Capitalism has been an immensely productive and efficient form of social and economic organization, and it was predicated at its birth on the notion that if you produce goods and services that people really needed, you could both provide for the public good and make a profit from doing so–and that was an exciting way of hitching together altruism and self-interest.
The problem is, in part because capitalism was so successful at that in the developed world, a lot of the fundamental needs that people had that drove capitalism have been successfully met. People with the money no longer had great pressing needs, and people who still had needs–there are billions of them–didn’t have the money to be part of the game, and that created this modern crisis for capitalism. Instead of meeting real needs by manufacturing goods, it’s manufacturing needs to sell all the goods it has.
The analogy to religion:
The analogy I use in the book is [that] religion is an important part of our life, but when religion dominates everything, when it’s 24/7, when all the signs are religious, when everything in the public arena is religious, we call that theocracy, and we don’t like it. And when politics dominates everything, when everything is political–you know, religion is political, our love life is political, entertainment is political, culture is political–we call that totalitarianism, and we don’t like it.
But when commerce and consumerism dominate everything, we call that liberty. And I don’t get that. That’s just as unbalanced, just as dangerous as when any one sector of our life dominates every other sector of life.
On restoring the balance between democracy and capitalism:
We live in a world [with] a lot of very great needs, the Third World, “the bottom billion” in Paul Collier’s phrase. People right now are making money by selling us water in bottles that we can have free from the tap when two-thirds of the world’s people don’t have access to clean water. Capitalists can make money by finding ways to cleanse water in the Third World. There’s a little firm in Denmark that makes what’s called a Life Straw that filters out the contaminants in water. That’s helping people in Africa get clean drinking water. At the same time it’s making money for this firm.
Capitalism needs to turn to real needs. American infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. There’s one set of industrial jobs that cannot be exported–fixing our bridges, fixing our tunnels, fixing our highways. That’s a great job creator; it helps us provide the infrastructure that makes private corporate life and public life possible.
So part of what we need to do is restore the balance between democracy and capitalism, but the other part is [to] get the capitalists back to serving real human beings and making profits from serving real needs instead of trying to sell us things we don’t need.
August 1st, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Wal-Mart is reportedly holding mandatory meetings warning its store managers that a Democratic victory could be bad for the stores since it could lead to unionization — news that that is likely to stir up a hornet’s nest of political trouble for the world’s mega-retailer.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart.
In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.
It’s mandatory, which means the move is going to come under fire in what is shaping up to be a close, bitterly-fought election contest.
According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.
(See UPDATE below since an AP story has a more extensive corporate denial.)
August 1st, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
In the latest bit of news that would have been absolutely unimaginable a decade ago, General Motors has announced that it has reported a $15.5 billion quarterly loss — yet another sign of the deteriorating economy and how high oil prices have dramatically changed the American public’s car-buying habits:
The General Motors Corporation reported a stunning second-quarter loss of $15.5 billion on Friday because of a dramatic decline in United States sales and charges for job cuts, plant closings and the falling value of trucks and sport utility vehicles.
G.M., the largest American automaker, said it lost $6.3 billion on operations in the quarter that ended June 30, and its worldwide revenues fell 18 percent.
But the company’s overall loss was inflated by $9.1 billion in special charges that included $3.3 billion for buyouts of hourly workers and $2.8 billion related to the bankruptcy filing of its former parts unit, the Delphi Corporation.
The dismal earnings reflected the impact of steadily falling vehicles sales in the overall United States market, and a huge shift by consumers away from the trucks and S.U.V.’s that were once G.M.’s most profitable vehicles.
And the bad news goes on and on in the latest manifestation of the Clinton recession the mental recession the economy’s accelerating decline under the Bush administration: now some restaurant chains are closing, adding to the list of big corporate stores that are biting the financial dust:
Several national restaurant chains were shuttered on Tuesday, possibly offering an early taste of what’s in store this year for businesses that depend on free-spending consumers whose budgets are now being squeezed.
The parent company of Bennigan’s, an Irish-themed bar and grill with about 200 sites across the country, filed for bankruptcy, a move that will put hundreds of employees out of work and leave many landlords with empty retail space during a painful time in the real estate market.
A sister brand, Steak & Ale, will also close. Franchise units of Bennigan’s will remain open for now, a spokeswoman, Leah Templeton, wrote in an e-mail message.
The restaurants are the latest casualties in the so-called casual dining sector, considered a cut above fast food. Soaring food costs and a surfeit of locations have hurt the companies’ bottom lines just as Americans are choosing to take more meals at home.
The closings are “something we’re going to see more of over the next 6 to 12 months,” said Amy Greene, a director at Avondale Partners who tracks the restaurant industry.
The San Diego Union-Tribune notes that its reporter learned that not all franchises are included in the bankruptcy filing (for instance the store in San Diego is not). And the Times story quoted earlier further notes that the problems are the economy, coupled with the concept for these restaurants, which have made them expendable in an economy where financially-strapped consumers have to make tough choices.
David Brooks this week tried to explain the gap between social pressures and personal responsibility in “The Culture of Debt” by insisting that, in digging America out of its mountain of debt, “the important shifts will be private, as people and communities learn and adopt different social standards.
“After the Depression, a savings mentality set in. After the dot-com bubble, a bit of sobriety hit Silicon Valley. Now it’s the borrowers’ and lenders’ turn. As the saying goes: People don’t change when they see the light. They change when they feel the heat.”
Brooks’ optimism about “a bit of sobriety” is a nice Conservative try to ease the pressure off the banks, credit card companies and sellers of stuff for the waves of debt that are now threatening to drown so many Americans. Why did all those irresponsible swimmers plunge so far out?
But he may want to look back at the early 1960s to an America wallowing in post-World War II prosperity when the poet-critic Randall Jarrell was warning in “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” about a society that “needs for us to be buyers, consumers, beings who want much and will want more –who want consistently and insatiably,” in which “the product or services which seemed yesterday an unthinkable luxury is today an inexorable necessity.”
Bigger homes with zero down, newer cars with delayed payments, electronic gadgets galore, flying everywhere on impulse, credit cards for jobless new college graduates in a world of hyper-consumerism and retail therapy (”When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”)…
If he were still alive, Randall Jarrell’s supermarket sadness would surely be deeper than ever, but then again what would a poet know about the real world?
In this Guest Voice post, columnist Bill Steigerwald interviews Carnegie Mellon University economics professor and veteran economics consultant Allan Meltzer on the economy.
Our Sorry Economy — Interview with Allan Meltzer
by Bill Steigerwald
Carnegie Mellon University economics professor Allan Meltzer has served as a consultant on economic policy for Congress, the U.S. Treasury and the World Bank and has written “A History of the Federal Reserve,” part-one of his definitive history of the Fed that ranges from its founding in 1913 to 1951. On Thursday, July17, I called Meltzer, 80, at his home not far from the CMU campus to find out his thoughts on the sorry state of the economy — and what Washington is or is not doing right to make things better:
Q: Oil prices have taken a nice dip and stock prices are jumping. Is the worst over for the economy?
A: Who knows? The decline in oil prices is probably a sign that the oil market recognizes that the world economy is slowing. Despite all the talk about speculators, the facts about the oil market are very simple: The demand has been about 1 million barrels a day more than the supply. Demand has been increasing and the supply has been falling. So you don’t need to blame speculators to get a story about why the prices have been rising.
Looking ahead, the market sees — whatever the moment-to-moment problems are — that there’s going to be less demand for oil unless something changes. Now, what might change? Well, one thing is world demand, and world demand is, I think, seriously slowly.
Q: And stocks moving up is not the start of a big trend?
A: A lower oil price does help. Despite all the talk about the housing market — and the housing market is in many locations a serious problem — it is not the major problem, as far as I can see. The major problem for the economy is that people are really pushed against their budgets to pay for gasoline and food, which have risen. Oil prices get into every product we buy; every product moves by truck or airplane, and those industries are seeing serious cost increases. So prices are going to rise for transportation, and that affects everything we buy.
Wait until we see what is going to happen to the home heating-oil prices of people who use oil to heat next winter. It’s summertime now and, of course, they are running air-conditioners. But there’s going to be a real problem in the winter in New England and the Midwest with oil prices for home heating.
You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
– FRANK ZAPPA
While I suppose that red-meat Americans should be up in arms over the impending sale of venerable Anheuser-Busch for 52 billion large to Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev, it certainly won’t change my leisure-time habits.
The AB stable of beers, from the flagship Budweiser brand to Bud Light and a seemingly limitless range of other hopped-down beverages, is a triumph of image over quality — flashy marketing based on big-breasted babes, golden retrievers wearing sunglasses and college frat house pranks.
The $90 billion a year domestic beer market dominated by AB, Miller and Coors is nothing to sniff at. It’s just that my taste buds prefer imported brews (about 7-8 percent of the market) and craft beers (about 3-4 percent) to the watered-down taste of the big domestics.
American brewers did not always have to find clever ways to market their beers.
Prior to the advent of Prohibition in 1919, most American cities had at least one brewery with beers and ales that compared favorably to their counterparts in the Old Country, most often Germany. This is because the owners and brewmasters were direct from the Old Country, or were first or second generation Americans.
But a funny thing happened in the years after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Brewery owners who survived those 14 dry years and the shakeout as shuttered breweries began to get back on their feet realized they had a big marketing problem: There wasn’t a ready-made way to increase sales.
But with millions of beer drinkers returning home at the end of World War II, brewers stumbled on an idea startling for its ingenuity: If their products were watered down, people would drink more of them.
If you have a credit rating that’s not absolutely in the tank, you probably receive a regular flood of paper in your mailbox which gushingly declares that you are a wonderful person, trustworthy and responsible, and because of that you have been pre-approved (sound of horns blaring, balloons floating skyward and pigeons being released) for a credit card from their generous organization. These pre-approved, pre-screened or “firm” offers can arrive at a dizzying pace, and they likely wind up in your trash. If you happen to be the more paranoid type, (and remember: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you) you may even spend the time to shred them all before discarding them.
You may be interested in avoiding all of this by simply stopping the flow, and there seems to be a way you can do this. You can check out optoutprescreen.com or call them at:
1-888-5-OPT-OUT.
By doing this you can make a choice to shut off your credit information from all three major credit reporting services to the companies who send out these offers and, in effect, put a “do not call” tag on your records. You can choose to do this for five years or permanently. Should you, at a future date, become unhappy with your current card and want to shop around, you can use the same site to “opt in” and provide that information to the credit card companies once again.
If you’re worried about the legitimacy of this service, it is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission. This has been a public service to annoyed junk mail recipients from The Moderate Voice.
Is what we’re seeing The Great Depression Part II? In this Guest Voice, author Martha Randolph Carr contends we’re at a tipping point.
The Great Depression, Part Two
by Martha Randolph Carr
In life there is a tipping point for everything where what had seemed impossible has inched its way forward against the odds and is now about to pick up a lot of speed.
Unfortunately, a great example of that right now happens to be the underpinnings of the U.S. economy.
We appeared in the past to have enough checks and balances that things could get bad but not come undone to the point that the safeguards stopped working. It’s what allowed us the freedom to spend time arguing over the choice between big government or allowing the free market system to correct on its own. That last one is another way of saying let things unfold as they will, it can’t get but so bad and along the way all of the scams will get peeled away. And, it is the idea that will inevitably come into play if the imbalance, the tipping point becomes too weighted on either side.
In other words, when tinkering no longer works for whatever reasons a government has to either go to martial law or for a little while into an economic freefall till we hit the natural resting point. We appear to be sliding ever more quickly into that latter category. However, and this is really ironic, it’s the illusion of that idea that helped get us here in the first place.
The recent approach that was taken toward the housing market was supposed to be an easement of so much regulation but was more look the other way than step back. That helps to explain why the older policies from the New Deal, a time of big intervention, were also kept in place.
The intention wasn’t really to create a healthy free market system but to allow certain groups to take advantage of a situation. Therefore, no one was really analyzing what the effect would inevitably be toward having the federal government backing up mortgages for low-income families through the institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and giving people with no money the opportunity to buy more than they could ever hope to pay back.
You see, we appeared to be choosing a free market system but we were practicing a rigged system. Read the rest of this entry »
July 14th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Everything, it is said, is fair in love and war. Let’s admit it, we all are in love with “oil”. In the present long-drawn “war” we have allowed anything and everything to happen. In fact our “love” has turned into a naked “lust” for oil. And when “lust” takes hold of leaders and the public, they lose their sense of proportion and become virtually myopic (or blind) to the consequences of their actions.
So what can a Mc Cain or an Obama do under the circumstances? (Have a look here…) These thoughts occured to me when I recently went through a must-read book “Half Gone” by Jeremy Leggett. A powerful book that provides fascinating insight into the geology and politics of oil…and hope(?).
He writes: “Despite the defectors from the Empire of Oil, the growing dissent within it, little (has) changed. The Great Addiction remained…Barons of the Empire of Oil rode the planet in executive jets, more powerful than any president except perhaps the president of the Number One Nation State. But then he was one of them anyway.
“The most basic foundations of our assumptions of future economic wellbeing are rotten. Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precendent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.
“Most US presidents since the Second World War have ordered military action of some sort in the Middle East. American leaders may dress their military entanglements east of Suez in the rhetroic of democracy building, but the long-running strategic theme is obvious. It was stated most clearly, paradoxically, by the most liberal of them.
“In 1980 Jimmy Carter declared access to the Persian Gulf a vital national interest to be proteced by ‘any means necessary, including military force.’ This the US has been doing ever since, clocking up a bill measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting. With such a strategy comes an increasingly disquieting descent into moral ambiguity, at least in the minds of something approaching half the country.
“The deeper the dependency on oil and oil money becomes, the worse the effects of the unforseen energy crisis will be when it hits, so the more America’s security is undermined, even as its government advances enhanced security as the rationale for the latest actions of the Pentagon’s global oil potection service.
“Out of everything that was said during the summit, which ended yesterday in Hokkaido, Japan, there was only one clear message - and it was not encouraging: the great powers have no joint approach with which to tackle the global economy’s momentous difficulties. Every country will have to take care of itself, if it can - which is possible in Brazil’s case - and the poorest and most affected by the food crisis and high oil prices can expect only modest assistance to avoid sinking into misery and social and political chaos.”
SI.com has learned that for the first time in history, a major presidential candidate may sponsor a race car in NASCAR’s premier series. According to sources, Barack Obama’s campaign is in talks to become the primary sponsor of BAM Racing’s No. 49 Sprint Cup car for the Pocono race on August 3. Details of the agreement are expected to be worked out over the coming days.
A BAM spokesperson has revealed the team will hold a press conference July 23 in Miami to reveal the partnership, currently a proposed one-race deal with an option to continue. Obama will be at the briefing, which will be tied to the “Get Out The Vote” campaign message he spread throughout the 2008 primary season.
You may recall that I am an unabashed Dan Ariely fan (see, for example, here, here, here, and here). It’s only fair that I give equal time to his critics.
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational [link] is the latest book by a behavioral economist to hit the jackpot. The reason for its popularity is not hard to discover. The experiments that it describes are as titillating as they are ingenious. Here is one of them. People were asked some rather suggestive questions, such as whether they would find it exciting to spank their sexual partners or to be tied up by them during the sexual act. After their answers were duly recorded, they were asked if they would be willing to respond to the same questions, only this time at the height of sexual arousal produced by masturbation. It turns out that when we are aroused we are completely different than when we are not aroused: we are more hospitable to risk, more irresponsible, more emotional. Ariely therefore concludes that people who have no idea what they will think or do when aroused cannot know themselves very well, and the implications are dramatic: “Our models of human behavior need to be rethought. Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves.”
Before one concludes that behavioral economists are obsessed with sex, it should be pointed out that the masturbation experiment is the only one discussed by Ariely that requires this particular kind of self-help. The others are designed to show just how odd our behavior can be in the circumstances of everyday life. Ariely and his colleagues set up a stand and offer Lindt truffles for 15 cents and Hershey’s Kisses for a penny: 73 percent of their customers choose the former, 27 percent the latter. Then they lower the price of the truffle to 14 cents and offer the Hershey Kiss for free, and now 69 percent choose the Kiss and only 31 percent the truffle. Calculating utility cannot explain this result. In both cases, the cost difference is identical. So it seems that we attach an almost mystical meaning to the idea of getting something for nothing. Zero is not just another number. It plays tricks with our rational minds.
Unfortunately:
Ariely is obligated to remind his readers, most of whom are neither psychologists nor economists, of the problems of selection bias that follow from his over- reliance on students as subjects. But he fails to do so. In fact, he does the opposite: he generalizes from MIT classrooms to humankind as a whole, and with abandon. This might be called the technique of the Big Slip, gliding imperceptibly from a controlled and artificial experiment to breathtaking generalizations about matters that have puzzled philosophers and theologians through the ages. It makes for entertaining reading. Alas, it tells us little about the kind of creatures we are…. Read the rest of this entry »
July 7th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has emerged as the first leader in the world who seems to have understood the implications of the looming food crisis and taken a practical step. Brown has issued a clarion call to his countrymen to wake up and stop wasting food. Will the G8 leaders support him in making this a worldwide campaign?
(More than 1,300,000 tonnes of food grain - worth millions of dollars - went rotten in storage over the past decade in India, officials admit.) (Read the BBC report here…)
The Independent reports: “Supermarkets (in Britain) will be urged to drop ‘three for two’ deals on food that encourage shoppers into bulk-buying more than they need, often leading to the surpluses being thrown away. The scandal of the vast mountains of food that are thrown away in Britain while other parts of the world starve is revealed in a (British) Cabinet Office report today. It calls for a reduction in food waste: up to 40 per cent of groceries can be lost before they are consumed due to poor processing, storage and transport.”
Ironically, a top British leader is now acknowledging the accuracy of the vision of Mahatma Gandhi, the arch foe of the British empire, that mindless consumerism would create a crisis sooner than later. Gandhi’s oft quoted words: “There is enough for everyone’s need…but not enough for everyone’s greed.” (For more on Gandhi pl click here…)
Let’s get back to The Independent story: “The (Cabinet) report says UK households could save an average of £420 per year by not throwing away 4.1 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten. The Government is to launch a campaign to stamp out Britain’s waste food mountains as part of a global effort to curb spiralling food prices.
“Gordon Brown said he would make action to tackle the soaring cost of food a priority at the G8 summit starting today in Japan. At his first G8 summit as Prime Minister, Mr Brown will argue that the world’s richest nations must do more to tackle the food price crisis. He will urge them to halt the decline in funding for agricultural projects in Africa, so the continent can boost farm production by 6 per cent a year.” More here…
“World leaders are not renowned for their modest wine selections or reticence at the G8 summit’s cheese board. Shortly after calling for us all to waste less food, Gordon Brown joined his fellow G8 premiers and their wives for an eight-course Marie Antoinette-style ‘Blessings of the Earth and the Sea Social Dinner’.” More here…
July 6th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
THE SELKIE
Starbucks chose the motif of the mermaid, a beautiful and ancient motif about which there are many stories. In one of my books I tell the story about how just such a mermaid sickens and dries out when lured to land by a man who says he loves her. But, she cannot abide his way of living, nor what he requires of her… she cannot become as the man wishes just because he wishes it so.
She is harmed by being forced to live endlessly according to land-locked rules. The mermaid– often in the oldest stories, called ‘the selkie,’– has to return to the water in order to live. During her time on land, she gradually loses the sparkle to her flesh, loses her moistness. Her body is dried, weakened and her eyes gone near blind, …but one night, she hears the call of the old grandfather selkie calling her home. Somehow, she finds her way to the water again, and diving under the waves, is restored.
But not without sadness, to leave the man. And not without the man’s sadness to have lost his dream.
Here in the west where I live, there once were mom and pop coffee shops everywhere. They had magazine bars and great live music, and small delis, and armchairs and outdoor seating under umbrellas, and many kinds of tea and coffee. Some had short order. Some had bakeries attached out back. Mom and pop and whoever worked there knew not only everyone by name, but by ailment, by achievement, by current challenge each customer was happily or sadly facing. You know, asked after every soul who walked in.
The mom and pop joints were more like Cheers than like American Idol. There were regulars; the core group that was friendly and funny. Strangers were included, invited into the conversations with a, Hey buddy what do you think? There was much, much laughter.
June 23rd, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
John Kenneth Galbraith, a distinguished economist and the popular American ambassador to India in the 1960s, once described the country as a “functioning anarchy”. Please judge for yourself if Galbraith was right or wrong… The drawing (on the left) shows the 27-storey house of Mukesh Ambani, world’s fifth-richest man, being built in Mumbai, home to Asia’s biggest slum. Mukesh’s $ I billion home would be ready in six months. Here is The Independent story… And to read how his brother, Anil Ambani, a business rival, is arranging a marriage between Bollywood and Hollywood, please click here… Now read this: “Wealth distribution in India is fairly uneven, with the top 10% of income groups earning 33% of the income. Despite significant economic progress, 1/4 of the nation’s population earns less than the government-specified poverty threshold of $0.40/day…” More here…
Let me add a bit of nostalgia. As children we used to play in the picturesque Lodi Gardens, New Delhi, where we often saw a tall American (almost 6 feet 9 inches) taking a stroll. At times Ambassador John Galbraith, mentioned above, would stop, watch us play and even talk and laugh with us. I still remember his wonderful and friendly face. The other American whom I met later in life in New Delhi was also an unforgettable personality/human being — Norman Cousins.
The famous editor/writer Cousins’s philosophy toward his work was exemplified by his instructions to his staff “not just to appraise literature, but to try to serve it, nurture it, safeguard it.” Cousins believed that “there is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis.” More here…
Recently their have been a lot of calls from Republican politicians to open up ANWR for drilling in order to lower gas prices. Having done my homework on this issue I believe that those that are doing so are either ignorant of the facts or have an ulterior motive that has almost nothing to do with lowering gas prices.
Senate Republicans blocked a proposal Tuesday to tax the windfall profits of the largest oil companies, despite pleas by Democratic leaders to use the measure to address America’s anger over $4 a gallon gasoline.
The Democratic energy package would have imposed a tax on any “unreasonable” profits of the five largest U.S. oil companies and given the federal government more power to address oil market speculation that the bill’s supporters argue has added to the crude oil price surge.
“Americans are furious about what’s going on,” declared Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and want Congress to do something about oil company profits and “an orgy of speculation” on oil markets.
But Republicans argued the Democratic proposal focusing on new oil industry taxes is not the answer to the country’s energy problems.
“The American people are clamoring for relief at the pump,” said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., but if taxes are increased on the oil companies “they will get exactly what they don’t want. The bill will raise taxes, increase imports.”
A good justification — but it won’t fly with many Americans. And if the Democratic party doesn’t see this as a political opening they need some of these. In fact, two energy bills, including the windfall profits tax, stalled in the Senate:
A Democratic proposal to impose heavier taxes on big oil companies stalled in the Senate on Tuesday as Republicans and Democrats offered different ideas on how to deal with soaring energy costs.
A bill, which would have rolled back some $17 billion in tax breaks and pressured major oil companies to invest in new energy sources by hitting them with a windfall-profits tax if they did not, failed to get enough votes to move forward. Fifty-one senators voted to bring the measure up for consideration, nine short of the number needed under Senate rules. Forty-three senators, most of them Republicans, voted “no.”
The oil-tax proposal was one of two energy-related bills that failed to advance. The other was a proposal to amend the Internal Revenue Code by providing “incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes,” as the measure to promote new energy sources was officially described. The vote to take up that legislation was 50-44, or 10 “yes” votes fewer than necessary.
Exxon fired back on the idea of a windfall profits tax after Democratic presumptive nominee Senator Barack Obama floated the idea of more taxes for oil companies:
Exxon Mobil fired back Tuesday at a proposed windfall profit tax, after the oil giant was mentioned by name in Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s call to counteract skyrocketing energy costs by hiking levies on producers. Read the rest of this entry »
The white spaces are the spectrum that will be freed up when TV broadcasters finish switching to wavelengths reserved for digital transmission in 2009. Google wants the spectrum liberated so any of us can freely use it, as we do now with wi-fi frequencies.
Google cofounder Larry Page made a rare appearance in Washington recently to push the point, arguing that unlicensed white spaces could turn into “wi-fi on steroids.”
Proponents say this would give consumers data-transmission speeds in the billions of bits a second - versus the millions we get, at best, today - and without wires. We could then do anything online - including, even, watching and sending video - from anywhere.
It would also serve a strategic, economic goal: getting the entire nation connected to high speed.
The FCC’s been considering its proposal for four years now. They’re being lobbied heavily by broadcast interests which oppose the plan. Jarvis says those interests are intent on protecting themselves from competition.
None of the presenters here argue that licensed uses are bad or unnecessary, but all were strongly convinced that the public should have at least a bit more access to public spectrum not controlled by corporations or the government. Some disappointment was expressed with even the 700MHz auction this year, which did have some “open access” rules but eventually found its way into the portfolio of über-incumbent Verizon.
The National Ass. of Broadcasters continues to fight tooth and nail against opening up the “whitespace” in the broadcast spectrum. Broadcasters get to use America’s spectrum for free. … there’s plenty of room for use of that whitespace in WiFi-style devices that are smart enough to know where they are and adjust their use of spectrum accordingly. The tiny sliver of spectrum given over to WiFi (and other unlicensed uses) at 2.4GHz has generated untold billions in economic activity and public good. […]
After all, we only own this spectrum that we’ve loaned to them.
