FCC allows Hundreds of New Low-Power FM stations

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a decision yesterday which paves the way for hundreds of new community radio stations to start broadcasting on low-power FM signals.  This is excellent news.  More stations, more competition, more jobs — right?

A few giant broadcasting conglomerates — e.g. Clear Channel — have been strangling the “public” airwaves for years, with the same five songs played over and over and over and the same talk radio inbreds spewing their bilge in every square inch of the country.  In a lot of non-urban areas, radio listeners’ “choices” come down to just one or two mega-corporate stations.  You can listen to either Rush Limbaugh OR Laura Ingraham — your cup runneth over.

And now, finally, listeners will have some REAL choices.  The Prometheus Radio Project has been pushing for this FCC ruling, and now it’s a reality.  The Prometheus Radio Project’s policy director said:

“These new, low power stations can only be licensed to non-profit organizations, and you can only have one per customer.  That way we won’t have these big corporate chains and media networks that are taking over the rest of the media landscape moving in on low power FM service. These stations have to be local, and they have to be independent. This clears the way for a real transformation of the FM dial.”

Works for me.

And there’s more good news from the FCC:  This isn’t a done deal yet, but the FCC is planning to create a website that will publicize TV stations’ records of which political groups purchased ads on each station and how much they paid.   Rep. John Dingell said:

“We desperately need openness.  We’ve got a bunch of billionaires and millionaires who are pouring millions of dollars into the elections of this country, and to these super-PACs, with nobody having the vaguest idea of who they are, what they’re up to, what they want or what would be the consequences of it.’’

A spokesperson for the Campaign Legal Center said providing this information online would “reveal the true interests behind the purchases.”

Fewer College Graduates Seeking Wall Street Careers

It’s about time.  This trend won’t show any immediate results, but ultimately this can only be a good thing.

There have been countless articles describing America’s brain drain.  Until a few years ago, the best and brightest would gravitate to a career in science, medicine, inventing something, building something, providing a service.  In a word, something useful.

There have been other articles warning us that when the financial sector — i.e. playing with other people’s money — has become a country’s largest industry, it’s a screaming red flag for that country.

And now — finally! — this dangerous trend is reversing.  This has been simmering for awhile, but it came to a boil with the recent New York Times column by Greg Smith, formerly of Goldman Sachs.  His public resignation letter / op-ed piece included: “I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

As Kevin Roose writes in the linked article:

“College students who were once attracted to prestigious banks like moths to bonfires are increasingly turning to other industries in search of success.”

An anthropology professor who has studied the Wall Street culture said:

“Everything from Occupy Wall Street to larger critical discourses of ‘fat cats,’ all of that has had some trickle-down effect to young people.”

At this year’s SXSW in Austin, there was a panel titled “Keeping Kids off the Street: Wall St. vs. Start-ups.”

In 2008 — before the Wall Street meltdown — 28% of Harvard’s graduating class went into finance.  Last year that number fell to 17%.

This sentiment was articulated by a business student at the University of Texas at Austin:

“I have no interest in working at Goldman.  I want to build something. I don’t want to be working in an industry that effectively leeches off other industries.  It’s not creative enough for me.”

Perhaps the most telling of all:  In a survey of 6,700 young professionals, respondents ranked Google, Apple and Facebook as the companies they’d most like to work for.  The highest-ranking bank — JPMorgan Chase — came in at #41.

Crash and burn, Motherfuckers.

Unions and Watchdog Groups to Shine Light on Corporate Cockroaches

Maybe cockroaches aren’t a good comparison. Unlike the six-legged variety, it’s not enough to turn on the lights and send the corporate cockroach scurrying back into the walls.

Corporate cockroaches — i.e. corporations and organizations that make secret undisclosed bribes and “campaign contributions” — need to be yanked out of their hiding places and revealed to the public. Voters have a right to know the identities of these anonymous cowards who are purchasing elections right out from under them.

Common Cause, Public Citizen, the SEIU and the Occupy Movement are teaming up for Operation Lift Up the Rock and See What’s Crawling Underneath It.

Super-PACs are required to disclose their donors’ identities. But the 501(c) non-profit groups that are affiliated with super-PACs are NOT required to disclose this information. There’s the rub.

Americans United for Change has offered $25,000 to the first whistleblower who proves that a company has donated to a 501(c) without disclosing it. Let’s hope this isn’t a one-time offer. Come on, smoke out the vermin.

Public advocate Bill de Blasio said:

“We’re going to challenge those donations. We’re going to challenge efforts to hide donations through (c)4s and (c)6s.”

He also referred to a 2010 boycott against Target for making secret donations:

“What happened to Target was child’s play compared to the strength that all of these organizations can bring to bear against companies that decide they’re going against the people’s will and involve themselves unduly in the political process.”

The executive director of Health Care for America Now said companies that make secret contributions are endangering their own reputation, their brand:

“If corporations want to use corporate dollars to influence elections, we will expose them. They will do so at their own risk. The groups represented in our coalition … all have different programs that will inflict economic damage on offending companies.”

Common Cause will be organizing rallies against secret donations at upcoming shareholder meetings of Target, 3M and Bank of America.

Common Cause and Public Citizen are also urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to require that all publicly traded companies disclose all of their political donations.

Go get ‘em! Or as the Teabaggers say, “We’re taking back our country!”

Mass Honeybee Die-off — Colony Collapse Disorder — Caused by Insecticides

For years, authorities have been dumbfounded (or were they?) by the mass die-off of millions of bees.  What could be causing this?

And now the results are in:  Insecticides have been linked to colony collapse disorder.  Specifically it’s the Neonicotinoid Insecticides that are used on corn.  The seeds are sprayed with these insecticides before being planted.

This information is from a study titled “Assessment of the Environmental Exposure of Honeybees to Particulate Matter Containing Neonicotinoid Insecticides Coming from Corn Coated Seeds” and has been published by the American Chemical Society.

OK, so now that we have this information, what are we going to do?  Which will be the higher priority:  Saving the ecosystems and food supplies that are dependent on honeybees?  Or making sure that Big Ag doesn’t have to suffer any inconvenience?

Perhaps Big Ag — via their prostitutes in Congress — will demand further study before making any rash decisions.  Some new corporate front groups might start orchestrating huge spontaneous demonstrations on behalf of the “family farm.”

There could be a massive smear campaign against bee-huggers and those nefarious socialists who want to take over America’s agriculture.

Or maybe our leaders will do the right thing.  (Riiight.)

In any case, we have the information now.  What will we do with it?

President Romney Will Self-Destruct in 5, 4, 3...

The Mitt Romneybot must have short-circuited yesterday during a Fox News interview.  So much for Fox News being a “shill” for Romney.

Megyn Kelly was asking Romney some “unusually combative questions” about his numerous flipflops on Obomneycare and his trouble connecting with conservatives and non-millionaires.  At one point Romney couldn’t handle it any longer and sputtered:  “Megyn, guess what? I made a lot of money… I'm not going to apologize for that.”

Whoa!  Have you ever heard such a stirring speech?  Move over JFK and FDR.

(The linked article has some YouTube excerpts of Romney’s interview.)

One journalist said:  “Now we know what it looks like when a robot initiates a self-destruct sequence.”

Somebody else commented:  “Why on Earth does he save his worst performances for the network most watched by Republican voters he's trying to court?”

And my favorite description:  “Should Romney win the GOP nomination, Obama's campaign should just play this video on a loop for the rest of the year.”

Bill Donohue to Rape Victims: “Bend Over Again. And LIKE it.”

According to Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, the world’s most pressing issue is the jillions of sexual abuse cases by Catholic priests.  No, not the abuse itself — that’s no biggie.

The REAL problem is those sniveling victims who were assaulted by priests, and the huge settlements the Catholic Church has had to pay.

Donohue told the New York Times that the church “has been too quick to write a check” to these victims, and that the church should fight all of these cases “one by one.”

He also said Catholic bishops should “toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough” in the fight against their victims.

Bill Donohue’s current mission is to go after the victims’ advocacy group Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).  Donohue’s lawyers — YOUR tax dollars at work — are demanding “more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.”

These subpoenas are calculated to sabotage SNAP’s advocacy work, and possibly bankrupt the organization.  Donohue describes SNAP as “a menace to the Catholic church.”

A reporter was hoping to get an interview with Bill Donohue, but several young boys had just been escorted into Donohue’s office a few minutes earlier, and Donohue was temporarily, uhh, unavailable for comment.

Natural Resources vs. Resourceful People

It’s official:  There really IS an inverse ratio between a country’s abundance of natural resources (more specifically, that country’s dependence on drilling/mining every last drop of those resources) and the inventiveness, resourcefulness of the people in that country.

At one end of the spectrum you have Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Israel and Hong Kong.  Each one of these countries has few (in some cases, zero) natural resources, a highly educated population and a booming economy.

Qatar and Kazakhstan are at the opposite end of the spectrum:  tons of oil and pisspoor test scores.

As Thomas Friedman says about Taiwan:

“Rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has completed a study of sixty-five countries.  They’ve found a solid correlation between each country’s  15-year-old students’ test scores in math, science and reading comprehension — and the percentage of that country’s G.D.P. that comes from natural resource extraction.

According to Andreas Schleicher, who oversaw the study, the results indicate:

“…a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from natural resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population…Today’s learning outcomes at school are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

And:

“In countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. ... Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”

Well, let’s be grateful that at least some of the world is on the right track.

Meanwhile, here we are, closing libraries and cutting education funding down to the marrow.

Ready now:  one, two, three…Dril Heer Dril Now.

Peter Bergman — Firesign Theater

Peter Bergman, one of the founding members of Firesign Theater, passed away this past Friday.

I never knew the names of any of the members of Firesign Theater.  But their records were just a total mindfuck.  Their skits were a rapidfire barrage of puns, puns within puns, puns segueing into further puns, non sequiturs and obscure references that would have you laughing yourself into a knot and simultaneously going “Huh?  What was that?  Wait, what?”

If Cheech and Chong were “hard rock comedy” (as rock critics described them back then), Firesign Theater were avant-garde jazz comedy; stream-of-consciousness comedy.  Or something.

The only album of theirs I had was “I think we’re all Bozos on this Bus.”  I could practically lip-synch along with it from playing it so many times.

Their other works included “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?” and “Everything You Know is Wrong.”

R.I.P.

Finally! A Practical Solution to the “Voter Fraud” Problem

The Minnesota state legislature is about to pass another assembly-line Voter ID law.  Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie are opposed to this law.  They’ve come up with their own idea instead — a simple method that would eliminate voter fraud WITHOUT disenfranchising anyone.

Polling places would have access to an electronic poll book.  Voters who don’t have an ID card could have their information pulled up from state computers.  Poll workers could easily verify whether or not the person actually is who he says he/she is.  The voter’s driver’s license would be scanned in, or any other ID card with a picture.  If someone has no picture ID whatsoever, they could take this person’s photo right there at the polling booth and scan that in.

Mark Ritchie said this procedure would be a lot less expensive than the Voter ID laws that are being passed in lockstep throughout the red states, as well as not disenfranchising anyone.  He said:

“We would not be disenfranchising anybody and we would not be breaking the bank.”

Presto!  Solomon himself couldn’t have come up with a more sensible solution.  We now have a simple pragmatic way to eliminate voter fraud and simultaneously make sure no eligible voters are denied the right to vote.

Isn’t this great?!?!?!?!?

Surely, Republicans are in favor of this.  After all, their stated reason for their Voter ID fixation has been their genuine fear that an ineligible voter might be able to vote.

And now — problem solved.  It’s a Win Win.

So, the GOP is on board with this, right?  Right???  I mean, they certainly wouldn’t have some sort of hidden unstated reason for pushing these Voter ID laws.

Would they????

Join Lawsuit Against Obamacare, Then Go Bankrupt from Medical Expenses

OUCH!  Talk about taking one for the team.

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida resident, became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

According to a spokesperson:

“She doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it.”

First things first — why spend money on health insurance when you can spend it on an exciting high-profile lawsuit instead?

Last Fall Mary Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy.  They have $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.

Jane Perkins, a health law expert in North Carolina, said:

“This is so ironic.  It just shows that all Americans inevitably have a need for health care. Somebody has paid for her health care costs. And she is now among the 62% whose personal bankruptcy was attributable in part to medical bills.”

It's not nice to point out someone's personal problems just to make a political point, but...