Can anyone out there defend capitalism in this context?

The FTC has ruled against maintaining net neutrality. ISPs will now be able to charge for priority access. For those of us who run independent blogs, websites, or internet based or enhanced businesses, we can now expect our readers, viewers, and customers to have to wait and endure slow access to our sites while those some readers, viewers, and customers, will have zippy access to corporate customers who are willing to pay money to the big ISPs. This is the likely outcome. A possible outcome is that ISPs may choose to just block any website that won’t pony up the fee. So much for “information wants to be free”.

The FTC made this ruling in spite of pretty massive popular outcry against it. The FTC has advised congress against legislating to the contrary under the current Bush doctrine of requiring a demonstrated and documented “market failure” before putting any regulations into effect.

According to this article, illegal immigrants are a potential leading indicator of economic health in this country. Because the jobs they fill tend to be the most marginal jobs in our economy, hence the most likely not to be filled, illegal immigrants are less likely to shoulder the risk of that trip across the border when times are bad. Times are bad at the bottom of the economic period before they are further up it.

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting little article on the melting polar ice caps. It looks like we’ve drastically underestimated the rate at which the ice is melting. The polar seas may be navigable in summertime before too long. They may be ice free in the summer by 2050. That stuff is the focus of the article. At the end of it, though, is some info that may explain why the Europeans are so much more serious about cutting back CO2 emissions than the US is. April was the 8th straight month of warmer than usual temperatures in Germany, the 13th in France. April 2006-April 2007 was the warmest 12 months in England in the last 350 years. I’ve seen this even better explained in some temperature maps that I’ve seen online in the last year. The U.S. has certainly had some weird and warm weather at times over the last couple of years, but nothing that’s really out of bounds for us and not nationwide. Based on what Europe has seen over the last couple of years, it’s not unreasonable to think they’re at the beginning of a permanent climate change. While the early phases of that are hot, we have no way of knowing yet how that will play out long term. Climate is so complex and depends on the interplay of so many factors, that it’s hard to predict how things will end up. One theory says that global warming could bring the end or the significant decrease of the Gulf Stream system, ultimately resulting in a colder, dryer UK and western Europe. Whatever the end result, significant climate change in Europe would devastate the region’s agriculture and agribusiness.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good article on the California housing market. It could be another year before the market bottoms out here, but any drop in home values here isn’t going to make housing affordable for the average Californian. In some parts of the state that made suburbia famous, the days of single family housing construction are over.

William Rivers Pitt writes in a thoughtful piece on the Mooninite terror “hoax” in Boston (where he lives)that the Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of terror threats for political purposes while fomenting a war that will, inevitably, create more terrorists has left our younger generation in a bind: they know that a terror attack is likely and yet have reflexively grown to view terror warnings as a sucker’s game and one that you can’t fall for or take seriously. It’s also left a lot of our not so younger generation sitting with the idea in the back of our minds that the next terror attack is going to be the end of habeas corpus, posse comitatus, and constitutional rule in this country. That’s what he feared he may be seeing the beginning of when the media spent hours describing, but not showing pictures of “explosive devices” on highway overpasses and hospitals in Boston.

Nativism and anti-immigration sentiment is leading to a resurgence of the KKK, including many parts of the country outside of the South.

Don’t believe the hype that says we’ve hit a soft-landing in the real estate market. D.R. Horton is one of the nation’s largest homebuilders. In the 4th quarter of 2006, their cancellation rate was 40%. There’s currently $300 billion dollars worth of adjustable rate mortgages that are set to see their payments go up this year alone. Many of those payments could double. Housing prices in California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona could easily fall by another 10% or more over the next couple of years.

For the last few years, we’ve had to listen to self-righteous right wing assholes try to tell us that the war in Iraq isn’t about oil. No more.  Bush must be just about ready to wash his hands of Iraq if it’s finally time to push this law through. If the collaborationist government in Baghdad had any support left among the population, it’ll be gone after this. There’s little chance that this law will be upheld by whatever government(s) emerge from the Iraqi civil war. I doubt that Iraq will be in the same position to muscle their way out of it that Russia has been. There’s no doubt that the oil companies will be able to extort something pretty damn valuable from Iraq in the process.

I meant to comment a couple of days ago on a Truthout.org column about the top green tech ideas of 2006. I was reminded of that today while reading an article on the upcoming Motor City Auto Show. I’m just going to go ahead and post the most interesting section below:

Plug-In Hybrids and the V2G At the end of 2006, General Motors announced it would commit to manufacturing a plug-in hybrid vehicle. A plug-in hybrid adds a larger battery pack and a plug to charge the batteries with grid power, allowing the car to rely more on the electric drive and less on the fuel supply. A new study for the Department of Energy has found that we already have enough electrical generating capacity to power 84 percent of our 220 million vehicles if they were plug-in hybrids. That’s because our capacity is designed to meet peak power needs for air conditioning on hot afternoons, and when peak power is not needed there is plenty of spare capacity to charge electric car batteries.

This would be a bad trade-off where grid power is provided by coal. But ask not what grid can do for your car; rather, ask what your car can do for the grid.

The real promise of plug-in hybrids is using their batteries to stabilize a power grid that is supplied by renewable but variable wind and solar power. Dubbed “vehicle to grid,” or V2G for short, the idea is to use the combined storage power of 220 million mobile battery packs to buffer the grid whenever the vehicles are not in use. Vehicles would absorb excess power at night or on sunny or windy days. The vehicle battery packs could then be tapped to help out during peak demand periods and a computerized “smart grid” would regulate it all. The potential is huge. Terry Penney, a technology manager at the National Renewable Energy Lab said, “if millions of these [plug-in hybrids] were produced, it would enable some of the renewable technologies to really take off.”