4/16/12
Posted: 15 Apr 2012 09:20 PM PDT
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
In truth the commoditised crap churned out by the great corporate machine is wholly reliant on creativity that emerges from the ground up. Today’s mainstream music scene relies on the hip hop and rap movements that emerged between the 1970s and the early 1990s in black communities in California and New York – needless to say that it is completely out of date but such is the stale nature of these institutions. Contemporary ‘alternative’ music feeds on the punk and post-punk scenes that emerged in Britain and the US in the late-70s and 80s – again, hopelessly out of date.
The great corporate machine simply sanitises and repackages culture in order to feed the masses through their tele-visual tubing. Fine. But it cannot truly create new flavours to inject into the tubes – and anyone who has an instinct to chase the new and the interesting will be quickly turned off. Put simply: corporate capitalism produces many things well – from clothing to furniture (although the question of style once again arises when we examine these in any serious way) – but it cannot produce true art. An alternative mechanism is needed.
Many have come to see this. People have discovered that the internet can provide them far more effectively with their cultural sustenance, so they take out the corporate tubing and logon. But this creates problems.
Stirrings of an Alternative
The economist Dean Baker outlined an alternative some time ago. He calls it the ‘artistic freedom voucher’. An excellent and detailed primer can be found here. Basically, taxpayers fork over money to their favourite artists and in return get tax credits. So, they pay their favourite artists some of the money that should have gone to the government in tax payments. The music would then be published under a ‘creative commons license’ that would allow everyone to access it for free.
Okay great. But this means that the government receives less money because the tax credits are ‘cashed in’ by people donating to the arts. This means that the government receives less revenue. Some have suggested that we offset this with taxes levied on digital audio equipment, blank CDs and internet connections. I have absolutely no problem with this. However, there is, once again, an alternative: we could run the system as a stimulus program and supplement it with an ambitious attempt to publicly subsidise institutions that artists could work in free from corporate influence at little personal cost.
Stimulating Creativity
Across the world today governments have been forced to run massive deficits in order to keep economies ticking over as private sector spending falls. Many of us would prefer that governments increase this spending in order to counter the unemployment that currently plagues most advanced capitalist countries.
Modern Monetary Theorists (MMTers) point out that governments that issue their own currencies can run such stimulus indefinitely until inflationary pressures build which will only happen after recovery takes place. They cite Japan as an example who, having stimulated their economy for over 20 years after the bursting of a private sector debt bubble in 1991, still have not encountered any problems with amassing government debts to the tune of 220% of GDP.
Countries that do not issue their own currencies have problems with large debt burdens – as is shown in certain Eurozone countries at the moment. However, either some formal mechanism is going to have to be put in place to allow these countries to run deficits or the Eurozone itself will collapse in the next few years.
(It is not difficult to fix the Eurozone problem. Although this is not the place to discuss such solutions – of which there are many – suffice it to say that the Eurocrats are well aware of what they can do but are being blocked by political pressures, mainly coming from the current German and French governments and their allies).
What we should do is build the ‘artistic freedom voucher’ into the deficits as a stimulus program. This has been done before in a slightly cruder way. During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration used the works program they had put in place (the WPA) to channel money to artists. Many artists took part and it was a great success. (For music buffs it should be noted that Woody Guthrie received funding, who would later go on to exert a huge influence over Bob Dylan).
The ‘artistic freedom voucher’ is more consumer friendly, however, in that people are allowed to choose which artists they give their tax credits to. In this it allows greater consumer choice. However, it could be supplemented by a WPA-style compensation fund for new and emerging artists. After all, many a would-be artist might be intimidated by the prospect of having to attract funding to set themselves up, so perhaps we could have a pool out of which to subsidise them for the first, say, 12 months of their career until they can build a fan base for their material.
Through such a stimulus program we could also open public recording studios, public art studios, public filmmaking studios and other facilities that anyone could use for a very small fee. We could do all this in a highly decentralised manner, allowing artists, engineers, directors and producers full control of setting these facilities up while government representatives merely keep an eye on their funding to ensure they’re spending reasonable amounts.
The Politics
This piece was originally written, of course, for the pirates. For those unfamiliar, the pirates are a successful and promising political party that have taken root in Germany and other countries. They have a membership of 24,000 and are growing. They are particularly concerned with many of the issues outlined above.
The pirate political model is perfect for instituting the above reforms. It is through political piracy that the above reforms can be implemented. By supporting these reforms the pirates will no longer be subject to criticism that they are hurting artists and producers. Instead they will be supporting a system where artists can throw off the corporate shackles and embrace their inner potential.
Starting with the arts we can then move on to other areas such as drug patents. Why not have governments subsidise drug research? Rather than having corporations prey on their customers in search of profits – while in the process producing sometimes dangerous drugs with dubious medical value – we can leave it up to the scientists and keep the patents under creative commons, to be used by humanity when needed.
The piracy movement has already taken shape in places like Germany and Sweden, but this should be pushed further. By adopting a real platform based on MMT principles they can start to expand to other countries by encouraging disillusioned young people who support the public good over corporate greed to form pirate parties of their own.
Corporate Shills in Libertarian Clothing
There are, of course, arguments against such proposals. Corporate shills like J. Mark Stanley say that it restricts freedom of choice which, according to him, only the Great God of The Market can provide. Most people with any sense aren’t fooled by Stanley’s theological rhetoric. They know that The Market doesn’t exist in the way Stanley imagines that it should – that is, as a great equaliser that guarantees freedom of choice.
(I’m not going to link to Stanley’s article due to its horrific, robot-prose and juvenile argument. Interested readers can find it for themselves.)
In reality we live in a world where corporations control much of the decisions of production. These corporations operate in oligopolistic or monopolistic fashion. Personally, I don’t think it can be otherwise. Mass production on the scale that modern societies require necessitates huge manufacturing plants and institutions to assist in distribution. It’s really a simple issue of economies of scale – the more of a product is produced, the bigger need be the producing institutions.
Now, that’s fine for producing cell phones and sunglasses, but we simply cannot trust these institutions with other public goods – especially art. Anyone that is not content with the current output of MTV must see the point being made here clearly and shun utopia and childish libertarian rhetoric.
Personally, I know an awful lot of professional artists (I’m an amateur musician myself) and I know well how difficult they find it to survive. Many musicians I know are pressed into destroying their own output and creativity so as to play crappy popularised songs in bars just to make ends meet. Together with the corporate audio-visual tube-feeding system that many of us have in our homes, this is the reality of the ‘market’ insofar as it functions at all. The winner is the participant with the most advertising, PR and corporate monopoly-backing. Like it or lump it, that’s reality. Anyone who believes otherwise is merely a fantasist who has an emotional need for a quasi-religious doctrine – these people generally have no political influence because practical people laugh at them and shun them.
Let’s get to work on eking out a free space for our artists to operate in – a creative space, that is at the same time a commons.
The political forces are aligning, now all we need is the correct approach toward policy. The first thing we must do is to remove the fiscal shackles that bind the minds of most politicians and recognise that, in today’s world, government deficits are a good thing – and it is only a case of channelling funding in the right direction.
I seen a lot of rappers turn soft, I turn my TV off (uh)
And thugs got commercials (yea) thugs in commercials (uh)
And everybody’s chick turned gladiator and shit
No pimps, no hustlers, yo where’s your whips
No Maybachs, no Lambos on the field
Towncar, ridin Music Express
You the best example, yo the industry is whack yo
Now you can bet your label and your Phantom on that
– Kool Keith ‘Bamboozled’
Daily, megacorporations shovel crap into our eyes and ears. There is no worse indictment for the so-called ‘free market’ – which is really just a few giant bureaucratic institutions – than the suppression of creativity in favour of the commoditised effluent of the corporate culture industry.And thugs got commercials (yea) thugs in commercials (uh)
And everybody’s chick turned gladiator and shit
No pimps, no hustlers, yo where’s your whips
No Maybachs, no Lambos on the field
Towncar, ridin Music Express
You the best example, yo the industry is whack yo
Now you can bet your label and your Phantom on that
– Kool Keith ‘Bamboozled’
In truth the commoditised crap churned out by the great corporate machine is wholly reliant on creativity that emerges from the ground up. Today’s mainstream music scene relies on the hip hop and rap movements that emerged between the 1970s and the early 1990s in black communities in California and New York – needless to say that it is completely out of date but such is the stale nature of these institutions. Contemporary ‘alternative’ music feeds on the punk and post-punk scenes that emerged in Britain and the US in the late-70s and 80s – again, hopelessly out of date.
The great corporate machine simply sanitises and repackages culture in order to feed the masses through their tele-visual tubing. Fine. But it cannot truly create new flavours to inject into the tubes – and anyone who has an instinct to chase the new and the interesting will be quickly turned off. Put simply: corporate capitalism produces many things well – from clothing to furniture (although the question of style once again arises when we examine these in any serious way) – but it cannot produce true art. An alternative mechanism is needed.
Many have come to see this. People have discovered that the internet can provide them far more effectively with their cultural sustenance, so they take out the corporate tubing and logon. But this creates problems.
Stirrings of an Alternative
The economist Dean Baker outlined an alternative some time ago. He calls it the ‘artistic freedom voucher’. An excellent and detailed primer can be found here. Basically, taxpayers fork over money to their favourite artists and in return get tax credits. So, they pay their favourite artists some of the money that should have gone to the government in tax payments. The music would then be published under a ‘creative commons license’ that would allow everyone to access it for free.
Okay great. But this means that the government receives less money because the tax credits are ‘cashed in’ by people donating to the arts. This means that the government receives less revenue. Some have suggested that we offset this with taxes levied on digital audio equipment, blank CDs and internet connections. I have absolutely no problem with this. However, there is, once again, an alternative: we could run the system as a stimulus program and supplement it with an ambitious attempt to publicly subsidise institutions that artists could work in free from corporate influence at little personal cost.
Stimulating Creativity
Across the world today governments have been forced to run massive deficits in order to keep economies ticking over as private sector spending falls. Many of us would prefer that governments increase this spending in order to counter the unemployment that currently plagues most advanced capitalist countries.
Modern Monetary Theorists (MMTers) point out that governments that issue their own currencies can run such stimulus indefinitely until inflationary pressures build which will only happen after recovery takes place. They cite Japan as an example who, having stimulated their economy for over 20 years after the bursting of a private sector debt bubble in 1991, still have not encountered any problems with amassing government debts to the tune of 220% of GDP.
Countries that do not issue their own currencies have problems with large debt burdens – as is shown in certain Eurozone countries at the moment. However, either some formal mechanism is going to have to be put in place to allow these countries to run deficits or the Eurozone itself will collapse in the next few years.
(It is not difficult to fix the Eurozone problem. Although this is not the place to discuss such solutions – of which there are many – suffice it to say that the Eurocrats are well aware of what they can do but are being blocked by political pressures, mainly coming from the current German and French governments and their allies).
What we should do is build the ‘artistic freedom voucher’ into the deficits as a stimulus program. This has been done before in a slightly cruder way. During the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration used the works program they had put in place (the WPA) to channel money to artists. Many artists took part and it was a great success. (For music buffs it should be noted that Woody Guthrie received funding, who would later go on to exert a huge influence over Bob Dylan).
The ‘artistic freedom voucher’ is more consumer friendly, however, in that people are allowed to choose which artists they give their tax credits to. In this it allows greater consumer choice. However, it could be supplemented by a WPA-style compensation fund for new and emerging artists. After all, many a would-be artist might be intimidated by the prospect of having to attract funding to set themselves up, so perhaps we could have a pool out of which to subsidise them for the first, say, 12 months of their career until they can build a fan base for their material.
Through such a stimulus program we could also open public recording studios, public art studios, public filmmaking studios and other facilities that anyone could use for a very small fee. We could do all this in a highly decentralised manner, allowing artists, engineers, directors and producers full control of setting these facilities up while government representatives merely keep an eye on their funding to ensure they’re spending reasonable amounts.
The Politics
This piece was originally written, of course, for the pirates. For those unfamiliar, the pirates are a successful and promising political party that have taken root in Germany and other countries. They have a membership of 24,000 and are growing. They are particularly concerned with many of the issues outlined above.
The pirate political model is perfect for instituting the above reforms. It is through political piracy that the above reforms can be implemented. By supporting these reforms the pirates will no longer be subject to criticism that they are hurting artists and producers. Instead they will be supporting a system where artists can throw off the corporate shackles and embrace their inner potential.
Starting with the arts we can then move on to other areas such as drug patents. Why not have governments subsidise drug research? Rather than having corporations prey on their customers in search of profits – while in the process producing sometimes dangerous drugs with dubious medical value – we can leave it up to the scientists and keep the patents under creative commons, to be used by humanity when needed.
The piracy movement has already taken shape in places like Germany and Sweden, but this should be pushed further. By adopting a real platform based on MMT principles they can start to expand to other countries by encouraging disillusioned young people who support the public good over corporate greed to form pirate parties of their own.
Corporate Shills in Libertarian Clothing
There are, of course, arguments against such proposals. Corporate shills like J. Mark Stanley say that it restricts freedom of choice which, according to him, only the Great God of The Market can provide. Most people with any sense aren’t fooled by Stanley’s theological rhetoric. They know that The Market doesn’t exist in the way Stanley imagines that it should – that is, as a great equaliser that guarantees freedom of choice.
(I’m not going to link to Stanley’s article due to its horrific, robot-prose and juvenile argument. Interested readers can find it for themselves.)
In reality we live in a world where corporations control much of the decisions of production. These corporations operate in oligopolistic or monopolistic fashion. Personally, I don’t think it can be otherwise. Mass production on the scale that modern societies require necessitates huge manufacturing plants and institutions to assist in distribution. It’s really a simple issue of economies of scale – the more of a product is produced, the bigger need be the producing institutions.
Now, that’s fine for producing cell phones and sunglasses, but we simply cannot trust these institutions with other public goods – especially art. Anyone that is not content with the current output of MTV must see the point being made here clearly and shun utopia and childish libertarian rhetoric.
Personally, I know an awful lot of professional artists (I’m an amateur musician myself) and I know well how difficult they find it to survive. Many musicians I know are pressed into destroying their own output and creativity so as to play crappy popularised songs in bars just to make ends meet. Together with the corporate audio-visual tube-feeding system that many of us have in our homes, this is the reality of the ‘market’ insofar as it functions at all. The winner is the participant with the most advertising, PR and corporate monopoly-backing. Like it or lump it, that’s reality. Anyone who believes otherwise is merely a fantasist who has an emotional need for a quasi-religious doctrine – these people generally have no political influence because practical people laugh at them and shun them.
Let’s get to work on eking out a free space for our artists to operate in – a creative space, that is at the same time a commons.
The political forces are aligning, now all we need is the correct approach toward policy. The first thing we must do is to remove the fiscal shackles that bind the minds of most politicians and recognise that, in today’s world, government deficits are a good thing – and it is only a case of channelling funding in the right direction.
Dispatches From The War On Women: Poor Women Get No Choice
Mitt Romney would like to be clear about something: being a stay-at-home mom is a choice that demands respect when a rich woman chooses it. Other mothers need to know the “dignity of work” that comes from working a job outside the home and raising children by themselves.
Not surprisingly, Romney offered a pretty lame clarification for believing only poor single mothers shouldn’t have the option of staying home with their children.
Poor women have, without a doubt, suffered the greatest attacks from the right, so it is good news that the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure reinstated funding Planned Parenthood. Over 130,000 women received cancer screens as a result of that funding stream, and the Catholic Bishops and Republicans want to take that away.
The Bishops also plan on disobeying the health care mandate, no matter what the Supreme Court rules.
In Iowa Republican lawmakers want to drug test any woman seeking child support while lawmakers in Rhode Island push for mandatory ultrasounds.
Former Michigan Congressman Pete Hoekstra wants to create jobs by repealing the “nuisance” of pay equity laws. According to Hoekstra, when a business does not have the liberty to freely discriminate it hurts the bottom line. Or something.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) makes the pro-choice argument on Meet The Press, while arguing against President Obama as a “health care dictator.”
Here is one Oklahoman putting her state’s assault on women’s rights in some context.
One of the reasons why reproductive rights are economic rights is so women don’t have to think of a diamond ring as “insurance.”
It would be helpful if the mainstream media stopped reporting baseless surveys like this one claiming that, if given a choice between bigger boobs and practically anything, women would choose bigger boobs. It’s not a real survey and it’s not news.
Here’s a powerful read from the New York Times on what it was like when women could access abortion care without being called a slut. Abortion care. Not contraception. Look no further for proof that women’s rights are in a free fall.
Thanks for checking back and don’t forget to send in your stories, suggestions and comments. We’ll be back tomorrow with the latest in the best and the worst from the War on Women. So long as the battle rages, we’ll cover the latest, so please check back!
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/dispatches-from-the-war-on-women-poor-women-get-no-choice.html#ixzz1sEyadhhW
Increasingly, the U.S. government has shown an intense desire to "friend" you, to "follow" you, to get to know your every online move. Now they're channeling that desire towards legislation that clear the path for authorities to work with companies like Facebook, Google and AT&T to snoop on Internet-using Americans. The legislation, called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA, is winding its way through Congress. Timothy Karr, SavetheInternet.com A coalition of privacy groups launched an online campaign on Monday against a House cybersecurity bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The campaign aims to re-create the backlash that derailed anti-piracy legislation earlier this year. Brendan Sasso, The Hill Opposition to pending cyber-security legislation ramped up when several high-profile Internet groups joined forces to protest the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA). Chloe Albanesius, PC Magazine Public interest groups and civil liberties organizations launched a week of Internet-wide protests against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), the controversial cybersecurity legislation that would negate existing privacy laws and allow companies to share user data with the government without a court order. The coalition is urging the public to take part in a Twitter protest directed at their lawmakers. Free Press The OpenNet Initiative has analyzed government interference with the Internet in 74 countries. The level of tampering in four categories is graded out of four in each country. See how each country is ranked. Garry Blight, Andrew Rininsland, Simon Rogers and Paul Torpey, The Guardian The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the Internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Ian Katz, The Guardian It's good that Google's chiefs support Web freedom -- but given the company's size, we need to keep an eye on it. James Ball, The Guardian For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington D.C., six blocks away from the White House. The office is the headquarters of a U.S. government-funded technology project aimed at undermining Internet censorship in countries such as Iran and Syria. Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian The FCC is scheduled to vote April 27 on whether to require TV stations to post online public information about political ad buys. Some form of the rule seems likely to pass, but the industry and others are lobbying the FCC to alter the nature of the final rule. Justin Elliot, ProPublica Outside political spending is already having an unprecedented effect on the 2012 presidential election, and much of those millions of dollars are going to television advertising. Right now, the only way for voters to find out who is behind the commercials they see is by visiting the station in person and rifling through paper records. An upcoming vote at the FCC could change that -- by requiring broadcast TV stations to put their public files online. Transparency advocates say the move is long overdue, but media industry groups are fighting the proposal. Alice Ollstein, Free Speech Radio News When Google first revealed in 2010 that cars it was using to map streets were also sweeping up sensitive personal information from wireless home networks, it called the data collection a mistake. Federal regulators have charged that Google had "deliberately impeded and delayed" an investigation into the data collection and ordered a $25,000 fine on the search giant. David Streitfield, New York Times Google earned about $38 billion in revenue last year, but the only penalty it's faced in the United States in connection with its Wi-Spy scandal is a mere $25,000 fine. Some say the penalty, issued for obstructing the investigation and not for violating the law, is a slap on the wrist -- too small of a price to pay for collecting troves of personal information from citizens' home networks. Tony Romm, Politico For the Orlando Sentinel, the Trayvon Martin story is local; the shooting of Martin happened in Sanford, a suburb of Orlando. But the newspaper senses an opportunity to reach a national and even international audience with online coverage. It is competing with all manner of national media, which have seized on the story with a ferocity that has already drawn comparisons to the Casey Anthony trial and, years before it, that of O.J. Simpson. Brian Stelter, New York Times Kristyna Wentz-Graff, her Milwaukee Journal Sentinel press credentials dangling from her neck, snapped a series of shots of about 50 Occupy protesters marching near campus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Wentz-Graff paid scant attention to the sudden line of police rushing past her. She was a veteran of other raucous protests in Wisconsin and thought she knew how to shoot photos without becoming part of the story. Allan Wolper, Editor & Publisher Hard to imagine, but there have only been five anchors of the CBS Evening News (six if you count the pairing of Dan Rather and Connie Chung). And it was 50 years ago, that the original went on the air. Walter Cronkite with the News debuted on April 16, 1962 as a 15-minute newscast. Chris Ariens, TVNewser It was the news story that forever changed the way news was shared. One hundred years ago, when a "tweet" was simply the sound a bird made, the story of the Titanic's sinking spread across the globe via a network of amateurs who used a then-cutting-edge radio technology. Tammy Swift, Grand Forks Herald | The federal government and big companies want limitless new powers to spy on you. And they plan to get them via legislation called CISPA -- the "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act." Tell your member of Congress to vote no on CISPA and stop this bill in its tracks. A U.S. appeals court just struck down a ban on political ads on public broadcasting. That means your local PBS or NPR station could start running nasty attack ads right away. Tell PBS and NPR to keep their stations free of nasty attack ads. Happy Spring! Help the Media Reform Daily grow by donating $5 or more to the Free Press Action Fund. Your gift will help place the needs of the public -- and our democracy -- before corporate interests. Plus it's bound to put a "spring" in your step! In Other News..CNet Ars Technica MediaPost CNN Communications Technology Ars Technica Upcoming Events25th Annual Arts Advocacy Day April 16-April 17: Washington, D.C. Discussion of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media Apr 17: El Paso, TX JournalismStrategies.ca April 19-April 21: Montreal Innovate / Activate Conference April 20-April 21: Berkeley, CA Rethink Music Apr 21-Apr 24: Boston, MA Students for Free Culture Summit Apr 22: Berkeley, CA |
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4/9/12
via FDL
In a NYT Economic blogpost Jason DeParle ponders the fact that government surveys are not showing much increase in poverty, even though we know there are many people experiencing long periods of unemployment and many forms of government assistance have been cut back. One possible explanation is that people in poverty and extreme poverty are less likely to be covered by the survey.
My colleague, John Schmitt, found clear evidence of a coverage problem in comparing employment rates as shown in the 2000 Census and the overlapping months of the Current Population Survey (CPS). This is a useful check on the accuracy of the CPS, the main survey for measuring both unemployment and poverty, since the Census has near universal reach with a response rate of close to 99 percent. By comparison, the coverage rate for the CPS is close to 88 percent.
Even after applying a Census adjustment formula, Schmitt still found a substantial difference in employment rates, with the CPS showing an overall employment rate that was more than a full percentage point higher than the Census. The difference was largest for groups with the lowest coverage rates. In the case of young African American men, who have a coverage rate of close to two-thirds, the CPS showed an employment rate that was 8 percentage points higher than the Census for the same months of 2000.
These results are consistent with a story where the CPS is missing more people through time and the people who it misses are disproportionately at the bottom of the income ladder. If this is true, then there could be a rise in poverty that is largely missed in the standard surveys.
###
Falling Coverage Rates: One Reason Government Surveys May Not Show a Rise in Poverty | |
| By: Dean Baker Sunday April 8, 2012 7:39 am | |
hope less (photo: Daniel*1977/flickr)
My colleague, John Schmitt, found clear evidence of a coverage problem in comparing employment rates as shown in the 2000 Census and the overlapping months of the Current Population Survey (CPS). This is a useful check on the accuracy of the CPS, the main survey for measuring both unemployment and poverty, since the Census has near universal reach with a response rate of close to 99 percent. By comparison, the coverage rate for the CPS is close to 88 percent.
Even after applying a Census adjustment formula, Schmitt still found a substantial difference in employment rates, with the CPS showing an overall employment rate that was more than a full percentage point higher than the Census. The difference was largest for groups with the lowest coverage rates. In the case of young African American men, who have a coverage rate of close to two-thirds, the CPS showed an employment rate that was 8 percentage points higher than the Census for the same months of 2000.
These results are consistent with a story where the CPS is missing more people through time and the people who it misses are disproportionately at the bottom of the income ladder. If this is true, then there could be a rise in poverty that is largely missed in the standard surveys.
###
Comcast's shifting explanations for its Xbox deal raise questions about the justification for its bandwidth caps and the different ways it charges consumers for video.
Matt Wood, CNet
Cable giant Comcast's efforts to secure passage of the defeated Stop Online Piracy Act provided a boost to the company's lobbyists.
Andrew Feinberg, The Hill
In the wake of SOPA and PIPA, there is yet another terrifying bill on the table. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is currently being discussed in Congress. It is feared that CISPA is far worse than SOPA and PIPA in its possible effects on the Internet.
Anne Sewell, Digital Journal
An online activist site has collected 300,000 signatures in opposition to a pending "cyber-security" bill that critics say would allow increased government spying on the Internet. The petition focuses on a bill by Rep. Mike Rogers, but his legislation is one of at least four proposals now being considered by Congress.
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica
You can still write annoying, profane things about this story -- at least for now. Arizona legislators are expected to amend a controversial bill that experts say could stifle free speech online and violate the First Amendment. But free speech experts say the anticipated changes to the bill -- which will be made before the legislation is sent to Gov. Jan Brewer -- may not fix the major flaws in the proposal, which passed both legislative houses last week.
Bianca Bosker, Huffington Post
The government is moving forward with a plan to make local television stations post information about political advertising on a central website. Owners of local stations have tried to block the proposal, but it appears likely to be approved by the FCC when it convenes later this month.
Brian Stelter, New York Times
Broadcast television stations would soon be required to disclose on the Internet the rates they charge for political TV ads under new rules circulated at the FCC.
Amy Schatz, Wall Street Journal
The FCC late last week released its tentative agenda for its April 27 public meeting and it will be a busy one. There are votes scheduled on Universal Service Reform, noncommercial station fundraising and a regulatory framework for allowing TV stations to share channels as part of the reclamation of spectrum for incentive auctions. The disclosure rulemaking is also on the agenda.
John Eggerton, Multichannel News
Everyone knows how long a minute is. And your cellphone carrier keeps close tabs on how many you have used this month. Now, in the smartphone era, more people are being forced to think about how many megabytes of data they are using. But what exactly is a megabyte?
Brian X. Chen, New York Times
We've all heard the commercials and seen the ads. The major cellular carriers are rolling out their shiny new 4G networks, and they're promising speeds "up to 10 times faster" than those on regular 3G networks. They also toss the term "LTE" around as if it were going out of style. For most people, 4G feels a little faster, but it's not anything close to the speed we were promised.
Ed Robinson, GigaOM
Starting April 8, AT&T will allow iPhone customers whose contracts have expired to unlock their phones, or remove the restrictions that bind them to the carrier.
Jenna Wortham, New York Times
In a first for the microblogging service, Twitter has gone to court in an effort to rid its site of spam.
Wendy Davis, MediaPost
Google wants to bring more small websites to mobile phones, and to help nudge those sites along it's willing to foot the bill for a year. Google, with the help of mobile Web optimization startup Duda Mobile, is offering for 12 months free hosting and website customization for mobile browsers in an effort to make more Internet content mobile-friendly.
Kevin Fitchard, GigaOM
Last week, the Center for Media Justice and Free Press, together with the Main Street Project, Waite House and the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, welcomed author Joseph Torres to the Twin Cities to promote his book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, co-written with Juan González. The timing for Joseph's visit to Minnesota couldn't have been more perfect.
amalia deloney, SavetheNews.org
Television news now feasts on fame, the gaudier the better, with journalistic credentials a mere afterthought. Morning shows must compete with YouTube, Twitter, iPads and a thousand other distractions. That's why they keep panting after the celebrity du jour, even one who claims to despise the lamestream media.
Howard Kurtz, Daily Beast
If most newspapers are an uneconomical proposition incapable of sustaining profits, let alone paying off the debt so many buyers have larded on them, who is left to own them? Rich guys.
David Carr, New York Times
Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of America's best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on 60 Minutes, died on Saturday. He was 93.
Tim Weiner, New York Times
4/6/12
Via:Naked Capitalism
Posted: 01 Mar 2012 09:05 PM PST
By Washington’s Blog
Two Senators with Access to Classified Information Say Saudi Government Backed 9/11 Attack
Two former senators – one a 9/11 Commissioner, the other the co-chair of the joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11 – state in sworn declarations that the Saudi government backed the 9/11 attack.
The New York Times reports:
For more than a decade, questions have lingered about the possible role of the Saudi government in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, even as the royal kingdom has made itself a crucial counterterrorism partner in the eyes of American diplomats.As we noted last year:
Now, in sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, two former senators who were privy to top secret information on the Saudis’ activities say they believe that the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks.
“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country by families of Sept. 11 victims and others. Mr. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional inquiry into the attacks.
The Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, previously stated that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here).The Times continues:
Today, Graham called for a new 9/11 investigation. As Raw Story notes:
Graham on Monday called on the U.S. government to reopen its investigation into 9/11 after a report found that links between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers were never disclosed by the FBI to the 2002 joint Congressional intelligence committee investigating the attacks.
“In the final report of the congressional inquiry, there was a chapter related primarily to the Saudi role in 9/11 that was totally censored, every word of the chapter has been withheld from the public,” Graham said on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show.
“Some of the other questions we ought to be asking are if we know that the Saudis who lived in San Diego and now apparently in Sarasota received substantial assistance, what about the Saudis who lived in Phoenix, Arizona? Or Arlington, Virginia? … What was happening in those places?”
“I believe these are questions for which there are definitive answers, but the American people and largely their elected representatives have been denied that information.”
His former Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat who served on the separate 9/11 Commission, said in a sworn affidavit of his own in the case that “significant questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions. “Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued,” Mr. Kerrey said.As we’ve repeatedly noted:
Their affidavits, which were filed on Friday and have not previously been disclosed, are part of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has wound its way through federal courts since 2002. An appellate court, reversing an earlier decision, said in November that foreign nations were not immune to lawsuits under certain terrorism claims, clearing the way for parts of the Saudi case to be reheard in United States District Court in Manhattan.
***
The Saudis are seeking to have the case dismissed in part because they say American inquiries — including those in which Mr. Graham and Mr. Kerrey took part — have essentially exonerated them. A recent court filing by the Saudis prominently cited the 9/11 Commission’s “exhaustive” final report, which “found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi individuals funded” Al Qaeda.
But Mr. Kerrey and Mr. Graham said that the findings should not be seen as an exoneration and that many important questions about the Saudis’ role had never been fully examined, partly because their panels simply did not have the time or resources given their wider scope.
Terry Strada of New Vernon, N.J., whose husband died in the World Trade Center, said it was “so absurd that it’s laughable” for the Saudis to claim that the federal inquiries had exonerated them.
Unanswered questions include the work of a number of Saudi-sponsored charities with financial links to Al Qaeda, as well as the role of a Saudi citizen living in San Diego at the time of the attacks, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had ties to two of the hijackers and to Saudi officials, Mr. Graham said in his affidavit.
Still, Washington has continued to stand behind Saudi Arabia publicly, with the Justice Department joining the kingdom in trying to have the lawsuits thrown out of court on the grounds that the Saudis are protected by international immunity.
9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that “There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn’t have access . . . .” He also says that it might take “a permanent 9/11 commission” to end the remaining mysteries of September 11Indeed, while everyone remembers the false allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, most forget that the other primary justification for the war was the false linkage between Iraq and 9/11.
The failure to really investigate 9/11 led us into a disastrous war … which has virtually bankrupted our country.
Unfortunately, the endless wars in the Middle East and North Africa are about oil, not national security (and see this).
So we have idiots like MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough saying that – even if the Saudi government backed the 9/11 attacks – Saudi oil is too important to do anything about it:
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