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The more interesting issue to me is the accusation that Google violates antitrust law by boosting its comparison shopping search results in its search results, unfairly disadvantaging competing shopping services and not delivering best results to users. What's interesting to me is that the Commission is attempting to portray general search as a separate market from comparison shopping search, accusing Google of attempting to leverage its general search monopoly into the separate comoparison shopping search market. At first blush, Iim not convinced that these are or should be regarded as separable markets. But the ramifications are enormous. If that is a separate market, then arguably so is Google's book search, its Google Scholar search, its definition search, its site search, etc. It isn't clear to me how one might draw a defensible line taht does not also sweep in every new search feature  as a separate market.   

"Our examination of the future of public debt leads us to several important conclusions. First, fiscal problems confronting industrial economies are bigger than suggested by official debt figures that show the implications of the financial crisis and recession for fiscal balances. As frightening as it is to consider public debt increasing to more than 100% of GDP, an even greater danger arises from a rapidly ageing population. The related unfunded liabilities are large and growing, and should be a central part of today's long-term fiscal planning. "It is essential that governments not be lulled into complacency by the ease with which they have financed their deficits thus far. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the path of future output is likely to be permanently below where we thought it would be just several years ago. As a result, government revenues will be lower and expenditures higher, making consolidation even more difficult. But, unless action is taken to place fiscal policy on a sustainable footing, these costs could easily rise sharply and suddenly. "Second, large public debts have significant financial and real consequences. The recent sharp rise in risk premia on long-term bonds issued by several industrial countries suggests that markets no longer consider sovereign debt low-risk. The limited evidence we have suggests default risk premia move up with debt levels and down with the revenue share of GDP as well as the availability of private saving. Countries with a relatively weak fiscal system and a high degree of dependence on foreign investors to finance their deficits generally face larger spreads on their debts. This market differentiation is a positive feature of the financial system, but it could force governments with weak fiscal systems to return to fiscal rectitude sooner than they might like or hope. "Third, we note the risk that persistently high levels of public debt will drive down capital accumulation, productivity growth and lon

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men? Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit. This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive. Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation. This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

This is a killer sketch featuring Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and George Soros along with the so called "victims" of the mortgage crisis. The setting is a joint press conference between Bush and congressional leaders Pelosi and Frank to celebrate the $750 Billion TARP bailout package. The sketch became so problematic for the NBC and the Socialist Party, the YouTube version was edited (gutted). When that didn't work, it was removed from YouTube.

The most significant features of the U.S. Constitution are the establishment of the rule of law, the creation of a federal system with a supreme national government, the separation of governmental powers into three branches that check and balance each other, its flexibility and the establishment of a republican form of government.

Tax cheat and treaasury secretary Timothy Geithner is featured in this SNL skit. Having no idea what to do about the financial crisis, Geithner comes up with a plan to offer a reward for a plan to solve the crisis. Various callers put forward their plans, giving the bureaucratic Geithner plenty of opportunity to demonstrate his cluelessness. The last call proves to be a bonanza, as Geithner falls for the ole Nigerian prince eMail ploy. Very funny! Even though at this point, it hurts to laugh

Good read!  Many thanks to the mighty marbux for the link.  Be sure to catch the YouTube video series featuring Sir James Goldsmith congressional testimony decrying free trade and corporatism. excerpt: "May 31, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --These are discouraging times, but once in a blue moon a bit of hope appears. I am pleased to report on the bit of hope delivered in March of 2011 by Michael Spence, a Nobel prize-winning economist, assisted by Sandile Hlatshwayo, a researcher at New York University. The two economists have taken a careful empirical look at jobs offshoring and concluded that it has ruined the income and employment prospects for most Americans. To add to the amazement, their research report, "The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge," was published by the very establishment Council on Foreign Relations. http://www.cfr.org/industrial-policy/evolving-structure-american-economy-employment-challenge/p24366  For a decade I have warned that US corporations, pressed by Wall Street and large retailers such as Wal-Mart, to move offshore their production for US consumer markets, were simultaneously moving offshore US GDP, US tax base, US consumer income, and irreplaceable career opportunities for American citizens.

Looks like the issue of Civil Liberties and the Obama Gestapo Government are getting traction in the main stream media.  So far the incredible increase in Obammunism's crushing Federal Regulations has been focused on the economic destruction caused.  The flip side of the Obammunism coin is that of Civil Liberties and the 10th Amendment getting similarly crushed. excerpt: Finally, some front-page attention to a major, and frightening, American problem! Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured an in-depth look at how federal laws increasingly apply criminal penalties for violations involving no mens rea, roughly translated as a "guilty mind." The stricture against criminal penalties for unwitting violations is an age-old, bedrock legal principle. Alas, in today's dangerously armed, bureaucratic super-state, ancient legal principles go by the wayside when politicians pretend to be "tough on crime" and when officious civil "servants" indulge their fetishes for power. U.S. governments at every level these days are prone to "overcriminalization," which means turning ordinary activity into violations of the law, turning what should be civil violations into criminal ones, and applying penalties far harsher than should be warranted. On the mens rea front, the Journal explains: "In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them…. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, plus thousands more embedded in federal regulations."

Short intro to the Michael Lewis article in Vanity Fair about the AIG implosion: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig200908?currentPage=1 excerpt: While nearly every other Wall Street firm had AIG's Financial Products group in Wilton, Connecticut on speed dial, Citigroup reportedly avoided doing business with them. Instead of off-loading risk onto the insurance giant by taking out credit default swap contracts, Citigroup prefered to keep one-hundred percent of the risk themselves, an AIG trader tells Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair. Lewis has a long article in this month's Vanity Fair that describes how AIG FP blew up. It's finally online and makes for an entertaining read. In case you are pressed for time, here's the short version: they sold lots of credit default swaps on subprime mortgage backed paper while no one internally had a clue what was going on.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s. this article features a complete break down of where the money went!!!! New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation's gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

A slide set featuring the corruption bio of the top 16 most corrupt members of congress.  Incredible.  Seems like the longer these clowns serve, the more corrupt and innovative they become.  Kudos to the  This top tier listing must have been very competitive.  Missing are criminals like Chris Dodd, Kathleen Sebelius, and Barney Frank.  Frank and Dodd are almost single handedly responsible for the Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac mortgage crisis that tripped the entire global economy.

I heard Catherine on Coast to Coast recently.  She is the real deal.

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

I wound up joining this campaign at the urging of the ACLU after checking the Privacy Policy. The Reset the Net campaign seems to be endorsed by a lot of change-oriented groups, from the ACLU to Greenpeac to the Pirate Party. A fair number of groups with a Progressive agenda, but certainly not limited to them. The right answer to that situation is to urge other groups to endorse, not to avoid the campaign. Single-issue coalition-building is all about focusing on an area of agreement rather than worrying about who you are rubbing elbows with.  I have been looking for a a bipartisan group that's tackling government surveillance issues via mass actions but has no corporate sponsors. This might be the one. The reason: Corporate types like Google have no incentive to really butt heads with the government voyeurs. They are themselves engaged in massive surveillance of their users and certainly will not carry the battle for digital privacy over to the private sector. But this *is* a battle over digital privacy and legally defining user privacy rights in the private sector is just as important as cutting back on government surveillance. As we have learned through the Snowden disclosures, what the private internet companies have, the NSA can and does get.  The big internet services successfully pushed in the U.S. for authorization to publish more numbers about how many times they pass private data to the government, but went no farther. They wanted to be able to say they did something, but there's a revolving door of staffers between NSA and the big internet companies and the internet service companies' data is an open book to the NSA.   The big internet services are not champions of their users' privacy. If they were, they would be featuring end-to-end encryption with encryption keys unique to each user and unknown to the companies.  Like some startups in Europe are doing. E.g., the Wuala.com filesync service in Switzerland (first 5 GB of storage free). Compare tha

I've been disgusted with American mainstream media and our political class for a very long time. Every now and then I get super-disgusted.  I'll begin with the Obama Administration. They tried to make political hay with something that should not have been made public other than notifying the released American prisoners' parents before the prisoner had been debriefed. Moreover, while I have no problems with swapping Taliban prisoners to get the American prisoner back even if it meant not giving Congress the full 30-day notice required by statute, the Administration certainly could have done a better job of it, notifying key committee members earlier that the deal might be pulled off. Waiting until the Taliban prisoners were up to the steps of the airplane bound for the exchange was not the way this should have happened. Next up, we have the members of Congress who have done their level best to turn the situation into a partisan issue. Obama may have deserved criticism given that he tried to make political hay with the release. But prisoner swaps during wartime have been a feature of most U.S. wars. It is an ancient custom of war and procedures for doing so are even enshrined in the Geneva Conventions governing warfare. So far, I have not heard any war veteran member of Congress scream about releasing terrorists. During my 2+ years in a Viet Nam combat role, the thought of being captured was horrifying. Pilots shot down over North Viet Nam were the lucky ones. No American soldier captured in South Viet Nam was ever released. The enemy was fighting a guerrilla war in the South. They had no means to confine and care for prisoners. So captured American troops were questioned for intelligence and then killed.  Truth be told, American combat troops were prone to killing enemy who surrendered. War is a very ugly situation and feelings run high. It is perhaps a testament to the Taliban that they kept Sgt. Berdahl alive. Certainly that fact clashes irreconcilably with

Very nice 2.5 minute video explaining the ongoing F35 boondoggle. 

"In a democracy, elected representatives make laws. But with new trade agreements, businesses could co-write legislation. The United States and the European Union (EU) are negotiating a trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The aim is to lower trade barriers. Unfortunately those 'barriers' include not just traditional trade tariffs and quotas, but also the laws your elected representatives make. For example, Pierre Defraigne, former Deputy Director-General in the EU Commission Department responsible for Trade, sees the core battle of TTIP is over "the norms and standards in terms of environmental, health and consumer protection". This is why the fight against TTIP is a fight for democracy. It is not about protectionism, but rather the protection of our democratic laws over their business interests. If TTIP was to be signed, two new doors will be opened for businesses to influence legislation: 1. Firstly, regulatory co-operation will give access to industry before laws are to be signed. This means regulators and stakeholders work together for the convergence of laws across the Atlantic. 2. And secondly, once laws are enacted, private investors can sue the EU or US in private tribunals, outside of national courts (known as ISDS or investor-state dispute settlement). The example of the chemical Bisphenol A illustrates what both these 'open doors' for business could mean in practice. Used in everything from water bottles to the lining of food cans, Bisphenol A is one of the most ubiquitous endocrine disruptors. As such, it disrupts the hormonal system of the body, which is responsible for all vital features such as growth, sexual development, and even behaviour. Its presence in the natural world is already felt: two out of three fish caught in Austrian rivers are now female. Bisphenol A has been banned in France since 1st January 2015. This ban goes further than the existing EU ban. Meanwhile, Bisphenol A is stil