The pigs she’s referring to in this instance are the HSBC bankers now-infamous for laundering over $880 million in drug cartels between Mexico and Colombia. Will Warren’s goals come to fruition? Doubtful, but it’s important that she’s bringing the issue into the so-called hallowed halls of Congress.
The Article: Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair by Bill Moyers in AlterNet.
The Text: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first place.
Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing new superhighway of information and innovation. Now many other countries offer their citizens faster and cheaper access than we do. The faster high-speed access comes through fiber optic lines that transmit data in bursts of laser light, but many of us are still hooked up to broadband connections that squeeze digital information through copper wire. We’re stuck with this old-fashioned technology because, as Susan Crawford explains, our government has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices, and stifle competition. Just like standard oil in the first Gilded Age a century ago.
Kind of funny that while Republicans and Democrats keep shrieking about the deficit, they ignore that legalizing and taxing marijuana would 1) reduce expenses on the failed “war” on drugs and 2) increase revenue. But that would just, you know, make sense.
As a gay marriage case finally makes its way to the Supreme Court this year, here’s a look at some of the best thoughts on the matter–funny, sincere and cynical alike.
The Article: How Conservatives See Liberals by Michael Lind in Salon.
The Text: Sometimes your adversaries understand you better than you do. That is why American progressives can learn something about themselves from a smart essay titled “Left 3.0” published in the latest issue of the conservative journal Policy Review by its longtime editor Tod Lindberg.
The latest issue also happens to be the last issue of Policy Review. Other than here at Salon, the demise of this conservative intellectual journal attracted only a little notice, which may reflect the marginalization of intellectual life on the American right, the shrinking audience for low-circulation, highbrow quarterlies and monthlies, or both. Policy Review published little of note other than Robert Kagan’s essay “Of Paradise and Power,” which became a best-selling book and made him a celebrity foreign policy thinker, even though his thesis — that Americans are far more warlike than Europeans — has been disproven in the last decade.
At their best, the neoconservatives inherited, from the Old Left subculture from which many of the movement’s founders emerged, the ambition to try to see big-picture historical trends through the clutter of current events. In this tradition, Lindberg traces the “ideological progression from old Left to New Left to today’s newer Left.”
