JOHN AZIZ, Business and Economics Correspondent - The Week
Stephan: One of America's central myths is that we lead the world technologically. Anyone who travels out of the country knows how bogus this is and how, in so many ways -- roads, bridges, airports, healthcare, education, childcare, life-expectancy, happiness, high speed trains and, yes, internet -- Americans live a second world quality of life. This is an excellent assessment of the internet situation and it explains why it has happened. Once again monopolistic corporate interests that control the government have blocked the well-being of the many in order to maintain the profit for the few.
ccording to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.
Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the U.S. ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.
So how did America fall behind? How did the country that literally invented the internet – and the home to world-leading tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Cisco – fall behind so many others in download speeds?
Susan Crawford argues that “huge telecommunication companies” such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have “divided up markets and put themselves in a position where they’re subject to no competition.”
How? The 1996 Telecommunications Act – which was meant to foster competition – allowed cable companies and telecoms companies to simply divide markets and merge their way to monopoly, allowing them to charge customers higher and higher prices without the kind of investment in […]
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Stephan: This report gives some excellent insights into the world of the uber-rich. Note that most of this action is coming from the Asian and Middle Eastern rich.
LONDON — The world’s super rich are turning from luxury mansions to hotels and office blocks, as they hunt for bigger property deals to preserve their growing fortunes which hit a combined $20 trillion in 2013, data showed on Wednesday.
The move into commercial property comes as wealth levels rebound after the financial crisis and home values in London and Monaco soar, prompting the rich to look for riskier investments that offer higher returns than gold or bonds.
Wealthy individuals spent $11.2 billion on hotels, offices, warehouses and shops globally in 2013, up from $7 billion in 2012 and three times the amount spent in 2008 after the crash, data compiled for Reuters by research group Real Capital Analytics (RCA) showed.
Such high net worth investors, most of whom come from Asia or the Middle East and made their fortunes in manufacturing among other sectors, often already own homes in cities such as London and Hong Kong, said Jeremy Waters, head of international investment at UK-based property consultants Knight Frank.
“They may be moving money because of repercussions from the Arab Spring, or internally the families are looking to diversify across the globe,” he said, adding that France, Germany and Spain were popular alongside […]
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KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: Here, in their own brief, you can see what is really behind the Theocratic Right's war on women. It is all about controlling their sexuality.
Hobby Lobby executives and other conservative opponents of the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act have argued that the legal challenge before the Supreme Court right now is about ‘religious liberty” – not controlling women’s access to healthcare or their personal lives.
That veneer falls away pretty quickly when you read the court briefs filed in support of Hobby Lobby, which are almost uniformly about controlling women’s sexuality and the apparent horrors of decoupling sex from reproduction.
It should probably be noted that virtually everything these groups claim about birth control (including calling it an ‘abortifacient”) is wrong. For actual information about birth control, please see here.
Here are five excerpts (emphasis added):
Beverly Lahaye Institute
Relying entirely on the 2011 IOM Report, the Government asserts that by increasing access to contraceptives, the Mandate will promote public health by decreasing unintended pregnancies. At the risk of stating the obvious, getting pregnant is not like catching a contagious disease.
If the Government intends to broaden the definition of “women’s health and well-being,’ and thus the goal of the Mandate, to include non-health related concepts such as emotional well-being and economic prosperity, then it should likewise have considered the […]
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JULIE STEENHUYSEN, - KDAL/Reuters
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Homo Superior Trend. Very exciting, but fraught with ethical implications. It isn't the science but the way our society distributes access to it that, to me, is the important issue.
LA JOLLA, California — When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would “revolutionize” the treatment of virtually all human disease.
The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA — the human genetic code — would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health.
As it turns out, Clinton’s forecast was not unlike President George Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech in the early days of the Iraq war, said Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Translational Science Institute, which is running a meeting On the Future of Genomic Medicine here March 6-7.
Thirteen years after Clinton’s forecast, even Venter acknowledges that mapping the human genome has had little clinical impact. “Yes, there’s been progress, but we all would have hoped it would have been more rapid,” he said in an interview in his offices this week.
But that is finally changing.
“We are at an inflection point,” said Collins, who now directs the National Institutes of Health. In a telephone interview, he said he never expected an […]
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SPENCER ACKERMAN, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As Rachel Maddow noted the other night when she reported an earlier story on this subject, it constitutes a direct assault by the Executive on the Legislative branch and attacks the foundation of our democracy. President Obama has a very compromised track record on privacy and, I believe, will be viewed as the President who created the surveillance state, to our great peril.
A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an ‘unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.
The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.
McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.
BTF MPU
Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.
‘As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling […]
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