From: Jean Hudon
Obama To Reportedly Nominate Former Telecom Lobbyist Tom Wheeler As FCC Chair
The White House will reportedly confirm that former telecommunications lobbyist Tom Wheeler will be nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission. Current FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will act as interim chairman while outgoing Chair Julius Genachowski enjoys his luxurious new life as a fellow at the Aspen Institute policy think tank. A decade ago, before he was a venture capitalist at Washington D.C.'s Core Capital Partners, Wheeler helped telecommunications companies secure more wireless spectrum and protected them against lawmakers who wanted to ban cell phones in public areas for fear of radiation. CLIP
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/
Sources: Obama will name former telecom lobbyist Tom Wheeler as FCC head (April 30, 2013)
The White House will soon name former telecommunications industry lobbyist and businessman Tom Wheeler as the head of the Federal Communications Commission, sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to The Verge. President Obama is expected to make the announcement on Wednesday, setting the stage for Wheeler to replace the outgoing Julius Genachowski. Wheeler currently works with venture capital group Core Capital, but he spent over a decade as head of the CTIA wireless industry group, leaving in 2004. Before that, he served as president of the National Cable Television Association. A 2002 Los Angeles Times profile describes Wheeler as "the rock star of telecom," crediting him with helping to fuel a major spectrum expansion for the mobile phone industry. He's also not a surprise pick for the FCC chairmanship, either. Similarly to Genachowski, who helped with Barack Obama's campaign, Wheeler was named as a member of Obama's Presidential transition effort following the 2008 election; his name was floated as a possible replacement not long after Genachowski stepped down in March. So far, responses from public interest groups have been mixed. Free Press said that "on paper" Tom Wheeler did not look like someone who would "stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest," but Public Knowledge - which characterized Genachowski's tenure as "one of missed opportunities" - had more praise to offer. "Some have expressed concern about Tom's past history as the head of two industry trade associations," wrote Public Knowledge head Gigi Sohn. "But his past positions should be seen in light of the times and in the context of his other important experiences and engagement with policy.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/
Obama to Name Tom Wheeler as New FCC Chairman
WASHINGTON -- President Obama is expected to nominate Tom Wheeler, a technology investor and former head of two major trade associations, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, according to the Wall Street Journal. Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement: "The Federal Communications Commission needs a strong leader - someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest. On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations. But he now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong, clean up the mess left by his predecessor, and be the public servant we so badly need at the FCC. "The FCC faces significant challenges - and historic opportunities - and Mr. Wheeler has a unique opportunity to address those issues, ranging from Net Neutrality and broadband competition to media diversity and election-ad transparency. He will face challenges from powerful companies to the most basic consumer protections and help determine whether the free and open Internet stays that way. We hope that he will embrace the FCC's mission and fight for policies that foster genuine competition, promote diversity and amplify local voices."There is a much to be done - and the honeymoon will be short - but we look forward to working with Mr. Wheeler and the other commissioners at the FCC to engage the public and make policies that truly benefit all Americans."
You Should Care That Obama Is Going to Pick Tom Wheeler to Head the FCC
Start reading from HERE in George Carlo's book Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age, and you'll see what a powerful enemy Obama is choosing against those who are sick and tired of the negationist stance of the wireless industry...
Wheeler will certainly uphold the recent FCC's decision...
FCC looks into cell phone radiation, decides to keep limitations same as before (Mar 30th 2013)
http://www.slashgear.com/fcc-
In 2012, the Government Accountability Office released a report after spending a year researching the health aspects of cell phone usage that stated the radiation limit needed to be reevaluated, the first time such a required had been made in nearly two decades. At the time of the report, the FCC had the SAR (specific absorption rate) set at 1.6W/kg. The FCC reevaluated the radiation limit after the report was published, and has now published its own response, in which it states that the SAR limit is staying the same as it has been for many years. However, all is not staying unchanged. Per the report, the outer part of the ear has been reclassified as an extremity, a designation that legally allows it to absorb more radiation under current specifications. The effects of cell phone radiation on humans is mostly unknown, but is typically regarded to be safe and to not cause some of the speculated conditions that populate conspiracy boards. Still, more research is needed on RF radiation and its potential health effects, something that could be prodded by the ever-increasing use of smartphones in our digital, mobile world.
http://www.truthdig.com/
Politics: Everything is Rigged: The Biggest Financial Scandal Yet (APRIL 25, 2013 )
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three - and perhaps as many as 16 - of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history - MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets." That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks - including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland - that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates.
(...) The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing - and it's only just coming into view.This story is from the May 9th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
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