Too Big to Block? Why Obama Must Stop the Comcast-NBC Merger

By Josh Silver, Executive Director, Free Press
Huffington Post
Posted: November 13, 2009 11:04 AM

By next week, cable giant Comcast is expected to announce a deal to buy NBC-Universal, the biggest proposed media merger in recent memory. Comcast, the largest cable company and the No. 1 Internet service provider in the nation, would take over the NBC empire: a television network, Universal Studios, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Telemundo, the Weather Channel, Hulu.com, 27 television stations and a host of other properties. The merger could be announced as early as Sunday.

This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity. On average, nearly one quarter of all channels offered to cable subscribers will be owned by the bloated Comcast.

Click here for the rest of an important story that details the disastrous effects of such a merger on diversity and access to information and what we can do to stop it.

Still-murky copyright treaty could change web as we use it

Published by The Toronto Star
Sun. Nov. 8, 2009

The future of the Internet in Canada may have been decided in Seoul, Korea, this past week.

But it's hard to be sure, since the latest negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement were held in secret, as they have been in the past, and the only details came to the public through leaks, says Michael Geist, a law professor and Star columnist, who himself posted a leaked chapter on the agreement's Internet Policy on his personal website.

"We're dealing with intellectual property agreements that are being treated as akin to nuclear secrets and that just doesn't make any sense at all," Geist says. "That's the transparency side of this. Then, of course, there's the content side of it... this week, they crossed the line into the realm of affecting individuals very, very directly."

If it's any measure of the public's interest, Geist's site got 100,000 unique hits in a 24-hour span after he posted the document.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an attempt to update international law to deal with online intellectual-property violations. The negotiations concluded on Friday and the next round are scheduled for Mexico in January.

The member states, which include the U.S., Canada, the European Union, and other states including Morocco and Mexico, hope to finish off the discussion and make it law later that year. For the average Internet user in Canada, then, 2010 could shape up to be a drastically different year than 2009, with much more scrutiny given to everything you do on your computer and mobile device – every download, upload, viewing, phone unlocking, burning, backing up, etc.

One of the proposals, according to leaks, involve a three-strikes system: three infringements and your Internet service provider (ISP) has to yank the cord from the IP address, not just the lone user. A few illegal downloads, iPhone hackings or movie uploads and an entire family could be without Internet for 12 months.

Click here for the rest of the story about how this treaty if ratified will impact the use of the Internet in the United States.

Check out these articles: Copyright Overreach Takes a World Tour
Knock it off: Global treaty against media piracy won't work in Asia

True US unemployment rate stands at 17.5%

By Stephen C. Webster
RawStory
Saturday, November 7th, 2009 -- 1:06 pm

According to figures released by the Department of Labor, the real marker of American unemployment stands at 17.5 percent -- a figure which takes into account under-employed workers and those who have not sought work in the last four weeks, according to a published report.

"If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression," reporter David Leonhardt wrote in Friday's edition of The New York Times.

The report continued: "In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982."

While official unemployment statistics were not available during the Great Depression, Department of Labor economists working with the Times estimated that some 30 percent of the U.S. workforce was put out during that period, the report added.

President Barack Obama called the figures "sobering," responding to widespread media accounts that placed the figure just over 10 percent, noting the department's calculation of workers who are actively searching for jobs.

Click here for rest of the story.

Nader: "Only the Rich Can Save Us"

Jason Leopold interviews Ralph Nader about his new book, "Only the Super Rich Can Save Us." The book is a utopian fictional account that raises expectations about the power of real-life wealthy public progressive leaders including Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue, jump-start a progressive revolution using their enormous wealth.

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing

By Marcia Angell, M.D.
Physician, Author, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School
Huffington Post
November 8, 2009

Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.

Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994.

To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates.

The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)

Click here for the rest of the story with Dr. Angell's recommendations.

U.S. Supreme Court to Decide Whether to Upend McCain Feingold

Corporate Money In Elections -- What To Expect

By Dave Johnson
Campaign for America's Future
November 2, 2009 - 10:50am ET

The Supreme Court may decide as soon as tomorrow on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case involving a corporate-funded anti-Hillary smear ad. It is likely the conservative-dominated activist court will overturn precedent and rule in favor of removing restrictions on corporate spending in elections, with terrible consequences. The 5-4 ruling will say that large companies injecting vast sums to sway election results is “free speech.” Imagine, vocal cords on a Cayman Islands post office box!

Common Cause has a report out, titled, Corporate Democracy: Potential fallout from a Supreme Court decision on Citizens United. "Lifting the ban on corporate political spending could unleash a flood of money into the political system and further diminish the public’s voice," the report says.

Really, imagine regular people trying to run for office while competing with the massive aggregated financial power of the biggest corporations. And imagine what will happen to anyone who dares to try to go up against their interests when they are able to openly spend any amount needed to get their way. I have come up with some examples of what to expect:

Click here for the rest of the story.

Progressive Values Dominant-- But Need to Rebuild Trust in Effectiveness of Government Action

Progressive States Network
Stateside Dispatch
11/02/09

We'll no doubt hear too much commentary reading too much into a few elections tomorrow in a handful of states, so it's worth stepping back to recognize the deep support for progressive policies and ideas that are increasingly dominant across our nation. Obama's election as President is one indicator of that shift, but progressive gains are reflected in the underlying support for progressive policies in poll after poll, whether in demands for greater corporate accountability, health care reform, environmental sustainability or a host of other issues.

If progressives face a challenge, it's not on allegiance to our values such as rewarding work or greater justice, it's a skepticism by many independents of the effectiveness of government in accomplishing the goals shared by most of the public.

However, if we understand the public support for progressive goals, it can inform our political messaging which should embrace a clear progressive agenda, even as we recognize that trust in government needs to be rebuilt after decades of right-wing attacks on its functioning. And we should also act with confidence, knowing that younger voters are even more progressive than their parents and grandparents, so our ability to move policy forward will only grow with each election cycle as these new progressives become a larger and larger share of the electorate.

This Dispatch will outline these trends in public opinion, with special emphasis on the results of two wide-ranging surveys this year, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press report, Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2009 (hereafter "Pew"), and the Center for American Progress report, State of American Political Ideology, 2009: A National Study of Values and Beliefs (hereafter "CAP-beliefs"). Other reports will be touched on as well, but the core results are similar across all major surveys on these points.

The Progressive States Network Stateside Dispatch is published monthly. For the series of articles on building trust in the effectivesness in government click on this link.

Progressive Values Dominant-- But Need to Rebuild Trust in Effectiveness of Government Action
- Support for Progressive Values and Policy
- Addressing Fears on the Effectiveness of Government Action
- The Increasingly Isolated Right-Wing
- The Future Will Only Be More Progressive
- Conclusion

Un-Censored: An Award For The BRAD BLOG and a New Premium Offer for BRAD BLOG Readers!

By Brad Friedman
The Bradblog
11/02/09

For various reasons, now seems a good moment to mention that The BRAD BLOG was honored this year with a prestigious Project Censored 2010 award for our coverage of the mysterious death of the GOP's IT guru Mike Connell. Connell, for those unfamiliar with the story (see background links at bottom of this article) was in the process of testifying about his rumored role in helping the GOP carry out fraud in Ohio's '04 Presidential Election when he was then reportedly threatened by Karl Rove. Weeks later he suddenly plunged to his death in a single-engine plane crash just before Christmas last year as he was preparing to land in Columbus while coming home from one of his frequent trips to D.C..

My colleagues Mark Crispin Miller and Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane were also honored by PC for their own coverage of the story.

Project Censored, based out of Sonoma State University, has been highlighting overlooked stories each year since 1976, and was recognized by Walter Cronkite as "one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured our newspaper and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."

In addition to our "Excellence in Investigative Journalism" award from PC this year, as highlighted in their annual "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010", I was also asked to write a chapter on problems faced by voters in Election 2008 for this year's book, Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09.
For the rest of the story click here.

The Incredible Shrinking Public Option

By Robert Parry
Consortium News
November 2, 2009

When the U.S. health care debate began last spring, the insurance industry and its congressional defenders fretted over the prospect that 119 million Americans might defect from private insurance to a public option, thus devastating the business model of wealthy insurance companies.

Since then, however, the industry has won so many concessions that the threat from the surviving public option has shrunk to about five percent of its feared effect. In assessing the House leadership’s health reform bill, the Congressional Budget Office projects that only six million Americans could or would sign up for the bill’s version of the public option.

And, to make the picture even prettier for the insurance industry, many of those six million would be the chronically ill, customers that the private insurers don’t want anyway.

Because of unified Republican resistance to any health-care overhaul and the objections of conservative and rural Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi scrapped her goal of a “robust” public option, one whose payments would be linked to Medicare rates and thus could have saved substantial money for the insured and the government, about $110 billion over the next 10 years, the CBO estimated.

Instead, Pelosi accepted a version of the public option which would require the government to negotiate rates with health providers just as private insurers do. That means the pressure to hold down medical costs would be much less and the potential savings would largely disappear.

Indeed, the CBO projects that the public option would have to charge premiums higher than private insurers because people with illnesses would turn to the public option as a more reliable way to get their medical treatment than what they could expect from profit-making companies, which would still look for ways of minimizing payouts

For the rest of the story click here.

Here are two related articles. Public Option Plan Will Cover Few Americans, New Statistic Reveals and The Two Percent Robustness.

Schwarzenegger Vetoes Election Integrity Bills

26Dems Editorial Note: The Voting Vendor industry has consolidated control over 85% of U.S. elections with the sale of Diebold Premier to ES&S. That means that this powerful monopolistic lobbying power is already is being used to defeat election integrity and transparency and saddle states and counties with expensive maintenance contracts for electronic voting and tabulating equipment already demonstrated to be fatally flawed.

The use of power to defeat transparency attacks the fundamental democratic principle that guarantees that voting is secret, but counting ballots is public. Throughout the history of the Republic, the advocates of fair elections have battled the barons of power who seek to profit at the public's expense. This most recent assault on democracy has attracted the attention of Sen. Chuck Schumer who has announced that the Senate Rules and Administration Committee will be investigating the Diebold/ES&S sale. Blackbox Voting has sent a Letter of Complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to protest.

The vendors are united against transparency and are working directly with bureaucrats in county election departments and the Secretary of State's office to fight off public records requests and to stay in control of elections, and to count votes secretly with proprietary software. In fact the Election Center funded by vendors has set up a private network of Secretary of State Organizations and Election Official organizations for training. The EAC, a weak federal body that sets up standards for voting machine accuracy is heavily influenced by vendors. Our state legislators face combined pressure to block election transparency and accountability laws from the associations that represent counties and election officials as well as a phalanx of intense lobbyists from Diebold-Premier-Sequoia.

It was thought that Arizona was moving toward greater transparency with the passage of a hand count audit law. However we have seen numerous examples of successful attempts to subvert the intent of election transparency and accountability laws locally and nationally.

Anyone believing that it will be easy to change the vendor control of elections by passing state laws should soberly consider how easily Governor Schwarzenegger with a flick of a pen allied himself with the voting vendor industry against public transparency. California is the nation's leader in the drive for public transparency and accountability. California is the state that elected Debra Bowen Secretary of State, the first in the country to conduct a top to bottom review of voting systems with some of the nation's top computer scientists.

Locally and nationally election integrity is suffering setback after setback even though the Arizona Attorney General declared electronic voting machines "flawed" and even though the general public has learned about the egregious software flaws that allow easy and quick insider access to change vote totals.

Read on about the Governor's vetoes.


By Brad Friedman
10/13/2009 6:20PM
Bradblog

CA SoS Bowen 'laments' rejection of 'common-sense election bills aimed at enhancing government transparency'

So do we. Please help demand Bowen now take corrective action on her own...
According to a press release from CA Sec. of State Debra Bowen [PDF] today, CA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed one bill for improvement to state election law, while using his veto pen to terminate three other "common-sense elections bills ... aimed at enhancing government transparency."

The one he approved will allow emergency workers in the field, such as fire fighters battling a wild fire, to vote from wherever they may be at the time. That's good. But Bowen "laments" --- as does The BRAD BLOG --- the other ones which she supported, and which he, incredibly enough, vetoed. He said hasta la vista to three bills which would have been very helpful in adding much-needed "common-sense" checks and balances to the nearly unabated rise of the machines in our electoral system...


From Bowen's press release:

Also yesterday, the Governor vetoed several common-sense elections bills sponsored by Secretary of State Bowen and aimed at enhancing government transparency.

AB 84 (Hill) would have allowed vote-by-mail (VBM) voters to find out if their ballots were counted and if not, why not. VBM ballots cannot be counted if they arrive after the polls close on Election Day or if the signature on the ballot envelope does not match the signature on file.

"A similar law already exists for voters who cast provisional ballots, so letting vote-by-mail voters know if their votes counted would have cost little or nothing," said Secretary Bowen. "If voters knew why their mail-in ballots were not counted, they could make changes that would prevent their votes from being rejected in the future."

AB 330 (Saldaña) would have required counties to provide public notice of the opportunity to review the preparation, testing and operation of ballot tabulating devices. Current law requires this testing be open to the public, but it does not require notice of when the testing will occur.

SB 541 (Pavley) would have enhanced transparency by requiring ballot printers and voting system vendors to notify the Secretary of State when they discover previously undisclosed flaws in their products. This bill was spurred in part by the revelation that a voting system software error caused 197 ballots to be inadvertently deleted from Humboldt County's initial results in the November 4 election. Upon discovery of the software error, Humboldt County corrected its election results.

While all three vetoes here are maddening, and an embarrassment to CA frankly (Really? Tests must be public, but the public doesn't need to be notified that they are happening??) the last one mentioned above should further encourage Bowen to do the right thing on her own by demanding accountability from Diebold for fraudulently and knowingly selling voting systems to the state (and 34 others!) which violate federal voting system guidelines by deleting ballots, allowing audit logs to be deleted without notice, and other epic fails for any voting system.

The Governor is clearly not going to do it. So unless Bowen, who is up for re-election next year, takes clear action, the message here is that voting machines companies can do virtually any damned thing they want and get away with it with little more than a slap on the wrist, if that much. And they can keep doing it, because nobody is actually going to stop them.

Your support of VelvetRevolution.us' DieboldReturnOurMoney.com campaign --- demanding the company return tax-payer money spent on faulty machines, that Bowen decertify those systems across the state, and that AG Jerry Brown (likely to run for Governor next year) investigate and prosecute for fraud where appropriate --- is much appreciated and clearly much needed!

Click here to send emails demanding action be taken by Diebold, Bowen and Brown only if, unlikely Schwarzenegger apparently, you give a damn about a transparent democracy and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people!

[Hat-tip Tom Courbat of SAV R VOTE for the heads up on Bowen's press release and Schwarzenegger's vetoes. DISCLOSURE: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us.]

* * *
UPDATE: This is really pathetic. Here's the veto message from Schwarzenegger on the bill that would have required voting machine companies to inform the Sec. of State of "each defect, fault, or failure" the company discovered in its voting system, as used in the state of California...

BILL NUMBER: SB 541
VETOED··· DATE: 10/12/2009
To the Members of the California State Senate:

I am returning Senate Bill 541 without my signature.

This bill is the result of an unacceptable situation in Humboldt County, where the county was notified of a defect in the voting software but failed to address the problem. This resulted in 197 votes being deleted. Because the Secretary of State (SOS) is not notified when there is a flaw in a voting system, there was no safety net to ensure that voters were not impacted.

The SOS inspects ballot manufacturing facilities before approving them to do business in California. This bill would appropriately include the SOS in a notification of equipment defects during and after this process. However, this bill goes beyond insuring appropriate notification and imposes substantial civil penalties on voting system vendors.

Many of the technical changes in this bill are acceptable, and I look forward to seeing a bill in the future that balances appropriate disclosure, without unnecessarily restricting a company's ability to do business in California.

Therefore I am unable to sign this bill.

Sincerely,

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The comment "this bill goes beyond insuring appropriate notification and imposes substantial civil penalties on voting system vendors" is telling.

The "substantial civil penalties on voting system vendors" that the bill would have required would be for systems that were in VIOLATION OF STATE LAW. Geez, would hate to "restrict a company's ability to do business in California" by requiring them to follow the rule of law and paying a --- rather modest --- fine where they failed to do so.

Apparently former, failed SoS Bruce McPherson's Diebold people have simply moved from the SoS' office to the Governor's office. Appalling.

Demand Open Source Voting Machines

This just in - Senator Chuck Schumer announced that the Senate Rules and Administration Committee will be investigating the Diebold/ES&S sale, signaling that election reform is a possibility if we demand it now!

We have Senator Schumer's attention - now is the time to tell the committee to make the open source voting machine software a focus of its investigation of the Diebold / ES&S deal.

Petition to Senator Chuck Schumer and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee will read:

Thank you for investigating the recent sale of Diebold to Election Systems & Software (ES&S). I am also urging you to take the next step in restoring voter confidence in our elections process by demanding that their voting machines software be made open source. It's critical that voting software be made available to election officials for inspection..

Click here to take action.

Weiner: AHIP Report Makes Strongest Case in Weeks for Public Option

By Sam Stein
Huffington Post
First Posted: 10-12-09 12:59 PM | Updated: 10-12-09 03:05 PM

One of the most high-profile progressives in the House of Representatives argued on Monday that a new insurance lobby report disparaging the Senate's main reform effort gives an unexpected and strong boost to hopes for passing a public option.

Appearing on MSNBC, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was asked about the hot news of the day on the health care front: a new report commissioned by America's Health Insurance Plans, which concluded that, under the Senate Finance Committee's legislation, family premiums would rise more than $4,000.

While dismissing the report's findings as typical of an industry that seeks to protect its profits, the New York Democrat also made a fairly salient point. The analysis basically assumes that insurers will raise their rates because the finance committee won't make the pool of consumers more desirable for them. All of which lays out the logical case for providing consumers with a cheap and available alternative, set up and administered by the federal government.
"I think in a strange way and obviously they didn't mean this, the health insurance lobby fired the most important salvo in weeks for the option," said Weiner. "Because they have said clear as day... they'll raise rates 111%."

"Here is a tell," Weiner offered earlier. "If you have the health care industry complaining that we're going to raise costs because of these changes, it is then putting us on notice that we haven't put enough cost containment in the bill. You know if the health care industry themselves is putting out a whole report saying that, that should be a tell to the Baucus team that, you know what, maybe it is time to go back and revisit the public option.

"But the other thing that is interesting here is the deal was always good for the health care guys. Look, you'll get all these new customers coming in and that is going to be the reason that you're going to take a hair cut here. But make no mistake about it, if the health care industry keeps raising costs, and I think this is what's going to happen with the Baucus bill, we'll put new requirements on them, they raise costs. And whatever subsidies we are giving people to buy their own insurance, they won't be able to afford it And we'll keep on losing people. This is the whole argument for the public option. It is right here laid out by the health care industry right now."

The congressman's argument seems eminently logical. Indeed, champions of the public option essential make the case that the provision is necessary because private insurers won't simply bring costs down on their own. The report commissioned by AHIP and put together by PricewaterhouseCoopers hints as much -- making the case that the finance committee's bill can't and won't reduce long term costs because it does not require enough young, healthy consumers to buy insurance.

For more Huff Post stories on the insurance industry's war on health care click here.