Beyond The Broken Spectrum

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s unsurprising affirmation of support for network neutrality is a victory for the high-minded principle of open, unfettered internet access. Too bad it means the days of all-you-can-eat, flat-rate internet access are probably over.

Net neutrality sounds like a good idea. After all, it’s the internet’s openness to any and all users, applications and content that gave it such a resounding victory over closed networks like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. And there’s no question that as a general business and networking principle, “anything goes” is both desirable and beneficial, to users and network operators alike. Over the long run, the most open networks attract the most customers and will be the most successful — and the most profitable.

But somewhere along the way, this principle of good network architecture turned into a political tenet that, according to some true believers, is almost equivalent to the Bill of Rights in importance.

The argument goes like this: Internet service providers have such strong motivations to restrict access to content or applications that they don’t like that the government needs to step in to ensure a level playing field. For net neutrality’s true believers, Comcast and Verizon no longer get to decide how best to configure the networks they spent billions building: Their networks are so ubiquitous, and so critical to the common good, that the government has a responsibility to ensure they are managed fairly.

It’s easy to see the merits of the argument, and when we’re talking about ISPs that are near-monopolies built in large part on the basis of government subsidy or exclusive federal licensing, it seems downright un-American to argue against net neutrality.

Unfortunately, there are at least three big problems with making net neutrality a federal mandate.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/fcc-neutrality-mistake/

Corporations are pitching a bizarre product — a radical vision of the 1st Amendment. It would give corporations rather than voters a central role in our electoral process by treating corporate political spending as protected speech. If this vision becomes reality, businesses and other big-money players will spend billions either hyping their preferred candidates or running attack ads against elected officials who don’t support their preferred agenda. Voters will be forced into a couch-potato role, mere viewers of the electoral spectacle bought and paid for by wealthy companies. Article continues at the L.A. Times

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

Story at Wired

As the number of problem U.S. banks swells to the hundreds, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is increasingly hard-pressed to fill in the gaps where institutions have put depositor’s funds at risk.

Unfortunately, a dire prediction made by government officials in early 2009 has come true: the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund is now broke, according to published reports.

“The deposit insurance fund dropped by $18.6 billion during the third quarter of 2009 to negative $8.2 billion, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. set aside $21.7 billion in provisions for additional bank failures,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “This is the second time in the agency’s history that the balance has fallen into negative territory.”

Article at The Raw Story

General Motors says it’s going to start early repayment of the company’s bailout debt.  The automaker owes 8.1-billion dollars to the U.S. and Canadian governments.  GM expects to pay back the debt by the end of 2011 and might even move faster.   Repayments will begin next month.

The company also announced it lost 1.2-billion dollars in the third quarter of 2009.  This is the first quarterly financial result for General Motors since it emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year.

Facing the possibility of a $27 billion pollution judgment against it in an Ecuadorean court, Chevron launched an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign to try to prevent the judgment as well as reverse a deeply damaging story line.

Chevron’s tactics — ranging from quietly trying to wield U.S. trade policy to compel Ecuador’s government to squelch the case, to producing a pseudo-news report casting the company as the victim of a corrupt Ecuadorean political system — were designed to win powerful allies in Congress and the Obama administration as well as to shape public opinion and calm shareholders.

But many of the company’s moves have backfired, drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York’s attorney general, members of Congress and even Barack Obama when he was a senator.

“Their lobbying and PR efforts are really clumsy and very heavy handed, and I think that that’s why they’re experiencing a degree of backlash,” said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who is circulating the first of what she promises will be three letters to colleagues blasting what she calls the company’s “misguided approach” to dealing with the case.

The case stems from a class action suit brought by well-connected U.S. trial lawyers on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadoreans alleging that from 1964 to 1990, Texaco — which was purchased by Chevron in 2001 — dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest, leaving behind an unprecedented environmental and public health disaster including a wave of cancers, birth defects and miscarriages.

Story at Politico

Intel Corp. is paying Silicon Valley rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. $1.25 billion to squash a legal battle over Intel’s sales tactics, a rift that led to antitrust charges against Intel in several countries and was headed toward a costly and nasty trial next year.

The settlement announced Thursday between Intel and AMD — which make essentially all the microprocessors that serve as the brains in today’s personal computers — doesn’t let Intel off the hook. It still has to deal with the antitrust charges that AMD pressed governments to file.

The biggest case is in Europe, where regulators have fined Intel a record $1.45 billion over what they described as Intel’s illegal tactics to bully PC makers into choosing Intel chips over AMD’s. EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said that the European Commission “takes note” of Intel’s settlement with AMD but that it does not change Intel’s duty to comply with European antitrust law.

Intel is also fighting an $18.6 million fine in Korea, and a federal lawsuit filed last week by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who accused Intel of abusing its market dominance to “rule with an iron fist.” The U.S. Federal Trade Commission also is investigating.

Continued at Yahoo Tech News

White House officials announced Friday that they had counted exactly how many jobs were created or saved by recent stimulus spending: 640,329.

So how many were saved and how many created? They don’t know.

In a briefing with reporters, officials acknowledged they can’t tell the difference between jobs “saved,” and jobs “created” by the $787 billion stimulus package.

They said they also can’t tell the difference between private sector jobs and government jobs.

And they said that they had found and corrected significant errors in the data submitted in 57,000 separate reports to the federal government by Recovery Act funding recipients.

Story at Politico

Be honest with yourself. Is the White House feeding you a line of crap? They have no idea whether they saved jobs or created them. On top of that they have no idea how many of those jobs were government jobs, and how many of them were private sector jobs. To add insult to injury, their numbers aren’t even straight.

Yeah, Obama is a one termer, unless my fears are true and we have enough people still willing to re-elect him in four years. I guess it all depends on how clueless and gullable these people are. Hopefully the Libertarians and Republicans put up good candidates.

If you haven’t heard already, a Home Depot employee was fired from a Florida store for a dress code violation. Sounds pretty clear cut and straight forward; he broke the rules, refused to follow the rules he agreed to when signing his contract of employment, and as a result was fired for insubordination. This wouldn’t even be a news story if not for the content of the pin he was fired over.

As a company policy in an attempt to be a neutral company to its customers, Home Depot has long had a blanket policy requiring that any pins or patches worn at work must be company issued. The same goes for hats and other articles of clothing, in that they cannot display any sort of logo or message unless it has been authorized by Home Depot. My uncle works for Home Depot and is not allowed to wear his Texas A&M hat due to company policy, because it could be offensive to a customer. It is a very sound policy that is entirely non-discriminatory in manner.

The employee was fired for wearing a pin that read “One nation under God, indivisible.” In what sounds like a sobbing manner, the guy made the statement “I’ve worn it for well over a year and I support my country and God, I was just doing what I think every American should do, just love my country. It feels kind of like a punishment, like I was punished for just loving my country.” If this is about patriotism, Home Depot offered him a pin that reads “United We Stand”, but he rejected that offer. It seems the guy was just looking for trouble and believed he was above the company policy that he agreed to.What is eye catching here is that Home Depot waited a year before approaching him about his pin, which they didn’t do until after the employee started bringing a bible to work. That’s a screw up on their part and it only serves to fuel this guy’s supporters, even though ultimately, its irrelevant that they were late in confronting him about his dress code violation since a violation is a violation.

I find it funny that he refuses to take responsibility for his actions and admit he was wrong, and would rather play the religious discrimination card and play to people’s emotions about their patriotism and God. I would hope any sensible person would not fall for such a trap, and would come to the realization that this employee is in the wrong. This has nothing to do with God or patriotism, but a person’s refusal to follow a rule that they agreed to.

So now Home Depot is being sued over the matter. Though I would hope it is unlikely that Home Depot would lose such a clear cut case, there is really no telling these days as more and more Judges are ruling on emotion rather than by facts and laws.

Posted by David Boaz

I wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, “One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can’t tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism.” (In the final section, “Toward a Framework for Utopia.”)

Now Ira Stoll notes the irony that it was very successful capitalists who put up the money that allowed Michael Moore to make his anti-market screed Capitalism: A Love Story: Story at CATO

Ben Bernanke’s dollar crisis went into a wider mode yesterday as the greenback was shockingly upstaged by the euro and yen, both of which can lay claim to the world title as the currency favored by central banks as their reserve currency.

Over the last three months, banks put 63 percent of their new cash into euros and yen — not the greenbacks — a nearly complete reversal of the dollar’s onetime dominance for reserves, according to Barclays Capital. The dollar’s share of new cash in the central banks was down to 37 percent — compared with two-thirds a decade ago.

Currently, dollars account for about 62 percent of the currency reserve at central banks — the lowest on record, said the International Monetary Fund.

Bernanke could go down in economic history as the man who killed the greenback on the operating table.

After printing up trillions of new dollars and new bonds to stimulate the US economy, the Federal Reserve chief is now boxed into a corner battling two separate monsters that could devour the economy — ravenous inflation on one hand, and a perilous recession on the other.

“He’s in a crisis worse than the meltdown ever was,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. “I fear that he could be the Fed chairman who brought down the whole thing.”

Continued at the New York Post

Yesterday, we brought you the insurance company that wouldn’t insure a 17-pound infant because he was too heavy. Today, we bring you the investment bank that manages to double its bonuses during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

On Thursday, Goldman Sachs will announce the firm’s bonus payments for 2009. Analysts expect the bonus pool to mushroom to $23 billion — double the bonus pool paid to employees in 2008. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs said that it had put aside $11.4 billion for bonuses during the first half of the year.

“The absolute size of compensation payouts will rise significantly,” Keith Horowitz, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a note to clients two weeks ago, highlighted by Andrew Sorkin in The New York Times‘ dealbook column Tuesday.

How much is $23,000,000,000?

For one thing, it’s enough to send 460,000 full paying students to Harvard University for one year, or 115,000 for four years. The story continues at The Raw Story

California NORML Release – Oct 12, 2009

Paypal, the well-known internet payment company has told California NORML that it will no longer accept payments to our “type of business” because we accept listing payments from cannabis-recommending physicians.

After years of offering free listings to physicians and collectives at our website http://www.canorml.org, CaNORML began charging a yearly listing fee to cover our costs last year.

PayPal froze CaNORML’s account in June, saying that by accepting listing fees from collectives, we were violating their Acceptable Use policy, which says, “you may not use PayPal in the purchase or sale of narcotics.” Although narcotics were not being sold over the CaNORML site, we reluctantly agreed to stop accepting listings fees from collectives that dispense medical marijuana, recognizing that even though they are legal under state law, they are illegal under federal law. However, we continued to accept payments online from doctors, attorneys, and members.

Now PayPal has stopped accepting payments from the CaNORML site because we continued to accept listing payments from physicians.

Under a ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (Conant v. Walters, 2003), physicians have the first amendment right to discuss and recommend medical marijuana for their patients, although they may not distribute it or help patients in finding it. PayPal was informed of this and wrote back, “We are not arguing the legality of this issue; we are simply stating that we have made the business decision to not be involved with this type of business.”

Because of its discriminatory policy and disregard of physicians’ first amendment rights, CaNORML submits that PayPal is not the “type of business” to be used by those who advocate for human rights. We will file a complaint with the federal banking committee over their practices.

Located in San Jose, California, PayPal was founded in 1998 and was acquired by eBay (California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s company) in 2002.

Complain to: PayPal, 2211 N 1st St, San Jose 95131 – (408) 376-7400

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner faces a major public-relations problem. His phone records and broader calendar, obtained by the Associated Press, indicate that most of his contacts with the financial sector in the first seven months of this year were in fact with just three mega-banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan Chase.

While such skewed access to a top policymaker would raise eyebrows at any time, this disclosure is particularly difficult for Geithner. He is known to have deep contacts with a small number of banks, partly from his time at the New York Fed (as reported by The New York Times in April) and partly from his mentor, Robert Rubin, formerly of Goldman and Citi.

Geithner himself has confronted this issue directly before, and always insists that his policies are intended to help the entire financial system and thus the whole economy. “I’ve been in public service all my life…” he told PBS in May. “And I would never do anything and be part of any policy that’s designed to benefit some piece of our financial system. The only thing that we care about and the only obligation I have is try to make sure this financial system is doing a better job of meeting the needs of businesses and families across the country.”

Such statements are hard to square with the fact that, in the height of the crisis, he actually talked primarily with only three big banks—not even representative of the entire field of large banks (e.g., Wells Fargo and Bank of America), let alone the small and medium-size banking sector that is now getting hammered.

The story continues at The Daily Best