Why not put 2 and 2 together, and demand that the United States not only stop the euthanasia, but reverse course and develop a robust, modernized postal system?

We know the USPS used to be permitted to open and maintain savings accounts, and that national postal services still do so in other nation-states.

We might also observe that the reason everybody states for tolerating the further erosion of the USPS — the rise of email, fax, SMS/text, and internet messaging, and the attending decline in paper-based letters and volumes — is merely a new form of the human process the Post Office was intended to encourage. Why permit the overclass to enjoy making the first half of the point without pressing them on the second? Why not fuse reason and radicalism, on a topic that few could dispute is of deepest importance?

So, Occupiers, why not occupy Post Offices and insist that the USPS be reinvigorated and launched into the business of building and maintaining a modern communications infrastructure, as well as maintaining some appropriate amount of snail-mail delivery? Why not use the USPS to compete with the corporate squatters who are now allowed to suppress public enterprise while sucking money-for-nothing from the patchy, over-priced, for-profit, advertising-intensive, second-rate telecom system in this country? Why not insist that the Postal Service build a modern, universally-available national internet, with lower prices, minimal marketing overlay, and no place for payouts to private investors? Why not out-compete the cell phone oligopolies and their pathetic but hugely expensive war over meaningless market shares? Why not insist that junk mail and corporate marketers pay first-class or even first-class-plus rates to use the public’s physical mail system?

While we’re at it, in our moment of deserved but dangerous bankster bashing, why not also press to restore the banking function to the Post Office? A 2% savings account sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? And the deposits could be used to finance the USPS’s modernization and universalization of the means of citizen-to-citizen communication.

Why not insist on preserving and expanding a major public enterprise that provides decent jobs to people who do honorable, vital tasks? Why not stick it to the Man — and in some vital organs, for a change?

We live in a kind of digital feudal economy these days. We live on land we don’t own, and we provide the masters of the realm (Facebook, Google, etc.) with unlimited free access to our data and behavior, which they monetize for billions of dollars. We get to keep our little plots of digital land for free and are otherwise pretty much at the whim of the feudal masters.

Of course, the masters are actually corporate capitalists, and the corporate capitalists at Facebook and Google are, as their founders now admit, 100 percent in the advertising business, meaning their product is both harvesting data and delivering eyeballs, eardrums, and mindshares to other corporate capitalists, who use those products to plan and execute marketing campaigns.

Nonetheless, the analogy to feudalism is apt. Surrendering corvée to exploiting overlords is the price of admission to almost all internet activities in the United States, including the basic search engine services mediated by Google.

Of course, there is no technical reason why the internet could not include first-class, not-for-profit, data-secure search engines and other services. It’s just that the overclass won’t permit such possibilities to be discussed, let alone implemented.

Product placement of the most ecologically unconscionable transportation products you can imagine in movies for militant meatheads.

Talk about a visual museum of a dying imperial culture…

So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services.  Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams.  The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.

So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.

Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”

In the United States, where public insurance is more aggressively opposed by the overclass, publicly provided automotive coverage is entirely unavailable.  Consequently, the insurance is inferior and the premiums higher.  And the record profits of U.S. insurance companies, which Advertising Age reports “reached $26.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010″ — where do those go?

Largely to folks like Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway empire owns Geico.

The basis for all those private-sector profits?  Sheer waste:  To promote brand awareness, Geico and its “competitors” engage in saturation advertising of their private monopoly-protected inferior product.  According to Ad Age, advertising expenditure by insurers more than doubled between 2000 and 2009.

The overall sales strategy in pure Pavlov.  With few differences between companies’ policies and no competition from the public sector, repetition-implanted name recall is everything:

[T]he average shopper can name just four insurance brands off the top of their head, according to J.D. Power. And the way to get on that list is to advertise — all the time. “There’s enormous overlap between the companies that advertise a lot and the companies that are growing faster,” Mr. Shields said. “It seems very much to work.” (Ad Age, February 21, 2011)

Such are the glorious “efficiencies” of capitalism.

“If there is a reason you don’t believe that this is the time to get off the sidelines — to hire and invest — I want to know about it. I want to fix it.”

In reply, the true and obvious answer gets mentioned by a Chamber member in attendance:

Mr. Obama’s suggestion that businesses can help the economy recover by spending their reserves was met with skepticism by some in the audience. Harold Jackson, a executive at Buffalo Supply Incorporated, a medical supply company, called it naive.

“Any business person has to look at the demand to their company for their product and services, and make hiring decisions,” Mr. Jackson said. “I think it’s a little outside the bounds to suggest that if we hire people we don’t need, there will be more demand.”

In other words, when all the money’s at the top, there’s no reason to stop hoarding it. Obama’s supply-side bailouts and apologetics are on exactly the wrong course.

Straight from the horse’s orifice, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Black Reagan and his moribund political party to get the point.

[Source: The New York Times, February 7, 2011]

It VILIFIES tobacco corporations!  From today’s NYT:

But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.

It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.

What next?  Calling fire inflammatory?

Roger Quarles, that fine upstanding Kentucky entrepreneur and leader, however,  is onto this sinister plot:

“We all know the real objective here is to eliminate tobacco consumption,” says Roger Quarles, a Kentucky grower and president of the [International Tobacco Growers Association].

Horrors!

Meanwhile, for those keeping score, one might note here yet another example of the namby-pamby jokes that pass for “anti-tobacco” campaigns back in the US of A.

Johnston explains some of the shocking, if not at all surprising, facts revealed by a bit of analysis:

[These statistics] do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.

The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.

The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!

You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.

And remember: This comparison includes federally taxable wages only. It says nothing about stock options, expense accounts, or benefits.

And single-year wage data also say nothing about wealth distribution, which, in a capitalist paradise like the United States, is far more unequal than the income structure.

Finally, I would invite people to just goggle these stats. Contemplate, for instance, the pyramidal structure of the wage system. By far the most densely populated wage segments lie at the low end of the scale. And the slots get almost precisely less-filled as they ascend into the unconscionable stratosphere.

Likewise, one might examine these numbers and ask “our” politicians why the fuck they never shut up about the so-called “middle class.” Aren’t the bottom and the top really the overwhelmingly important issues? And, even without knowing the facts Johnston discusses, aren’t people thirsty for some leadership and meaningful choice in this area?

Alas, few topics are more off-the-table in our market totalitarian society. The mass media are owned by corporate capitalists who enrich themselves by serving the other corporate capitalists who are the sponsors of their fare.  The ruling (R) v. (D) junta, the money-grubbing Business Party duo-mono-poly, a.k.a. our “serious” policians?   The same.

Two items:

Wind Farms Over-Rated

Micro-Wind Hopeless

None of this stops energy capitalists from spreading and exploiting the shit out of the naive assumptions that rule the roost on this crucial topic.

The fact of the matter is that the laws of physics are real, and they dictate that it always costs some energy to get energy.  As explained by Kevin Phillips, wind power’s regime had its heyday in the 17th century.  It is not capable of powering the 21st, unless we get very radically small.

For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:

The [WSJ] conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:

The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.

It is also increasingly powerful:

Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.