Summers’ Lending Club makes money by bypassing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act

Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe

Don’t know about you, but for some reason I have a sinking feeling when it comes to the idea of Larry Summers. Word on the CNBC street is that he’s about to be named new Fed Chair, and I am living in a state of cognitive dissonance.

To distract myself, I’m going to try better to explain what I started to explain here, when I talked about the online peer-to-peer lending company Lending Club. Summers sits on the board of Lending Club, and from my perspective it’s a logical continuation of his career of deregulation and/or bypassing of vital regulation to enrich himself.

Time for tech transfer law to change? U-M doctor looks at history of Bayh-Dole and says yes

Supreme Court ruling on gene patenting, and modern risks raised by industry/academic interaction, signal need for change

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The law that has helped medical discoveries make the leap from university labs to the marketplace for more than 30 years needs revising, in part to ensure the American people benefit from science their tax dollars have paid for, says a University of Michigan Medical School physician and medical historian.

In a new commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U-M Center for the History of Medicine, looks at the fluke-ridden history of how the law known as Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was passed in 1980. The law made it much easier for research findings made by academics to be patented, licensed by companies and commercialized.

Where Have America’s Wages Gone?

Richard Eskow

A new briefing paper from the Economic Policy Institute provides an overview of the income stagnation currently plaguing the vast majority of Americans.  ”A Decade of Flat Wages,” by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz, offers valuable background on one of the under-reported stories of our time: the slow disappearance of the middle class and the loss of social mobility.

The critical question is why?  Why has the economy failed so many people, and what can be done about it?

Hydrogen Fuel From Sunlight

Berkeley Lab Researchers at Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis Make Unique Semiconductor/Catalyst Construct

 

August 29, 2013

 

In the search for clean, green sustainable energy sources to meet human needs for generations to come, perhaps no technology matches the ultimate potential of artificial photosynthesis. Bionic leaves that could produce energy-dense fuels from nothing more than sunlight, water and atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide, with no byproducts other than oxygen, represent an ideal alternative to fossil fuels but also pose numerous scientific challenges. A major step toward meeting at least one of these challenges has been achieved by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) working at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).

Senator Who Advocates for Arming Teachers Accidentally Shoots Teacher With Rubber Bullet

By Igor Volsky

August 29, 2013  |  A state senator who is advocating for arming teachers in the aftermath of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, accidentally shot a teacher with a rubber bullet during a training course, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports [3].

 

Arkansas Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R) recently participated in “active shooter” training and mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a so-called bad guy. The experience gave Hutchinson “some pause” but failed to shake his confidence in the plan.

Larry Summers is “The Great Unifier” – of Larry Summers’ Opponents

Richard Eskow

It takes a special kind of magic to bring together groups as diverse as progressive Democrats, Californians, conservative Republicans, feminists, a number of prominent economists, and a large chunk of the global investment community.

Lawrence Summers has that kind of magic.

The Latest Stupidity of the Right-Wing: "Medicare is Un-American"

By Igor Volsky

August 30, 2013  |  Heritage Foundation president and former Senator Jim DeMint suggested to a town hall audience in Wilmington, Delaware, Thursday that health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid are “un-American” and built on the principles of “socialism and collectivism.”

 

“I cannot think of anything that’s more un-American than national government-run health care,” DeMint said. “Those who believe in those principles of socialism and collectivism we’ve seen over the centuries, they see as their holy grail taking control of the health care system.”

The Scariest Thing About NSA Analysts Spying On Their Lovers Is How They Were Caught

Michael Kelley, Aug. 27, 2013, 12:49 PM

Last week Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal reported that National Security Agency analysts have occasionally used vast surveillance tools to spy on love interests.

NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLong told reporters that willful violations of spying rules — dubbed "LOVEINT" — happened on “very rare” occasions, adding that he didn't have exact numbers because most of the violations were self-reported.
 

What Whistle Blower and Former High Level Executive Michael Winston Knows About Bankers Crimes Will Horrify You

By David Dayen

August 28, 2013  |  You may know Michael Winston’s story from a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times [3], or from a celebrated Frontline episode, “The Untouchables [4],” about the lack of prosecutions on Wall Street. He was a Ph.D. who rose to the corporate elite, with stints at Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Motorola and Merrill Lynch. He was recruited to mortgage originator Countrywide Financial with the promise that it wanted to become the “Goldman Sachs of the Pacific,” a full-service global financial corporation.

 

“They talked about the importance of ethics and principles, and they said they heard I was a high-integrity guy,” Winston tells Salon, noting his father had a vanity plate that read “HONOR.” Winston initially succeeded as enterprise chief leadership officer at Countrywide, getting promoted twice in 14 months and building a team of 200 working on corporate strategy.

A CIA Hand in an American ‘Coup’?

August 26, 2013

Special Report: The U.S. government decries leaks, but the other side of the story is that key chapters of American history are hidden from the public for decades and maybe forever. The CIA has just admitted its 1953 Iran coup and may never acknowledge a role in ousting Jimmy Carter in 1980, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

It has taken six decades for the CIA to formally acknowledge that it undertook a coup against Iran’s elected government in 1953, but the spy agency might never concede that some of its officers joined in a political strike against a sitting U.S. president in 1980, yet that is what the evidence now indicates.

As with the ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, the motive for sabotaging the reelection of President Jimmy Carter in 1980 appears to have flowed from fears about the direction of the Cold War, with American hardliners justifying their actions based on an assessment that Carter, like Mossadegh, was a dangerous idealist.

Dean Baker: Japan's pump-primed recovery proves US deficit hawks wrong

Prime minister Shinzo Abe is kickstarting Japan's economy with expansionary policies. So why must the US have a 'lost decade'?

Many of the people who ridicule efforts at using government spending to boost the economy and create jobs like to turn to Japan to warn countries from following that route. After all, Japan's budget deficit last year was more than 10% of GDP. That would be more than $1.6tn in the US economy today. Its gross debt is more than 245% of GDP. That would imply a debt of almost $40tn in the United States, which would mean a debt of $125,000 for every man, women, and child in the country.

Those are the sorts of numbers that policy types in Washington find really scary. Fortunately for the Japanese people, the folks currently running their economy are more interested in sound economic policy than pushing scare stories about debt and deficits. Rather than rushing to reduce the deficit, Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, went in the opposite direction. He deliberately increased spending to create jobs.

College Costs Surge 500% in U.S. Since 1985: Chart of the Day

By Michelle Jamrisko & Ilan Kolet - 2013-08-26T10:00:00Z

The cost of higher education has surged more than 500 percent since 1985, illustrating why there have been renewed calls for change from both political parties.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows that tuition expenses have increased 538 percent in the 28-year period, compared with a 286 percent jump in medical costs and a 121 percent gain in the consumer price index. The ballooning charges have generated swelling demand for educational loans while threatening to make college unaffordable for domestic and international students.

Beloved San Francisco Community College Targeted by "Rogue" Accreditation Commission

Monday, 26 August 2013 12:32
By Joe Berry and Helena Worthen, Labor Notes | News 

Late last night, 150 students staged a sit-in at San Francisco's City Hall, demanding that the mayor defend City College of San Francisco. Twenty-six were arrested.

The much-loved, low-tuition community college may shut down in July 2014. It’s the target of an unusually frank attack from an unexpected source, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

ACCJC doesn’t claim any problems with quality of instruction. Rather, CCSF apparently treats its employees too well and gives away too much free community service.

How Milton Friedman’s NAIRU Has Increased Inequality, Damaging Innovation and Growth

Yves here. Advocates of Galtian “winner take all” markets frequently invoke both moralistic and efficiency-based arguments for more income inequality. The problem with their argument that “creators” should get to hoard their winnings is that their success does not take place in a vacuum, but is built on the back of generations of cultural, technological, and procedural advances, as well as public-provided infrastructure. And as the post below describes, the idea that a more Darwinian economic order produces higher growth is also spurious.

By Servaas Storm and C. W. M. Naastepad , both Senior Lecturers in Economics at the Delft University of Technology

For many years, economic fatalism ruled the roost: markets are sovereign, governments must never interfere, social democracy is passé, and politics is effectively dead. The big bang of the crisis has ended this fatalism, and is—albeit slowly—leading to calls for a fairer capitalism (as by the Occupy movement).

What has been not widely understood however is that inequality actually matters: the deeper roots of the financial crisis lie in deregulated labour markets and the consequent wage squeeze and sharp rise in inequality.

Dean Baker: Pinching Pensions to Keep Wall Street Fat and Happy

The debate over public pensions shows clearly the contempt that the elites have for ordinary workers. While elites routinely preach the sanctity of contract when it works to benefit the rich and powerful, they are happy to treat the contracts that provide workers with pensions as worthless scraps of paper.

We see this attitude on display currently in the Detroit bankruptcy proceedings. It is even more clearly on display in efforts by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to default on the city's pension obligations.

Paul Krugman: The Decline of E-Empires

Steve Ballmer’s surprise announcement that he will be resigning as Microsoft’s C.E.O. has set off a huge flood of commentary. Being neither a tech geek nor a management guru, I can’t add much on those fronts. I do, however, think I know a bit about economics, and I also read a lot of history. So the Ballmer announcement has me thinking about network externalities and Ibn Khaldun. And thinking about these things, I’d argue, can help ensure that we draw the right lessons from this particular corporate upheaval.

First, about network externalities: Consider the state of the computer industry circa 2000, when Microsoft’s share price hit its peak and the company seemed utterly dominant. Remember the T-shirts depicting Bill Gates as a Borg (part of the hive mind from “Star Trek”), with the legend, “Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated”? Remember when Microsoft was at the center of concerns about antitrust enforcement?

Why do Haters Have to Hate? Newly Identified Personality Trait Holds Clues

PHILADELPHIA (August 26, 2013) – New research has uncovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything. Apparently, it’s all part of our individual personality – a dimension that researchers have coined “dispositional attitude.”

 

People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The journal article, “Attitudes without objects: Evidence for a dispositional attitude, its measurement, and its consequences,” was written by Justin Hepler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dolores Albarracín, Ph.D., the Martin Fishbein Chair of Communication and Professor of Psychology at Penn.

Fear-mongering won't scuttle Obamacare

Opponents hope to kill health care reform by scaring people, but time is running out

By Wendell Potter, 6:00 am, August 26, 2013 Updated: 9:06 am, August 26, 2013

Opponents of Obamacare know that time is not on their side. If they can’t kill the health care law by threatening to shut down the government, as some Republicans are suggesting, the game will be over, and they know it. That’s because there is an expiration date on their long-running campaign to scare the bejesus out of Americans about the awful things that will happen if health care reform is not mortally wounded by year’s end.

Fear mongering has a shelf life. The strategy the president’s opponents have been using to influence public opinion is based on the premise that people fear the unknown. Most of us just don’t like uncertainty.

The Leveraged Buyout of America

Giant bank holding companies now own airports, toll roads, and ports; control power plants; and store and hoard vast quantities of commodities of all sorts. They are systematically buying up or gaining control of the essential lifelines of the economy. How have they pulled this off, and where have they gotten the money?

by Ellen Brown

In a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke dated June 27, 2013, US Representative Alan Grayson and three co-signers expressed concern about the expansion of large banks into what have traditionally been non-financial commercial spheres. Specifically:

[W]e are concerned about how large banks have recently expanded their businesses into such fields as electric power production, oil refining and distribution, owning and operating of public assets such as ports and airports, and even uranium mining.

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?

The country's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework

By LynNell Hancock
Smithsonian magazine, September 2011


It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.

Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

Paul Krugman: 2009 And All That

There has been a lot of commentary on Neil Irwin’s report on why the White House doesn’t want Janet Yellen to chair the Fed, with good reason. The merits of Yellen versus Summers aside, it sounds as if the WH wants Summers, and doesn’t want Yellen, for all the wrong reasons. They want a team player — and consider Yellen’s somewhat independent stance as a liability, even though she has been consistently right. They consider Yellen diminished because she wasn’t part of the team making policy in 2009 — when most people outside the WH don’t consider 2009 anything like a policy triumph.