Category: Corporate Statism

Fukushima water reaches Canada

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Okay, I can’t help wondering. Did they raise the permissible levels lately?

Researchers say radioactive cesium isotopes from Japan’s severely damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant have made their way to the waters just off the coast of Canada.

Scientists confirmed the arrival of radioactive Fukushima water at the annual American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu today, but pointed out that the concentrations of the two isotopes were still well below safe drinking levels.

Researchers from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography have been continuously sampling water off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia, since 2011.

“These levels are still well below maximum permissible concentrations in drinking water in Canada for caesium-137 of 10,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water — so, it’s clearly not an environmental or human-health radiological threat,” Bedford’s Dr. John Smith told BBC News.

Arresting development

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

Not So Neutral? Comcast and Netflix Strike Network Deal

From Freepress, an explanation of why the Comcast-Netflix deal is so bad:

This is more than a deal between two giant companies: It will affect everyone who uses the Internet. And as with so many things involving Comcast, consumers will end up paying for it in the end.

The deal should also be a wake-up call to regulators who are weighing the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger and grappling with what to do about Net Neutrality.

And if the game of chicken that preceded this pact becomes the norm, it will be a disaster for the future of online video.

Nobody Wins, Everybody Pays

The exact terms of the Comcast-Netflix deal are secret, but this much is clear: Millions of consumers who already paid handsomely for a premium broadband experience received poor service for months on end. Comcast refused to make minimal investments to deliver what its customers already bought — and simultaneously pushed people to upgrade to more expensive services.

Comcast and friends like to cry foul at the sheer amount of traffic video-streaming companies use. But the actual investment these extremely profitable ISPs would need to make to ensure their customers get the quality of service they paid for is extremely small. We’re talking so small it wouldn’t make the slightest dent in the continued growth in broadband profits these companies enjoy year after year.

The dispute between Comcast and Netflix had gone on for months. It’s likely that millions of unsuspecting consumers paid to upgrade to faster speed tiers thinking it would fix their problems. Comcast customers report hearing about this “solution” from customer-service reps after trying — without success — to fix the problem on their own.

Comcast had no qualms about letting its customers suffer lousy speeds and service. To Comcast, bad service is just another negotiating tactic — the company knows that most of its customers have nowhere else to turn for high-speed broadband. (And for the few that do, the options aren’t great: Verizon is apparently degrading Netflix, too.)

This is what happens in a broken market: Powerful players abuse their power to serve their own anti-competitive ends.
Continue reading “Arresting development” →

It’ll all be fine

~ susie ~ 3 Comments
Oleh Tyahnybok claims a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" rule Ukraine and that "Germans, Kikes and other scum" want to "take away our Ukrainian state."
Oleh Tyahnybok claims a “Moscow-Jewish mafia” rule Ukraine and that “Germans, Kikes and other scum” want to “take away our Ukrainian state.”

I’m sure it’ll be fine. Every time we align the U.S. with extremists to get corporate-friendly regime change, it has a happy ending!

As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.

White supremacist banners and Confederate flags were draped inside Kiev’s occupied City Hall, and demonstrators have hoisted Nazi SS and white power symbols over a toppled memorial to V.I. Lenin. After Yanukovich fled his palatial estate by helicopter, EuroMaidan protesters destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died battling German occupation during World War II. Sieg heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol have become an increasingly common site in Maidan Square, and neo-Nazi forces have established “autonomous zones” in and around Kiev.

An Anarchist group called AntiFascist Union Ukraine attempted to join the Euromaidan demonstrations but found it difficult to avoid threats of violence and imprecations from the gangs of neo-Nazis roving the square. “They called the Anarchists things like Jews, blacks, Communists,” one of its members said. “There weren’t even any Communists, that was just an insult.”

“There are lots of Nationalists here, including Nazis,” the anti-fascist continued. “They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.”

The deep state

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

From Moyers & Company, an episode that has many people talking. I wasn’t all that shocked:

Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests.

“It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State.

In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written an exclusive essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State.”

Who treats their workers even worse than Walmart?

~ susie

CWAers protest outside Amazon's global headquarters in Seattle
As it turns out, it’s Amazon. Still. Only in Germany have workers stood up to them (mostly because the law is on their side, and political leaders back them — unlike here):

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the parties of the center Left, the Democrats and the Labour Party, have today lost this focus, and the labor movements in both countries are in long-term decline. But in Germany the labor movement remains strong, and on workplace issues the mainstream political parties, the Christian Democrats as well as the Social Democrats, are well to the left of their American and British counterparts. This became apparent following the scandal at Amazon’s Bad Hersfeld depot in 2012, when security guards allegedly forced their way into dormitories housing temporary Amazon employees and intimidated them. Amazon faced what Der Spiegel called a Shitstorm and was strongly criticized by the federal minister of labor, the prime minister of the state government of Hesse, the head of the Labor Office in Hesse, as well as the Social Democratic Party opposition in the federal and state parliaments.

Amazon was on the defensive, and in an interview with Spiegel Online that followed the scandal, Amazon’s local CEO, Ralf Kleber, distanced himself from the managerial absolutism of Bezos and Onetto in saying that he would welcome the setting up of more work councils (Betriebsrat) at Amazon depots. The services union, Ver.Di, was also a beneficiary of the Amazon Shitstorm. The union’s goal is to organize the whole Amazon workforce in Germany, negotiate wage increases with Amazon management, improve the working conditions of temporary employees, and blunt Amazon’s more oppressive workplace practices. In a German political and social context, it has a good chance of succeeding. Such success would, however, raise issues of ethics and economics that apply equally in a US and UK setting.

Union success would unquestionably raise Amazon’s costs and slow the growth of employee productivity. Wages would begin increasing in line with employee productivity, and productivity growth itself would slow as the union and the Betriebsrat together blunted Amazon’s practice of pushing employees to the limit and beyond. We can be sure that at this point, Amazon would play the “cult of the customer” for all its worth and would do the same in an American setting if faced with the same challenge. So customers would have to start paying more for their packages and could no longer be absolutely certain of receiving delivery of them the very next day.

But should these marginal benefits to customers really be purchased at the price of a system that treats employees as untrustworthy human robots and relies on intimidation to push them to the limit, while denying them the rewards of their own increased efficiency? This is not a choice to be made solely with the economist’s narrow calculations of monetary costs and benefits. In quantitative, monetary terms, the cost to Amazon customers of a benign reengineering of the company would far outweigh the monetary benefits to employees. But what is the real value of such customer inconvenience when set alongside the value lost with the millions of lives damaged by Walmart, Amazon, and their ilk?

The same way we ‘fixed’ Iran

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Manifestação contra o presidente Nicolás Madura, da Venezuela

The elites are so excited at the thought of taking over Venezuela again!

Since Hugo Chavez died in Spring of 2013 and Nicolas Maduro was elected last Fall, Venezuela’s economy has been spiraling downward, as has Maduro’s political legitimacy. Once a top-ten economy, Venezuela’s wealth is based entirely on the oil industry, and the continued success of a finite resource. One large source of the economic malaise has been the mismanagement of oil money – Venezuela energy czar Rafael Ramirez recently admitted that 30 percent of oil revenues were diverted from their original purpose. And while a few corrupt individuals at the top are skimming the nation’s oil money meant for social programs, Venezuelan currency is rapidly declining in value as inflation rates skyrocket.

Mass protests organized largely by students have started erupting all over Venezuela. A brutal government crackdown has resulted in the deaths of dozens of protesters and the injury of hundreds more. While tragic, the deaths harken back to the leaked strategic document:

“Whenever possible, the violence should cause deaths and injuries. Encourage hunger strikes of numerous days, massive mobilisations, problems in the universities and other sectors of society now identified with government institutions.”

Several photos of supposedly Venezuelan protests and police response that went viral on Twitter have recently been found to be taken from other protests, in other countries, years ago.
Continue reading “The same way we ‘fixed’ Iran” →

The rentiers

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Good guy Netflix http://advice-animal.tumblr.com/

I’m perfectly happy to switch back to DVDs if they really want to push the issue. (Until they make it illegal to sell them used, of course.):

Long-running disputes involving Verizon, Netflix, and Internet bandwidth providers are flaring up, causing recent slowdowns in Netflix speed.

According to a Wall Street Journal report tonight, “[t]he online-video service has been at odds with Verizon Communications Inc. and other broadband providers for months over how much Netflix streaming content they will carry without being paid additional fees. Now the long simmering conflict has heated up and is slowing Netflix, in particular, on Verizon’s fiber-optic FiOS service, where Netflix says its average prime-time speeds dropped by 14 percent last month.”

One possible interpretation of the above statement is that Verizon has been demanding direct payments from Netflix in exchange for carrying any video traffic beyond some numerical limit. That’s probably not precisely what’s happening, however, because the report says this particular dispute has been simmering for months—meaning it started before the court decision last month that overturnedthe Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules. Prior to that court decision, it would not have been legal for Verizon to refuse to carry Netflix traffic when its payment demands weren’t met.

However, there are other ways Verizon can play hardball and affect Netflix performance. Netflix has been pushing ISPs to host its caching equipment within their data centers and to peer directly with the video provider—that is, exchange traffic without a third-party intermediary.

“Netflix wants broadband companies to hook up to its new video-distribution network without paying them fees for carrying its traffic,” the Journal noted. “But the biggest US providers—Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T Inc.—have resisted, insisting on compensation.”

ISPs are under no obligation to accept Netflix’s peering and caching offers. Teaming up with Netflix might improve performance for consumers, but not doing so isn’t the same as refusing to carry traffic. If Verizon’s network and its interconnections with third-party networks are strong, Netflix quality should be reasonably good.

The biggest problem is probably the same one we’ve seen in previous disputes: the connections between ISPs and the Internet bandwidth providers that Netflix pays to distribute its traffic to the rest of the Internet.

As we’ve reported before, those bandwidth providers, such as Cogent Communications, have traditionally exchanged traffic with consumer ISPs without money changing hands. But ISPs are using increases in Netflix traffic as justification to demand payment.

The Ukraine

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

IMG_7981

Be careful about what you believe. I’ve been following these protests for a while now and I suspect U.S. corporate interests and the right wing have joined forces in the Ukraine because of their rich mineral deposits. No way of proving it, of course, but the whole thing smells like a set-up:

We’ve been here before. For the past couple of months street protests in Ukraine have been played out through the western media according to a well-rehearsed script. Pro-democracy campaigners are battling an authoritarian government. The demonstrators are demanding the right to be part of the European Union. But Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has vetoed their chance of freedom and prosperity.

It’s a story we’ve heard in one form or another again and again – not least in Ukraine’s western-backed Orange revolution a decade ago. But it bears only the sketchiest relationship to reality. EU membership has never been – and very likely never will be – on offer to Ukraine. As in Egypt last year, the president that the protesters want to force out was elected in a poll judged fair by international observers. And many of those on the streets aren’t very keen on democracy at all.

You’d never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the hard-right antisemitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a “Moscow-Jewish mafia” controls Ukraine. But US senator John McCain was happy to share a platform with him in Kiev last month. The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews.

So in the week that the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army was commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day, supporters of those who helped carry out the genocide are hailed by western politicians on the streets of Ukraine. But Svoboda has now been outflanked in the protests by even more extreme groups, such as “Right Sector”, who demand a “national revolution” and threaten “prolonged guerrilla warfare”.

Tit for tat

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

The white House in Washington

Why, it’s almost as if they expect something in return!

A controversial trade deal being touted by the White House is expected to give American corporations broad new authority if approved. Now according to newly released documents, big banks gave millions to the execs that are now orchestrating the agreement.

Investigative journalist Lee Fang wrote for Republic Report on Tuesday this week that two former well-placed individuals within the ranks of Bank of America and CitiGroup were awarded millions of dollars in bonuses before jumping ship to work on the Trans-Pacific Partnership on behalf of the White House.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is a widely-contested trade deal between the US and 11 other nations adjacent to the Pacific Rim, and has been negotiated by representatives for those countries in utmost secrecy. According to leaked excerpts of the TPP and remarks from experts following the news closely, though, it’s believed that the arrangement would allow corporations to oppose foreign laws while at the same time limiting the abilities for governments to regulate those entities.

On Tuesday, Fang wrote that two major United States-based financial firms have significantly awarded former executives who have since attracted the attention of President Barack Obama and subsequently been offered positions that put them directly involved in TPP talks.

Former Bank of America investment banker Stefan Selig, Fang acknowledged, received more than $9 million in bonus pay after he was nominated to join the Obama administration in November. And Michael Froman, the current US trade representative, was awarded over $4 million from Citigroup when he left them in 2009 in order to go work for the White House. Republic Report were provided those statistics through financial disclosures included in Fang’s article.