Sen. Al Franken (D.-Minn.) warned a packed house Thursday night in Minneapolis that the corporate takeover of our media, and the government’s failure to stop it, is one of the most important issues of our time.

Franken said our media system is at risk everywhere we turn — from our free speech online to the growing power of companies who own a massive number of media outlets.

Franken was speaking during a hearing featuring Federal Communications Commission Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps.

He spoke about recent efforts by Verizon and Google to push a “policy framework” on Washington that transfers control over Internet content from the people who go online into the hands of a few powerful corporations.

“We can’t let companies write the rules that they’re supposed to follow,” he said. “Because if that happens those rules are going to be written only to protect corporations.”
He also warned of the looming merger between cable giant Comcast and NBC-Universal, urging Copps and Clyburn to oppose the merger and enforce Net Neutrality rules that would protect free speech online.

With the Internet, “We don’t just have a competition problem, we have a First Amendment problem,” Franken said. He then quoted Justice Hugo Black, who warned against letting companies have the power to prevent people from publishing.

In a Thursday Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial, both Copps and Clyburn said that the power of the Internet must remain in the hands of consumers, “because corporations will press their advantage if they can.”

“History teaches us … that when technological capability to exercise control combines with a financial incentive to do so, some will try to turn this power to their own advantage,” they wrote.

In reference to the Verizon and Google deal, they wrote: “This new framework is not what the American people have been waiting for, not by a long shot.”

Companies like AT&T, Verizon and Google would like to resolve this issue by creating policies in closed-door meetings with regulators. But the hundreds of people who packed the hearing in Minneapolis made it clear that this issue demands public participation.

Commissioners Copps and Clyburn and Sen. Franken are strong supporters of policies that would make Net Neutrality the rule of the road. President Obama has called protecting Net Neutrality a top priority. But FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has been reluctant to move forward to create a lasting rule.

Give Us Your Lavishly Rich, Your Xenophobic
by Paul Buchheit
Immigrants. Taking our jobs and public assistance. The cause of all our problems.

But it’s not true. We’re blaming people who are struggling day-by-day to survive on their own or support their families, while we applaud a system that allows a financial expert to make enough money to pay the salaries of 50,000 police officers.

Here are some facts:

The Census Bureau and the World Wealth Report 2010 both report increases for the top 5% of households even during the current recession.

Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie in one generation. In 1980 the richest 1% of America took one of every fifteen income dollars. Now they take THREE of every fifteen income dollars. That’s a TRILLION extra dollars a year.

Some ultra-rich individuals, like hedge fund managers David Tepper and John Paulson, made $4 billion in a year (on most of which they paid only a 15% capital gains tax rate). This is enough to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City.

But we blame the immigrants instead of the people taking unimaginable amounts of money from society.

Howard Zinn wrote about the petty thieves who go to jail for crimes averaging $1000 per offense, while sophisticated financial insiders get probation for swindling millions from the system. The only difference now is that it’s “legal” to use financial trickery to divert funds from education and infrastructure to a few well-positioned money managers.

The way it’s supposed to work, say the free-market tax-me-not supply-side trickle-down tea-party advocates, is that the rich will create jobs and stimulate the economy by investing in new production. But the richest 1%, who used to take $7 of every $100 of America’s income, have increased that to $20 of every $100 in just one generation.

To put it another way, if the bottom 90% had shared in America’s prosperity at a level consistent with 1980 incomes, the average middle-class family would be making $45,000 a year instead of $35,000.

And it’s not just the rich individuals, but also the corporations that are taking money meant for jobs and public needs. Fareed Zakaria noted in Newsweek that the 500 largest non-financial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in uninvested cash.

Zinn said change will occur only through direct action by the people, as occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The poor foreigner is not the enemy. It’s the person or corporation who siphons money away from the rest of us while supporting our irrational fears through the media and the military.

Give us your tired, your poor.

Give us your manipulator of finances.

Paul Buchheit is a faculty member in the School for New Learning at DePaul University.

NYT’s John Burns Calls for All the News That’s ‘Necessary to Report’

07/16/2010 by Steve Rendall  

Published on Friday, July 9, 2010 by Inter Press Service

Wealthy Reap Rewards While Those Who Work Lose

 by Adrianne Appel

 BOSTON – Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top. Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top. (photo by Flickr user wannabehipster)The riches of the wealthiest North Americans grew by double digits in 2009, primarily from interest their money earned when it was invested in the stock market and elsewhere, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group. Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars, the report found. Worldwide, 11 million – or less than 1 percent of all households – were millionaires in 2009. They owned about 38 percent of the world’s wealth or 111 trillion dollars, up from about 36 percent in 2008, according to Boston Consulting Group. About 4.7 million millionaires live in the U.S., four percent of the population and more than anywhere else in the world. Japan, China, Britain and Germany followed the U.S. in the number of millionaires. Their fortune is a stark contrast to the lives of more than 15 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed and searching for work, and the eight million more who are just getting by with a part-time job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than two million more people were working prior to the recession but have now dropped out of the labour force. Apart from the newly unemployed, about 39 million people in the U.S. are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat, according to the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The nation’s jobs crisis is so catastrophic that, unless Congress acts on the scale of the New Deal, millions of Americans will experience extremely long periods of unemployment for many years ahead,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told a panel of the Committee on Ways and Means recently. Not so for millionaires and the uber-rich. The uber-rich, those with more than 30 million dollars, are on the rebound. They spent more money in 2009 on fancy cars, yachts and jets compared to 2008, according to a study by Merrill Lynch-Capgemini. They bought fine art, expensive jewelry, gems and antiques, items that are likely to increase in value over time, so they can sell them later and make more money. The recession isn’t hitting those at the top as it has workers. In fact, many wealthy people benefited from the stock market’s ups and downs, said Mike Lapham, director of the Responsible Wealth Project at United for a Fair Economy, an NGO in Boston. “Folks at the top have a cushion, a disposable income to fall back on. Maybe their portfolios took a hit but they didn’t lose their jobs and their homes. If they had losses, they can deduct them from their taxes,” Lapham told IPS. “Some people bet successfully on the financial system going under,” he said. “The stock market went from 10,000 to 6,000 and back to 11,000. That’s a big jump for people with significant portfolios.” “The people at bottom who’ve lost work, it’ll be years before they get back to where they were before the crash,” Lapham said. The U.S. average national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent. Only those who are actively looking for work are included in this statistic. Among Black Americans, the rate is 15.5 percent and Latinos, 12.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that unemployment will remain almost unchanged in 2011, about 9.5 percent. Many families have been surviving on small, weekly unemployment checks provided for 26 weeks by their state government, and an additional 73 weeks by the federal government. The first group of unemployed to run through both benefits hit that point Jul. 1, and today about a million people are receiving no assistance at all. About nine million more are still receiving unemployment payments. Congress is considering extending federal assistance for another 20 weeks. The House approved the legislation, but the Senate did not. Congress left town for its holiday break until mid-July without passing the legislation. In the Senate the issue fell almost precisely along party lines, with all but one Democrat for extending the benefit, and all but two Republicans against it, saying the 34- billion-dollar cost was not worth adding to the federal deficit. Without the vote of Democratic Senator Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, the bill was one vote short of the 60 needed for passage. “I think we’re going to see a new wave of heartache here in Rhode Island,” with the end of the federal assistance, Kate Brewster, executive director of the Poverty Institute, a Rhode Island NGO, told IPS. The small, northeastern U.S. state, a former manufacturing centre whose jobs moved offshore, has struggled with higher unemployment and low-wage jobs for years. Most recently, it was hard hit by the foreclosure crisis and the downturn in the construction industry. The ongoing unemployment and low jobs creation nationwide is helping to fuel the millions of foreclosures sweeping across the nation, according to a report by the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. The nation’s anemic jobs creation, high foreclosures and weak consumer spending has convinced Mishel and many economists that the U.S. is in for an extended downturn. Just 83,000 jobs were created in June, instead of the 150,000 needed for robust employment, according to the U.S. Labor Department. “The United States is undergoing the worst economic downturn in 70 years, and the damage and suffering it is causing will last many years beyond the official end of the recession,” Mishel said. Rhode Island’s future is uncertain. “We’ve consistently had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country,” Brewster said. Today, in the midst of the recession, more people are showing up at soup kitchens for free meals and dialing in to a toll-free, crisis phone service for families in dire circumstances, she said. “They’ve had an enormous influx of calls in the past 18 to 21 months,” she said. Fewer services are available to help them. “Within last five years the state cut back work support programmes like child care assistance and funded health insurance,” Brewster said. “The cruel irony is that when families really need help, less is available.”

Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service

sounds like something needs to change, who’s with me?

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AT&T Apologizes for Luke Wilson Ads

By Megan Tady, April 1, 2010

AT&T this morning apologized for their advertising series featuring once-credible actor Luke Wilson. The ads, which began in early November, show Wilson awkwardly touting the company’s 3G network – which the company admits would be difficult role for any actor, given the network’s terrible reputation. An AT&T spokesperson issued the following statement: We’re sorry for this whole ‘Luke Wilson thing.’ We didn’t realize he would mail-in his performance with the enthusiasm of an angsty teenage boy forced to tell his mom about his day at school – even if our network is hard to sell with any semblance of real passion. The company had tried to lure other actors to sign on as spokespeople, including George Clooney, Tom Cruise and Anthony Michael Hall. Clooney’s handlers responded to our inquiry with a terse email: “Clooney dropped the iPhone after his calls were dropped one too many times. Also, Clooney doesn’t do marbles falling on his head.” The AT&T spokesperson admitted it was difficult to find someone – anyone – to sing the network’s praises, even for cash. She said: AT&T has no ‘indie cred.’ We’re a massive blue chip corporation with interests in defeating most everything the independent arts, film and music movement stand for, like Net Neutrality. That said, we never realized how difficult it would be to make our sub-par product, and our sub-par company, appear better than it is. AT&T had hoped Luke Wilson’s deadpan delivery as a monotone slacker in films like My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Idiocracy were actually not the extent of his range as an actor. The company now regrets not just letting the falling marbles on the maps speak for themselves. When asked why the company doesn’t simply improve its public image by investing in its networks, offering better prices and supporting public policies like Net Neutrality, the spokesperson responded with a blank stare, and then this undecipherable last sentence: “AT&T is best known for what it does best, and is going to keep it that way.”

Not only were they falsely claiming they have better coverage than Verizon, every single commercial with luke wilson talking about AT&T made me want to never again see his face in any film, EVER. Thats how bad those commercials irritated the living crap out of me. I feel bad for luke wilson as his image as an actor will never again be the same, thanks to AT&T.

Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea

By John D. Sutter, CNN March 31, 2010 –

Updated 1409 GMT (2209 HKT)

South Korea is known for having the fastest broadband Internet connections in the world.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS South Korea has the world’s fastest Internet speeds The U.S. Internet lags far behind for a number of reasons South Korea has more competition; it’s also more dense, which makes for shorter lines Korea’s culture may also contribute; the country has helped breed demand for fast speeds

RELATED TOPICS Broadband Internet Asia U.S. Government Editor’s

 Note: Which 17 countries have faster Internet connections than the United States?

See our Internet speed map.

 (CNN) — People in the United States basically invented the Internet. So U.S. connections must be the fastest and cheapest in the world, right? Not so much. Broadband Internet speeds in the United States are only about one-fourth as fast as those in South Korea, the world leader, according to the Internet monitoring firm Akamai. And, as if to add insult to injury, U.S. Internet connections are more expensive than those in South Korea, too. The slower connection here in the U.S. costs about $45.50 per month on average, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In South Korea, the much-faster hook-up costs $17 per month less. An average broadband bill there runs about $28.50. So why is U.S. Internet so much slower and pricier than broadband connections in South Korea? The question is timely, as the U.S. government pushes forward with a “broadband plan” that aims to speed up connections, reduce costs and increase access to the Internet, especially in rural areas. Map: U.S. Internet is slower than Slovakia’s? The comparison between South Korea and the United States is not perfectly instructive, especially since “we probably won’t ever be South Korea,” said Robert Faris, research director at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The whole political and social climate is so different, the geography is different, the history is so different,” he said. “It’s all pretty different.” With those caveats in mind, here are the five potential reasons U.S. Internet speeds are slower and more expensive than those in South Korea. This list was gleaned from interviews with broadband experts and from policy papers: Korean competition Countries with fast, cheap Internet connections tend to have more competition. In the U.S., competition among companies that provide broadband connections is relatively slim. Most people choose between a cable company and a telephone company when they sign up for Internet service. In other countries, including South Korea, the choices are more varied. While there isn’t good data on how many broadband carriers the average consumer has access to, “I think we can infer that South Korea has more [competition in broadband] than the United States,” Faris said. “In fact, most countries have more than the United States.” Some academics, including Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center, have criticized the U.S. government’s broadband plan as not doing enough to create the kind of competition that is present in other countries. In a New York Times editorial, Benkler says competition will reduce costs for broadband consumers. “Without a major policy shift to increase competition, broadband service in the United States will continue to lag far behind the rest of the developed world,” he writes. Culture and politics There are stark cultural differences between hyper-connected Korea, where more than 94 percent of people have high-speed connections, according to the OECD, and the United States, where only about 65 percent of people are plugged into broadband, according to an FCC survey. The South Korean government has encouraged its citizens to get computers and to hook up to high-speed Internet connections by subsidizing the price of connections for low-income and traditionally unconnected people. One program, for example, hooked up housewives with broadband and taught them how to make use of the Web in their everyday lives.

Parents in Korea, who tend to place high value on education, see such connections as necessities for their children’s educations, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. These cultural differences mean Korea has a more insatiable demand for fast Internet connections, he said. That demand, in turn, encourages telecommunications companies to provide those connections. Faris, of the Berkman Center, said no one society has a stronger appetite for Internet connectivity than another. Korea’s government simply has whetted that appetite, and provided the incentives to make high-speed connections accessible to a large segment of society. Political culture has more to do with it, he said. “The United States is a more litigious culture than others, and the power of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to regulate is not as strong here as it is in other countries,” which means its less likely that the U.S. will pass policies to promote the growth of ultra-fast broadband. Open versus closed networks There is vigorous debate in the telecommunications world about the role “open networks” have in creating fast, cheap Internet connections. The idea behind an “open” system is essentially that, for a fee, broadband providers must share the cables that carry Internet signals into people’s homes. Companies that build those lines typically oppose this sharing. A number of governments, including South Korea and Japan and several European countries, have experimented with or embraced infrastructure-sharing as a way to get new companies to compete in the broadband market.

The U.S. does not require broadband providers to share their lines, and some experts cite Korea’s relative openness as one reason the Internet there is so much faster and cheaper than it is here. The most important thing is that countries create a way for companies to enter the broadband market without having to pay for huge amounts of infrastructure, said Faris. Population density South Korea, with more than 1,200 people per square mile, is a lot denser than the United States, where 88 people live in the same amount of space, and where rural areas and suburbs are large. The result for broadband? It costs less to set up Internet infrastructure in a tightly populated place filled with high-rise-apartments, such as South Korea, than it does in the United States, where rural homes can be great distances apart. In both countries, copper wires tend to carry broadband signals from fiber optic cables and into the home. Data can travel fast on copper wire, but it slows down the farther it goes. In South Korea, that’s usually just from the base of an apartment building to a particular unit. In the U.S., copper wire may have to link a home with a fiber optic cable that’s a mile away. Korea had a plan … a decade ago In the 1990s, South Korea set a priority that it would be a highly connected country with a high degree of Internet literacy. “They made this a priority 10 years ago and they’ve really executed on it,” said Atkinson, from ITIF, the Internet policy think tank. The country is still four to five years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to broadband policy, even as the United States tries to catch up, said Taylor Reynolds, an economist at OECD. “Korea has long been a leader in broadband and in very fast broadband,” he said. “And, in fact, the technology that Korea has used for probably the past four to five years is VDSL, and that’s a technology that’s now being put in by AT&T” in the United States. Meanwhile, Korea is abandoning that technology in favor of the next big thing, Reynolds said. That likely involves bringing super-fast fiber optic cables straight into homes. And, according a recent report by the Berkman Center, that could make South Korean Internet 10 times faster than it is now. Faris said Korea’s clear-cut plan helped lead to its faster broadband speeds. “A big difference is that Korea made a decisive move to expand Internet in the country,” he said. “They said we want to be very good at connecting to the Internet. A lot of government money was thrown at it … “The U.S. has taken a fairly hands-off approach to the sector. They’ve left it to the private sector. There’s been some money put into it, but not that much, on a per capita basis. We just haven’t taken it that seriously.”

Health Means Life; Health Means Freedom

by George Lakoff

Five Reasons NOT to Invest in Nuclear Power

by Robert Alvarez

Yesterday, President Obama announced that the Energy department will provide an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to the Southern Co. for its proposed nuclear power plant near Augusta, GA. “The loan guarantee program for new nuclear power plants not only will further the nation’s commitment to clean energy, Obama said, “but also will assist in creating jobs in American communities.” Unfortunately, nuclear energy isn’t safe or clean and it’s too costly for the nation.

 

Barack Obama speaks about creating new energy jobs. He announced plans to fund two new nuclear power plants. (Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty)

News coverage has been mostly supportive and, in some cases, bordering on cheerleading. In his blog for the Atlantic magazine, Editor Daniel Indiviglio laid out “five reasons to cheer Obama’s ambition.” Let’s take a closer look at these “five reasons.” 

Reason #1: “Nuclear power is a known quantity. The U.S. has been successfully using this energy source for a very long time.”

Nuclear power is certainly well known to Wall Street, which despite its recent debacles, has refused to fund power reactors for more than 30 years because of their financial risks. Reactor construction costs climbed as high as 380 percent above expectations during the boom period for nuclear in the 1970s. Nuclear investors eventually wrote off about $17 billion. Consider the 1979 Three Mile Island Accident, in which TMI investors lost about $2 billion in about an hour, when the reactor core started to melt. Nuclear energy has depended primarily on the financial burden being born by the tax payer and rate payer. This is hardly a success story.

Reasons #2 & #3: Semi-Shovel ready, Jobs now — Jobs later

A new nuclear reactor might provide 800 near-term jobs and as many as 3,500 new construction jobs later. This is comparable to the number of home weatherization jobs created in State of Ohio last year. Unlike energy conservation, in which jobs are created relatively quickly, nuclear reactor construction jobs may take several years to come about.

Reason #4: Probably not very costly

Costs for nuclear power have nearly doubled in the past five years. Currently reactors are estimated to cost about $8 to $10 billion. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office estimate these loan guarantees have more than a 50-50 chance of failing — something Energy Secretary Chu told the news media yesterday he was unaware of before signing off on them. Because of the way the $54.5 billion in loan guarantees are structured, the Federal Financing Bank (otherwise known as the U.S. Treasury) will provide the loans. Guess who will be left holding the bag if things go south?

Reason #5: Preparing for America’s Energy future

Assuming that all $54.5 billion in nuclear loan guarantees being sought by Obama are successful — this will provide less than one percent of the nation’s current electrical generating capacity. Replacing the existing fleet of 104 reactors which are expected to shut down by 2056 could cost about $1.4 trillion. Add another $500 billion for a 50% increase above current nuclear generation capacity to make a meaningful impact on reducing carbon emissions. This means the U.S. would have to start bringing a new reactor on line at a rate of once a week to once a month for the next several decades.

Meanwhile, Obama has pulled the rug out from under the nuclear industry by terminating funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada. After nearly 30 years of trying, disposal of high-level radioactive waste is proving to be extremely difficult. So Obama has convened a “blue ribbon” panel of experts to go back to the drawing board and recommend what to do two years from now.

The accumulation of spent power-reactor fuel is expected to double at reactor sites and poses new safety issues, which will be the reality for several decades to come. Spent fuel pools currently contain about four times what their original designs envisioned and may be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than reactors. In 2004, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that drainage of water from a spent fuel pond by an act of malice could lead to a catastrophic radiological fire. One thing is certain. Republicans and Democrats do not want to restart a national radioactive waste dump selection process that’s guaranteed to anger voters before the 2012 elections and beyond.

Nuclear Energy is an intriguing idea until you start to think about it.

 

 

do people really think that spent nuclear waste is safe enough to put down as a layer on the ground on children’s playgrounds? versus rubber tires or wood chips? I think not, and when it comes to energy, solar, water, wind, and geothermal are the ways to go, not nuclear.