Our own representative, Chip Pickering, is vice-chairman of the committee, and there's little question of how he voted. Look at where his campaign money comes from.
There is nothing to be gained by allowing the major broadband providers to sell better service to firms that pay them more and to degrade everyone else's service, except more profits for the providers. Such an arrangement will put startups at a terrific disadvantage because the giants will have the money to purchase special treatment for their IP packets.
This is a land grab in cyberspace and if it succeeds we will all be the poorer for it. Call your representative and let him or her know that you expect the Internet to remain neutral, like a common carrier.
Below are some related articles. The Lessig article is particularly good:
[W]hen the Internet first reached beyond research facilities to the masses, it did so on regulated lines — telephone lines. Had the telephone companies been free of the “heavy hand” of government regulation, it’s quite clear what they would have done — they would have killed it, just as they did when Paul Baran first proposed the idea in 1964. It was precisely because they were not free to kill it, because the “heavy hand[ed]” regulation required them to act neutrally, that the Internet was able to happen, and then flourish.
So Waltzman’s [house majority telecommunications counsel] wrong about the Internet’s past. But he’s certainly right about what a mandated net neutrality requirement would be. It would certainly be a “complete step backward for the Internet” — back to the time when we were world leaders in Internet penetration, and competition kept prices low and services high. Today, in the world where the duopoly increasingly talks about returning us to the world where innovation is as the network owners says, broadband in the US sucks. We are somewhere between 12th and 19th in the world, depending upon whose scale you use. As the Wall Street Journal reported two months ago, broadband in the US is “slow and expensive.” Verizon’s entry-level broadband is $14.95 for 786 kbs. That about $20 per megabit. In FRANCE, for $36/m, you get 20 megabits/s — or about $1.80 per megabit.
Save the Internet
TPM Cafe: Net Neutrality Defeated -- Telcos and Cable Win
Daily Kos: Net Neutrality Committee Vote Update
Washington Post: Intel Offers Support for Net Legislation
Lessig: the fiction zone that DC has become
But to the point: Readers of this blog will be familiar with my admiration for Thomas Palley's blog, Economics for Democratic and Open Societies. Palley has recently posted an excellent article on how the trade imbalance between the U.S. and China is distorting the economies of both nations, as well as the economies of the rest of the world. The article will require considerable effort for the economically unschooled, but the efforts will be well-rewarded.
After reading the article, I decided out of idle curiosity to invoke the Yi-Ching with the question "What should the United States be doing with respect to China?" Using a program I wrote a for the Mac several years ago that duplicates the yarrow stick method of selecting a hexagram, I was presented with Hexagram 63 - "Chi Chi / After Completion." Here is a portion of the Wilhelm translation that explains the hexagram:
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This hexagram is the evolution of T'ai PEACE ( 11 ). The transition from confusion to order is completed, and everything is in its proper place even in particulars. The strong lines are in the strong places, the weak lines in the weak places. This is a very favorable outlook, yet it gives reason for thought. For it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder. The one strong line that has moved to the top, thus effecting complete order in details, is followed by the other lines. Each moving according to its nature, and thus suddenly there arises again the hexagram P'i, STANDSTILL ( 12 ).
Hence the present hexagram indicates the conditions of a time of climax, which necessitate the utmost caution.
THE JUDGMENT
AFTER COMPLETION. Success in small matters.
Perseverance furthers.
At the beginning good fortune.
At the end disorder.
The transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished. In principle, everything stands systematized, and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved. In respect to this, however, we must be careful to maintain the right attitude. Everything proceeds as if of its own accord, and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let thing take their course without troubling over details. Such indifference is the root of all evil. Symptoms of decay are bound to be the result. Here we have the rule indicating the usual course of history. But this rule is not an inescapable law. He who understands it is in position to avoid its effects by dint of unremitting perseverance and caution.
THE IMAGE
Water over fire: the image of the condition
In AFTER COMPLETION.
Thus the superior man
Takes thought of misfortune
And arms himself against it in advance.
When water in a kettle hangs over fire, the two elements stand in relation and thus generate energy (cf. the production of steam). But the resulting tension demands caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished and its energy is lost. If the heat is too great, the water evaporates into the air. These elements here brought in to relation and thus generating energy are by nature hostile to each other. Only the most extreme caution can prevent damage. In life too there are junctures when all forces are in balance and work in harmony, so that everything seems to be in the best of order. In such times only the sage recognizes the moments that bode danger and knows how to banish it by means of timely precautions.
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I leave it to the reader to determine the significance.
Postscript: The purpose of this post was to encourage the reader to read Palley's article, not to convince the reader to learn the Book of Changes, which I find to be an amusing and often effective way of stirring up new ideas. The Tarot can be used similarly. If your tastes tend to the more contemporary, you might find Oblique Strategies (Mac Dashboard Widget or Windows ) amusing and useful.
What the pollsters aren't measuring at the moment, however, is what Americans are willing to give up in order to become truly energy-independent. Are they willing to give up low-density housing? 3000+ square foot homes? cheap personal transportation such as autos and trucks? recreational driving? 68-degree F. houses in summer and 78-degree F. houses in winter? cheap imports of consumer electronic equipment such as cameras, TVs and computers? cheap imported food?
The entire American way of life—which George Bush characterized as non-negotiable—is based on cheap energy.
People may be worried about energy, but they are mainly worried about how they are going to hang on to all the things they believe they are entitled to when hard times come. They are worried about how to avoid bankruptcy when the economy begins to come apart and their mountainous debts mature. The idea that everyone will have to drastically change their way of living if we are to weather the end of cheap oil is still unthinkable.
We are like the trapped monkey, fist caught in a coconut, unwilling to let go of the nut he holds, but stuck because the nut makes his fist too large to withdraw it from the hole.
That kind of thinking courts—nay, almost guarantees—disaster. In a Hobbsian state of nature, which is exactly what will come about if we don't pull our heads out of our gas tanks, hardly anyone gets to keep the goodies. Everyone loses. Life becomes nasty, brutish and short. A good set of readings on this subject is Jim Kunsler's blog. Read and heed. An example:
Happenstance led me to take a trip on the Washington DC beltway in a rent-a-car last week, when some putz graduate student from the U. of Maryland failed to pick me up at the airport. It was a navigational challenge for a stranger to get from Northern Virginia to the campus up in College Park, MD. And it was impressive to see how ghastly the suburban build-out has gotten in recent years there. One could not fail to be conscious of how the viability of all that stuff — including hundreds of millions of dollars of beltway widenings and new ramps I encountered under construction — depended utterly on a continued stream of Middle East oil imports. And you had to wonder whether any of the senators, congressmen, or executive officials saw a link between this tragic clusterfuck of car dependency that they live in day in and day out and our troubles out in the world.
The time is not becoming short; it has already arrived. See how far you can drive your Hummer on ten dollars worth of premium gas. The time for putting off doing something pending further studies and research has passed. Incantations to the free market won't cut the mustard. We are getting to the point that we should not be allowed to buy just anything we can afford. The price of most resources, including energy, is unrelated in the short run to existing reserves, but is determined only by immediate supply and demand. Given what we know about energy reserves we have no excuse not to immediately alter our collective usage of oil and gas in light of the inevitable flattening and then decline in world production.
Oil producers have discovered no major oil and gas fields in the world since the 1960s. None. Really.
We are presently burning up 4 barrels of oil for every barrel we discover. Really.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that we can't go on doing this indefinitely.
Now is the time for reality therapy. The writing is upon the gas station billboard. It takes no prophet Daniel to interpret it.
The latest pout is the Bush administration's ban on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with the Palestinian Authority because the Palestinians, in their exercise of the right to vote, rejected the utterly corrupt Fatah and put Hamas into power. Hamas has a rather peculiar (and unacceptable) view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict: if you are bombed and strafed, your homes bulldozed, your people deprived of water, land and the right to travel and treated like sub-humans, you are justified in taking up arms against your oppressors. What an outrageous notion!
I suspect the Palestinians have been reading our Declaration of Independence and taking it seriously -- not a smart idea, as too many nations have unhappily discovered. Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Vietnam--the list is endless--have discovered that self-determination is a luxury that can be enjoyed only by nations with overwhelming wealth and power.
Or nations with nuclear weapons.
In any case, the cutoff of U.S. aid and commerce will undoubtedly result in an even worse humanitarian catastrophe than the one which has been going on since 1967 in the occupied territories. As with the sanctions on Iraq during the '90s, one wonders what political objective is so important that to further it innocent adults and children should needlessly die from hunger and disease? More to the point, what vital interest does the United States have in Israel's oppression of the Palestinians and its illegal appropriation of their water and land?
But on this Holy Saturday let us put others' sufferings out of our mind (even though they result directly and deliberately from our own government's policies in support of Israel's desire for lebensraum) and think only of Christ's sufferings and death. Let us anesthetize our consciences with ancient rituals that grant us permission to ignore everything that does not relate to our own personal salvation. Let us lay out our Easter clothes in preparation for our celebration of the resurrection (and our affluence). Let us drive to church tomorrow in our SUV, a family idol the worship of which has led directly to the disaster in the middle east and is inexorably leading us to our own social and economic disaster here at home.
It is not too much to say that our nation, and perhaps our entire world, is spiritually dead. There are a few flickers of the spirit but they are faint. The death of our civilization will inevitably follow our spiritual death. The wave of fundamentalism enveloping the globe--Islamic, Christian, Jewish, even Hindu and Buddhist--are like the last gasp of a star that has burnt up nearly all its fuel and become a red giant on the verge of collapse.
I once heard Episcopal priest and prophet Michael Dwinell say that before there can be a resurrection there must be a betrayal. Our nation is being betrayed by its leaders. Worse, we are betraying ourselves by our indifference, our greed, and our willful refusal to acknowledge our role in bringing about suffering in the world. Dwinell could have added that for there to be a resurrection there must also be a death. Since we are on a downward and possibly fatal spiral, it is not out of place to speculate on the meaning of death in the context of contemporary civilization. In one of the finest poems ever written Dante represented the road to Heaven literally spiraling down into the depths of Hell, wherein we must face Satan, the archetype of betrayal-- the ultimate sin--appropriately set in a vast lake of ice. It is only by grasping the fiend himself and climbing up his hideous body that we are able to ascend.
Even though from a theological standpoint the souls suffering in Hell may fly straight to Paradise by simply desiring to go there, Dante's vision implies that for living humans there are no shortcuts. One cannot climb up from, for instance, the burning lake of the grafters in the Eighth Circle toward Purgatory, because Purgatory sits on the other side of the ice lake. There is no shortcut because there is no perfect contrition. The path from the Dark Wood of Error to Paradise inevitably leads through the deepest places in Hell. As Jung might say, to find light, one must accept darkness. Like Prospero, one must acknowledge the creature of darkness as one's own.
It is no accident that one of the medications most in demand today is the antidepressant, a sign that the universal psyche senses the approach of darkness but shrinks back from it with all its might. But as long as we individually and collectively refuse to acknowledge and even embrace the darkness within us and within our nation and society, we will remain unconscious on a course to catastrophe.
Another entirely predictable outcome of Bush's crusade for democracy.
IRAQ: Women were more respected under Saddam, say women's groups
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
On the same note:
Perusing Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology yesterday, I came across the following passage that criticizes the creationist and intelligent design standpoints:
The term "apologetic," which had such a high standing in the early church, has fallen into disrepute because of the methods employed in the abortive attempts to defend Christianity against attacks from modern humanism, naturalism, and historism. An especially weak and disgusting form of apologetics used the argumentum ex ignorantia; that is, it tried to discover gaps in our scientific and historical knowledge in order to find a place for God and his actions within an otherwise completely calculable and "immanent" world. Whenever our knowledge advanced, another defense position had to be given up; but eager apologetes were not dissuaded by this continuous retreat from finding in the most recent developments of physics and historiography new occasions to establish God's activity in new gaps of scientific knowledge. This undignified procedure has discredited everything which is called "apologetics."
Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 1, p. 6 (Chicago, 1951)
As the factories move overseas, the technology and expertise will follow them. American “manufacturers” are becoming merely marketers of foreign made goods. The CEOs and shareholders have too short a time horizon to understand that once foreigners control the manufacture-design- innovation process, they will bypass American brand names. US companies will simply cease to exist.
Yet we are being told by the power elite and the economists that are paid by them that outsourcing is the key to future economic prosperity and all we need to do is retrain and reeducate displaced workers to participate in this coming abundance. Roberts swats that one down, too:
The assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind because it doesn’t produce enough science, mathematics and engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always brought back to education failures in K-12, that is, to more education subsidies. When CEOs say they can’t find American engineers, they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or Indian wages. That is what the so-called “shortage” is all about.
I receive a constant stream of emails from unemployed and underemployed engineers with many years of experience and advanced degrees. Many have been out of work for years. They describe the movement of their jobs offshore or their replacement by foreigners brought in on work visas. Many no longer even know American engineers who are employed in the profession. Some are now working in sawmills, others in Home Depot, and others are attempting to eke out a living as consultants. Many describe lost homes, broken marriages, even imprisonment for inability to make child support payments.
I hope everyone concerned with the welfare of our children and grandchildren reads this article. I hope every Mississippian that isn't completely blinded by political prejudice realizes that the people that lead Washington today are not our friends unless we are millionaires. The time is getting short.
Read and heed: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02162006.html