Net Neutrality No-Brainers

The internet is for everyone.
This is not a partisan issue.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/35431/

"Saving the Internet with Strange Bedfellows"

Interesting bit of news I learned today. The house is working on a bill to give the CIA & NSA arrest powers.

Section 423 of H.R. 5020 "appears...to grant to CIA security personnel powers that have little to do with the primary mission of 'executive
protection,' and potentially creates a pretext for use or abuse of these powers for the purposes of general domestic law enforcement -- something no element of the CIA has ever been empowered to perform," wrote Danielle Brian
of the Project on Government Oversight in a letter to members of the House Intelligence Committee opposing the provision.

http://www.pogo.org/p/government/gl-060401-intel.html

Checked out Josh Marshall's blog, followed the links on the net neutrality issue, read the stuff, signed the petition.

Badabing, badaboom.

Do it.

Interesting about the NSA; Dick and I were approached while we were parked there, Sunday--it is right near where we drop off my son to go to his father's house. The officer was nice and understood what we were doing -- admiring the scenery (nature and some spy planes) on a nice afternoon.

The CIA, on the other hand--well, let's ask Ray McGovern about that...

WalMart rallies tomorrow; find one near you:
http://www.wakeupwalmart.com/feature/ctw/

(from ThinkProgress)

Last year, ExxonMobil recorded the highest profit of any company in history, over $36 billion. Retiring Exxon chairman, Lee Raymond, is collecting "one of the most generous retirement packages in history," nearly $400 million. Royal Dutch Shell collected $23 billion in profits last year, a record amount for a British company. The profits have come from soaring crude oil prices at a time when supply is at an 8-year high.

--Bush is now making token overtures toward actions he has been encouraged to make for a long time, purely out of political expediency.
It's beyond phony.

Last year, ExxonMobil recorded the highest profit of any company in history, over $36 billion. Retiring Exxon chairman, Lee Raymond, is collecting "one of the most generous retirement packages in history," nearly $400 million. Royal Dutch Shell collected $23 billion in profits last year, a record amount for a British company. The profits have come from soaring crude oil prices at a time when supply is at an 8-year high.

(ThinkProgress)

Does anyone know the name of the small business bill that has been advertised on the radio? I'd like to research it, but I forgot the bill number.

Bush only proposed to roll back $1 billion of the $30 billion in oil company tax credits; demand that state AGs, not Gonzalez stop price gouging; that oil co. contribute to build more refineries in 5-10 years-which is agood idea but about 5 years late; and that we stop him from filling the strategic reserves at $74/barrel-boy that was a tough call. New Hybrids for '06 get a $2,000 tax credit but only for 60,000 vehicles. There should be no cap on this credit rather we should have real CAFE Standards like JK proposed 2 years ago and there should be a real gas guzzler tax on trucks and suvs that get less than 20 mpg we would either slow down their sales or force Detroit to start making vehicles that get good gas mileage now, not as Bush proposed years after he has left office.

Lets hope that Dems push a real plan and once again insist that Cheney open up the minutes to his meetings with Oil Execs in 2001 so we can find out the real reason for price gouging. Perhaps a Democratic Congress should take up that as one's of its first actions in the next Congress and should propose that as one of their reasons to vote for them in Nov. Cheney and the courts have no intention of ever letting us know what that pact was in 2001.

I agree Ira. Kerry did a great job pointing out those issues on Ed Shutlz today.

Ira
This is an incredible book - The Bush Agenda - Invading the World One Economy at a Tme

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343214

This author tells about as much as I've ever heard about the Cheney energy meetings. The transcript of the interview with Amy Goodman is here. I just heard it. I have tried to boil her ideas down to a few paragraphs.

Mahdi has been in every U.S.-appointed Iraqi government. He was the man that the Bush administration wanted to be the new prime minister of Iraq, but he's vice president & advocates the Bush agenda of opening Iraq to corporations.

150 U.S. corporations received $50 billion in contracts to fail in reconstruction in Ira . Mahdi advanced Paul Bremer one hundred orders & pushed their agenda for a new oil law in Iraq to open Iraq's oil sector to private foreign corporate investment. BearingPoint wrote the plan 2 months before the invasion. If you haven't heard of them, they are the renamed Arthur Andersen (think Enron) & were paid $250 million to rewrite the Iraq economic plan.

Bremer was to put it in place - a plan of radical globalization whereby corporations can enter Iraq but contribute nothing to its economy, could give preference to American countries, did not have to hire Iraqis, could bungle the reconstruction.

For example, Bechtel got $2.8 billion to rebuild water, sewage & eletricity. The Iraqis rebuilt these systems in 3 months after Gulf War I, but we have not got back to those levels in 3 years!

Lakhdar Brahimi, U.N. Special Adviser to Iraq, called Bremer "the dictator of Iraq." That was because he had to sign virtually every contract. That was illegal under the Geneva Convention because an occupying power is supposed to provide security and services but not change he law of an occupied country. The Bush govt did the opposite.

Bush, Cheney & Rice are all former energy officials. Bush & Rice have more experience doing that than working in government. The oil industry gave 13 times more to Bush than Gore, and 9 times more to Bush than Kerry. The war is connected to the price of gas because we are fighting it for the oil industry.

ChevronTexaco & Unocal merged into one company, Exxon & Mobil merged, & had the highest profit in the last 2 years in the history of the industry. The price of oil at the pump is about 50% the price of a barrel of oil, about 25% taxes, and the rest is marketing and the price determined by the company at the pump. That means that about 18% - 20% is determined by the oil companies. They could reduce the price of oil and their profit margin, or could jack up the price of increase their profit margin. They did the latter.

The US receives alot of oil from Iraq - 2.5 million barrels/day prewar & 2-2.2 million barrels/day now. Half comes to the US via Chevron, Exxon, Marathon. The supply isn't down as much as the myth suggests. We're told it's wartime, we're suffering, prices will go up. The companies are profitting like crazy.

Here's an old quote from a Chevron exec: “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas, reserves I would love Chevron to have access to.” Here's an old quote from a Halliburton exec: “We hope Iraq will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We don't like being kept out of markets, because it gives our competitors an unfair advantage.”

Iraq certainly has the second largest oil reserves in the world, on par with Saudi Arabia. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Rumsfeld -- for 20 years have been trying to get their hands on this oil. To get it, we need to be there, acc/them. The U.S. value of Iraqi oil has increased by 86% between 2003 and 2004. Those profits have gone to Exxon, Chevron and Marathon.

Chevron has seen its most profitable years in its 125-year history in 2 years. The oil minister of Iraq got rid of all the old contracts for oil with Saddam, which were with countries all over the world but not with US.

This is directly from the interview:

The Cheney Energy Task Force, that met at the very beginning of the Bush administration, mapped out foreign suitors to Iraqi oil, listed all of the companies, all of the countries, the fields that they had access to, within a document that said we need --the U.S. needs to get greater access to Middle East oil.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who Cheney met with?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Cheney met with -- thank goodness for the Supreme Court, that ruled to release these documents, because otherwise they were completely secret. He met with Bechtel, Chevron, Halliburton, Exxon, all of the largest oil companies and all of the largest oil engineering companies, and they decided we need to increase our access to Middle Eastern oil. Aloum then became Iraq’s Oil Minister.

(snip)

Chevron has been training Iraqi workers in the United States for years, mapping -- doing mappings, free services, so that they are ready, when the permanent government is in place, to sign contracts. And then, I believe, once those contracts are signed, they will get to work, but they need security. And what better security force than 150,000 American troops. And I do not think that those troops will leave, unless we all have something to do about it, until the oil companies are safely at work.

READ THE REST because it's fascinating -
She will tell how Kissinger was involved & how he's linked to Bremer.

She will tell how the Iraqi oil industry & engineers could handle everything but security is bad now because Bremer's first act was to fire the military & the bureaucrats, & with 50-70% unemployment - they are understandibly reluctant to work with us, plus it's unsafe.

From the transcript:
Again, that was a private company that made the decision to fire the Iraqi military. Ronco Consulting had the contract of what to do with the military, and they’re the ones, I imagine, that decided they should all be fired.

So, reconstruction can happen. The money just needs to get to the Iraqis.

(snip)

And I say, because I believe, unfortunately, that the new Iraqi government is simply not reflective of the people of Iraq -- however, it is the Iraqi government -- that there should be an international monitoring board that partners with the Iraqi government, made up of non-governmental groups with specific knowledge in reconstruction, obviously Iraqi civil society groups and people from the appropriate United Nations offices that have expertise, and maybe one representative of the United States government, since most of the money would be U.S. taxpayer money, but certainly not with, you know, oversight over the rest of the every member of the committee.

AMY GOODMAN: And the troops? The U.S. troops?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: U.S. troops have to be withdrawn. There’s just no -- there's no way around it. It’s not going to be pretty. And I think we fool ourselves if we say peace will rain on Iraq as soon as the U.S. soldiers leave. But it is still unquestionable that U.S. troops are creating more hostility than they are solving.

Note: This information does mesh well with what James Fallows of Atlantic Monthly found concerning why it's so slow to train the Iraqi military, & how reconstruction & personnel were mishandled by the government.

Suppressed movies I've heard about lately:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343222 Peace Patriot - by a warrior turned peacemaker
--I heard about this on public radio.

http://www.sirnosir.com - About the peace movement in
Vietnam era
--I heard about this from Marjorie G, showing in NYC

http://www.freedomtofascism.com = About what's happening to this country.
--I heard about this via email from a friend of a friend

Meanwhile, my husband says from the other room: "You hear who's replacing Scott McClellam? Tony Snow, a commentator from Fox News."

Bert's Kos diary has 624 comments - the photo is priceless!
(relates to costs at the pump)

The myth of "oil price gouging" will hurt us all

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2006/4/25/11581/7668

the link

Cool Diary Bert.

Actually BearingPoint is the name that was adopted by KPMG Consulting in 2002, the management consulting and IT services unit that was spun off from KPMG Peat Marwick in 2000.

http://www.bearingpoint.com/portal/site/bearingpoint/menuitem.0e9ea8ac38e6299ccccc9610826106a0/channel/published/News/Press%20Kit/Corporate%20Timeline/

Checked out Josh Marshall's blog, followed the links on the net neutrality issue, read the stuff, signed the petition.

Badabing, badaboom.

I did it. Time to Do it.

Thx, Victoria

Benson is good as always.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/benson/

Mick Jagger Refuses to Give Up Hotel Room For George Bush

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7003306618

Snow Job.

Suggested questions for the White House press corps to ask on Tony Snow's first day...
http://mediamatters.org/items/200604250008

Its now official, Faux News is now totally in charge of the Whitehouse. And Snow's first statement as part of this Administration fits in perfectly with their constant lies, when he said he was not interested in the job.

Yes, but wouldn't it just be perfectly interesting if Mr. Snow should somehow turn out to be less of a default spokespuppet for Team Shrubya than so many are assuming that he will be, though? After all, the many contrarian-sounding quotes from his previous columns included in the MediaMatters article that mdf linked to (at 10:09 AM above) might indicate a certain amount of independent intelligence on his part. And wouldn't *that* just turn out to chap Rove's asterisk!

and thoroughly gast his flabber too,
Otter

Posted by: Otter at April 26, 2006 11:58 AM

When pigs fly...

Strong words by James Webb in his opening salvo against George Allen.

"Webb Opens Race to Replace Allen
Ex-Reagan Aide Criticizes Ethics in Washington, Iraq War

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006; Page B02

GATE CITY, Va., April 25 -- Democrat James Webb officially kicked off his campaign for the U.S. Senate in this conservative corner of Virginia on Tuesday, offering a strongly populist indictment of the Bush administration and pledging to seek an end to the war in Iraq and a "culture of corruption" in Washington.

But he scalded the Bush administration and a Republican Congress that he said had sent "other people's kids to war and other people's kids to bad schools."

But Webb was an early opponent of the Iraq invasion, and his military credentials -- he's a decorated Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War -- make him to some Democrats and an enthusiastic base of liberal bloggers an attractive candidate against the conservative Allen.

"We have a lot of work to do and a lot of cleaning up to do," he told his supporters in Gate City. "Number one is to end the war in Iraq and refocus our military." Webb said it was not contradictory to support the troops and urge an end to the war. He told his audience that his son, also a Marine, is schedule to be deployed to Iraq this summer.

"My objection to the war is not aimed at my country but at the administration that has chosen to wage this war, an administration that has muddied the truth, made mistake after mistake and refused to accept responsibility," he said.

Webb's event in Gate City was a homey affair in a field by an old farmhouse, organized by his cousin Jewel Jones and attended by about 50 people, two dogs and a videographer from the Allen campaign. Webb said that his ancestors hail from the area and that starting the campaign there was symbolic of his roots.

Webb has more events planned for Wednesday in Richmond, Fredericksburg and Arlington County.

The former boxer and Naval Academy graduate criticized Allen as a "rubber stamp" in an administration that has ballooned the federal deficit, authorized a domestic spying campaign and entered into a misguided war. "George Allen is in the middle of this, try as he might to distance himself from it," Webb said. "Voting with this president 97 percent of the time tends to hold you accountable."

But Webb spoke mostly about the Bush administration and a culture in Washington that has made people suspicious of their political leaders. "Why? Because we're in the hands of people who follow no creed," he said. "They speak to you of values but know nothing other than political expediency and blind loyalty to a money-drenched political machine."

Ira, I don't think there's any way that Sen. Allen is going down in this election. Way too much support and seniority, plus no smoking gun that might turn a Red state against him.

Sydney Blumenthal on the Snow Job

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sidney_blumenthal/2006/04/white_house_snow_job.html

This hits several nails on the head at once.

new thread...

veritas I am a realist and you are probably right but Webb looks like he will put up a hell of a fight and might bloody Allen a little. Many though that Governor Kaine was not possible either.