Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

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The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan

by Robert Dreyfuss

Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama’s decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he’d ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.

Here’s the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One:OBAMA: “I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?”

PETRAEUS: “Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame.”

OBAMA: “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”

PETRAEUS: “Yes, sir, in agreement.”

MULLEN: “Yes, sir.”

That seems unequivocal, doesn’t it? Vice President Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again according to Alter: “In July of 2011 you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S. military, however, things are rarely what they seem. Petraeus, the Centcom commander “demoted” in order to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts about what will happen next July — and those second thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in, too, are the lock-step members of the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.

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By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown

If a political pollster came to my door and asked whether I consider myself a conservative or a liberal, I’d answer, “No.”

Not to be cute–I have a bit of both in me–but because, like most Americans, my beliefs can’t be squeezed into either of the tidy little boxes that the establishment provides.

Also, most of the big issues that our country faces defy right-left categorization. Take conservatism. It’s a doctrine that classically embodies caution and…well, conservation. Yet the gushing and spreading Gulf Coast oil disaster was caused by people who proudly identify themselves as conservatives–including top executives of BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, as well as the top regulatory officials involved. However, they’re not conservatives, they’re anything-goes corporatists. Likewise, the five Supreme Court justices who recently enthroned corporate money over democracy (Lowdown, March 2010) are routinely labeled by the media as “conservative”–but their reckless rulings destroy our democratic values, rather than conserve them. Again, corporatists all.

As I’ve rambled through life, I’ve observed that the true political spectrum in our society does not range from right to left, but from top to bottom. This is how America’s economic and political systems really shake out, with each of us located somewhere up or down that spectrum, mostly down. Right to left is political theory; top to bottom is the reality we actually experience in our lives every day–and the vast majority of Americans know that they’re not even within shouting distance of the moneyed powers that rule from the top of both systems, whether those elites call themselves conservatives or liberals.

For me, the “ism” that best encompasses and addresses this reality is populism. What is it? Essentially, it’s the continuation of America’s democratic revolution. It encompasses and extends the creation of a government that is us. Instead of a “trickle down” approach to public policy, populism is solidly grounded in a “percolate up” philosophy that springs directly from America’s founding principle of the Common Good.

Few people today call themselves populists, but I think most are. I’m not talking about the recent political outbursts by confused, used, and abused teabag ranters who’ve been organized by corporate front groups to spread a hatred of government. Rather, I mean the millions of ordinary Americans in every state who’re battling the real power that’s running roughshod over us: out-of-control corporations. With their oceans of money and their hired armies of lobbyists, lawyers, economists, consultants, and PR agents, these self-serving, autocratic entities operate from faraway executive suites and Washington backrooms to rig the economic and governmental rules so that they capture more and more of America’s money and power.

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by Hendrik Hertzberg

For the young Presidency of Barack Obama, and for the nation, this hellish summer of discontent started in balmy spring, on the evening of April 20th, forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. At first, after the explosion aboard the giant oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the rig’s operator, BP, estimated the resulting flow at a thousand barrels a day. A nasty business, yes. But at that rate it would have taken eight months to approach the level of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and eight years to equal the record for the Gulf, set in 1980 at Ixtoc, off the Mexican coast.

By May 17th—the day that the chief executive officer of BP predicted that “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest”—it was obvious that what was unfolding was the single biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States. By last Tuesday, June 15th, when President Obama commandeered the networks for his first address to the nation from the Oval Office, the per-day estimate had been ratcheted up to sixty thousand barrels—a thousand every twenty-four minutes. The surface muck was fouling Florida beaches and Louisiana wetlands, leaving doomed seabirds shrouded in black; just as ominous, huge subsurface blobs were leaching oxygen from the depths, threatening to suffocate an entire ocean ecosystem. The Times was describing the governmental response as chaotic, “bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials.” And Obama himself was under attack from all sides, with even admirers berating him for seeming coolly detached and not angry enough.

Against this background, Obama’s speech was bound to feel unequal to the occasion. What “people” wanted to hear was an answer to Malia Obama’s now famous question—“Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”—and the answer they wanted to hear was yes, or, failing that, real soon. This the President could not provide. Plugging the hole is beyond his power, or, apparently, anyone else’s. By Labor Day, perhaps, relief wells, now being drilled at maximum speed, will still the gusher. Or so we are told.

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By Simon Johnson

The president should nominate Paul Krugman to replace Peter Orszag as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  (Orszag resignation details are here.)

We have previously reviewed Krugman’s outstanding qualifications for this (or any other top level) job (link to details).  The main reason Krugman himself has been reluctant in the past relates to a potentially difficult Senate confirmation hearing – for example, if Krugman had been put forward to replace Ben Bernanke.

But for the OMB position, the dynamic of a hearing would be terrific for the president’s specific agenda and broader messages.  Krugman, of course, is the leading advocate for continued (or increased) fiscal stimulus.  This is exactly President Obama’s message to the G20 this weekend.

Plus, when Republicans push back against Krugman on this issue, he will let them have it full blast on fiscal policy during the Bush administration.  Krugman has, again and again, been an outspoken critic of the Bush era fiscal policy.  He has precise chapter and verse on where the Bush team went off the deep fiscal edge.

Krugman also stands for responsible medium-term fiscal policy – he wrote the original definitive work, after all, on balance of payments crises.  But the point is not to engage in precipitate and panicky fiscal austerity (as announced in the UK today), but rather to put the overall debt onto a sustainable path.  It is very hard to do that when the people claiming the represent “fiscal prudence” are actually the ones who created this massive mess in the first place.  Krugman can set the public record straight on this – it would be great television and very good economics.

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People didn’t drown the markets; a bad system did.

BY CHRYSTIA FREELAND

The temptation is to see the 2008 Wall Street implosion that helped trigger the broader economic crisis as the consequence of individual idiocy and avarice. That thesis is emotionally appealing — nowadays everyone loves to hate and, better still, feel superior to wealthy Masters of the Universe. It is intellectually appealing, too. Blaming the crisis on human error is a lot easier than trying to work out the systemic problems it laid bare.

But just because something is easy doesn’t make it accurate. Call it the Michael Lewis fallacy. His book The Big Short deserves its place on the best-seller lists; it offers the best insight yet into the lunacy of subprime borrowing and the intricate world of structured financial products used to bet on those dreadful home loans. But the fabulous human stories of greed and stupidity Lewis tells are a seductively dangerous basis for understanding the global economic meltdown.

Start with the hedge-fund crowd Lewis introduces us to. It is easy to cheer for the smart outsiders who bet against those risky subprime mortgages, and to think that if only everyone else had been as sharp and as contrarian, the system wouldn’t have imploded. But both academic research and real-life market experience show that buying into a bubble — rather than betting against it — is often the wiser, safer, and more lucrative approach.

It is this perverse logic that Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citigroup, had in mind in July 2007, when he explained that “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” That remark, made just a few weeks before the credit crunch really began to bite, is ritually cited as evidence of the blinkered Wall Street groupthink that nearly detonated the world financial system.

Yet what’s really unsettling about Prince’s observation is not that he was wrong, but that he was right. Betting against an overheated market seems like common sense in hindsight. In real time, though, fighting a bubble is a lot more complicated than simply recognizing that certain assets are overpriced.

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By Dylan Ratigan, AlterNet

The same Washington spinsters who have driven our country into the ground seemed to be out in full force on Friday, claiming that their latest policy “victory” is the most “sweeping change” of our financial regulatory since the Great Depression.

Actually, it is nothing more than window dressing.

The real sweeping change of our financial system took place over the past 20 years. The irresponsible repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. The Commodities and Futures Modernization Act of 2000 by Larry Summers and Bob Rubin — the one that legalized the most destructive financial instruments of all, derivatives. The leverage exemption at the SEC in 2004, asked for (in person) and received by Hank Paulson and friends.

Of course, there are small victories here — there is better investor protection and, most importantly, an awakened citizenry.

What’s not fixed?

- The Cops (regulators and ratings agencies) working for the crooks.

- Banks still Too Big To Fail.

- Banks gambling with your deposits.

- Banks allowed to “mark to myth” and use off-balance sheet accounting to bonus themselves into the atmosphere, with the taxpayer taking the fall.

- Banks getting trillions from the Fed, Fannie and Freddie — AKA you, the future and present taxpayer.

What does it mean for us?

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By BOB HERBERT

President Obama can be applauded for his decisiveness in dispatching the chronically insubordinate Stanley McChrystal, but we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.

No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.

We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban. The American public gave up on the war long ago, and it is not at all clear that President Obama’s heart is really in it.

For us to even consider several more years of fighting and dying in Afghanistan — at a cost of heaven knows how many more billions of American taxpayer dollars — is demented.

Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.

The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy weren’t trying to win the hearts and minds of anyone.

In Afghanistan, we are playing a dangerous, half-hearted game in which President Obama tells the America people that this is a war of necessity and that he will do whatever is necessary to succeed. Then, with the very next breath, he soothingly assures us that the withdrawal of U.S. troops will begin on schedule, like a Greyhound leaving the terminal, a year from now.

Both cannot be true.

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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries — Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

“As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Previous reports by the nonprofit fund, which conducts research into healthcare performance and promotes changes in the U.S. system, have been heavily used by policymakers and politicians pressing for healthcare reform.

Davis said she hoped health reform legislation passed in March would lead to improvements.

The current report uses data from nationally representative patient and physician surveys in seven countries in 2007, 2008, and 2009. It is available here

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by Gautham Nagesh

WASHINGTON – A coalition of media companies, unions and nonprofits is urging the Federal Communications Commission to block the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal.

The coalition, made up of organizations including media giant Bloomberg, the Writers Guild of America, West and advocacy groups like Free Press and Media Access Project, wrote to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski on Monday voicing their opposition to the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal.

Monday is the last day for organizations to submit public comment to the FCC on the proposed merger, which would create a new $30 billion joint venture merging the Philadelphia cable giant’s content division with NBC Universal’s (NBCU) stable of television networks, film studios and theme parks. Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, (R-Calif.), David Paterson, (D-N.Y.) and Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) have expressed support for the merger.

The groups argue the new entity would have unprecedented control over the country’s media landscape, raising antitrust concerns.

“The proposed merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal is poised to fundamentally alter the landscape of the U.S. media market,” the letter states. “We are a group of varied organizations with many specific concerns with this merger, but we have joined together because the threat of this merger to consumers is so great.”

“As filed,” it goes on, “we oppose this merger.”

According to the letter, the new entity created by the merger would include the largest cable company, the largest residential broadband Internet service provider, the owner of one of the four national broadcast networks, several prominent local stations, cable networks and some of the most popular websites.

This would give the company “a degree of market power unrivaled in our nation’s media history,” the letter claims.

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The true story of the BP disaster is how private contractors, not the government, are handling the response. Of the 25,000 people responding to the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the nation, 21,000 are under contract to the foreign oil giant BP. This private army includes workers shipped in from California making $10 an hour to clean the beaches, ex-military public relations experts, and submarine robotics companies. There are no contractors working directly for the government. The Center for American Progress — like many other outside observers — recommends that the government take over operational control from BP, to resolve conflicts of interest between the foreign corporation’s shareholders and public health and safety.

BP has been notoriously secretive about the network of companies working to run practically every aspect of the Deepwater Horizon response, including claims processing, hazardous material cleanup, boom deployment, scientific monitoring, and call centers. BP has ignored the state of Louisiana’s request on May 7 for a list of contractors and subcontractors.

On June 3, the Wonk Room called the Unified Command number and talked with USCG officer Rachel Polish, who told me that BP would have to answer my questions. Later that day, a BP subcontractor contacted this reporter, but would only identify himself as “Les.” On June 4, the Wonk Room asked National Incident Commander Thad Allen in the daily briefing for a list of contractors, which he promised to address. USCG officer J. R. Hoeft followed up by email to say he would start working on it.

On Saturday, June 12, the Washington Post published a story on some of the contractors working on the clean up, noting that “BP has major contracts with two national companies to clean up any major spill at Deepwater Horizon: the nonprofit group Marine Spill Response Corp., based in Herndon, and National Response Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Seacor Holdings, based in Fort Lauderdale.” These organizations were established as joint ventures of the oil industry to follow the rules of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, passed in response to the Exxon Valdez incident.

On Wednesday June 16, Hoeft emailed the Wonk Room with a list of fourteen companies “that direct about 68 percent of the total contractors working the spill” — with only the company names. Follow-up calls with the Unified Command, including a contentious discussion with BP spokesman Toby Odone, did not provide more information. The Wonk Room has been unable to determine the identity of one of the contractors on the list, named only “ILES.”

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MILANVILLE, Pa. (AP)– What do you do when a gas company offers nearly $100,000 for the right to drill on your land?

If you’re Josh Fox, you refuse the money – then make an award-winning documentary portraying the natural gas industry as an environmental menace that ruins water, air and lives.

In “Gasland,” premiering Monday at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO, Fox presents a frightening scenario in which tens of thousands of drilling rigs take over the landscape, gas companies exploit legal loopholes to inject toxins into the ground and residents living nearby contract severe, unexplained illnesses.

This isn’t some dystopian nightmare, Fox says, but the harsh reality in communities from Texas to Colorado to Pennsylvania. “People are feeling completely upended,” the 37-year-old filmmaker said in an interview at his woodland home near the Pennsylvania-New York border, where gas companies have been leasing thousands of acres of pristine watershed land in anticipation of a drilling boom.

WATCH: “Gasland” clip shows tap water contaminated with combustible gases from nearby natural gas wells

CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER? from JOSHFOX on Vimeo.

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By Raw Story

Group: Former President Carter could be prosecuted for monitoring fair elections in Lebanon

The US Supreme Court endorsed Monday a broad reading of the law criminalizing “material support” to terrorism, a statute that critics argue targets legitimate free speech.

In a six to three vote, the highest US court sided with the government and found that an NGO could face prosecution for providing non-terror-related support, including rights training, to US-designated terror groups.

The case involved the Humanitarian Law Project, a human rights group, which the court ruled could face prosecution under the material support statute for providing human rights or conflict resolution training to groups including the Kurdish PKK or the Tamil Tigers.

“The material-support statute is constitutional as applied to the particular activities plaintiffs have told us they wish to pursue,” the court ruling said.

In a press release sent to RAW STORY, the Center for Constitutional Rights argues that the ruling “criminalizes” free speech, and that even former President Jimmy Carter could face potential prosecution.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to criminalize speech in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case to challenge the Patriot Act before the highest court in the land, and the first post-9/11 case to pit free speech guarantees against national security claims. Attorneys say that under the Court’s ruling, many groups and individuals providing peaceful advocacy could be prosecuted, including President Carter for training all parties in fair election practices in Lebanon. President Carter submitted an amicus brief in the case.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, affirming in part, reversing in part, and remanding the case back to the lower court for review; Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor. The Court held that the statute’s prohibitions on “expert advice,” “training,” “service,” and “personnel” were not vague, and did not violate speech or associational rights as applied to plaintiffs’ intended activities. Plaintiffs sought to provide assistance and education on human rights advocacy and peacemaking to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, a designated terrorist organization. Multiple lower court rulings had found the statute unconstitutionally vague.

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You Gotta Read This !!!

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by Ritt Goldstein

Nobody’s perfect, and so mistakes do happen.  But while I doubt if any of us could conceive of the tragedy coming with a reported 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil daily entering The Gulf, are we any more capable of conceiving what might come with a nuclear disaster?  While optimism is important, it’s sometimes a trap – just ask BP.

Before we are ‘sold’ into a wholehearted embrace of the ‘clean, safe, and reliable’ energy that gave us the Chernobyl Disaster, perhaps we might want to consider why so many of us are so sure ‘the unthinkable’ can never occur…at least until it does.

We humans are an interesting species, our achievements demonstrating that we are capable of virtually incalculable greatness. Unfortunately, our catastrophes – such as that ostensibly ‘one in a million’ chance oil debacle in The Gulf – demonstrate that we have our downsides too. Of course, sometimes even I happen to have that ever so rare occasion when, dare I say it, even I actually make an error; though, I reassure myself that this just means I’m only human.  But that’s precisely it – ‘human error‘ can be a problem.

I recently read an opinion piece titled “Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall Street”.  The author, an academic from the University of Chicago, indeed making a good point about our society’s capability for estimating the capacity we have for grave miscalculation, not to mention its consequences.  Pointing to The Gulf Debacle and Wall Street’s financial crisis, he noted our track record for foreseeing disaster could be better.

The Professor seemed to feel that we have been, and yet remain, unduly optimistic.  He also noted that “we do not live in an ideal world”, and then (simultaneously offering that he felt compelled to utilize a genteel term) strongly observed that “stuff happens”. And indeed it does.

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Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club. Discretion is everything. Rule number one is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. Rule number two is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. The story about the wild characters who are shaping this campaign cycle is worth telling, but please excuse my anonymity.

I hold as many meetings as possible over Tanqueray and tonics at the St. Regis hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C. The bar is dark and private, with comfortable couches. Even the gin tastes better there. On weekday afternoons the only people in the bar are foreigners and political consultants long past caring about who actually wins.

“You’re going to see something spectacular,” an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. “About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within.” Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and—for the first time in a decade—scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORN’s Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, “That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work.”

The ACORN blood tasted good. Shortly after, a core group of about 30 of us convened for the first time. It was the kind of conference call during which no one, except the handful with nothing to lose, offered last names. But it didn’t matter. I’d been around long enough to know many of the people by voice. Most of our talk was devoted to rants about the K Street lobbyists who are ruining the GOP. There I sat, in the quiet corner of a coffee shop on K Street, listening to a conference call beating the shit out of the people who keep me in business.

The cynical among us think it’s a group of peasants with pitchforks controlled by an underground cabal of Glenn Beck, wealthy donors and the guys who killed JFK. But the worst thing I can say about the Tea Party I work for is that it can make lots of noise but can’t win without professional help. I love the irony of helping run this organization from the St. Regis Bar.

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By LEVI SUMAGAYSAY

The Internet can be the ultimate democratic tool, where anyone can roam to acquire knowledge previously unavailable and/or inaccessible, with the potential to make something useful of that information. It can also be a hangout for those who seek things considered trivial, unproductive, immoral, malicious, even dangerous. Yet the concept that all Web traffic should be treated equally — net neutrality — applies to people who fall in either category. The problem is, some people fall into both categories. Gray areas abound. That is the nature of the free Internet, and continued unfettered access to it is now a vital part of our lives.

The FCC, which under new Chairman Julius Genachowski advocates net neutrality, has voted to try to reclaim its authority over broadband regulations after an April court ruling undermining its power. The reaction to the FCC move isn’t surprising: Broadband providers such as AT&T and Verizon — which oppose net neutrality and would be subject to stricter rules, blasted it; consumer groups and Silicon Valley companies in the business of providing or enabling content, such as Google, are all for it.

The FCC has invited public comment, setting the stage for a big fight, one that’s been a long time coming. It is highly unlikely that the bitterly partisan Congress, who has been called upon to address this issue by revisiting the Telecommunications Act of 1996, will help resolve this conflict anytime soon. It is telling that the New York Times article about the FCC’s latest move includes the following sentence: “It would not regulate Internet content.” Perhaps highlighting this fact was purely informational, but it’s also possible the writer was anticipating that the anti-regulation crowd would seize on the FCC effort as the latest example of a misguided, meddlesome government. Those who tend to characterize all government regulation as power grabs might want to read and reread that sentence. In this case, the government seeks to protect the free Internet, not control it. It aims to prevent a more potentially harmful power grab, that of ISPs that want their own control — free of pesky regulations that would prevent them from doing things such as slow down traffic from certain sites, as Comcast did with BitTorrent, in the case that prompted the April federal appeals court ruling against the FCC for chastising Comcast.

There is no overstating the value of a free Internet. Leaving the ISPs — and their inherent corporate mindset of profit over public interest (See Comcast ruling is a shift from neutral into reverse) — to their own devices risks a scenario in which Web surfing might someday be equivalent to channel surfing on our TVs. We don’t want to type in a URL only to be met with “you have not subscribed to this channel.”

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By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet

Editor’s Note: At publication of this story, news just broke of a ruptured natural gas well in Pennsylvania that has resulted in a spill. It was brought under control on the afternoon of June 4th, but not until a million gallons of toxic drilling fluid flowed into the ground in an area rich with tributaries to a major American river.

Massive natural gas drilling under way in Pennsylvania and imminent in New York makes the Upper Delaware the most endangered river in America, according to American Rivers, a major environmental organization, whose yearly report, America’s 10 Most Endangered Rivers, focuses national attention on rivers that need immediate safeguarding for “the benefit of people, wildlife and nature.” On June 2nd, in a commemorative ceremony in Narrowsburg, NY, overlooking the majestic river, local citizens and leaders from government and advocacy groups gathered to hear the announcement, vowing to take action to protect the pristine river which provides drinking water for some 17 million people in New York and Pennsylvania.

Speakers, who included NY Congressman Maurice Hinchey, National Park Service superintendent Sean McGuinness, Ramsay Adams of Catskill Mountainkeeper, Bruce Ferguson of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, and Marcia Nehemiah of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, stressed the need to protect the river and its basin from the unregulated gas drilling which has which wreaked havoc on water, air, health, economies, and quality of life across 32 states, and unregulated oil drilling which devastated the Gulf of Mexico waters and coast for years to come: “We’ve seen what happens when energy companies are granted unfettered access to our precious natural resources without proper oversight,” Hinchey said. “In the wake of one of the largest environmental disasters in our nation’s history, as millions of gallons of oil spew into the Gulf of Mexico, the need for action to protect the Delaware River could not be more clear.”

The Historic River Under Attack

The 2010 America’s Most Endangered Rivers (MER) paints a picture of the dramatic river: “The Upper Delaware…winds through deep forests and farmland, past towering cliffs and historic towns.” The river’s 73 most northern miles, designated by Congress in 1978 as as one of the original National Wild and Scenic Rivers and a unit of the National Park System, provides sightseeing, boating, camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, and bird watching to millions each year and a home to thousands of rare and endangered species.

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By Tara Lohan, AlterNet

With BP’s oil gusher in the gulf approaching two months, public anger is approaching the boiling point. When will the oil spilling into the gulf be stopped and what remediation can be done for the ecosystem and the local economy? Those of us who aren’t at ground zero have to rely on what the media is reporting — which is turning into an outrageous scandal of its own.

“Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials,” wrote Jeremy W. Peters for the New York Times. “To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.”

So what’s really going on? Is there is concerted effort to block information from reaching the public? Here are four examples that point to a widespread effort to suppress public access to information about an environmental disaster — we may still not yet know exactly how bad this thing is, or how bad it’s going to get.

1. Restricting Access

One of the most common complaints so far from journalists is that they are having problems getting the access they need to do their jobs — like CBS, which reported its news team was threatened with arrest while attempting to get footage of an oil-soaked public beach. Weeks of similar complaints resulted in a memo issued by Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, claiming that the company is not interfering with press access.

The memo states: “Recent media reports have suggested that individuals involved in the cleanup operation have been prohibited from speaking to the media, and this is simply untrue. BP fully supports and defends all individuals’ rights to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if they so choose.”

But when WDSU news anchor Scott Walker tried to interview cleanup workers on a public beach on Grand Isle, LA, private security guards tried to prevent him. The news agency reports: “He told the guards he intended to ask contracted cleanup crews about their efforts while workers were on their breaks. The guards told Walker he could not question the workers and was not allowed on the public beach.”

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Lucia Graves
lucia.graves@gmail.com | HuffPost Reporting

Ken Abbott, a former project control supervisor on BP’s Atlantis deepwater oil rig, was fired in 2009 after expressing concerns about the safety of the operation.

“I got a lot of pressure from the lead engineers and from the managers saying, ‘Don’t do that; don’t push so much; we don’t want to mess with that,’” Abbott told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday. “I feel like the real reason I was fired was because I was trying to raise a safety issue, and you know BP has a long history of getting rid of people who try to raise safety issues. I was one of those victims.”

“Management sets the tone,” Abbott added. “If they think that production is more important than safety, then that’s the tone of the company, and that was the tone at Atlantis.”

In his testimony on the Hill on Thursday, BP CEO Tony Hayward repeatedly said that he didn’t make any design choices. “I wasn’t involved in any of the decision-making,” he told Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), adding that there were clearly discussions about rig safety among the well’s engineering team.

“You’re not taking responsibility,” Waxman said. “You’re kicking the can down the road and acting like you have nothing to do with… this company. I find that irresponsible.”

Congressional investigators recently obtained internal BP documents showing that BP chose a well design for Deepwater Horizon that was riskier but $3 million cheaper.

The story sounds familiar to Abbott who had his safety recommendations for Atlantis vetoed by BP management for fiscal reasons — the estimated cost was $2 million.

In September of 2008, Abbott was warned by his predecessor, Barry Duff, that “hundreds if not thousands” of Atlantis’s documents had not been approved or finalized, and that it could “lead to catastrophic Operator errors.”

Duff had reported these concerns to management, but nothing had happened. “They didn’t want to spend the money to fix it,” Abbott said. “I think [Duff] was unhappy.”

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