John Robb has an "inside source" that says the 82nd Airborne will be deployed to Lebanon soon. This echoes speculation in Harpers that US Forces will be put in due to a lack of other countries feeling like putting their kids on the line to solve other peoples' problems.

Robb:

However, that won't work since Hezbollah won't comply. Their guerrillas will fight the effort and missiles will continue to fly. The result will be a widening of the war to include Syria and Iran to get at the "real sources" of the conflict...

This is something to watch for. This is something we should try NOT to do as a country. There's no benefit to us to getting involved here as a third party, and plenty of danger. Sadly, I think the political dynamics here are such that there will be no major mainstream opposition to such a deployment, and non-establishment action (e.g. protest, etc) won't start hitting where it hurts until things widen futher and there's a need for a draft or something. At which point...

Sweet light crude:

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSa.L) beat forecasts on Thursday with a 36 percent rise in second-quarter profits, boosting its shares, as high oil prices more than compensated for disappointing production news.

Investors were also cheered by Shell's reaffirmation that it was sticking to its 2006 and 2007 spending plans, despite rampant sector cost inflation.

ConocoPhillips also boosted quarterly profit, making more than $2B more than in the same period in 2005.

With that, and the previous news on BP, I'll bet ExxonMobil and Chevron/Texaco turn in bumper quarterly earnings reports too. Two years ago would have been a great time to buy Oil Futures. Thankfully that kind of investment is out of reach of normal people and most mutual funds. Only for the big boys, you know?

The numbers are looking promising for the Democrats to be able to build some power this fall (addl. Kos analysis). If you're at all interested, check this stuff out.

That's important. It means there's a decent chance we'll finally put a check on the Bush administration, perhaps even start some investigations. If things go well it will mean building a national progressive consensus around key issues. Health Care will get another shot if we can put together two winning cycles in a row (e.g. gain ground this fall and then take either the White House or Congress in '08).

My advice for you? Get savvy on your representatives. This fall's action is going to be faught in over four-hundred 500,000-person districts. It's going to mean a lot of local nuance, which is where grassroots participation can make the biggest impact. There's also probably some important action at the state/county/city level. The best strategy here is to flood the zone; to push forward on every front and juice turnout as much as possible. At the very least get registered and vote Democrat in the fall, and try to get your friends to do the same. If you're on board for the slow-steady takeover of the government (e.g. you really want that Health Care, out of Iraq, etc), then find a campaign (even a long-shot) and get directly involved.

Getting involved is actually doubly important. It's necessary if the change is to happen, and should Dems indeed put together a comeback with our help, they're going to start getting more and more of that corporate slush money. HMOs, Big Pharma, and the Insurance Rackets all give to the GOP about 2-to-1, but that ratio will probably change if there's a transfer of power. People power will be critical in keeping 'em honest.

Power and Free Markets, a good post for those wondering whether there's a connection between turing over public goods, services and utilities to private corporations, and all the blackouts this summer. Hint: yes.

Trad media talking heads are hostile to Stephen Colbert for the same reasons columnists are hostile to bloggers: they're facing competition from strangers who are pitching a product that hits above the brain-stem, and people are responding. It's pretty alarming how most members of the Press (I'm thinking in particular of the I've heard Mark Halperin of ABC's "The Note" say) view themselves as producers of a commercial product, with a pretty dim assessment of their "consumers."

It's a post-consumer era, mi amigos. Take a minute and let it sink in.

Bonus link: Matt Stoller pens a great piece in Net Neutrality.

Trad media talking heads are hostile to Stephen Colbert for the same reasons columnists are hostile to bloggers: they're facing competition from strangers who are pitching a product that hits above the brain-stem, and people are responding. It's pretty alarming how most members of the Press (I'm thinking in particular of the I've heard Mark Halperin of ABC's "The Note" say) view themselves as producers of a commercial product, with a pretty dim assessment of their "consumers."

It's a post-consumer era, mi amigos. Take a minute and let it sink in.

Bonus link: Matt Stoller pens a great piece in Net Neutrality.

Jerebus:

The UN in Lebanon says the Israeli air force destroyed [an] observer post, in which four military observers were sheltering.

It said the four, from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, had taken shelter in a bunker under the post after it was earlier shelled 14 times by Israeli artillery.

A rescue team was also shelled as it tried to clear the rubble.

Beyond being tragic, this seems so blindingly stupid. Abulances have been hit too (photo), along with power plants, sewer systems, trucks full of food, and plenty of other stuff that doesn't make much damn sense to me.

It's hard to even imagine what the hell is supposed to be accomplished here. The Hez dropping rockets on a train yard is just as bad, but the motives there are at least clearer: provokation. This just is senseless. It's out of control. Terrible.

....

Billmon:

Morality aside (since terror now seems to be the order of the day on both sides) this is a very bad sign for the Israelis. It has the smell of panic about it. It's like the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi -- an exercise that served no rational purpose other than to vent Richard Nixon's rage at his own inability to bend the North Vietnamese government to his will.

The difference is that Nixon could get away with it -- he'd just won a landslide re-election, and the destruction of Hanoi wasn't being covered in real time by every television network on the planet.

I hope that the sheer brutal idiocy of all this forces everyone to step back, but I fear that with so many egos (personal and national) on the line, the response from the People In Charge will be to push further forward, to escalate again in some way.

More atronomical profits for Petrochemical companies:

Profits are pouring in at the BP Group... the company announced a profit of $7.27 billion in the second quarter, 30 percent more than the comparable period a year ago and the equivalent of more than $55,000 a minute.

Looks like another record-breaking year is shaping up for Big Oil.

In keeping with my previous note about the emergent global aristocracy, here's something. Rich, Poor Live Poles Apart in L.A. as Middle Class Keeps Shrinking:

Demographers at Wayne State University in Detroit recently found Greater Los Angeles to be the most economically segregated region in the country. The study found only about 28% of its neighborhoods to be middle-class or mixedincome, compared with more than half of those in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

More than two-thirds of L.A.-area residents live in neighborhoods that are solidly rich or poor, according to the analysis, which is based on 2000 census data. That share has been steadily growing for three decades...

I find John (who I got this link from) Robb's analysis of this sort of thing compelling. Whatever the long-run effects, one of the near-term outcomes of ecoonomic globalization is likely to be that patterns of wealth distribution become more and more normalized worldwide. This is somewhat different from the idea that global wages and standards of living will reach an equilibrium, and it seems to be coming true. Even the EU is seeing movement towards an hourglass-type distribution.

I think this relationship is unstable and likely to produce some significant turbulence if (when?) the current consensual hallucination of international finance is broken. It would be better if we were pushing more towards a bell-curve, but we're not. "Every one of the 100 metropolitan regions [reaserchers] looked at has grown more economically segregated over the last 30 years."

It's a long-term thing that spans generations, but the longer we wait to turn it around soon the more shocking and disruptive the inevitable realignment will likely be.

BLS Numbers, via the Agonist:

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 105.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $659 in the second quarter of 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

That 4.0 inflation excludes energy prices. So not counting increased costs of gasoline, electricity, natural gas and heating oil, wage-earning people (that's all of us non-CEOs) saw our real pay decline by 2.5% in the past year.

But we got rid of that estate tax, so things are bound to pick up soon.

It boggles my mind how blind most people in the corporate/government/media power elite are to the dangers of our current economic situation. We've got income inequality the likes of which we haven't seen since right before the damn depression, personal debt levels (mortgage and credit cards) the likes of which we haven't seen since, well, ever, and an economy that's based on "financial products," cheap oil, and crappily-made shit from China that we sell out of giant concrete boxes.

This is the kind of thing people talk about when they use the term "house of cards." It won't be appocalyptic if (when) it collapses, but it would be a hell of a lot better if this was something we did intentionally rather than just playing Jenga as long as we can.