WHAT: The People Vote: Stop the Comcast Mega-Merger
WHEN: Wed. May 21st, from 9.30 – 10.30 AM
WHERE: The Kimmel Center, 300 South Broad Street (southwest corner of Broad and Spruce)
RSVP: Click here to RSVP, and find us on Facebook and invite your friends!
WHO: You! Organizers include CAP Comcast, Common Cause, Consumers Union, Free Press, the Media Action Grassroots Network, and Media Mobilizing Project
Category: Corporate Statism
Comcast talking about data caps on all customers
Comcast Says It’s Going To Slap All Of Its Customers With Data Caps, Makes Half-Hearted Attempt To Walk Back Earlier Statements When Backlash Kicks In (via Techdirt)
Comcast, perhaps feeling a bit too confident about its chances to swallow up Time Warner Cable, is talking about rolling out data caps to all of its subscribers. It had, up to this point, only “offered” it in certain areas on a “trial basis.” Customers…
Moral surrender
Matt Taibbi talks about his new book and why only some people go to jail these days:
His relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever.
Salon sat down last week with Taibbi for a wide-ranging chat that touched on his new book, the lingering effects of the financial crisis, how American elites operate with impunity and why, contrary to what many may think, he’s actually making a conservative argument for reform. The interview can be found below, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
So, what is “The Divide”?
The book is really just about why some people go to jail and why some people don’t go to jail, and “the divide” is the term I came up with to describe this phenomenon we have where there are essentially two different criminal justice systems, one that works one way for people who are either very rich or working within the confines of a giant systemically important institution, and then one that works in another way for people who are without means. And that’s what the book is about.
A point you make in the book, though, is that the justice system is starting to treat people who aren’t poor or part of a marginalized group with a level of brutality we tend to think is only reserved for the oppressed.
I made a conscious decision to start the book with the story of Abacus Federal Savings bank, which is this little bank in Chinatown. The people who run that bank were not poor. They weren’t even what you would typically classify as members of the victim class … But why was that bank prosecuted and why was Goldman Sachs or Chase not prosecuted? What I was trying to get at was, in this new reality, [legal authorities] consider it not feasible to go after companies of a certain size, and [Abacus] is how small you have to be now to be targeted …
There was an SEC commissioner who talked about “shot selection,” like in basketball, [and] how you should go for the baskets with the greatest chance of scoring. So while it may be more satisfying to go after the bigger companies, you’re more likely to get a successful action against a smaller company.
So it’s not just about poor people, it’s also just about the way the regulatory system works. Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer. They hesitate before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court … It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else.
Continue reading “Moral surrender”
Congratulations, graduates
You are so screwed! Thomas Frank:
In sum, you paid nearly sixty grand a year to attend some place with a classy WASP name and ivy growing on its fake medieval walls. You paid for the best, and now you are the best, an honorary classy WASP entitled to all the privileges of the club. That education your parents got, even if it was at the same school as yours, cost them far less and was thus not as good as yours. That’s the way progress works, right?
Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: college costs more and more even as it gets objectively worse and worse. Yes, I know, universities today offer luxuries unimaginable in the 1960s: fine gymnasiums, gourmet dining halls, disturbing architecture. But when it comes to generating and communicating knowledge—the essential business of higher ed—they are, almost all of them, in a frantic race to the bottom.
According to the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty, only about 30 percent of the teachers at American colleges these days are tenured or tenure-track, which means that fewer than a third of your profs actually enjoy the security and benefits and intellectual freedom that we associate with the academic lifestyle. In 1969, traditional professors like these made up almost 80 percent of the American faculty. Today, however, it is part-time workers without any kind of job security who are the majority of the instructors on campus, and in general these adjuncts are paid poorly and receive few benefits. That is who does the work of knowledge-transmission at the ever-so costly, ever-so excellent American university: Freelancers. Contract laborers.
Continue reading “Congratulations, graduates”
Wrong audience?
Considering that most Yale grads are going to work on Wall Street, this advice must have seemed like something from another planet. After all, the more gridlock, the better for the financial markets — none of that pesky regulation!
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Secretary of State John Kerry urged Yale University graduates on Sunday to keep faith in government’s ability to break gridlock, even as many problems remain unsolved.
Kerry, a 1966 graduate of Yale, told students and their families, faculty and staff at the Ivy League school’s 313th commencement that some people don’t believe they can make a difference “and the sum difference of all of this is that we do not believe we can make a difference. We remain gridlocked.”
Over the years, Congress has enacted broad legislation protecting the environment and civil rights, said Kerry, a former U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But, he said, the need to reform immigration and grapple with climate change now remain undone.
“This daring journey of progress played out over years or decades,” he said. “Today, the felt needs are piling up while legislatures or foreign capitals seem frozen.”
Oh here we go
This is what didn’t work. Why is Obama handing this hammer back to the insurance companies?
The Obama administration earlier this month quietly handed the insurance industry another loophole in the Affordable Care Act—infuriating advocates for universal coverage who say this shows that an insurance-driven health system is doomed to fail.
Announced on May 2, the provision opens the door to “reference pricing,” which allows insurance companies to set a price for medical procedures. If a patient receives a treatment that costs more, he/she will simply have to pay out of pocket. The measure is slated to apply to a majority of work-based health insurance plans and exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), according to the Associated Press.
Many worry that reference pricing will force patients to bear the burden of a costly and difficult-to-navigate medical system.
“We don’t need reference pricing—we need “right pricing” under a single-payer program,” Don McCanne, M.D., senior health policy fellow at Physicians for a National Health Program told Common Dreams. “This is merely another way in which insurance companies are going to chisel down payment for care, shifting a greater share of the cost onto patients.”
“This new rule to limit payments for needed medical procedures is a reminder of everything that is wrong with our profit-driven healthcare system,” Jean Ross, RN, co-president of National Nurses United, told Common Dreams. “Rather than crack down on price gouging by hospitals—some of who set their charges as high as 12 times their costs — the administration is enacting a rule to ration care for patients.”
[…] In its own fact sheet, the Department of Labor acknowledges concerns that “such a pricing structure may be a subterfuge for the imposition of otherwise prohibited limitations on coverage, without ensuring access to quality care and an adequate network of providers.”
According to Ross, “A Commonwealth Fund study last November comparing Americans to 10 other developed countries found that U.S. adults are by far the most likely to not get the treatment their doctor recommends, as well as forgoing doctor visits or filling prescriptions, because of the high cost. All that this rule will do is increase those medical disparities and further brand our dysfunctional healthcare system as one based on ability to pay rather than on patient need.”
Nothing to see here
In the span of a few weeks, an energy firm little-known inside the United States added two members to its board of directors — scoring connections to Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden in the bargain.
On April 22, Cyprus-based Burisma announced that financier Devon Archer had joined its board. Archer, who shared a room in college with Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, served as national finance co-chair for the former senator’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Then, on Monday, the firm announced that Biden’s younger son, R. Hunter Biden, would join the board of directors.
Why would the company, which bills itself as Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, need such powerful friends in Washington?
The answer might be the company’s holdings in Ukraine. They include, according to the firm’s website, permits to explore in the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the country’s eastern regions, home to an armed pro-Russian separatist movement. They also include permits to explore in the Azov-Kuban Basin of the strategic Crimean peninsula, annexed earlier this year by Moscow.
Tone-deaf Obama sings Walmart’s praises
Swamp Rabbit and I had just watched a PBS show about “nightmare bacteria” — insidious, human-killing organisms resistant to all antibiotics. Pretty scary. Then we saw a news item about Barack Obama appearing at a Walmart to praise the company for using green energy. Really scary.
It occurred to me that Obama is the nightmare Democrat, an insidious organism resistant to all strategies and tactics for progressive change. During his time in office he has hacked away at what remains of the Democratic Party’s credibility. There are no campaign promises he hasn’t broken, no Republican legislators he hasn’t caved in to, almost no Democratic constituencies he hasn’t betrayed. He has disappointed on climate change, jobs creation, income inequality, regulation of big banks. He has eagerly pursued the so-called Grand Bargain, devised by right-wingers to shred the social safety net and put the final nail in the coffin of FDR’s New Deal. He is the anti-FDR.
I tried to express my feelings to the rabbit, but he wasn’t having any of it. “You way over the top, Odd Man. This here Barry fellow was a fake Democrat from the git-go, a neoliberal, a tool of the Wall Street posse, a brother to George W. Bush when it comes to the violatin’ our First and Fourth Amendment rights. You sayin’ you was surprised when he went out of his way to make nice with Walmart?”
“But it’s not fair, you dumb rodent,” I shouted. “Obama walks like a progressive, he talks like a progressive. Man, does he ever talk! But the loftier his talk, the more perverse his actions. I mean, why would a Democrat single out Walmart for energy efficiency, even if it didn’t actually lag behind other large companies on renewables? Walmart is the enemy of workers’ rights, the antithesis of everything the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for.”
The rabbit started chuckling when I said “not fair.” When he came up for air, he offered me a hit of Wild Turkey and invited me to take a swim in the swamp with him. I told him no thanks, I didn’t want to get infected by nightmare bacteria.
“Then you should git back to writin’ that book of yours and stop readin’ about politics,” the rabbit said.”That way you don’t get infected by no more nightmare Democrats.”
This is a disgrace
And Obama never should have gone along with GOP budget cuts. When we have this many people out of work, scraping to get by and we’ve shredded the safety net, it’s a disgrace to everyone involved:
The U.S. Treasury Department booked a $114 billion surplus in April, the largest for that month since 2008, according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office released Wednesday.
For the first seven months of this fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, the CBO estimates the country has racked up a $301 billion deficit, which is $187 billion lower than it was for the same period last year.
Federal coffers saw a 7% increase in individual income taxes and payroll taxes, a 15% increase in corporate income taxes, and a 37% increase in money paid to Treasury by the Federal Reserve.
Last month, the CBO projected that the 2014 shortfall would decline to 2.8% of gross domestic product — or $492 billion. That is well below the 4.1% — or $680 billion — recorded for fiscal year 2013.
The door is open for Elizabeth Warren — or someone like her
Still shaken by the financial crisis and rattled by personal debt and uncertain job prospects, economic security remains a dominant and vital political priority for progressives. Attendees at a recent Elizabeth Warren book event in Washington, D.C. describe why this could create a big opening for a challenger like the Massachusetts senator in the 2016 Democratic primary for president.
H/t to Attorney Edward Tayter.