridge

By John Barkdull at Mar 13, 2010


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As noted earlier, the Stoneridge v. Scientific Atlanta decision absolved third parties from civil liability despite their knowing participation in fraud regarding a company's balance sheet. The Supreme Court ruled against Stoneridge, an investment firm, saying that defendants' actions were too remote to incur civil liability. The decision played a part in plaintiffs dropping $40 billion of lawsuits against third parties in the Enron scandal, investment banks in particular. It appears that, as it stands, as long as a third party did not make a public statement to potential investors on which investors relied in making investment decisions, third parties are not liable, even if they knowingly helped a company misrepresent its financial condition. 

Why should progressives care about the rights of shareholders? Public pension funds, union retirement funds, and various other public investments are at stake. These funds, financed by the savings of working people, were major victims of the mortgage-backed securities rip-off that brought us to the current economic crisis. We should care that the regulatory framework is so biased toward investment banks, brokers, accounting firms, law firms, and the ratings agencies that they can aid and abet massive confiscation of public wealth and get away with it. For me, the question is still open: Does this case and related law and litigation shield the likes of Goldman Sachs from civil liability for their part in disseminating shaky securities, knowing that consumer lending standards had collapsed and everyone was looking the other way while securities based on home loans and consumer credit were flooding the world market?

Some useful sources on this case.

http://www.theracetothebottom.org/securities-issues/friday-editorial-sox-stoneridge-and-the-assault-on-sharehold.html

Susan Antilla, “Investors Lose Again, Thanks to the Supreme Court,” Bloomberg.com January 18, 2008, www.bloomberg.com;

 

Greg Stohr, “Enron Investors Suing Banks Spurned by Top U.S. Court (Update 2),” Bloomberg.com January 22, 2008, www.bloomberg.com

 

http://topics.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/06-43

 

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/colloquy/2009/17/LRColl2009n17Gevurtz.pdf

 

 

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