It’s well known that the FCC is having so-called “stakeholder meetings” with the big phone and cable companies about their proposed “third way” to reclassify broadband Internet and codify net neutrality rules, which would allow the FCC to protect the Internet for consumers. These meetings, coming in the wake of the court case that essentially took away the FCC’s authority to protect the Internet and implement the National Broadband Plan, have included all the big phone and cable giants – AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and the like – but have excluded consumer groups who are advocating for protection against these corporate behemoths.

Most observers see these meetings as the prelude to the collapse. The FCC will meet with the big corporations, they’ll come to an agreement behind closed doors, and eventually, the FCC will put forward net neutrality and other regulations that are either so full of loopholes as to be nonfunctional or absent altogether. In other words, most people think these meetings are where deals to sell out the Internet to big companies are made.

It’s certainly possible that these meetings are exactly that, despite denials from the FCC. But what if they’re something different?

I got a call yesterday from a telecommunications lobbyist who had an interesting and very plausible theory: What if Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is simply running out the clock?

The New York Times turns over valuable op-ed space to a former Bush OMB official who uses it to obscure it was his and OMB’s job to oversee how effective Interior and Minerals Management Service (MMS) were in promoting and regulating offshore oil drilling.

Some news media portray the financial reform deal as “sweeping” but is it?

For some 30 years, many Americans have supported the low-regulation policies of Ronald Reagan. Now we are paying a huge price.

After 30 years of deregulation, it’s time for a top to bottom review to see whether there are other BP-type disasters lurking out there in the deregulated economy.

During the era of deregulation that has so damaged this country environmentally and financially, as well as in all manner of legal precedents, has brought on disaster in the gulf. The disaster would be worse than we can imagine if nuclear contamination were so unleashed as oil has been. The precedent of unsafe operation that was certified and guaranteed by oil companies to be harmless should provide a huge incentive to insure the safety of our world by intensifying the effort to contain vastly more deadly nuclear waste.

Warren Buffet gave a prophetic pronouncement back in 2003 about the Derivatives market, seeing the exponential dangers of this “paper-thin” type of investment.

Buffet did not mince words. He called them “financial weapons of mass destruction“:

Buffett warns on investment ‘time bomb’
BBC – 4 March, 2003

The derivatives market has exploded in recent years, with investment banks selling billions of dollars worth of these investments to clients as a way to off-load or manage market risk.

But Mr Buffett argues that such highly complex financial instruments are time bombs and “financial weapons of mass destruction” that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system.
[...]

Some derivatives contracts, Mr Buffett says, appear to have been devised by “madmen”. [...]

BBC Link

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger

Congress returns from its April recess this week with financial reform at the top of its to-do list. With millions of Americans still bearing the brunt of the worst recession in 80 years, Congress needs to start protecting our economy from Wall Street excess, and repair the shredded social safety net that has allowed the Great Recession to exact a devastating human cost.

Big banks are an economic parasite

‘Proprietary trading’ – The use of client funds to work against client interests ought to be illegal. The right wing is representing criminal activity. What they like to present as free enterprise is freedom from the rule of law. Deregulation has been used by those who call themselves ‘conservative’ to enable outright robbery of the constituents they are sworn, and paid, to protect.

Government regulators are like the referees in any sports game. They are supposed to make sure there is fair competition and everyone plays by the rules. Without refs you can’t really have a fair game, you would pretty much have anarchy.

So, for example, if Toyota is making cars that speed out of control until they crash, you would need a government regulator or ref to make sure that doesn’t happen. We also need refs to make sure that the food we eat is safe and the drugs we take don’t kill us.