Transatlantic cable
March 2014
47
Even so, Mr Obama was able to point to a pilot project in
Youngstown, Ohio, that he said had turned a shuttered
factory into a lab where workers were honing skills in
three-dimensional printing.
Of related interest…
The Cleveland International Fund takes advantage of a
federal programme that enables a wealthy foreigner to gain
an expedited visa to the US in return for an investment of
$500,000 or more. Cited as a national model, the fund seeks
out immigrant investors and connects them to job-creating
projects in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County. The e ort has helped to
build a hotel and an o ce tower and to fund expansions at a
hospital. Robert L Smith, who covers economic development
for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, reported that the fund was
founded in 2010 by an entrepreneur who went to prison for
fraud. Its executives took ownership and, in 2012, with the
support of Cleveland business leaders, they gained federal
approval to resume matching investors with local initiatives
that need nancing. (“International Investment Flows
into Cleveland,” 10
th
January). “The fund’s renewed e orts
to boost a Heartland economy with international money
impressed the consulting group,” Mr Smith wrote. “So did its
growing portfolio.”
In 2013, the fund attracted about $40 million from overseas
and has commitments for $90 million worth of local projects
in 2014. Its chief executive o cer told the
Plain Dealer
that,
while his team is also seeking investors from Eastern Europe
and South America, most of the interest in the fund comes
from Chinese businessmen.
Telecom
A court decision favours the telecom
operators on Internet neutrality – but on a
technicality that sidesteps the main issue
A federal appeals court on 14
th
January overturned neutrality
(“open-access”) rules for the Internet set by the US Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) in 2010 – rules meant
to prevent service providers from controlling Internet tra c,
blocking or slowing access to websites at will or whim.
Immediate reaction to the 2-to-1 decision exposed what has
become a predictable divide.
ID Scales of
TelecomTV
described “the usual pat responses from
the usual suspects.” On the US right wing, he wrote, the talk was
of “so-called net neutrality” (inferring that the very concept is
meaningless) and the defeat of “FCC regulation.”
The left produced “the usual high- own rhetoric” about a threat
to innovation and freedom of expression.
In fact the court took only glancing notice of net neutrality
and the case for its enforcement. It held that, given the original
classi cation of the Internet as an information service – as
distinguished from a telecommunications provider – the FCC
had denied itself any regulatory power over the net.
Dorothy Fabian
USA Editor
