Diesel Civil Trust

Imagine an Internet where consumers paid a low price for basic service and more for add-ons such as 3-D video.

Or imagine if Comcast Corp., now seeking approval to acquire General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, let its customers download Universal movies at superfast speeds, while relegating the latest Harry Potter film from rival Time Warner Inc. to the slow lane.

suburbananarchist:

The real enemy behind the untold millions of deaths inflicted by Empire are what C. Wright Mills called “Crackpot Realists”:  the sane, sensible, serious people who know what needs to be done to keep the only world they know running, and just quietly do it.  As C. S. Lewis put it, the greatest crimes in human history were committed by men with clean fingernails and pleasant, well-modulated voices, sitting in tastefully appointed offices.  For these people, a global system of corporate neoliberalism enforced by the United States, the G20, the World Bank and UN Security Council is the only conceivable way of doing things.  And to keep this system going — as the only possible basis for what they call “peace and prosperity” — they do what’s necessary.  When there’s “collateral damage,” they regret it.  But they don’t flinch from the task.  Because, after all, America is the indispensible nation.

azspot:

Even though deep snowdrifts cover his fields in eastern Kansas, Luke Ulrich, a corn and soybean farmer here, is thinking about spring. It’s time to buy seed again, but hundreds of seed companies have gone under in the past two decades.

Ulrich remembers the days before genetically modified seeds upended the industry. Critics of the big agriculture biotech company Monsanto say its popular Roundup Ready technology is to blame for that. Roundup Ready is a line of gene-modified seeds that inoculate plants against a herbicide, Roundup, also made by Monsanto, that kills just about everything else.

“Ever since they’ve come out with the Roundup Ready trait and that became popular and basically took over farming, we’ve seen significant increases every single year,” Ulrich says.

Ulrich says his seed costs shot up almost 50 percent last year. That’s because farmers are contractually prohibited from saving seeds and planting them the following year.

Farmers face lawsuits if they try to save and replant the genetically modified seed because they don’t own the technology. While they bristle at that, they love the Roundup Ready seed.

“There’s nothing like Roundup. A monkey could farm with it,” Ulrich says.

As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.

The first of many broken promises around healthcare, I’m sure. Emphasis mine.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — With a new mandate looming that will require business owners to file millions more tax forms, the Internal Revenue Service has begun the daunting process of figuring out how to turn the law’s sweeping demands into actual rules for taxpayers.

Freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield [1] was working on assignment for ProPublica in Texas City, Texas, last week, when a BP security guard began following him. Rosenfield was later detained by police after taking photos for two ProPublica stories. One revealed that BP’s Texas City refinery had illegally emitted 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals [2] into the air in April and May. The other reported that the Texas City refinery continues to have serious safety violations [3] five years after an explosion at the plant killed 15 workers.

The decision by BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward to spend a day with his family in England Saturday was perhaps defensible. Two months into the Gulf oil spill, some Americans might grudgingly admit that even a man charged with solving the worst environmental crisis in US history needed a day here or there to recharge the batteries.

The fact he spent that day yachting with his son in an exclusive race off the English coast was perhaps the starkest evidence yet of the BP chief’s deep misunderstanding of American public opinion – or his dismissal of it.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding “closed-door meetings” with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality — the rule that lets users determine their own Internet experience.

Stan Moody has served in the Maine State House of Representatives both as a Republican and a Democrat, pastors a small country church in Central Maine and served as a chaplain at the maximum security Maine State Prison, where he ministered to inmates in the Supermax unit. He has authored several books on the state of the evangelical church in America, including “No Turning Back: Journal of an All-American Sinner,” “Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship: A New Look at the Second Coming of Christ” and “McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.”