Keep Your Eye On FreedomPop

It's only a matter of time until someone comes up with a Skype-like application that will make smartphones affordable -- something like FreedomPop. Watch this space.

Let Us All Mock Eric Cantor (2012)

It's an oldie, but a goodie. Click here for Eric Cantor's tweet celebrating Labor Day, 2012:

Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

The link includes a short blurb about the establishment of Labor Day as a national holiday. Hey, Eric, maybe you should recognize that Labor Day was created to honor labor -- not management. Jerk.

CPC Budget

The CPC (Congressional Progressive Caucus) has released its annual budget proposal. It contains a lot of good ideas -- that will be seen by hardly anyone. Lightweight Paul Ryan gets all kinds of coverage of his smoke-and-mirrors Ayn Rand propositions, but the CPC? Not so much. Here's a budget summary:

"We’re in a jobs crisis that isn’t going away. Millions of hard-working American families are falling behind, and the richest 1 percent is taking home a bigger chunk of our nation’s gains every year. Americans face a choice: we can either cut Medicare benefits to pay for more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or we can close these tax loopholes to invest in jobs. We choose investment. The Back to Work Budget invests in America’s future because the best way to reduce our long-term deficit is to put America back to work.

"In the first year alone, we create nearly 7 million American jobs and increase GDP by 5.7%.

"We reduce unemployment to near 5% in three years with a jobs plan that includes repairing our nation’s roads and bridges, and putting the teachers, cops and firefighters who have borne the brunt of our economic downturn back to work.

"We reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion by closing tax loopholes and asking the wealthy to pay a fair share.

"We repeal the arbitrary sequester and the Budget Control Act that are damaging the economy, and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid, which provide high quality, low-cost medical coverage to millions of Americans when they need it most.

"This is what the country voted for in November. It’s time we side with America’s middle class and invest in their future.

Job Creation
• Infrastructure – substantially increases infrastructure investment to the level the American Society of Civil Engineers says is necessary to close our infrastructure needs gap

• Education – funds school modernizations and rehiring laid-off teachers

• Aid to States – closes the recession-caused gap in state budgets for two years, allowing the rehiring of cops, firefighters, and other public employees

• Making Work Pay – boosts consumer demand by reinstating an expanded tax credit for three years

• Emergency Unemployment Compensation – allows beneficiaries to claim up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits in high-unemployment states for two years

• Public Works Job Programs and Aid to Distressed Communities – includes job programs such as a Park Improvement Corps, Student Jobs Corps, and Child Care Corps

Fair Individual Tax
• Immediately allows Bush tax cuts to expire for families earning over $250K
• Higher tax rates for millionaires and billionaires (from 45% to 49%)
• Taxes income from investments the same as income from wages

Fair Corporate Tax
• Ends corporate tax bias toward moving jobs and profits overseas
• Enacts a financial transactions tax
• Reduces deductions for corporate jets, meals, and entertainment

Defense
• Returns Pentagon spending to 2006 levels, focusing on modern security needs Health Care
• No benefit cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security
• Reduces health care costs by adopting a public option, negotiating drug prices, and reducing fraud

Environment
• Prices carbon pollution with a rebate to hold low income households harmless
• Eliminates corporate tax subsidies for oil, gas, and coal companies

GETTING AMERICANS BACK TO WORK
The Back to Work Budget creates nearly 7 million jobs in its first year

Robert Reich's 7 Points

Okay, he's shilling for his documentary, "Inequality for All" -- an excellent documentary, by the way -- but this exposition on 7 points is a short clip that puts his arguments in a nutshell.

High-Speed Rail For Low-Information America

Click here for an argument for building an American high-speed-rail network.

Good Gravy (train)! The Media FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) Factory

Click here for Bob Rankin's take on the media (CNN in particular) -- sensationalistic nonsense designed simply to garner clicks -- this is news?

A Short Interview With Bill Maher

Click here for short takes from an interview of Bill Maher by Harry Smith of NBC News, in which Maher makes several good points in a short time.

Impending Societal Collapse - The Fall Of The Western Empire?

Click here for an article in The Guardian by Nafeez Ahmed entitled Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

The subheading is "Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system."

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

In other words, it's happened to advanced, complex civilizations before; it can happen again. And it isn't Armageddon; it's the natural order of things.

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels."

The elites are cushioned against the collapse, which is felt first by the poor or the commoners, but it eventually overwhelms the elites as well:

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."

The study's conclusions are not all gloom and doom, though: with wisdom and foresight (?!), corrective measures can be taken:

The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."

And finally:

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies - by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be very conservative.

Read Extremely Fast, With Total Comprehension!

Click here for an article at Elite Daily, by Christian La Du, entitled This Insane New App Will Allow You To Read Novels In Under 90 Minutes. It seems to work! Courtesy of my newsletter from Bob Rankin.

Trailer For Court Reporting Movie: For The Record

Jon Stewart - Arizona SB 1062 (8:55)

Excellent bit by Jon Stewart. The Arizona legislature passed a law, SB 1062, that would allow discrimination against LGBT people on religious grounds. Proponents said the bill was designed to defend freedom of religion. Condemnation was universal, and as a result of the backlash, even the bill's sponsors scrambled to denounce their own vote. (A Phoenix pizzeria got a lot of coverage of its window sign, "We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators.") Governor Jan Brewer eventually vetoed the bill.

I especially like the last minute:

Megyn Kelly (Fox News):  "We hear a lot from folks on the religious right who say they feel religion is under attack, and you know, I look at this bill and I wonder whether this is a reaction, an overreaction, to people who feel under attack."

Stewart:  "That's a good point -- 'a reaction, an overreaction.' Where would people of faith -- where would Arizonans have gotten the idea that religion is under attack in this country?"

Then we see 14 rapid-fire clips from Fox News of various Fauxes complaining about the war on Christianity. Rubbing his chin contemplatively, Stewart wonders:

"Why would religious people overreact to that constant barrage of apocalyptic paranoia and outrage? [shrugs] God only knows."

Where Have All The Workers Gone? and A Star In A Bottle

A couple of rescues from The New Yorker for later perusal: Click here for In the Age of Amazon, Where Have All The Workers Gone?, by George Packer. Click here for A Star In A Bottle, 15 pages(!) by Raffi Khatchadourian.

A Star In A Bottle is about the development of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, expected to be ready around a decade from now.

At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles—the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.

No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of ITER’s vacuum interior.

Mike Lofgren, Republican Congressional Staffer, Defects

Click here for an article dated 3 September 2011 by Mike Lofgren, a Republican congressional staffer for 28 years who retired in May 2011 out of disgust for what the Republican party had become. The article, at Truth-Out.org, is entitled Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. It's long, and it's excellent.

Three areas it considers in depth are:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.
2. They worship at the altar of Mars.
3. Give me that old time religion.

Ouch! Richard Engel, How Could You?

Click here for a clip of a video that aired on NBC News -- Brian Williams (one of my favorites), with millions of viewers -- by Richard Engel -- an idol of mine, a reporter whose courage in theaters of war is practically beyond belief -- that is a complete and utter lie. (Et tu, Richard? And Brian?)  

Click here for an article by my favorite tech guy, Bob Rankin, on how this article represents a complete failure by respected newsmen.

A Koch Brothers Compendium

Click here. I had to save this one for later perusal. I'm not sure who to credit. It appears on Crooks & Liars as "By ProPublica." They later credit Kim Barker and Theodoric Meyer. Anyway, it's a collection of articles on the Koch brothers -- more than you ever wanted to know, I'm sure. Publications mentioned are The New Yorker (twice), The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico (twice), OpenSecrets, The Texas Observer, and Mother Jones.

Cranking Up The Police State

Hey, Smallville, USA: Wanna buy an 18-ton, 14-foot-high, heavily armored MRAP -- Mine-Resistant, Ambush Protected -- vehicle for your police force? When your local cops are responding to complaints of family disputes or noise violations, keep them protected from AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and IEDs!

If so, man, have I got a deal for you! Although they originally cost taxpayers between $400,000 and $700,000, complete with gun turret and bullet-proof windows, how about FREE? The Pentagon happens to have about 11,000 of them sitting around unused, so all you have to do is come and pick them up, and pay for the gas. They get about 5 miles to the gallon, they can't go over or under most bridges, and they tend to tip over on rough terrain (how's your pothole situation, Smallville?).

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars, apparently by Who.What.Why.com, entitled Police State 'Gears Up.'

At the time of the article, 165 of the vehicles had been delivered, with 731 more requested. "Customers" include the University of Ohio -- for a "police presence" at football games -- and the town of Hamburg Village, NY (pop. 9,500). A dozen or so of these impressive vehicles put on a great show when you're hunting a wounded, unarmed 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.



 

More and more, the U.S. is militarizing its police forces, even in small towns. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars, trained to regard the civilian population as the enemy, are eagerly scooped up by civilian police recruiters. The Mexican border has become a playground for defense contractors looking to utilize their fancy warmaking and surveillance technologies. When did you last read 1984?

U.S. Grand Juries - a.k.a. Kangaroo Court

Most Canadians are familiar with the term "grand jury" from American police procedurals, but hardly any of them know what it is. Click here for the Wikipedia entry for "grand jury."

A grand jury is a legal body that is empowered to investigate potential criminal conduct and to determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A grand jury may compel the production of documents and may compel the sworn testimony of witnesses to appear before it. A grand jury is separate from the courts, which do not preside over its functioning.

The only thing that's "grand" about a grand jury is that it's big (from the French "grand," meaning "big.") It's a big jury. The jury we're accustomed to seeing on TV is a "petit jury" -- American pronunciation, "petty jury" -- a small jury; usually 12, but in some states and in some proceedings, there may be only 6 jurors. The number of jurors in a grand jury varies from state to state, from 16 to 23.

This "big jury" is in fact a kangaroo court, by any definition of that term. There's a common saying in discussions of American law that "A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich." The only persons present at a grand jury hearing are the jury itself, a judge, and the prosecutor (and at least sometimes a court reporter). The prosecutor presents his reasons as to why criminal proceedings should be brought against the accused. There is no rebuttal. A recent Crooks & Liars post referenced an article by Tim Cushing in Techdirt entitled Grand Jury Somehow Fails To Indict Man Who Shot Deputy During No-Knock, Pre-Dawn Raid For Capital Murder. According to this article:

During a single four-hour workday last week, a Mecklenburg County [Charlotte, NC] grand jury heard 276 cases and handed down 276 indictments.That means the 18 jurors heard evidence, asked questions, weighed whether the charges merit a trial, then voted on the indictments – all at the average rate of one case every 52 seconds.

U.S. Antitrust Law From The Robber Barons To The Clinton Years

Click here for an article entitled Antitrust Law from West's Encyclopedia of American Law, which defines antitrust law as

Legislation enacted by the federal and various state governments to regulate trade and commerce by preventing unlawful restraints, price-fixing, and monopolies, to promote competition, and to encourage the production of quality goods and services at the lowest prices, with the primary goal of safeguarding public welfare by ensuring that consumer demands will be met by the manufacture and sale of goods at reasonable prices.

Some excerpts:

Premised on the belief that free trade benefits the economy, businesses, and consumers alike, the law forbids several types of restraint of trade and monopolization. These fall into four main areas: agreements between competitors, contractual arrangements between sellers and buyers, the pursuit or maintenance of monopoly power, and mergers.

Antitrust law originated in reaction to a public outcry over trusts, which were late-nineteenth-century corporate monopolies that dominated U.S. manufacturing and mining. Trusts took their name from the quite legal device of business incorporation called trusteeship, which consolidated control of industries by transferring stock in exchange for trust certificates. The practice grew out of necessity. Twenty-five years after the Civil War, rapid industrialization had blessed and cursed business. Markets expanded and productivity grew, but output exceeded demand and competition sharpened. Rivals sought greater security and profits in cartels (mutual agreements to fix prices and control output). Out of these arrangements sprang the trusts. From sugar to whiskey to beef to tobacco, the process of merger and consolidation brought entire industries under the control of a few powerful people. Oil and steel, the backbone of the nation's heavy industries, lay in the hands of the corporate giants John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. The trusts could fix prices at any level. If a competitor entered the market, the trusts would sell their goods at a loss until the competitor went out of business and then raise prices again. By the 1880s, abuses by the trusts brought demands for reform.

In 1890, Congress took aim at the trusts with passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, named for Senator John Sherman (R-Ohio). It went far beyond the common law's refusal to enforce certain offensive contracts. Clearly persuaded by the more restrictive view that saw great harm in restraint of trade, the Sherman Act outlawed trusts altogether.

After the turn of the twentieth century, federal enforcement picked up speed. President Theodore Roosevelt's announcement that he was a "trustbuster" predicted one important aspect of the future of antitrust enforcement: it would depend largely on political will from the executive branch of government. Roosevelt and his successor, President William Howard Taft, responded to public criticism over the rapid merger of even more industries by pursuing more vigorous legal action, and steady prosecution in the first decade of the twentieth century brought the downfall of trusts.

After the demise of the robber barons, the industrial climate changed:

As World War I and the 1920s reversed the outlook of previous years, antitrust policy was characterized by the hands-off policies of President Calvin Coolidge, who declared, "The business of America is business." Economic trends created and supported this attitude; prosperity seemed a worthwhile reward. In this era, the Justice Department gave more attention to promoting fairness than it did to attacking restrictive practices and monopoly power.

A more permissive business climate initially stymied some of FDR's antitrust efforts, but by 1940 Roosevelt's arguments had largely won the day and stronger antitrust legislation was securely in place. That era reached its high-water mark in the early 1980s with the breakup of AT&T, which was found to have impeded competition in long-distance telephone service and telecommunications equipment.

The result was the largest divestiture in history: a federal court severed the Bell System's operating companies and manufacturing arm (Western Electric) from AT&T, transforming the nation's telephone services.

In the Reagan years, though, the pendulum started to swing back. One landmark case was the Justice Department's 13-year suit against IBM, ultimately dropped.

Throughout the 1980s, political conservatism in federal enforcement complemented the Supreme Court's doctrine of nonintervention. The administration of President Ronald Reagan reduced the budgets of the FTC and the Department of Justice, leaving them with limited resources for enforcement. Enforcement efforts followed a restrictive agenda of prosecuting cases of output restrictions and large mergers of a horizontal nature (involving firms within the same industry and at the same level of production). Mergers of companies into conglomerates, on the other hand, were looked on favorably, and the years 1984 and 1985 produced the greatest increase in corporate acquisitions in the nation's history.

A conservative Supreme Court "strengthened requirements for evidence, injury, and the right to bring suit," and "antitrust cases became harder for plaintiffs to win. Most decisions in this period narrowed the reach of antitrust."

After the Reagan years, antitrust attitudes sharpened in Washington, D.C. The administration of President George Bush adopted a slightly more activist approach, reflected in joint guidelines on mergers issued in 1992 by the FTC and the Justice Department. In following the trend away from strict Chicago school efficiency standards, the guidelines looked more closely at competitive effects and tightened requirements. But understaffed government attorneys generally lost court cases. President Bill Clinton took this activism further. Anne K. Bingaman, his appointee to head the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, beefed up the division's staff with sixty-one new attorneys, declaring her organization the competition agency. The Antitrust Division filed thirty-three civil suits in 1994, roughly three times the annual number brought under Reagan and Bush. It won some victories without going to court, in one instance compelling AT&T to keep a subsidiary private, but it lost a major lawsuit claiming that General Electric had conspired with the South African firm of DeBeers to fix industrial diamond prices.

Under President Clinton, the most important antitrust action involved a federal probe of the computer software giant Microsoft Corporation. In its potential for far-reaching action, this was the biggest antitrust case since those involving AT&T and IBM. Competitors complained that Microsoft used illegal arrangements with buyers to ensure that its disk operating system would be installed in nearly 80 percent of the world's computers. In-depth investigations by the FTC and the Department of Justice followed. In mid-1994, under threat of a federal lawsuit, Microsoft entered a consent decree designed to increase competitors' access to the market. All the parties involved---the original complainants, Microsoft, and the government---expressed relative satisfaction. But in early 1995, a federal judge rejected the agreement, citing evidence of other monopolistic practices by Microsoft. In a highly unusual move, the Justice Department and Microsoft together appealed the decision. The uncertain future of the case carried the threat of further action against the nation's fifth-largest industry.

The article ends there, abruptly and rather unsatisfyingly. How did the Microsoft case turn out? What developments to antitrust law took place during the Bush II and Obama years? We'll have to look elsewhere for the answers to those questions. in place.

A New iPad!

So, Papa, do you like the new iPad we got you?

Seinfeld: You Want A Piece Of Me?

Classic Seinfeld out-take clip: