Just Like the Internet You See in the Movies

No Web sites that choke your browser. No waiting for YouTube clips to buffer. No email attachments too big to send. No files that take forever to download. No "Loading - please wait" messages, or spinning beach balls, or slowwwwly lengthening bars meant to tame your mounting impatience.

That's how the Internet works in the movies. On laptops and cell phones and the rest of the small screens we watch on the big screen, the Internet is a tantalizingly perfected version of the hiccupping marvel we know now.

In a handful of years at most, the blinding speed and reliability we see in the movies will be available here in reality. Too bad it won't be available on the Internet.

Last week, Google and Verizon announced their plans for the future. Their message was that if you want to do the cool stuff in real life that Tom Cruise and Matt Damon do online in the movies, you're going to have to buy a subscription to the other Internet, the superduper one that the telecom and wireless giants are going to build next.

When Profit is your Motive you get Cheaper wells

WSJ Analysis Shows Oil Giant Used 'Risky' Design More Often Than Most Peers

In recent years, oil giant BP PLC used a well design that has been called "risky" by Congressional investigators in more than one out of three of its deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico, significantly more often than most peers, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data shows.

MAIN STREET VS. WALL STREET:

 For nearly two years after a global financial crisis shook the world, progressives in Congress have been hard at work overhauling the nation's financial regulatory system to address the concerns of hard-working Americans. Progressives have fought hard to make the legislation as tough as possible, pushing for provisions that would rein in abusive practices by the credit card industry, stop financial institutions from "trading taxpayer money for their own profit," audit the Federal Reserve, and break up big banks so that they could never again grow large enough to endanger the world economy.

Bailouts and Bucks

Walk down Bank Street


Rich CEO and paycuts?

The People Versus The Powerful

As BP CEO Tony Hayward testified before Congress yesterday, oil continued to gush into the Gulf of Mexico for the 58th day after the oil rig his company operated exploded and initiated the largest oil spill in U.S. history. While many lawmakers used this opportunity to press Hayward on his company's incompetence and malfeasance, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP for the White House's efforts to make sure the oil giant compensates the victims. Barton's stunning apology to a giant foreign oil corporation that has

devastated the Gulf Coast economy is emblematic of a larger philosophical divide in U.S. politics. On issue after issue, progressives have fought to hold big corporations accountable, stand by everyday Americans struggling to create a better life for themselves, and create a more just America for all. Conservatives, on the other hand, have aligned themselves with the nation's most powerful interests -- Big Oil, Wall Street, insurance companies, labor rights violators, and others whose mantra may as well be "greed is good." At stake in the battle between these two sides is the very idea of the American Dream -- that anyone who plays by the rules and works hard will succeed. The question Americans must ask of their politicians is clear: Which side are you on -- the people or the powerful?