Throwing Tax Breaks At AT&T And Verizon Shockingly Not Creating Promised Jobs, Investment

from the we-don't-appear-to-be-learning-anything dept

by Karl Bode

Time and time again we're told by incumbent ISPs that if lawmakers give them "X," we'll soon be awash in all manner of miraculous network investment and job creation. Sometimes "X" is an acquisition, as when AT&T promised to magically increase competition if it was allowed to remove T-Mobile from the marketplace. Often "X" is broad deregulation. Other times it's significant regulation of they other guy. Sometimes it's just subsidies. Lately we've been told that if we only don't apply net neutrality rules, we'll be awash in amazing network investment and next-generation broadband in no time.

Ground Truth: In Dozier's neglected cemetery, a search for lost boys and the reasons why they died

Ben Montgomery

MARIANNA — The darkness started to fall on the pines and the kudzu-covered fields and on the little cemetery when a thundercloud erupted in the distance, and everybody down in the graves stopped digging and looked up at the sky. "Was that thunder?" one of them asked. The last thing they needed was more rain, because more rain meant more mud and more mud would make it much more difficult to get the bones out of the ground intact and in time for the evening news.

The CNN reporter was pacing in front of the satellite truck, talking into his cell phone and stressing out the public relations people from the University of South Florida. This was the biggest story USF had ever handled. They'd fielded calls from the press about bedbugs in dorms and misbehaving football players and USF's work on the oil spill in the Gulf. But this? Hundreds of reporters and producers had called. The story involved a cemetery at a brutal reformatory known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys and mysterious deaths. The excavation of a graveyard. The bones of boys coming out of the earth.

Part Two

Bankers Brought Rating Agencies ‘To Their Knees’ On Tobacco Bonds

Wall Street pressed S&P, Moody’s and Fitch to assign more favorable credit ratings to their deals and bragged that the raters complied. Now many of the bonds are headed for default.

by Cezary Podkul
ProPublica, Dec. 23, 2014, 1:53 p.m.

When the economy nosedived in 2008, it didn’t take long to find the crucial trigger. Wall Street banks had peddled billions of dollars in toxic securities after packing them with subprime mortgages that were sure to default.

Behind the bankers’ actions, however, stood a less-visible part of the finance industry that also came under fire. The big credit-rating firms – S&P, Moody’s and Fitch – routinely blessed the securities as safe investments. Two U.S. investigations found that raters compromised their independence under pressure from banks and the lure of profits, becoming, as the government’s official inquiry panel put it, “essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction.”

Oil Crash: Don’t Believe the Happy Clatter

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 23, 2014

There is a mushrooming false narrative taking over the business airwaves: lower oil prices lead to lower prices at the pump which put more cash in consumers’ pockets which will lead to a more robust economy in the United States in 2015.

Yes, there are certainly lower prices at the pump. Yes, that gives consumers more disposable income. But it will decidedly not lead to a more robust economy in the United States for very long.

Rewarding failure by design?

by Tom Sullivan

For the investor class, it is a tragedy of the commons when they don't get a cut from it. That's why, for example, they are so hot to see a middle man in every middle school. Since the GOP took over in North Carolina in 2011, we've been warning about efforts by industry and ALEC to privatize public schools and public infrastructure:

Public private partnerships are a hot, new investment vehicle. PPPs are a way for getting public infrastructure — that you, your parents, and their parents’ parents paid for and maybe even built with their own hands — out of public hands and under the control of private investors who are more than happy to sell your own property back to you at a tidy profit. A turnpike here, an airport there, or your city’s water system. Psst. Hey, bud. C’mere. I got this bridge in Manhattan ...

Fox station apologizes to Black Lives Matter protester for editing chant to say ‘Kill a cop’

David Ferguson

A Baltimore Fox affiliate station apologized to a Black Lives Matter protester on Monday after the station deceptively edited a chant by protesters to say “Kill a cop.”

According to Talking Points Memo, the chant, led by protester Tawanda Jones, actually said, “We won’t stop, we can’t stop, ’til killer cops, are in cell blocks.”

Thank Postal Workers by Fighting to Save the Postal Service

John Nichols on December 23, 2014 - 8:31 AM ET

Postal workers, mail handlers, letter carriers and rural carriers will process and deliver more than 15.5 billion packages, letters, and parcels this holiday season. It’s intense, demanding, long-hours, late-night and weekend work that keeps the promise of a robust national Postal Service outlined in Article 1 of the United States Constitution.

There is something profoundly wrong—not to mention profoundly absurd—about the notion that any federal official would abandon that promise and the workers who keep it.

Wall Street Bank Regulator Issues Outrageous Press Release

By Pam Martens: December 22, 2014

Last week members of both the House and Senate were issuing press releases to express their outrage over the sneaky repeal of a Dodd-Frank financial reform provision meant to stop giant Wall Street banks from using FDIC-insured bank affiliates to make wild gambles in derivatives, thus putting the U.S. economy in grave danger again and the taxpayer at risk for another behemoth bailout.

What was the Federal regulator of these very same banks doing? It was bragging in a press release issued at the end of the same week about the gargantuan risks these insured banks were taking in derivatives.

Secret WTO Trade Deal Threatens Internet Freedom, New Leak Reveals

Newly exposed text of Trade in Services Agreement raises alarm of analysts

by Sarah Lazare, staff writer

Global governments are secretly negotiating a little-known mega trade deal that poses a threat to internet freedoms and boon to corporate interests, analysts warned Wednesday, citing a just-leaked U.S. proposal.

The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), under discussion between a 50-country subset of World Trade Organization members for nearly two years, is so secretive that its talks aren't even announced to the public, making it even more shadowy than the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Paul Krugman: Raising Rates Too Early Could Be Disastrous

The Federal Reserve definitely seems to be gearing up for monetary tightening, even though inflation remains below target. And I agree with Ryan Avent at The Economist: If this happens, it will be a big mistake - just as European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet's decision to raise interest rates in Europe in 2011 was a big mistake, just as the Swedish Riksbank's early rate hike was a mistake, just as Japan's rate hike in 2000 was a mistake.

And you would think that Fed officials would understand that. In fact, I suspect they do, and are somehow letting themselves be bullied into doing the wrong thing anyway. More on that in a minute.

Brian Beutler: Obamacare Enrollment Is Going Exactly as CBO Predicted—Just in Time for Republicans to Break the Agency

Big top-line numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services today show that, five weeks in to the Affordable Care Act’s 2014 open-enrollment period, 6.4 million consumers—including 1.9 million first-timers—have signed up, or were automatically re-enrolled, for coverage on healthcare.gov. That doesn’t count the million-plus enrollees who have signed up so far on state-based exchanges that aren’t run by the federal government.

The current open enrollment period ends seven weeks from now, on February 15, which leaves Obamacare poised to nearly double its first-year enrollment total in year two.

Dean Baker: The Trade Agreement Pinatas

In recent weeks many labor, environmental, and consumer groups have stepped up their criticisms of the Obama administration’s plans for pushing fast-track trade negotiating authority. The purpose of fast-track is to allow the administration to negotiate to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP) and then hand both deals to Congress on a take it or leave it basis.

Under the fast-track rules there would be no opportunity for amendments or delays. The deal must be voted up or down in a narrow time-frame. The idea is that with the bulk of the business community promising large campaign contributions to supporters and threatening to punish opponents, most members of Congress would find it difficult to vote no.

Why you ... you want to punish success!

by Tom Sullivan

I wanted to follow up on Steve Fraser's comments to Bill Moyers. Fraser is wondering when people in this new Gilded Age age will rise up to oppose the robber barons, as our forebears did 100 years ago. He spoke of how, out of the social upheavals that ended the Gilded Age, Americans created a social safety net, a "civilized capitalism that protects people against the worst vicissitudes of the free market." But the wealth worshipers of the second Gilded Age have shredded it, and an even deeper, more pervasive corruption has overtaken Washington, and with a direct line to Wall Street:

It is the consummate all embracing expression of the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom. In other words, it used to be you could talk about freedom and the free market as distinct notions. Now, and for some time, since the age of Reagan began free market capitalism and freedom are conflated. They are completely married to each other. And we have, as a culture, bought into that idea. It's part of what I mean when I say the attenuating of any alternatives.

The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama

By Greg Grandin, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

As we end another year of endless war in Washington, it might be the perfect time to reflect on the War That Started All Wars -- or at least the war that started all of Washington’s post-Cold War wars: the invasion of Panama.

Twenty-five years ago this month, early on the morning of December 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, sending tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into Panama to execute a warrant of arrest against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. Those troops quickly secured all important strategic installations, including the main airport in Panama City, various military bases, and ports. Noriega went into hiding before surrendering on January 3rd and was then officially extradited to the United States to stand trial. Soon after, most of the U.S. invaders withdrew from the country.

8 Shocking Facts About Water Consumption

Anastasia Pantsios | December 15, 2014 2:45 pm

Water is a finite resource. And its preciousness has been driven home by water wars in California, where record drought has agricultural users, fracking interests and home consumers vying for the same supply; in the southwest where the water levels in the rivers, aquifers and reservoirs that provide waters to major communities like Phoenix and Las Vegas are dropping; and in the battles being fought over withdrawing water from the Great Lakes. Reducing our water footprint is essential to conserving this life-giving substance.

FBI’s genetic tests didn’t nail anthrax killer, GAO says

By Greg Gordon, Mike Wiser and Stephen Engelberg
McClatchy Washington Bureau, PBS’ “Frontline” and ProPublica, December 19, 2014

WASHINGTON — For a second time in three years, an inquiry cast doubt Friday on the FBI’s assertion that genetic testing had cinched its conclusion that a now-dead Army bioweapons researcher mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized the East Coast in 2001.
The long-awaited report from the Government Accountability Office found that the FBI’s exhaustive, cutting-edge attempt to trace the killer with matches of genetic mutations of anthrax samples at times lacked precision, consistency and adequate standards.

Thomas Frank: The New Republic, the torture report, and the TED talks geniuses who gutted journalism

Zillionaire new media barons think themselves geniuses, not say, really lucky to've been Mark Zuckerberg's roommate

Between the crumbling of a landmark Rolling Stone story and the dynamiting of The New Republic, these have been a bad couple of weeks for journalism. But with the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program on Tuesday, the whole doleful parade took a turn toward the comical.

Chapter IV of that report describes the CIA’s efforts to twist public perceptions of its torture program by revealing certain classified information to journalists—information that was wrong, per the report, because its object was to claim great successes for the torture program where few really existed. But said information, regardless of its truth value, was still classified. That, in turn, set up an awkward dilemma for all parties: certain CIA officials wondered whether to do something about the journalists in question for reporting these great dollops of bogusness; other spooks gently suggested that they shouldn’t, since, er, the Agency leaked that stuff to them.

How the Iran-Nuke Crisis Was Hyped

A prized weapon in the U.S. geopolitical arsenal is “information warfare,” the ability to promote false or misleading information to heighten the pressure on an adversary, often using supposedly neutral UN agencies as a front, as may have happened on Iran’s nuclear program, reports Gareth Porter.

By Gareth Porter

In a critique of the handling of the Iran file by the International Atomic Energy Agency, former IAEA Director General Han Blix has called for greater skepticism about the intelligence documents and reports alleging Iranian nuclear weapons work and warned that they may be used to put diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

In an interview with this writer in his Stockholm apartment late last month, Blix, who headed the IAEA from 1981 to 1997, also criticized the language repeated by the IAEA under its current director general, Yukiya Amano, suggesting that Iran is still under suspicion of undeclared nuclear activity

How ALEC Plans to Undo Minimum Wage Increases in 2015

by Nina Liss-Schultz, Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check
December 18, 2014 - 4:39 pm

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) laid out its blueprint for 2015 at its annual meeting in early December, making public a plan that includes attacks on labor unions, paid sick leave, and minimum wage increases that have proven popular across the political spectrum.

Despite the GOP gains in both Congress and statehouses across the country, the midterm elections saw the passage of several progressive measures fought for years by Republicans. Among those measures were several state and local minimum wage increases.

New York City Cops Seek Federal Court Approval to Mass Arrest Protesters Without Warning

A legal fight from Occupy resurfaces amid 2014's police brutality protests.

by Steven Rosenfeld

December 19, 2014 | As New York Mayor Bill de Blasio takes high-profile steps to try to curtail abusive policing— sympathizing with protesters over Eric Garner’s death and vowing to reform the notorious Rikers Island prison—the city’s Law Department is going back to federal court to seek new authority to make mass arrests at protests.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has agreed to meet in full to reconsider an August ruling that sided with protesters and chastized the New York Police Department for the way it herded and arrested 700 Occupy protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in fall 2011. It concluded that the cops violated the protesters' constitutional rights and the police did not have “cause” to arrest them.