Back in March, I diaried about some weird charges on my AT&T bill. In the process I discovered the crusty world of "cramming" - the practice of using a 3rd-party biller to passthrough fraudulent charges onto your phone bill.  Just like last time, I see a final page at the end of my bill that contains an itemized list of charges processed by "OAN Services, Inc", with this month's fraudulent charge being for the "service" of "Premium Voice Mail, Inc 1X Setup Fee" for $15.74. I have never ever heard of either company and certainly did not order any voice mail services, as I have a perfectly good answering machine that costs nothing per month.

By WeBuyItGreen: promoting green living and fair trade

This is the first in a five-part series of articles that compare three alternatives to the traditional coffee trade industry:  fair trade, direct trade, and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. program.  However, before we compare these three alternatives to one another, let’s take a look at why fair trade coffee was created in the first place.  What conditions in the traditional coffee industry have created the need for fair trade, or some alternative that resembles it?

The economy is sinking as two more banks with 28 branches in Nevada, Arizona and California are taken over by the FDIC.

When I was growing up as a young Republican dork, I was told that "regulation" was a bad word. Sensible people were for less government regulation. Socialists were for more government regulation because they liked big government controlling the markets and your life. And most of all they loved red tape that inhibited business.

And to this day, I still shudder when I hear the word "regulation." It sounds so nasty and socialist. That's the power of brainwashing.

Here's the only problem - it turns out you totally and completely need regulation. Without government regulation, the excesses of the market go unchecked and we constantly have financial meltdowns. Kind of like ... now.

Fanny and Freddie prove that Democratic regulation is usually a good thing.

It has finally happened, one huge industry is taking a progressive stance.  The airline industry sent me an email asking my support.

I find this pretty ironic.  one industry asking me to help regulate another industry.

(Treading on thin ice.)

Let me start out by saying gun bans aren't the answer. Regulation and other incentives are.

At issue isn't legal gun ownership. That is, and always will
be, a protected right under the second amendment. As long as you're not
a crazy, or a criminal, you can have a stockpile.

The problem is with the NRA's stance for the total deregulation of guns.

Deregulation is what happened, on a larger scale, with nuclear weapons. It promotes the escalation of weaponry. "If the criminals carry knives, I'll carry a hand gun. If the criminals are carrying hand guns than I'll carry a rifle. If the criminals are carrying a rifle, I'll carry a machine gun." Where does this stop? When everybody is counting the silos in their backyards or has the biggest wall?

(More Below)

I stumbled onto an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic which discussed one of the places in the West Virginia Panhandle, where I live, that I have shopped at: the local Wal-Mart.

Or, as he put it, the "crappiest Wal-Mart in America".  An exerpt:

If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here.

John McCain's chief economic adviser helped create what Olbermann calls "a legalized form of insider trading". This is a pretty in-depth report with a lot of details that shows how the road to four dollar gas begins with a little company called Enron (remember them?).

Keith Olbermann looks at the infamous "Enron Loophole" and how McCain Senior Advisor Phil Gramm is highly involved in policies that screwed the public for corporate / financial gain. They were able to take advantage of post-9/11 confusion and were awarded deregulation across the energy market.

Take a look at Countdown's special report and weigh in with your own thoughts and opinions below:

Well, it turns out the reluctance of Bush's skeleton-crew Commodities Futures Trading Commission to investigate the causes of the oil-price spike, much less to take action, is allowing "hedge funds and big Wall Street banks" to buy up oil contracts at rate that has made their demand for oil contracts comparable to the increase in demand attributable to China(!) over the last five years, with consequences that are likely to be devastating for the rest of us...

Scott McClellan’s Revelations

LACK OF OVERSIGHT – A FATAL FLAW

With ex-White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s recent about face, and the publication of his book "WHAT HAPPENED?" which describes a lot of his life in the bush White House for three years, the American population is finally able to draw a more reasonable breath.  I use that metaphor, because, as Keith Olbermann alluded, most Americans simply didn’t believe the degree of the republican excesses since January of 2001.  Most of us were just wishing he and his Administration would go away, collectively holding our breath.

When Bill Moyers' had Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds, as his guest last Friday night, it served to bring considerable solace to this citizen of the republic.  I thought I was the only one (never an accurate thought) to be driven to the brink of madness by the ubiquity of television advertising for prescription drugs.  Ms. Petersen has come to specialize in the crimes against the U.S. citizenry perpetrated by the drug industry.  Some of what she reveals will come as no surprise given the advertising budget of the large drug companies, namely, that we use more drugs than a host of other major nations combined.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised by anything that U.S. corporations are free to do at this point, but another of her revelations was even more stunning.   The United States is one of only two nations that allow television advertising for prescription drugs, the other being New Zealand, one of our British cousins.  More and more, it is becoming clear that American "exceptionalism" is synonymous with corporate theft.

Free markets are mostly a very good thing.  But when the concept is
applied to life supporting less elastic essential resources, the problem
of the ego and the desire for power overcomes the good that would
otherwise flow from such unfettered pursuit of "happiness"/"property".

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current fiasco of oil prices.
Having compiled wealth into the hands of the few, the few are now waging
a feudal war for control of the life's blood of the planet:

"'free trade' -- despite the well meaning wishes of the idealists --
ends up concentrating wealth and power into the hands of the greedy-
selfish" says retrogrouch.....

"We're all tainted by the millions and millions of dollars that were contributed by Enron executives," John McCain told CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. McCain then acknowledged receiving $9,500 from Enron in two campaigns.

http://www.time.com/...

McCain took Enron's money because he is a fairly poor individual earning just $405,000, much less than Barack and Michelle Obama who earned over $4 million last year.  Of course, Barack's wife doesn't loan him the family jet for campaigning since they don't own one.  McCain's wife Cindy, who's tax returns are "confidential", has a fortune estimated at $100 million and loaned John the jet regularly.  If you look at McCain's family wealth, he is in the top 1% of Senators, making the other 99 Senators poor in comparison.

Obama, by the way, is not tainted by Enron, since he wasn't in the Senate to receive the handouts.  His campaign funding comes mostly from small contributors like you and me.  That's what inspires me to believe in his ability to enact reform.  He isn't tainted.

Obama's speech below:

This will be the last bubble but no more are needed. Having concentrated wealth into the top 1% of the people on earth we have economic feudalism  where the fight is over the ownership of the world's oil supplies.  The price of oil is not a reflection of supply and demand in anything even remotely resembling a "free market" . It is the hoarding and withholding of non-produced fixed supply resources in pursuit of power.  The ownership of oil is more concentrated than it has ever been in that the unregulated but enforced futures markets make it entirely possible and legal to exercise sufficient control over supplies to wage economic warfare for control of the world.

MSNBC has two Nobel Prize economists on right now. They were asked which of the three - Obama, Clinton or McCain - would be best for the economy, and both replied Obama.

Joseph Stiglitz, who was connected to the Clinton presidency and a 2001 prize winner, said that Obama's speech 3 weeks ago on the economy was brilliant. He also said that the deregulation of the markets during Clinton's presidency was a mistake and the markets need to be re-regulated.

Edmund Phelps, 2006 prize winner, agreed. We need a new way of looking at the economy and Obama is the one that can do that. We do not need the thinking of the past.

What great endorsements there!
Stiglitz bio
Phelps bio
Per FlDem5 Video of show
Per ManahManah Obama's speech

I've just finished an extraordinarily entertaining and enlightening book, Charlatan, by Pope Brock.

It's about the Golden Age of Quackery, of American medical regulations in the 1920's and '30's.

And what on earth does it have to do with deregulation and The Law of Unintended Consequences?

It has everything to do with what we struggle for today.

To the Flipmobile!