Political polarization is a feature not a bug

I've been sick for almost all of last week and as I surveyed the social media scene, I noticed that being sick changes the way I look at media. Where I see hate, accusations and plenty of mind reading, I see a need for real and lasting solutions. Even looking at Slate, Salon, and the Huffington Post, places I like on social media, I felt like I've had enough of the old way. I began to realize that polarization in politics is a feature not a bug. It's almost as if, there is a hidden hand seeking to keep us all divided, to prevent us, members of one of the greatest democracies in the world, from finding common ground.

I find myself wanting and looking for a unifying issue that will bring this country together. I believe that I have found that issue. This is an issue that is so fundamental, so large in scale and scope, yet so hard to see, that we will need something like the Civil Rights Movement or the Women's fight for suffrage to bring about lasting, unifying change. When I talk about scale, I'm talking about a unifying force strong enough to bring about the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Social Security Act. We need something like that. The issue? The corrupting influence of money in politics.

Polls have consistently shown that corruption is high on the minds people engaged in politics, but few candidates are willing to address the issue as a plank in their campaigns when they run for office. As Lawrence Lessig notes in his book, The USA is Lesterland, corruption didn't even get a mention in Obama's first State of the Union speech when he took office.

Few if any of our leaders discuss corruption at the highest levels of government. This is because to state the obvious, to talk about that grand elephant in the room, is to literally bite the hand that feeds you. Politicians need that money to keep their campaigns going, yet few seem to realize that by going to a few select private interests to fund their campaigns, they are subjecting themselves to the Skinner Box of campaign fundraising.

Every day, our leaders spend hours calling the wealthiest people in the country, to beg for campaign contributions. In return for the money, our leaders promote and enact laws that provide an advantage to the campaign contributors at the expense of everyone else. The evidence is there, yet the Supreme Court in their Citizens United decision (just one of many rulings over 30 years), refused to acknowledge the corrupting influence of money in politics. This is what we are fighting against: a power so vast, that it is capable to turning our best efforts to right our country against us for their own gain.

There are many good ideas for government reform on both the left and the right, but meaningful reform remains just a dream until we deal with corruption. You can take your best idea, your most highly valued political goal, hold it, look at it, and admire it. Even write about it. But it won't mean squat until we bring the money in politics to heel.

We have to ask ourselves the great existential and political question: do we want a government that answers only to the 0.05% that are the relevant funders of all political campaigns, or do we want a political class that must appeal to the widest possible audience?

If we want the latter, then we must acknowledge that fundamental campaign finance reform is a requirement before we can accomplish anything else for our great country, without hindrance from the relevant funders of the political system we have now. Your dreams of true government reform are but dreams until you take the relevant funders, the really big money, out of politics and put the elections back in the hands of the people. Read or listen to this book to learn more about the relevant funders and their objectives.

This isn't just about politicians who run for office. The relevant funders get to decide who runs for office and we get to vote on their choices. Our limited choices for office holders is a big part of the problem and needs to be addressed, but there is something else.

This is also about the scope of the debate. That tiny minority can exercise great power over the scope of public discourse to prevent real reform in any aspect of government to be discussed. You want an audit of the Fed? The relevant funders are there to stop that. You want that public option in health care? The relevant funders will prevent discussion of the topic on the talking heads shows on Sunday. You want reform of copyright and patent laws? Sorry, not on the agenda for the relevant funders.

The corrupting influence of money in politics is the biggest if not the only issue we need to address prior to 2016. There are only two candidates that I know of that have the foundation needed to run for president and that have expressed a desire to seek fundamental campaign finance reform. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Does your Congressman or woman seek fundamental financial reform? If they're in the campaign finance Skinner Box, probably not.

There may be others seeking such reform and willing to run for office, but you won't hear any discussion of that. since the relevant funders won't have it. Remember that the relevant funders need our consent, they need us for them to be relevant, and they need the world to believe that we agree with them, even if we don't.

Whatever your desire for reform in government, it's not going to happen until we remove the corrupting influence of money in politics. Our best shots at removing this influence can be found below:

mayday.us
http://www.friendsofdemocracypac.org/
http://www.rootstrikers.org/#!/

The corrupting influence of money in politics is not partisan. It is not conservative or liberal. It is a problem for all of us to solve, together, and we can solve it. But we must be willing to admit that it doesn't matter which side we're on, that we are all responsible for letting this happen and for changing course. This is the change in attitude that I am adopting for the new year.

Will you join me in this change of attitude and perspective? Can we work together to eliminate the corrupting influence of money in politics?

How to improve your Chromecast connection experience

For regular readers, I've been pretty sick the past few days and I apologize for the pause. Thank you for returning. If you're new here, hey, you're welcome, too. And now let us return to my blog.

About a year ago, I bought a Chromecast and I loved it as long it would just work. Often it would work, just as often it would not. The problem was not in the operation, the problem was in the connection and I spent many months trying to figure out what was going on.

See, everytime I turned on my TV, and then turned on Chromecast, I would have to then use the Chromecast app on my phone (my remote control device of choice) to scan the network for a Chromecast device. But most times, my phone just could not connect. Before I found the solution I will present today, I will say that my experience with Chromecast was far worse with Centurylink's router than with my own router when I was a Comcast subscriber. This is true even when the wifi router is sitting right under the Chromecast dongle.

I've made a very thorough investigation of this problem by trying anything and everything that I can find to fix it. I've tried rebooting my phone, powercycling my TV, powercycling the router, powercycling the Chromecast itself, disconnecting the Chromecast from any power for 30 minutes (hey, it worked once) doing a factory reset of the Chromecast, getting my phone as close to the wifi router as possible, toggling wifi on the phone and doing a wifi dance to the heavens in the hopes that this ritual would someday be obsolete. None of that worked.

Except that today, I happened to be reading a forum that discussed the pros and cons of connecting the Chromecast to the USB port on the TV for power (newer TVs have this sort of thing) vs providing power to the Chromecast with a USB/AC power adapter. Although I didn't notice any comments suggesting a difference in performance, I did notice that with AC power, the Chromecast was always powered on.

I read on. No one indicated any problems with using the AC power supply and keeping it there. Hmmm. Where is that power supply? I had no idea where it was. I just went through 3 weeks of moving and delivering a baby daughter. My mind was a mess and I had been really sick for 3 days. A good chunk of my life was in boxes, some of which I didn't pack myself, and they were in the basement.

I went looking for the adapter in the most likely places in the basement to no avail. I searched for pricing on a replacement adapter. There were plenty to be had for reasonable prices, but then there is shipping. So little time, so much to do.

Then it occurred to me that I had plenty of spare power adapters, but many of them were special purpose units for a particular phone. Yes, I was considering the use of a USB/AC adapter originally intended for a phone. I know it's important to use the adapter that came with the box, but consider this: the output voltages of USB adapters are pretty low to begin with and the output voltage of the USB port on a TV are about the same. I don't see how there could be a safety or technical concern, but if you know of one, post a comment.

Anyway, regardless of which AC adapter you use, be sure it's one that accepts a standard USB plug. I just happened to have the original cable that came with the Chromecast already there. All I needed was a better power source, the key point being that the power supply was always on.

So once I got the new adapter ready to go, I plugged in the cable to the power adapter and then plugged the adapter into the wall socket. Then I watched the Chromecast boot up with the TV off. As the Chromecast powers up, there is an LED on the top toward the end that receives the power. Watch that as it starts red and if boot is successful, it turns white. If you get white you're good to go.

Then I did a factory reset and ran through the setup routine again. The first thing you see during setup is a code on the screen and then a code on your phone. If they match, tap, "I see the code." Then you will be prompted to connect the Chromecast to your wifi network. If your wifi network is password protected, you will be prompted for the password, so enter your password at that point.

I know this seems like a lot of effort, but after going through this so many times, I got really interested in making this the last time I have to do this for a long, long time. The bottom line is this: having AC power directly to your Chromecast will yield far greater satisfaction than using the USB port on your TV as a power source for your Chromecast.

It's worth noting that in my search results, I didn't find any discussion of this problem, so perhaps this is an isolated case. But the fact that I had the same experience in two different houses with different hardware, changes in the distance between the Chromecast and the router, and removal of obstructions (walls) between the router and the Chromecast, suggested otherwise.

I believe that this kind of behavior occurs enough to befuddle more than a few Chromecast fans out there, so I hope you find this post helpful and welcome your comments.

Who does that policeman really work for, anyway?

There is an interesting statistic floating around to suggest that the top 10% own about 85% of all the non-home wealth in the United States. This would be ludicrous if true. Well, it's true. As of 2010, the top 10% owned 85% of all the wealth, and I doubt that has changed much in 4 years. The picture isn't much different with respect to net worth, either. The top 10% owned 77% of all net worth in America in 2010. Given current employment and other economic data, not much has changed since then.

One other interesting thing to note is that the rate of concentration of wealth increased during the Great Recession, which suggests an enormous transfer of wealth during that period from the poor to the wealthy.

Considering the concentration of wealth in this country gives rise to a very interesting question to me. I see a police car on the road, and I think the officer in the car is there to protect me. Really? Given the distribution of wealth, who is he really protecting?

Once I started to notice the distribution of wealth, I began to see that government goes where the money is. The police are protecting the people on the hill, next to the capital. Everything else seems to be for show, to give comfort to everyone else so that there will be no unrest or protest in the streets.

When I think of the federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI, CIA, and Treasury, again, I think of that ratio and I am reminded of who they really work for. It's not ordinary people like you and me. No, sir, they're working for someone else.

That ten percent has everyone else working for them, while they're taking it all in. This isn't an accident. Sure, we could say that is just how it is and that we should accept it for the way it should be. There may be some truth to that, since accepting things the way they are gives us peace.

But accepting things the way they are gives us another power, one that many of us never realize: the power to change things to be something better for all of us. The distribution of wealth is a reflection of our participation in politics, or the lack of it, nothing more and nothing less. When more of us are involved, the distribution of wealth tends to flatten out. If more of us vote, income inequality becomes less of a problem and we can all focus more on problems that affect us all. The government tends to listen to everyone instead of the people who just have more money when more people participate in politics. That's just the way it is, right?

This relationship between voter participation and income inequality has been proven in at least one natural experiment in Argentina where compulsory voting was abolished. As voter turnout decreased over the years, income inequality increased. In the United States, voting is voluntary, not mandatory, and given our experience, if we do not vote, we are essentially giving our money and our power to someone else, usually with more money and power.

Much of the problem with voter turnout seems to arise from how our candidates for office are chosen. Larry Lessig is a political activist who has noticed the corruption in our government, particularly in the way that political campaigns are financed and run. To put this in a nutshell, candidates seeking elected office must appeal to the "relevant funders", approximately 150,000 out of more than 300 million in America, who fund more than 60% of political campaigns. Those people get to decide who even has a chance of running and winning. If you can't get your campaign money from one of them, you're not going to run and you won't even have a chance of winning if you try to run for office.

Those 150,00 people? They're the top 0.05%. They're the people the government works for. Everything else you see in government is just for show, to keep the peace and order so that we don't rise up and rebel against that tiny minority. This is what we're up against, but it's also important to remember, that tiny minority needs us and depends on us to work for them.

The Mayday.us SuperPAC, the SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs, can restore the balance of power so that Congress works for all of us, not just a tiny few who sincerely believe that they can do a better job of running the world without help from anyone else. The Mayday.us campaign has a simple purpose: to fund all political campaigns with many millions of small donations rather than just a few really big donations from donors who aren't thinking of the rest of us.

When we can remove big money from politics, then we can truly say that the government works for all of us. To trust my government, I need to know they're thinking about me, not just 150,000 sincerely deluded Americans who happen to have a lot more money than me.

Debating Net Neutrality

I've been debating net neutrality for quite some time now on Facebook and on Google+. Well, mostly on Google+, I guess Google+ is more intellectual than Facebook, but I don't really know for sure.

In reviewing the debates I've had on Google+, I've noticed a few interesting patterns. The first one is pretty obvious: there is a severe dearth of facts coming from the faction that hates the idea of reclassifying ISPs as Title II common carriers. Even when they come up with something so specific that it could be a fact, they are loathe to come up with a reference, you know, a link.

Maybe that's because there is this fantasy that the market is rational and that it will correct itself from the abysmal service we're now getting from ISPs we all hate. Even when pressed to provide concrete examples, opponents of reclassification are unwilling to provide the proof needed to support their position.

Another pattern I've noticed is that opponents of reclassification seem to have missed something: things got this bad even though no reclassification has been done. Proponents of the status quo will tell us over and over again that reclassification will reduce our ISPs to humdrum services that will slowly devolve to mediocre services that will never get better. Here's the problem: we already have that.

We've given the ISPs subsidies and tax breaks for more than a decade and they have really done nothing close to keeping up with world class ISPs in other developed countries like Japan, Norway, Finland and South Korea. Really, we're not even close.

If we really want to revive our staid internet carriers, there are at least two things that need to happen:

1. Reclassify our ISPs as carriers under Title II. This will have three particularly obvious effects: it will force carriers who own the pipes to share their pipes at wholesale pricing, drive selfish investors away and it will force carriers to divest or spin-off their content properties.
2. As investors flee from traditional ISPs due to reclassification (as predicted by so many people who don't really know for sure), we need to remove state barriers to community broadband so that internet access becomes what should have been from the beginning: a state owned, transparently regulated utility. When internet access is sold as a utility service, suddenly, the network becomes neutral about where content is coming and where it is going.

This is not a political issue as it transcends the entire political spectrum. Conservative communities in Colorado have voted in favor, and sometimes overwhelmingly so, of communities to build their own broadband networks, even after rigorous barriers have been passed into law. Democrat, Republican, conservative, and liberal alike, they all agree that the status quo sucks and they are looking for something better. And they are doing it without Congress.

While members of Congress are scoring points in favor of hobbling and stifling internet access, communities are going it alone. Conservatives hate to see the FCC get involved because they think it's a state's rights issue. Never mind the millions they get from incumbent carriers to keep the status quo. Liberals in Congress tend to oppose net neutrality because they are friends to copyright interests, and anything that keeps the spigot small means more DVD and BluRay sales.

Unfortunately, the corrupting influence of money in Congress means that they aren't listening to the rest of us. They don't see the more than 400 communities that have already built their networks, with many of them delivering gigabit access to their residents. And they certainly don't see those community broadband networks delivering the content without hindrance based upon origin and destination. Why not? Because community broadband networks are loyal to the communities they serve, not some jerk of a CEO in a corner office on 5th Avenue in New York, intent on using his bonus to buy his second home on the coast of Spain.

The monopolies are here because government allows monopolies to exist. The public monopolies, community broadband, are doing a great job of servicing their residents, by any measure. The private monopolies like Comcast, Time-Warner, ATT and Verizon are plowing their money into political contributions rather than their networks. They are setting up alliances to prevent encroachments like community broadband and Title II reclassification. Most of the problem arises from government, or the lack thereof. How did that happen?

The slow erosion of campaign finance regulation is how it happened. Once large companies figured out that they could pay for the laws they wanted, the regulators and regulations they wanted, they gave up on competition in the market. Now they compete in the government. Citizens United is the Supreme Court case that brought the issue to a head, to national recognition. Private monopolies and the lack of fundamental campaign finance reform got us here.

But we can get Congress and our state legislatures to listen to us again. Once we remove the incentives for big donors to spend their money on candidates and for candidates to rely upon them, then the Congress, and our state legislatures will once again be dependent upon the people, alone.

That is how we can restore freedom to the internet in the United States. But you won't hear any of that from opponents of net neutrality, reclassification or community broadband.

Centurylink, Part IV - an adhesion contract, a win at the FCC

Note: this is a belated blog post concerning my relationship with Centurylink as a customer and end-user of their service. The events described herein occurred more than a year ago, in late 2013. At the time, I didn't think there was much interest in this, so I discontinued the series. But in the last few days, one of my readers brought it up and wanted to know how things ended between Centurylink and I. This is how the story ends.

This is a continuation of a series of articles ( Part I, II, and III) to chronicle my struggle against a large corporation unwilling to provide adequate internet access speeds. That is, Centurylink and I agreed that they would provide internet access at a max speed of 5mbs, guaranteeing 80% of that speed at 4mbs per second. It appears that they could not even do that.

I tried their service for a month only to find that I had to babysit the modem every day to make it work properly. I even started logging my observations in the hopes of establishing a pattern of behavior.

After many calls and emails, it became clear to me that Centurylink had no intention of fixing the root cause of the problem: DSL. They seem quite determined to not upgrade the line to my house to fiber. If they would just do that, I would not be writing this series of blog posts. Perhaps they have made a tacit agreement to not really compete with Comcast. They may also be aware that eventually UTOPIA will be available for our house and that I would just as soon abandon both Comcast and Centurylink.

For those who don't know, UTOPIA is community broadband, a project born out of frustration on the part of 13 cities who could not get decent service from either Centurylink or Comcast. Neither of the two incumbent ISPs were willing to increase speeds and upgrade service until UTOPIA came along. Unfortunately, UTOPIA halted their rollout about one and a half blocks away from my home. I guess Comcast and Centurylink don't really think they can compete with a government run ISP. Isn't private enterprise always more efficient than government? Maybe not.

So what was Centurylink's response when I cancelled my service and filed a complaint with the FCC? Impose a $200 early termination fee and try to collect. I reviewed their statement, and sent them a check, with a catch.

No, I didn't pay for the early termination fee and I didn't pay for unusable internet service. The bill was for $237 and change. I paid them for the phone service and taxes associated with the phone service - nothing more - for a net payment of $11.46.

So what's the catch? I modified the check to include an adhesion contract on the back of the check. The idea is that their check processing system is automated with little or no human inspection of the checks. What does the adhesion contract do? It says that all claims between the parties are satisfied with endorsement of this check. I don't use it lightly and have only used it once before, and it worked then. It could very well work in this instance, and it did, as they zeroed out my balance.

Here is what the adhesion contract says:

“Endorser acknowledges full satisfaction of any and all claims, and this check represents accord and satisfaction amongst the parties of any outstanding claims.”

When this check is endorsed, the endorser is waiving all outstanding claims against me and should have little recourse in any legal proceeding to collect any other outstanding amounts. This also means that whatever upfront costs I assumed to set up service are waived, too. I can't recover those. I regret not being able to collect those funds back, but I have to choose my battles. I lost more than $100 on this deal with Centurylink and I'm not happy about it.

I checked my online bank account a few days ago and sure enough, they did cash the check. I now have a nice hard copy of the check, front and back for use in any further proceedings.

At least with the adhesion contract, I'm attempting to set a legal limit on any further exposure to Centurylink since terminating service with them. At this point, I could deal with the debt collectors and the credit records while my complaint with the FCC is being worked out. Once the debt collector sees that there is an adhesion contract on the back of the check, that could present a problem for him to collect anything from me, legally speaking.

I didn't have to fight much with Centurylink to prevail. Centurylink conceded and I won. But there wasn't much to win. I was glad to win, but I won on their terms. Had they amassed their considerable legal team against me, I'm sure they would have found some way to win. It is very likely that they had at least one ally on the commission at the time.

So I went back to Comcast. Their speeds were far superior to Centurylink and I believed that they offered much better customer service. You may find this hard to believe, but I hate Centurylink more than I hate Comcast. Given the choice, I would choose Comcast over Centurylink without further consideration.

More than a year later, I've moved to a new home on the other side of the valley. Once again I see the same situation. Centurylink is the only wired service provider here, and it would seem that Comcast has ceded the territory to Centurylink, perhaps in exchange for some other territory.

Service has been decent so far, although I do wonder if ftp and http downloads for my linux updates has been throttled. With M-Labs from Google, I test very well at 22mbs, but have only 1mbs upload speed. That's pretty stingy of Centurylink. I just did a test here by updating the linux kernel and found speeds close to those advertised, so maybe my concerns are a bit premature. I will have to wait and see.

For now, I'm getting halfway decent service with Centurylink. I've got things set up the way I want them and I don't really have any complaints about them, either, for now.

Mayday.us is leading the charge to get big money out of politics

I just finished watching this video by Larry Lessig, the leader of the the Mayday.us SuperPAC, a political action committee dedicated to ending all SuperPACs. The single purpose of this SuperPAC is to get big money out of politics. To put it more succinctly, to paraphrase the words of the Supreme Court, to make our elected representatives dependent upon the people and the people alone - not big donors to political campaigns.

Larry is one of the coolest people in politics today. He has a firm grasp of technology, law and politics. He's been around longer than I have and has seen people come and go. He knows where we've been and where we're going if we don't change course. He is, in my opinion, the ultimate peaceful activist.

Since he is a law professor, I think it's cool that he can mount a legal defense of a copyright challenge to any of the videos he posts on YouTube. He is a notable figure in the free software movement and is a very passionate and persuasive speaker. He seems perfect for the leadership position he alone has created.

The single purpose of Mayday.us is to fund candidates who will work to enact fundamental campaign finance reform. Here is a list of candidates that Mayday.us supported in the last midterm. Every candidate on the list has made a firm commitment to enact fundamental campaign finance reform to remove the corrupting influence of money in Congress in order to receive support from this SuperPAC.

The Mayday.us FAQ shows that they are non-partisan, that they are sticking to a single issue: getting big money donors out of politics. That single purpose attitude is what I like most about this SuperPAC, and that attitude allows the organization to stay focused on one goal, without a whit of deference to partisan politics.

The ramifications of true campaign finance reform are tremendous in a very positive way in just about every part of government. Consider for just a minute what that would to do antitrust law. One reason we have giant monopolies running most of our major industries is unlimited or unregulated campaign contributions. Contributors can remain anonymous and the amounts they can give are unlimited when they are anonymous. This greasing of the palms has allowed mergers and acquisitions to proceed, unabated, promoting the consolidation of entire industries at the expense of the consumer to the point that 10 parent companies produce nearly everything we consume.

Even before Citizens United, this has been going on for a long time, as over the years, the courts have been chipping away at campaign finance laws to remove the limits we once had, or affirmed that under the current policy, there were no limits.

Without effective regulation of campaign contributions, it's easy for a monopoly like Microsoft or just a very large company like General Electric, to use money to get a soft touch from regulators and policymakers.

Creating a policy that requires elected office holders to rely upon many people for many small contributions rather than a few very deep pockets, means that candidates will have to support policies that have a much broader appeal. You know, populist. When we create incentives for candidates to appeal to a much broader audience, they will have to promote policy ideas that actually have merit.

Take the recent budget bill that is still in transit through Congress to avoid a partial shutdown of the government. Some of the provisions, like allowing even greater gambling on Wall Street with funds that are federally insured funds in consumer checking and savings accounts, and giving Apache land to a foreign corporation for exploitation - are simply ludicrous.

It's clear that the riders on that spending bill had two purposes. The first is obvious - payback to their sponsors. The second is not so easily seen - the riders are so odious that if the opposition fights them, and the spending bill fails to pass, and the government shuts down, who will get blamed?

At the same time, anyone looking at the riders will know that these provisions offer no consideration for all of the American people. They're embarrassing. But if the American people had any power to remove people who are sitting in what are effectively safe seats, compromise would be a word in common usage in public discourse on Meet The Press and Face The Nation.

The only way to fix Congress is to start with how they fund their campaigns so that members have to listen to the rest of us. Without that, we have what is essentially taxation without representation. When members of Congress are dependent on the people alone to fund their campaigns, we will once again have a Congress that works - for all of us.

The Republican Mandate that never was

Republicans in Congress are rubbing their hands with glee now that they will see majorities in both houses in Congress. Republicans will start next year with 54 members of the Senate and 246 members of the House. This is the largest majority they've had since the Truman Administration which ended in 1953.

Many Republicans seem keen to point out that Democrats lost, fair and square, and that they now have a mandate to defy, hobble and spit upon the sitting Democrat in the Oval Office, President Obama. But they sure seem slow to admit that voter turnout in the midterms was the lowest in 72 years.

This isn't just a problem for the Republicans. It's a problem for the Democrats, too. Democrats fair much better when voter turnout is higher. When voter turnout is higher, Republicans can actually claim a mandate to do something. But with such a low turnout, that only gives Congress permission to do nothing.

So Republicans are claiming a mandate with just 36% of adults casting votes. Considering all the new voter suppression laws, Citizens United, and the low quality of candidates that both parties have sent to Congress, a new question comes to mind. Is low voter turnout a feature or a bug?

This isn't an accident and didn't happen overnight. This is a trend that has spanned decades. There seems to be a confluence of trends that either inhibit or prevent people from voting. Many people are very busy working and they are thinking about money, not politics. They are thinking about feeding their families, paying the rent and where their next paycheck is going to come from. A weak economy is a feature, not a bug, designed to keep people working, away from politics, away from the street where they can cause trouble.

The Citizens United ruling from the Supreme Court ensured that Congress goes to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, that means the highest bidder is among the wealthiest in this country, a small minority so sure that they can single-handedly run this country for everyone. They live in Lesterland. A land where about 142,000 of the wealthiest people in this country decide who gets to run for office. Then the rest of us get to vote for their choices. I don't know about you, but that is a supreme turn off for young voters. This is a feature, not a bug.

Then you have voter suppression laws in many states across the country, particularly in the deep south, that seem squarely aimed at discouraging minorities from voting. Proponents of such laws claim that they're making reasonable demands, but the results say something else. Such proponents are awfully quiet about voter fraud after such a low turnout. This is a feature, not a bug.

We cast our votes in black box voting systems. Our voting systems are run on proprietary software, so no one really knows what the code is doing except the vendors. We cannot even trust our voting machines or the systems used to tabulate the votes. For the next generation of voters, that's a big turn off. They know something is up. This too, is a feature, not a bug. We need open source voting systems that we can trust.

So for the Republicans giddy with power, get real. Remember that your majorities come at the cost of lower voter turnout. You may have received a majority, but only by design, not by the merit of your ideas. Voters need to get their butts to the polls for every election, true enough, but you're not doing much to help that. Note also that statistically speaking, Republicans are bound to have a bloodbath in the next election, especially if turnout goes way up in 2016.

Democrats have a problem in that the candidates they put out for us to choose from are not really that liberal. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are true Democrats, Social Democrats and they are willing to fight for the rest of us. They are vociferous in the Senate and they are building legacies that Ted Kennedy would be proud of. I know, Bernie is an independent, but he sure acts like a Democrat from the 1960s and 70s.

So when I see that Hilary Clinton is our best shot at the presidency in 2016, I must admit to some mild nausea. Clinton is part of the neoliberal economics faction that crashed the economy and helped to run voter turnout into the ground. Unless I hear her talking like a Jimmy Carter Democrat, I'm going to be looking for third parties like the Green Party.

If the trend continues and the Republicans succeed in taking both houses and the presidency, they are going to run a scorched earth campaign to destroy the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, science funding, the space program and the Post Office. Oh how they love to gore the Post Office. Every element of American infrastructure will become a profit center for their biggest donors. They will claim a mandate to do it, too, even with low voter turnout.

Unless we can get big money out of politics and elect Congressmen and women who speak for the rest of us. There are two very interesting campaigns to do this: 

Mayday.us

http://www.friendsofdemocracypac.org/

I know more about Larry Lessig's PAC, Mayday.us. They have raised more than $10m to fund candidates dedicated to real campaign finance reform. Not so sure about the other one, but both of these PACs seem to drive the same goals. Get rid of Citizens United, get real reform signed as law.

I hope we can do it before it's too late.

The Case For a Weaker Dollar

After much reading and learning, I find that a pattern is emerging. For the last 30 years, we've been fed a line about why we need a strong dollar. A strong dollar meant that our country was strong, and gas would stay cheap. Neither promise came true.


While our dollar was strong, first the Japanese ate our lunch. Then China came along to eat our breakfast. And the Middle East ate our dinner while we watched the news, all before we could even get to the table.


Someone benefits from a strong dollar and it isn't the middle class. When was the last time you heard of someone in the middle class going to Europe for 2 or 3 weeks? Hardly anyone in the middle class can get the time off to go on vacation, and if they do go, they take their computer, their cell phone and anything else that ties them to work to be sure that they have a job when they return. I sincerely doubt that the middle class has an opportunity to worry about the exchange rates.


That would leave the upper class to worry about that, if they worry at all. They want a strong dollar to make it cheap to import goods from afar. A strong dollar keeps fuel cheap, and that means lower shipping costs. They want a strong dollar to take advantage of cheap labor in places like China and Vietnam.


If the dollar were to become substantially weaker in world markets than it is now, a few interesting things would happen.  For one, cheap labor would no longer be as appealing as it was. Not only that but if the price of oil goes up, the cost of shipping goes up, piling onto more expensive foreign labor.  As we can see, the effects tend to compound on each other.


Some in the mainstream press and in Congress, particularly the Tea Party types, worry about China.  They say that some day, China will start to unload their US debt.  But at least one economist has made it clear that China buys US debt in order to support the value of the dollar.  China sees the writing on the wall: if the dollar becomes weak, *they* will see huge unemployment numbers. China is a much larger country and the effects of a shift in currency value would be much more pronounced. That one lone economist, Dean Baker, has noticed that the threats from China are hollow.


A weak dollar would make foreign oil more expensive than it is now. So what? Since 1973, we got the message that the Middle East can set the price of oil and we decided, for a short time anyway, that we can make more efficient cars. When we didn't, Japanese, Korean and European car makers were happy to oblige. Now that the Big Three automakers were saved from bankruptcy by the Federal Government, they have a chance to change their ways and make cars that sip gas. If gas were to hit $5 a gallon or more, SUVs would get smaller or stay in the garage.  We'd use public transportation. We'd walk, ride bikes or telecommute to work. One way or another, we'd work around high gas prices like the internet works around damage.


It seems ironic that a weak dollar would make this country strong again. We'd be making things again.  We could build infrastructure again. Andy Grove wrote a rather long piece, that in sum, says that we can't afford the things we don't make. When we make things, we get the experience needed for innovation to occur. And we save on the shipping.


All those MBAs who were trying to dress up the bottom line with foreign manufacturing seem to have forgotten the source of innovation. The source? The manufacturing floor. Each time we make a widget, we refine the process down to the simplest steps, eventually refining the process down to a science.


We can't do that with a strong dollar, and we'll never get a chance to make the things we buy unless move the dollar down with other currencies. A weaker dollar will not only bring jobs home, it will bring innovation back home, too.

3D printing could make patents obsolete

When most people think of patents, they think "residual income", "Edison" and "Wright Brothers". Few if any ever consider the downstream effects on future innovators, you know, patent lawsuits for infringement, chilling effects on innovation from litigation threats and the like. The Founding Fathers put language in the Constitution for the protection of inventors and their works based on the assumption that inventors who get a patent will disclose their work so that other people can build upon their work.

For a closer examination of the intent of the men who wrote the Constitution, lets see what the relevant clause says:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" --- US Constitution Article 1, Section 8.

Think about it. When courts consider patents, most of the time, like you and me, they're concerned with whether or not the "inventor" has a right to royalties for his "invention". I have yet to read a case, any case, where the question before the court was, "Does this patent actually advance the sciences and the arts." Usually, the court asks a narrower, more subtle question: "Is there any prior art? Has this ever been done before?"

But there is something else the Framers of the Constitution had in mind. They wanted patents for the disclosure of the invention so that if the inventor dies, the invention does not die with the inventor. They knew that great inventions would create economic growth, you know, jobs. The goal was to ensure that the invention should reach as many hands as possible.

3D printing will enable the proliferation of inventions without patent protection in ways that we are just beginning to see. 3D printing is taking place all over the world, in many scales, too. From the micro to the macro, 3D printing is revolutionizing how we make things. Almost anything that is solid can be replicated using 3D printing.

Ironically, the patents relating to 3D printing itself have been holding the technology back. Many of those patents are expiring this year and analysts predict that the industry will explode going forward. 3D printing is not alone. In almost every industry, patents have been shown to slow down innovation because after the patents expire, the previously protected technology really takes off.

As the market opens up due to expiration of 3D printing patents, we will be witness to a new manufacturing revolution. Perhaps someday soon, someone with the power to do it will finally see a reason to abolish all patents so that we can all be free to innovate.

Most of the water on Earth is not on the surface

They say you can't judge a book by it's cover. Appearances can be misleading. Turns out, that's absolutely true about the Earth. We know the surface of the Earth fairly well. We roam all of the continents. We have explored the poles, the highest mountains and the lowest valleys of the oceans. We know that water covers about 71% of the surface of the Earth.

Scientists have recently found evidence of an ocean about 400 miles below the surface of the Earth. But this ocean is estimated to be 3 times the volume of all of the water on the surface. That means there is far more water on the planet than we can imagine and it's probably been there for a very, very long time.

96% of the water on the surface of the planet is in the oceans. It is entirely possible that the water below the ground is fresh water. It is a wonder then about what kind of life might be present there. At 400 miles below, the temperatures there would almost surely support life below. I'm not sure about the pressures, but since we know that life persists at the bottom of our oceans, it's likely to have evolved there, far below the surface of the earth.

Reading about this discovery reminds me of another article I read several years ago. It was about hydrogen eating bacteria. I can't find the reference as of this writing, but what I recall is this: upon the discovery of this bacteria, they estimated the mass of such bacteria to be greater than that of all other life on the planet. Just one family of bacteria, deep below the surface, eating hydrogen at the boundary between the rocks and the water, could outweigh us all.

Perhaps we're not the rulers of the planet we make ourselves to be. But at least we won't be running out of water anytime soon.

The Great Indoors - victim of a libertarian hedge fund manager

In 2007, I gave retail sales on commission a try. I worked 8 hours a day, walking the floor, selling big screen TVs and high-end audio at a place called The Great Indoors. It was a fascinating, if not very profitable experience. I tried it because I wanted to see if I could really sell.

Turns out that I can sell, but the problem was, I had virtually no support to sell. For one, I noticed that hardly anyone came by my department and couldn't figure out why. I talked with another member of my team there and learned that I also had to market on social networks to get people to come to the store. Oh, so I'm doing marketing, too?

There's more. Whenever I did close a sale, I had to check their inventory database to make sure I had something to sell, that was a given. But I was also told that even if I had it in stock according to the database, I had to run upstairs and see for myself if we really did have it in stock. Wait a minute, so I'm doing inventory, too?

More than once, by the time I got back down to finish the paperwork, my customer was gone. In 2007, that was what it was like working at The Great Indoors.

Fast forward to present day and now I find out why I had to struggle so hard back then. It was because a self-styled "entrepreneur", Edward Lampert, hedge fund manager extraordinaire, had managed to cut costs and get people laid off at the parent company, Sears. Mr. Lampert had managed to engineer the merger of Kmart and Sears in 2005 and Sears had acquired The Great Indoors the same year that the merger between Kmart and Sears closed.

Instead of growing the companies, Lampert has been liquidating their assets, very efficiently. This is probably what we can expect from a man who's had little retail experience, and who takes a very different view than Warren Buffet. Where Buffet lays low and lets the company run after acquiring control, Lampert has been very aggressive, inserting his own ideas of how the companies should run. So how does he think Kmart and Sears should run?

Like an Ayn Rand fantasy, that's how. Lampert's strategy has been to force managers to compete with each other, spying on employees and managers, and finding ways to get everyone to act "selfishly" to improve performance. Under Lampert's reign of management terror, Sears stock dropped by half. The best minds in management quickly fled when they saw what was coming. Some had to fight for their severance packages according to contract, in court.

Much of that was happening while I was trying to sell top-end products for a tiny subsidiary of Sears, The Great Indoors. This management induced suffering explains why inventory and sales couldn't get their act together. It also explains why there was no marketing support for my department. The word in management offices and on the shop floor was "competition at any cost", not cooperation. Unfortunately, I didn't hear it and didn't notice it. I find it very fortunate and comforting that I now work for a company that rewards cooperation and sharing, but this time, I'm sticking with IT.

So even though many people working at Sears and Kmart lost income, endured bickering and suffering between departments, and ordinary shareholders lost money in their 401ks, Lampert is a billionaire, completely insulated from his mistakes. Oh, sure, he's lost money big time, but he will never be homeless or have to worry about retirement. He gets to keep his house and take nice vacations, and still makes big bucks even when he's not working. His kids will still go to college.

Lampert and his Ayn Rand experiment with Kmart and Sears proves that at the very top, there can be a very obvious and serious disconnect between performance and consequences. The difference is this: For most employees, when they lose money, that comes at the price of a months rent, with no savings and no 401k.

For Lampert, with almost $3 billion net worth, losing a job means that he's still going to be living comfortably. He will have the money needed to buy another opportunity to succeed. He can easily gain C-class employment on friendly terms. Why? Because CEO salary is largely a matter between friends.

So what happened to The Great Indoors? Liquidated. I guess I should have done more research before applying for that job.

When the 1% stand to lose money, the Feds intervene

It's all over the news: Bill Gross, The Bond King, has resigned from PIMCO, the bond fund he founded and managed since 1971. While I did find the gory details of his departure to be interesting, I found another back story that isn't getting much press. What caught my eye in the Bloomberg article link in the first sentence of this post, is this:

"The government reached out to financial firms to ensure Gross’s departure didn’t destabilize the $100 trillion bond market."

Maybe I'm just a bit cynical here, but who, exactly do the Feds work for when they "reach out" like that? If the top 1% own more than half of all stocks and bonds, I think that statistic narrows the search for the answer to my question. I think it's a fair statement to say that the Feds are not thinking of the 80% at the bottom who own a mere 7% of all the wealth in the country when they reach out to big financial firms to prevent the bond market from falling apart when someone at the top resigns.

It's worth noting that Mr. Gross will not go hungry for his mistakes at PIMCO. Nor did he remain "unemployed" for very long. No, sir. He went to Janus for his next gig and he will still enjoy his digs in Newport Beach, California.

The government intervened not because a bunch of little people might lose jobs here. The government intervened in the market because very wealthy people might lose a great deal of money. As noted economist Dean Baker has pointed out, conservatives like to talk about a free market, but they are loathe to talk about the ways that public policy keeps the money flowing up.

Oddly, I don't hear anyone in Congress expressing concern about this intervention in the market.

Investors will flee if ISPs are reclassified as Title II carriers - bring it on

There is considerable angst and worry within the telecom industry that ISPs, the companies that provide the last mile connection between you and the internet, will reduce the amount of investment and effort to maintain their networks if they are reclassified as common carriers under Title II of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association goes to great lengths to tell us that it's a good thing that ISPs are not common carriers, and fails.

The biggest argument they have against reclassification? Cable and telecom companies will hold back investments in their networks if they're reclassified. Why? Reclassification will require a few changes in how they behave. First, they will have to share their networks with other service providers. Second, they will not be as free to discriminate against traffic sources as before. In their words, investors will flee if they are reclassified.

If the cable and telecom companies are worried that investors will flee as a result of reclassification, that's fine by me. Even without reclassification, our biggest ISPs are not even close to being the fastest or the most innovative service providers in the world or even in this country. In fact, they seem a lot more interested in the media side of their business than in the infrastructure side. Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Time-Warner and even Centurylink have enormous investments in media and tend to favor media over speed. In other words, rather than building out a faster network, they are putting most of their effort into media distribution.

This creates a conflict of interest and an enormous incentive to deploy unfair business practices against their competitors. A good case in point is how Comcast negotiated a contract with Netflix to charge more money to ensure that Netflix customers had proper delivery of their services. In my mind, just that example alone is reason enough for reclassification of ISPs under Title II.

The FCC's classification of ISPs as "Information Services" is arbitrary and capricious. In at least one Supreme Court ruling more than ten years ago, Justice Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion that tells us that if you own the pipes, you're a common carrier. He pointed out that you cannot classify ISPs as information service providers just because they provide a service on top of the cable that they provide to connect you to the internet. Even Scalia could see the conflict of interest that Title II classification seeks to prevent.

If investors flee from incumbent carriers over reclassification, that's OK. In fact, I say bring it on. Why? Community broadband will rise up to meet the demand for consumers clamoring for more speed. Cities like Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC, have demonstrated that communities can build and maintain their own networks when the incumbent carriers fail to address repeated requests for better service. Both of those cities now offer 1 gigabit service to their customers, far surpassing the service and speed offered by the incumbent carriers.

Community broadband networks don't have a conflict of interest like the incumbent carriers do. Their only interest is the network, not the content. So they make sure that every legitimate service is treated equally. Since they don't own content properties, they have no reason to discriminate against traffic sources. As far as they're concerned, net neutrality is a moot issue. The only issue they're concerned with is building and maintaining a fast, efficient network that satisfies the demands of the people they serve. That's it.

To hear it from the incumbent carriers, you'd think the internet would fall apart if they are reclassified. Their warnings of woe and suffering would only come to them. For when community broadband is finally seen as the ally we need to fight against the communications and media conglomerates that control most of our internet access in this country, we will have speeds and service that are world class.

Community broadband is a great job creator and a great utility

Hardly anyone seems aware that the City of Los Angeles is working on a community broadband network. I certainly didn't see that in the news, did you? The plan? To connect every house and business within the city of Los Angeles with fiber for up to gigabit access. They got started on the idea in 2013. I learned about it by accident while searching for videos on the topic of community broadband. During my search, I found videos of city council meetings with discussion of this idea. I hope they succeed in doing this because LA can set a national trend for community broadband like no other city can.

There seems to be some cognitive dissonance in Congress on two topics: net neutrality and community broadband networks. Net neutrality is the idea that every packet that passes through an ISP must be treated equally to avoid creating an environment that allows a carrier to block or hinder communication with any business, organization or person on the internet. Net Neutrality is about freedom of speech. Net Neutrality enjoys wide support among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. But you would not know it by listening to some very vocal members of our Congress. Why? The majority of both houses take big money from the incumbent carriers and are in the pockets of the likes of Comcast, Time-Warner, Verizon and ATT.

In terms of public policy, community broadband networks and municipally owned networks have a similar problem. The chairman of the FCC has stated that he will seek to preempt state laws that prevent communities from building their own networks, but Congress has threatened to defund the FCC if such attempts are made. When asked directly, incumbent carrier executives have a real hard time explaining their opposition to community broadband networks and continue to falsely assert that they tend to fail, when in fact, the vast majority of community networks have been successes.

The amazing success of community owned networks like those in Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC prove the point. Those networks deliver gigabit service for the very reasonable price of $70 a month, have brought thousands of jobs to their cities and keep the money in the the city rather than allowing that money to go to New York or Philadelphia to finance the CEO's vacation home on the coast of Spain.

I see in community owned networks, a solution to the problem of net neutrality. First, the community owned network sets the interests of the community they serve as the highest priority. They answer to the community first, not a distant board of directors or shareholders intent on seeing greater dividends at the expense of their customers. Community broadband providers must answer to local governments that must answer to local citizens, rendering the issue of net neutrality moot.

Community networks have been shown to create or attract thousands of jobs. Graduates with big ideas are choosing Chattanooga over San Francisco for that great gigabit connection. Companies are relocating to places that offer a gigabit from a community owned network for one simple reason: they don't have to worry about a private monopoly pricing them out of the market or throttling their connection. People are staring to see that the incumbent carriers are imposing a tax and unnecessary regulation on their communities by distant bureaucrats in corporations like Comcast and Verizon.

So, on the one hand, we have Congress threatening the funding of the FCC when it comes to preempting laws that prevent communities from building their own networks. On the other hand, several conservative communities in Colorado have passed resolutions to reclaim local control so that they can build their own networks.

Colorado isn't the only state that allows communities this option. Many states are starting to understand that communities need to be able to escape from recalcitrant incumbents who make promises to build out, but never do, by building their own networks.

It should also be noted that in Comcast's quest for a merger with Time-Warner, many cities are noticing that they can prevent Comcast from taking over properties held by Time-Warner if the merger goes through. They are actually voting NO on Comcast and making a very public statement that they do not want to let Comcast in.

It seems to me that community broadband is part of something much bigger, an anti-monopoly movement. The problem with dark money in politics grew from the growth in monopolies in the US. Monopolies are too big to fail, too big to jail. They are massive concentrations of political power and will always, always, always, seek to promote their own survival and profits even when the laws they promote really don't support the communities they serve.

Community broadband represents a shift away from private infrastructure, private monopolies and the graft, bribery and corruption that they can promote. There are many things that private enterprise can do better than government. We get that. Unfortunately, infrastructure run by self-interested private corporations doesn't work very well. That's why we've had much greater success with public water and electric utilities, and internet utilities like Chattanooga's Electric Power Board.

Our infrastructure works better when it's a tightly regulated public monopoly than a privately held monopoly that consistently works against the interests of the people they serve. Broadband is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity and as such, it is infrastructure, it's a utility and it's a public interest that should be managed by a public utility company that answers to voters and local government.

If there are private interests who think they can do better, let them try, but a public option is a requirement to set a level playing field for the consumer and the service providers. A public network will keep the private networks honest and limit the ability of the private service providers to grow beyond a point where they can be held accountable.

Monsanto is dumbing down America with glyphosphate

If you have a garden, you might be familiar with RoundUp, Monsanto's famous weedkiller. If you follow agriculture and GMOs in general, you know that Monsanto developed and sells seeds for corn and soy that are "RoundUp Ready". But what you might not know is that there is a definite correlation between the use of glyphosphate, the active ingredient in RoundUp and autism. See the chart below:

Sorry, Jenny McCarthy. Autism shows a stronger correlation with glyphosphate than vaccines.

When asked about the safety of their products, Monsanto will routinely point to the FDA, which is conveniently staffed with former Monsanto employees and executives. But what they can't get around is the science. The FDA will then tell us that we need to ask Monsanto about the safety of their food. Perhaps we need to frame that inquiry in a class action lawsuit.

Monsanto says their data proves the safety of their products, that 30 years of using RoundUp and GMOs proves their safety. Yeah, if you want to use Americans as lab rats, you could say that's science, but their methods are very unscientific when it comes to food safety. Fortunately for the rest of us, there's a really cool thing about science. Science learns from being wrong. It's self-correcting. This data used in the chart above, is not only conclusive, it's alarming. This trend has been confirmed by Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This is the price we pay for Monsanto to have their patents, and the royalties that accrue from them. The patents create perverse incentives to create, build and defend monopolies to the point where Monsanto now pays millions to lobby against labeling of genetically modified foods to state and federal legislators. They not only want to keep their monopoly profits as the owner of 90% of the seed market, they want protection from liability for their products. That's why at the federal level, you're just not going to see a law that requires the labeling of GMO food any time soon. The money is just too good for any Congressperson to pass up (save for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren).

GMO apologists and lobbyists say that GMOs are safe. Maybe that's so, but the research on the topic has never really been done. All that we hear when we ask about GMO safety is this, "Hey, we've been using it for 30 years, so what's the big deal?"

Here's the big deal: for years we've been told that artificial sweeteners were safe. Now we are learning that they change the environment in our gut and increase our tendency to gain weight. When artificial sweeteners were introduced, no one even looked at the effect that they might have on our gut bacteria. Until recently.

The problems with glyphosphate have been known for some time, but now hard data is starting to show up, proving that there is a real health issue building. But don't worry, the elite in Congress know what's best for us and they will try to hide or ignore this issue for as long as they can. This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. Both parties have been feeding at the Monsanto trough.

If Congress won't help, there is something you can do. Buy clearly labeled organic products.

The US is a nation built on illegal immigration

Considering the hyperbole flying across the social media space regarding which president took the most unconstitutional action, it is easy to forget that many of our ancestors came here as "settlers" and "immigrants". But it is well documented that Christopher Columbus intentionally gave blankets that were used by the sick among his group of explorers to the native Indians in the hopes of killing them off. That was just the start.

Had the native Indians any notice of the plans of the early settlers of this country and the power to stop them, most surely, they would have prevented the settling of the US by white invaders. If they had newspapers, and an advanced government, almost surely, the white men they saw on their shores would be "illegal immigrants", "invaders" or worse, "white trash".

It should be noted that in recent years, this country hit a 25-year low in birth rate. If we don't let enough immigrants into the country, we're going to be looking to Japan for ideas on how to manage and care for a fast growing elderly population. The solution in Japan is not all that surprising. They want to build robots that will care for their aging population.

Japanese immigration policy is stricter by far than ours. As a result, they have a low birth rate, a slow economy and projections show that they are poised to lose at least 30% of their population within 50 years. Is that where we want to go?

Does anyone remember what it says at the base of the Statue of Liberty?

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Those people come here to the land of opportunity for a reason. To make their lives better, and in so doing, they find ways to make the lives of others better, too. It is a basic principle of life that when you make your life better, the best way to do it is to help others and make their life better. I know this from personal experience.

The current immigration policy and debate suggests that we are being very selfish to the point of self-destruction. There is no evidence that Mexican immigrants are taking jobs that Americans want. They are picking the produce we see at the market, they are keeping house at work and at home where people can afford it, they are doing the menial labor that most Americans don't want to do. Unless of course, you're working on a post PhD thesis, then there is real competition for the janitor space. By the way, I also note that in the landscaping space, white men dominate in Utah. I know this because the landscaper I hired to keep my lawns for the last few years was white. Even his crew was white.

(If you want to bring jobs home, deal withe strong dollar first.)

This country was built by immigrants, from top to bottom. It is not white, black or brown. It is a wonderful mix of everything from everywhere, providing the greatest possibility for our survival. The diversity of our nation is essential to our survival.

America ignores thorium at their own peril

Last night, I happened to have found the time and opportunity to listen this podcast, featuring Kirk Sorensen. I was looking for recent news on thorium molten salt reactors and this one came up.

There were a few topics in that podcast that caught my attention that I wanted to bring to yours. First, China is investing hundreds of millions every year into research in this technology. Compare that to American interest: one or two government committees and a handful of private companies actively researching it. You almost certainly won't hear of any news of debate over this topic because there are entrenched carbon fuel interests who don't want us to consider it yet. They'd rather wait for peak oil, peak gas or peak coal to hit for maximum profits.

Fortunately, there is building American interest in molten salt reactors (MSRs). Just a couple of months ago, Forbes ran this article about the growing interest and investment in thorium MSRs and provided some great history on the topic, too. Like Mr. Sorensen, the article expressed concern that we will be left behind as other lead the charge to build a commercial MSR for civilian power production. A young startup from MIT has just scored $2 million in seed money and that is encouraging.

China wants to have an operational MSR by 2017. India claims to have one in operation in 5 years. The Czech Republic and Russia are also working on MSRs. We had two running, one in the 1950s and one built by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that ran for 4 years with no problems. We started it, but other countries are taking the lead.

Another concern raised by Mr. Sorensen is that there are 23 power plants in the US that are built on the same design as the one that blew in Fukishima. GE, the company that designed the plant says that since then, the plants have been modified based on experience from Fukishima and from decades of experience worldwide. But the bottom line is that all nuclear power plants today use a highly pressurized containment vessel, up to 160 atmospheres of pressure, to contain the water that keeps the core of the reactor cool. This is what we're really worried about, a rupture of that containment vessel.

Thorium MSRs don't have that problem because the fuel is already a liquid. There is no worry about a meltdown and even if there were an accident, the fuel can be safely drained away into a holding tank to stop the reaction. It all runs at one atmosphere of pressure, too. So there is nothing to explode in an accident.

It's good to see that some American companies and investors are taking notice and building the power plant of the future. There are numerous benefits to thorium MSRs which are discussed in the Forbes article. Hopefully, someone in Congress is noticing that for a long time, we've been using a very inefficient nuclear power plant and that we're ready for a change.

But given the composition of the next Congress, we might have to wait until 2016 to see people in Congress who are not funded by carbon fuel interests and are willing to make more rational decisions about energy policy.

Changing the terms of the debate between Congress and Obama

While it may not seem like it, President Obama is actually in an excellent bargaining position with Congress. Sure, he's facing solid Republican majorities in both houses. In January, every committee will have Republicans chairing them, which means that almost certainly no bills authored by Democrats will ever see the floor of either house for a vote. Especially if Obama supports that bill. But he still has something Republicans don't have. Veto power, or the power to sign a bill into law.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, they still have to show that they're making a good faith effort to negotiate with the president (they haven't). They will also have to show the nation that president is not playing ball (they haven't). Once Obama casts the Republicans as extreme, unreasonable and offering completely unpalatable and unworkable solutions, just to tease the president, life could get really unhappy at the next major election for the Republicans. Of course, people would have to take time out of their very busy day to notice what's going on.

Republicans may think they have the upper hand in the debate on the economy, but they sure have a hard time explaining what happened to the loss of more than $900 billion in annual economic demand since 2008. Republicans have been keen to point out problems in the economy, but have failed to account for the improvements since the start of Obama's term. Perhaps they aren't as focused on inequality as Obama is.

Some pundits are saying that Obama now has nothing to lose as a lame duck president. While that may seem apparent, he is acutely aware of the prospects for his colleagues in the Democratic Party and is doing what he can to improve them. But he won't have the cooperation of the majority Congress to do it. Who can he turn to for help?

I would say that his biggest ally is his pick for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen. Yellen is, by many accounts, more concerned with unemployment than with inflation compared to her predecessors, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. She is a Keynesian economist and seems to understand that when demand falls, government can take up the slack and make up demand in the form of government spending. She would be in direct opposition to the position held by many conservative members of Congress: that when government gets out of the way, the private sector will create demand.

Anyone familiar with the history of this country since the Reagan Administrations, can see that the empirical evidence simply isn't there to support the majority in Congress. We've tried their neoliberalism for more than 30 years and it simply hasn't worked. All it has done is given us a bubble economy where wages remain flat for workers while income rises for professionals and capitalists (the people who own most of the capital). If conservatives were right, the wealthiest of us would be spending money to enjoy their wealth and that would increase employment. But that is not what happened now, did it?

There are some economists who have figured out that biggest problem to solve is the trade deficit, not the federal budget deficit. They may have even noticed that China buys our debt to support the dollar, and to support the trade deficit we are running with China. At least one economist has noticed that bringing the value of the dollar more in line with other currencies, to the point that the trade deficit disappears, will bring home about 6-7 million jobs. That is probably enough to fill the $900 billion hole left by the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008.

Obama can change the terms of the debate by showing us how all of this fits together. He can work with Yellen to show how the trade deficit works to send jobs overseas, keeps wages flat and allows CEOs to profit from the delta between the dollar and currencies around the world. Together they can show us that diminishing or eliminating the trade deficit by cutting the value of the dollar will bring jobs back home and increase demand here, at home.

I believe that Yellen is well positioned to act on such a strategy. When demand returns, unemployment falls, and when unemployment falls, employers have to pay more to keep workers around. When unemployment hits 4%, the lowest paid workers will get a raise, whether employers like it or not. You see, I don't think the debate in the minds of Republicans is so much about keeping what you earn. I believe it's about keeping or increasing the distance between the 1% and everyone else.

Once trade balance is restored, if they act on the plan described above, all that Obama has to do is point to a do-nothing-Congress full of Tea Party conservatives who exhibit nary a concern for unemployment, but who will protest, gnash their teeth and whine about how their plan would have worked if we had just given it a try. We did that for more than 30 years. It's time to go the other way. Obama could lead the way in that direction, toward even trade and full employment. Without the help of Congress.

It's time to make corporate political contributions public information

This caught my eye this morning. Maryland is working on a bill that requires among other things:

• Corporate contributions to any political campaign must be posted on the corporations website within 48 hours of the contribution.
• Corporations must show that a majority of shareholders approved the contribution.
• Corporations must show that a majority of their shareholders are permitted to make political contributions.

Such a law would make anonymous political contributions by corporations illegal. Publishing information about political contributions from corporations would allow their customers to see if they're making a purchase that works against customers' interests. It would also allow the employees working for that company to see that management has an interest aligned with theirs, and if not, workers are free to work somewhere else or strike.

Such a law would also subject every political contribution to a vote by the shareholders. This is a big part of corporate governance that is often ignored. Why should the board of directors be the sole arbiters of the value of a political contribution? Everyone who has skin in the game gets a voice in the ultimate fate of the business. Besides, board members have been shown to make mistakes and sometimes, they need parental supervision. You know, better corporate governance.

The last bullet point is very interesting. As the article notes, in most Fortune 500 companies, the majority shareholders are institutions and those institutions are not allowed to make political contributions.

It is telling that Congress refuses to pass any meaningful election reform, particularly with Obama in office. It is also telling that during the last midterm election, many states passed very liberal initiatives while increasing a conservative majority in Congress. Several states raised the minimum wage and legalized marijuana yet returned or added conservatives to Congress. This suggests that gerrymandering played a significant role in building and maintaining a conservative Congress.

90% of Americans believe there is too much corporate money in politics. If big conservative ideas have such broad political support, then having a fair election, without corporate money involved, or even making corporate contributions public information wouldn't be a concern. Unfortunately, for many in Congress, it still is. Imagine what would happen if every state passed such a law as the one being considered in Maryland.

Wasting the land for fun and profit with fracking

I note with supreme disappointment some of the abysmal images of what the land looks like after oil and gas companies are done with fracking the land (just do a search for images of land after fracking and you'll see what I mean). It's just as bad or worse than mountain removal mining, something that's all the rage here in Utah.

Fracking is a process of using water to force oil and gas out of the ground for collection. Fracking allows oil and gas companies to get at hard to reach, hard to extract, but very large deposits of gas and oil. According to some sources, fracking has increased oil production here in America by 50%.

Unfortunately, fracking is wreaking havoc across our land. Fracking is polluting our water supplies, leaving square miles of wasted land where nothing will grow, land that is ugly, and far beyond remediation. It will take centuries for nature to reclaim that land. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the remake of the television series, Battlestar Galactica used the term "frack" in place of a well known four letter word.

Oil and gas companies defend their practice of fracking and are happy to see a Tea Party Congress not only ready to defend them, but just chomping at the bit to reward them with a regulatory environment that lets them walk away with the profits without cleaning up their mess. To put it differently, the Tea Party is working hard to allow oil and gas companies to privatize the profits of their activities while socializing the costs.

It is unfortunate to see President Obama supporting conservative efforts to allow fracking to continue in the United States. This is particularly vexing when even the the most favorable evidence shows that US domestic oil production pales in comparison to world production and demand, with negligible effects on energy prices.

The natural resources extracted from our land will be sold at a profit and the profit will see very little taxation. Just ask Exxon. The best estimates place their effective tax rate at just 17%.

But I don't think it's just a question of taxation and reparations. After looking at the tremendous abuse that fracking does to the land, I don't think there is any amount of money that can be paid to rebuild the land as it once was. The damage is so horrific that many small towns, cities and even one state have all banned fracking.

We might not be having this conversation save for one president Nixon. In 1971, Nixon gave a speech to Congress to address energy policy in the United States. His speech directed our efforts towards a fast breeder reactor, the same reactor we still use today for producing energy from nuclear fission.

Had he turned another way, we could have had a far more efficient and safer molten salt reactor that runs on thorium and is at least 200 times more efficient in energy production, produces 1% of the waste of uranium and requires a fraction of the mining and processing effort. One ton of thorium can replace about 31 billion barrels of oil. Why? Nuclear fission has an energy density one million times greater than the carbon bond.

If the free market is so rational, why did it pick and stick with two of the most inefficient methods for producing energy, carbon-based fuels and the fast breeder reactor?

There is one more question to ask: who will pay for all of the mess? The Koch Brothers? They have every intention of extracting their profits without cleaning up their mess. Just ask the Tea Party. Lucky for them (and others like them), their anonymous contributions allow them to buy public policy without being responsible for their mistakes. Not so great for the rest of us.

The problem with patent supported drug development - it's slow.

Economist Dean Baker justly notes that patent supported drug development is slow. Not only is it slow, but it is inherently unfair because once a patent issues for a new drug, all further developments around that drug will accrue to the patent holder. No one else will want to work on that drug because they won't get any credit for the work and two, they could get sued for doing so.

This is a winner take all situation. As in so many "races" in technology, the one who gets the patent first wins and then everyone else quits and works on something else. Such conditions stifle innovation and preclude collaboration on new therapies and new technology in general.

This leaves a lone scientist to work at his bench for years and years without much help, unless he is willing to share the glory and the royalties with others. With a patent supported development process, it could take a long time to get all the rent-seekers in the room to agree on how to split the reward.

With open source development, scientists who truly want to save lives can do so, and still find a way to make a living with government or charitable funding. Now that conservatives are running the show in America, we can expect to see our government supported research subject to emaciating funding attacks on the part of the Tea Party. This is just one more reason that open source drug development makes sense. Drug development becomes more decentralized and not subject to the petty motives of any single political faction.

 Open source drug development is a collaborative system that allows many people to research and develop novel new therapies for any disease. Open Source Drug Discovery in India works with governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to collaborate on drug discovery and development using open source models rather than the proprietary patent supported development model. It is first being applied to neglected tropical diseases where there is apparently not enough financial interest or it doesn't affect those who would seem to be in the best position to help.

There is one other problem with patent supported drug development that doesn't get much press, but it is noted by Mr. Baker: inappropriate promotion of a drug for a use not originally intended. With patents comes incentives to promote a drug for an inappropriate use or to exaggerate the efficacy or safety of the drug for a given disease. Removing patent incentives would allow the market to work naturally. Where the drug works, it's applied, where it doesn't work, it's not prescribed or recommended. But as long as the patent spigot is there, they will keep pushing the drugs for uses in ways that could hurt patients.

Open source drug development can reduce the time required to develop new drugs and allow everyone to be a winner with affordable health care. With patent supported drug development, there is one thing we can be sure of: there is only one winner.