The Global Crisis: Seeing It Whole

If important new studies of social and economic failure can be fused with awareness of environmental and security trends, the chances of progress will be multiplied.

by Paul Rogers

There have been many books published about the failures of the global economic system since the onset of the financial crash since 2007-08, but two in particular compel attention. The first is Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level (2009), which analysed in great depth the many ways in which inequality harms society and people's life-chances. The second is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), a magisterial historical overview of the entire system of capital whose copious research examines its inconsistencies and shows how its very structure consolidates extremes of wealth and poverty, and prevents it from delivering equity.

A common reaction to The Spirit Level among hostile commentators was that it merely repeated what everyone already knew, that inequality is bad. This dismissal reflected a wider consternation of free-market ideologues who were unable to counter the book's arguments. The book (subtitled "why more equal societies almost always do better") survived the sneers, and continues to be a major influence on social and economic thinking about a better system.

Blocked Wage Increase Another Sign Of Right’s Economic Sabotage

Isaiah J. Poole

If members of the U.S. Senate had bothered to scan the news before they cast their votes Wednesday on whether to allow final debate and passage of a bill that would increase the minimum wage, they would have seen headlines like this one from Bloomberg News: “Growth Freezes Up as U.S. Business Spending Slumps.”

One would think that would have given senators pause before 42 of them voted to filibuster the legislation, which would increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. After all, Tuesday’s news of a barely perceptible 0.1 percent increase in gross domestic product growth in the first three months of the year is one more sign of how a virtuous economic cycle has been broken by wrong-headed economic austerity. And a crucial part of restoring that cycle – in which businesses do well because consumers are doing well in a broadly shared prosperity – is to give people work and then make work pay.

Fatter Cats: Executive Pay and American Inequality

By Colin Gordon - April 24, 2014

Executive pay has risen dramatically—both in absolute terms and in relation to median wages—across the last generation. The spike in executive salaries is both a key driver of inequality at the top end of the income spectrum (about half of the “1 percent” are executives or managers at non-financial firms) and a symbolic marker of social norms in our “winner-take-all” economy.

Conservative economists have tried to spin this as a triumph of market forces, manifesting the ability of superstar innovators to pull away from the pack in a global, wired economy. But there is little evidence to sustain this view. Gains in executive pay have dramatically outstripped gains in educational attainment and bear little relation to merit or productivity, as the CEOs of successful and failed enterprises alike have made off like bandits. Instead, the trajectory of CEO pay is a political story, embedded in tax policy and in the slow collapse of meaningful corporate regulation or governance.

Donors, friends of governors often get state supreme court nod

Best-qualified candidates may lose out to cronyism

By Rachel Baye, 6:00 am, May 1, 2014 Updated: 9:49 am, May 1, 2014

When Justice Champ Lyons retired from the Alabama Supreme Court, the election was still almost two years away, so it was up to then-Gov. Bob Riley to name a replacement. He didn’t look far.

Riley chose Jim Main, his close friend for 40 years, 25 of which Main served as Riley’s personal attorney. Riley’s wife, Patsy, was in Main’s wedding. Main served in Riley’s administration, first as senior counsel to the Republican governor and later as finance director.

Conservatives, Evil and Psychopathy

By Paul Rosenberg

May 1, 2014 | It’s not the least bit surprising that Rush Limbaugh is still defending Donald Sterling, spinning an elaborate conspiracy theory about how Sterling was “set up,” as Elias Isquith described here at Salon [3]: “Whoever set this up,” Limbaugh said with understated drama, “is really good.”

He continued: “They covered every base. They’ve got the media wrapped around their little finger. I mean, when you get rid of the anthem singer — I used to be in charge of anthem singers at the Kansas City Royals. When you can get rid of (the) anthem singer, you’ve got power.”

Paul Krugman: Why Economics Failed

On Wednesday, I wrapped up the class I’ve been teaching all semester: “The Great Recession: Causes and Consequences.” (Slides for the lectures are available via my blog.) And while teaching the course was fun, I found myself turning at the end to an agonizing question: Why, at the moment it was most needed and could have done the most good, did economics fail?

I don’t mean that economics was useless to policy makers. On the contrary, the discipline has had a lot to offer. While it’s true that few economists saw the crisis coming — mainly, I’d argue, because few realized how fragile our deregulated financial system had become, and how vulnerable debt-burdened families were to a plunge in housing prices — the clean little secret of recent years is that, since the fall of Lehman Brothers, basic textbook macroeconomics has performed very well.

Carbon Dioxide Levels in Atmosphere Reach Terrifying New Milestone

By Eric Holthaus

It’s official: Earth’s atmosphere is now in uncharted territory, at least since human beings evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The Scripps Institute at the University of California-San Diego confirmed the news on Thursday:

And another first: April 2014 average CO2 value was 401.33, the first monthly average over #400ppm in human history. #globalwarming-- Keeling_Curve (@Keeling_curve) May 1, 2014

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Regime Change in America

By Peter Van Buren
Posted on May 1, 2014, Printed on May 3, 2014
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175838/

The old words are on the rebound, the ones that went out in the last century when the very idea of a Gilded Age, and the plutocrats and oligarchy of wealth that went with it, left the scene in the Great Depression. Now, those three classic terms that were never to return (or so it once seemed) are back in our vocabularies. They’ve been green-lighted by society. (If they’re not on SAT tests in the coming years, I’ll eat my top hat.)

Of course, an inequality gap has been widening into an abyss for decades now, but when it comes to the present boom in old-fashioned words that once went with being really, really, obscenely wealthy and powerful, give the Occupy movement of 2011 credit. After all, they were the ones who took what should already have been on everyone’s lips -- the raging inequality in American society -- out of the closet and made it part of the national conversation. 1%! 99%!

4 Disturbing Reasons the Private Prison Industry Is So Powerful

By Aaron Cantú

April 23, 2014 | Since the early 1980’s, incoming revenue for private prison corporations has steadily grown, even through times of deep recession. As long as lawmakers were passing punitive laws to keep mostly young men locked in cages indefinitely, it seemed like the party would never end.

However, there’s been something of an awakening in the last few years. Today over 2.3 million people are locked away in prisons, a number so extreme that lawmakers are now actually considering piecemeal changes to the system of mass incarceration. And just last week, three major corporations (Scopia Capital Management, DSM North America, and Amica Mutual Insurance) announced that they were divesting $60 million [3] from the two largest prison corporations in the nation thanks to a Color of Change campaign urging companies to drop their private prison investments: Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, worth $3.2 billion in total. As a consequence of all this movement, some have portended the eventual demise of the private prison industry.

Bill Black: Since When Does Refusing to Put Fraudulent Banks into Receivership Help the Economy?

Posted on May 1, 2014 by Yves Smith

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

Conservative economists love “creative destruction.” They can’t wait to “get their Schumpeter on” when a business fails and thousands of workers lose their jobs.

There is no more “creative destruction” conceivable than when we put a bank that has become a fraudulent enterprise into receivership, remove the controlling officers leading the fraud, and sell the bank through an FDIC-assisted acquisition. Indeed, the pinnacle of creative destruction would be doing this with a systemically dangerous institution (SDI) through a process that split the supposedly “too big to fail” bank into smaller components that (1) were no longer large enough to pose a systemic risk, (2) were more efficient than the bloated SDI, (3) no longer extorted a large (implicit) government subsidy that made real competition impossible, and (4) no longer had dominant political power via crony capitalism. Unlike the situation in which an SDI collapses suddenly in the midst of causing a global crisis when its frauds cause a liquidity crisis, it is vastly easier to put fraudulent SDIs in receivership in today’s circumstances. Unlike Arthur Anderson, the receivership power allows us to keep the enterprise alive and create more competitors rather than fewer.

It Was Nice While It Lasted

Tuesday, 29 April 2014 15:26
By Joe Macare, Truthout | Message

They say that all good things must come to an end. I don't know if that's true. But when it comes to an open Internet, something which I've very much appreciated having and I suspect you have too, it looks like that saying might be true.

After a federal appeals court threw out the existing rules on net neutrality in January, the Federal Communications Commission now looks to be proposing weaker rules that would allow big Internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon to charge websites premium fees to deliver content to consumers more quickly.

NOAA-led researchers discover ocean acidity is dissolving shells of tiny snails off West Coast

NOAA-led research team has found the first evidence that acidity of continental shelf waters off the West Coast is dissolving the shells of tiny free-swimming marine snails, called pteropods, which provide food for pink salmon, mackerel and herring, according to a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Researchers estimate that the percentage of pteropods in this region with dissolving shells due to ocean acidification has doubled in the nearshore habitat since the pre-industrial era and is on track to triple by 2050 when coastal waters become 70 percent more corrosive than in the pre-industrial era due to human-caused ocean acidification.

Dean Baker: What Problem Is Privatizing Fannie and Freddie Meant to Solve?

President Obama’s chief economist, Jason Furman, weighed in behind efforts to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week. The main plan on the table is a bill forward by Senators Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo, the chair and ranking member, respectively, on the Senate Banking Committee.

While Furman’s column (which was co-authored with James Stock, another member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) indicated support for the principles behind the Johnson-Crapo bill, it is not clear what problem they are hoping to solve.

The Hedge Fund That Ate Chicago

By Les Leopold

April 23, 2014 | There's a battle royale raging in Chicago. It pits hedge funds, the Chicago financial exchanges, real estate interests and Mayor Rahm Emanuel on the one side, against public employee unions and community groups on the other.

At issue is whether public employee pension benefits should be slashed. Mayor Emanuel claims [3] that, "If we make no reforms at all across our pension funds, we would have to raise City property taxes by 150%.... Businesses and families would flee, not just from our city but from our state." By 2017, he claims [4] the city will have to pay $2.4 billion a year into the pension fund.

One percent’s anti-Piketty scheme: Its insane new plan to boost the rich (and raid the poor)

Just as the nation rallies behind the fight against inequality, Wall Street wants to pull off this audacious heist

David Dayen

It may not last, but for one brief moment yesterday, the country dodged a huge bullet. Members of both parties, and the entire White House economic team, have wanted for years to deliver a startling wealth transfer from the public to Wall Street, one that will almost certainly trigger homeowner abuse while making the largest financial institutions wildly rich. In other words, some of the same politicians who pay lip service to Thomas Piketty and the fight against rampant socioeconomic inequality wanted to pull off the greatest heist for the rich at the expense of the poor in decades. But at the last minute, they couldn’t get the support they needed in the Senate Banking Committee.

Louisiana Bill Criminalizes Begging. What's Next? Being Homeless?

By John Amato April 29, 2014 1:48 pm

You'd think living in the streets, being forced to beg to eat was harsh enough for a person, but not according to State Rep. Austin Badon (D), who authored a bill that's criminalizing panhandling, hitchhiking and prostitution.

So if you're wet, cold, homeless and hungry, you better not start begging.

Scott Walker, ALEC and RNC Lies Unmasked In Court Ruling Tossing Wisconsin's Tough New Voter ID Law

By Brendan Fischer

April 30, 2014 | The political fraud of policing the polls to prevent likely Democratic voters from casting ballots was unmasked by a federal judge in Wisconsin on Tuesday, who struck down that state’s tougher new voter ID law in one of the most forceful federal court rulings of 2014 upholding voting rights.

Federal Judge Lynn Adelman found that Wisconsin’s tougher voter ID law, a pet project of Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his right-wing legislative allies, was not only an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. It also violated Section 2 of the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act based on the its "disproportionate racial impact and discriminatory result" of depriving "the right of Black and Latino citizens to vote on account of race or color."

Follow the Honey: 7 Ways Pesticide Companies Are Spinning the Bee Crisis

by Michele Simon

If you like to eat, then you should care about what’s happening to bees. Did you know that two-thirds of our food crops require pollination -- the very foods that we rely on for healthy eating -- such as apples, berries, and almonds, just to name a few. That’s why the serious declines in bee populations are getting more attention, with entire campaigns devoted to saving bees.

A strong and growing body of evidence points to exposure to a class of neurotoxic pesticides called neonicotinoids -- the fastest-growing and most widely used class of synthetic pesticides -- as a key contributing factor to bee declines.

The Origin of Ideology 

Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?

By Chris Mooney

If you want one experiment that perfectly captures what science is learning about the deep-seated differences between liberals and conservatives, you need go no further than BeanFest. It’s a simple learning video game in which the player is presented with a variety of cartoon beans in different shapes and sizes, with different numbers of dots on them. When each new type of bean is presented, the player must choose whether or not to accept it—without knowing, in advance, what will happen. You see, some beans give you points, while others take them away. But you can’t know until you try them.

Paul Krugman: High Plains Moochers

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.

Treat homelessness first, everything else later: Study 

HAMILTON, ON, April. 28, 2014 — Providing safe, stable and affordable housing first is the best way to help homeless in Hamilton, Ont., according to new research.

Researchers from St. Michael's Hospital and McMaster University assessed the success of Hamilton's Transitions to Home program – a program designed to quickly find permanent housing for men who are frequent users of the city's emergency shelter system. Hamilton men who in the last year spent 30 nights or more in emergency shelters or on the streets are eligible for the program, which is run by the city's Wesley Urban Ministries.

The FCC changed course on network neutrality. Here is why you should care. 

By Barbara van Schewick on April 25, 2014 at 7:16 am

Wednesday's press reports of the new network neutrality rules proposed by FCC Chairman Wheeler have been met with anger and confusion. According to the Wall Street Journal, "[r]egulators are proposing new rules on Internet traffic that would allow broadband providers to charge companies a premium for access to their fastest lanes. […] [T]he proposal would […] allow providers to give preferential treatment to traffic from some content providers, as long as such arrangements are available on 'commercially reasonable' terms for all interested content companies. Whether the terms are commercially reasonable would be decided by the FCC on a case-by-case basis."

Dean Baker: Paul Krugman and the Economics Fringe

Paul Krugman has devoted two recent blogposts to address complaints from heterodox economists over Thomas Piketty’s new book. I have written several pieces on the book and made my own view quite clear. I think it is a great book and I am happy to see it bring so much attention to the growth in inequality over the last few decades, even if Piketty gives short shrift to policies that could reverse this rise in inequality.

'Drop Everything and Take Action': Activists Issue Clarion Call to Save the Internet

As a countdown begins, time to show "FCC largest protest it's every seen" say defenders of net neutrality

- Jon Queally, staff writer

There's no time like the present to save the future of the internet.

That's the message from the nation's largest and most active organizations focused on the issue of online freedom and net neutrality.

Following this week's news that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is preparing a push to pass new rules that would allow the nation's internet providers to create a two-tiered, two-speed internet by allowing corporations to pay for privileged access to broadband "fast lanes," the group's opposed to the move are warning the American people that if they don't act quickly and aggressively, the open internet they know and love could be destroyed forever.

What Happens When a Dark Money Group Blows Off IRS Rules? Nothing. 

The Government Integrity Fund spent most of its money on election ads, despite IRS rules prohibiting a social welfare nonprofit from doing so.

by Kim Barker and Theodoric Meyer
ProPublica, April 25, 2014, 11:08 a.m.

To see how easy it is for a dark money group to ignore the Internal Revenue Service, look no further than the loftily named Government Integrity Fund.

The Fund, an Ohio nonprofit, spent more than $1 million in 2012 on TV ads attacking Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and praising his Republican opponent, Josh Mandel. Now the Fund's tax return, which ProPublica obtained from the IRS this week, indicates that the group spent most of its money on politics — even though IRS rules say nonprofits like the Fund aren't allowed to do that.

The NSA Comes Home: Police Departments Conceal Phone Tracking Equipment From Courts

Saturday, 26 April 2014 09:54
By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report

The intricate surveillance equipment used by the federal government to track and store the cellphone data of millions of people and to monitor terrorism suspects is making its way to Main Street.

Police departments across the nation have been trying to conceal their use of cellphone tracking equipment from local courts because of nondisclosure agreements that allow the departments to use the devices on loan - as long as they promise the manufacturer they will keep it a secret.

The devices, manufactured by the Florida-based Harris Corporation, are commonly used at the federal level, but are also proliferating across local and state police departments. The technology has been purchased under various names, including StingRay, HailStorm, Harpoon, AmberJack, KingFish and RayFish, and mimics a cellphone tower.

We Know How to Save the Internet: Towns and Cities Across America Are Doing It

By David Morris

April 25, 2014 | With the announcement by the FCC that cable and telephone companies will be allowed to prioritize access to their customers, only one option remains that can guarantee an open Internet: owning the means of distribution.

Thankfully an agency exists for this: local government. Owning the means of distribution is a traditional function of local government. We call our roads and bridges and water and sewer pipe networks public infrastructure for a reason.

In the 19th century, local and state governments concluded that the transportation of people and goods was so essential to a modern economy that the key distribution system must be publicly owned. In the 21st century the transportation of information is equally essential.

We're NOT Number 1: Guess Which Country Now Has a More Affluent Middle Class Than America

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

April 23, 2014 | Fancy living up in Canada? Granted, it’s a bit chilly. But the middle class up there has just blown by the U.S. as the world’s most affluent [3]. America’s wealthy are leaping ahead of the rest of much of the globe, but the middle class is falling behind. So are the poor. That’s the sobering news from the latest research put out by LIS, a group based in Luxembourg and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

After taxes, the Canadian middle class now has a higher income than its American counterpart. And many European countries are closing in on us. Median incomes in Western European countries are still a bit lower than those of the U.S., but the gap in several countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain, is significantly smaller than it was a decade ago. However, if you take into account the cost of things like education, retirement and healthcare in America, those European countries’ middle classes are in much better shape than ours because the U.S. government does not provide as much for its citizens in these areas. So the income you get has to be saved for these items.

5 Easy Ways You Can Save Hundreds on Your Water Bill Each Year

By Cliff Weathers

April 23, 2014 | When it comes to conserving water, it’s amazing how small adjustments to your lifestyle can have a big impact. Water rates have surged across the nation in the past 15 years as communities deal with aquifer depletion, drought and water-utility privatization. Consumers in some 30 communities are paying double what they were in 2000, with the rates in Atlanta, San Diego and San Francisco tripling. As water continues to become a more precious commodity, finding better ways to save it becomes more important all the time.

While there are hundreds of small ways [3] we can all save water, here are five tips that can go a long way to help the local ecology, cut your water bill in half or more, and maybe make life around the house a little more enjoyable.

Disgorge the Cash

By J.W. Mason

Companies used to borrow in the markets as a last resort finance investment in their business. Now it’s a front for shareholder giveaways

“All these people have a sort of parlay mentality, and they need to get on the playing field before they can start running it up. I’m a trader. It all happens for me in the transition. The moment of liquidation is the essence of capitalism.”
“What about the man in Rigby?”
“He’s an end user. He wants to keep it.”
I reflected on the pathos of ownership, and the ways it could bog you down.
—Tom McGuane, Gallatin Canyon

In January 2010, Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Aronds wrote a peevish article about Apple. Instead of wasting its money on this stupid tablet thing, he said, the company should “hand it back to its rightful owners. … The money belongs to stockholders: Give. Indeed Jobs should go further. Apple should—gasp—start borrowing, and hand that money back, too … the biggest innovation we’d like to see from Apple this season isn’t the iPad or iSlate or iTablet. It’s the iGetsomemoneyback.”

Given the spectacular success of the iPad launch a few months later, Aronds’ complaint would seem singularly ill timed. But no: It was prescient. In 2012, under the prodding of activist investor Carl Icahn, Apple announced it would begin paying dividends for the first time in its history. And it began a share-repurchase program to “return capital to shareholders” (in the words of its press release) that rapidly expanded in size. By last year, Apple’s share repurchases had reached a pace of $30 billion per year, on top of $11 billion in dividends. This tribute to shareholders represents four-fifths of the company’s cash from operations and slightly exceeds its $37 billion reported net income for 2013, compared with just $8 billion spent on fixed investment and $4 billion on R&D.

Paul Krugman: Distortions Fuel Paranoia About Inflation

I've been thinking about how we talk about - or don't talk about - the desirability of low inflation targets.

As I noted recently, the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook report makes a compelling case for raising the target above 2 percent - but avoids saying so explicitly, resorting to coded euphemisms. Meanwhile, inflation paranoia is very much a partisan thing. In my notes for a recent class at Princeton, I listed the signatories of an open letter to Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, from 2010 warning about dollar "debasement" from quantitative easing; it's obvious that everyone on the list is a highly committed Republican, and some people with the right ideological credentials are on board even though they have no relevant professional credentials. (William Kristol and Dan Senor, monetary experts?)

The FCC’s New Net Neutrality Proposal Is Even Worse Than You Think 

By Marvin Ammori

In 2008 and 2012, President Obama campaigned on the incredibly popular idea of network neutrality—a law that would forbid phone and cable companies from changing the Internet and charging websites new tolls, and different tolls for new fast lanes and slow lanes on the internet. Yet yesterday, the New York Times reported that the man Obama appointed as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, has made a complete turnaround on network neutrality. He is now proposing rules that authorize massive discrimination by cable and phone companies, legalizing new tolls on tech companies, and pretty much putting our entire Internet economy under the control of a few politically connected, powerful phone and cable companies.

Understandably, the Internet exploded.

You don’t know the half of it. It’s even worse than you realize. The rules on paper are bad, and their enforcement will be even worse. That’s because you would need a small army of telecommunications lawyers and economists to bring a case under the new rules.

Why Canada may be heading down the 'slippery slope' toward American-style health care

By Wendell Potter
The Huffington Post, April 14, 2014

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- During the year leading up to the 2008 presidential primaries, my insurance industry colleagues and I were working hard to influence the debate on health care reform.

Our number one objective: make Americans so afraid of "heading down the slippery slope toward socialism" that no candidate would even consider supporting a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system.

Leading the scare campaign behind the scenes was the trade association, America's Health Insurance Plans. With help from a right-wing Canadian outfit called the Fraser Institute, which has received funding from the Koch brothers and other American donors, AHIP put together a three-ring binder of talking points for insurance company executives to use in speeches and media interviews.

Revealed: ALEC's 2014 Attacks on the Environment

Friday, 25 April 2014 11:42
By Nick Surgey, PR Watch | Report

An internal tracking document-- obtained from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) by the Center for Media and Democracy/the Progressive Inc. under Texas public records law -- reveals the scope of ALEC's anti-environmental efforts in 2014.

The spreadsheet (dated from late March 2014 and made public by CMD/The Progressive today) reveals ALEC tracking a total of 131 bills that, amongst other things, roll back state renewable energy standards, increase costs for American households with solar, hype the Keystone XL pipeline, push back on proposed EPA coal regulations that protect human health, and create industry-friendly fracking rules despite growing national and international concerns about fracking.

That “Iron Law” Of Oligarchy Is Back To Haunt Us

by Danny Schechter

The word Oligarchy has finally come home.

For years, it was a term only used in connection with those big bad and sleazy Mafioso-type businessmen in Russia.

Russia had Oligarchs; we didn’t. That became a big difference between the official narrative of what separated our land of the free and the home of the brave from THEM, the snakes in the shades and private planes, in the post-Soviet period.

The FCC Is About to Axe-Murder Net Neutrality -- What You Should Know

By Dan Gillmor

April 24, 2014 | In January, a federal appeals court rejected regulations [3] designed to assure some measure of fairness in the way America's internet service providers (ISPs) handle information traveling through their networks. The problem, according to the court, was not so much that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)couldn't insist on what is called "network neutrality" – the idea that customers, rather than ISPs, should decide priorities for information they get online. No, the issue was that the FCC had tried to impose broadband rules under the wrong regulatory framework. And the court all but invited the FCC to fix its own mistake and rewrite its own updated rules.

The FCC's new chairman, the former cable and wireless industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler, said he would comply, rather than appeal. "Preserving the Internet as an open platform for innovation and expression while providing certainty and predictability in the marketplace is an important responsibility of this agency," he said in a February statement [4].

Now, based on a slew [5] of frightening [6] news reports [7] Wednesday night and a "clarification" [8]from the FCC Thursday, we know how the agency – or at least the former cable and wireless industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler – proposes to respond: it won't exercise its supreme regulatory authority in the manner the court suggested.

No, not at all.

Scathing Report Finds Rocketship, School Privatization Hurt Poor Kids

Posted by Ruth Conniff on April 24, 2014

Gordon Lafer, a political economist and University of Oregon professor who has advised Congress, state legislatures, and the New York City mayor's office, landed at the airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late last night bringing with him a briefing paper on school privatization and how it hurts poor kids.

Lafer's report, "Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education Than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," released today by the Economic Policy Institute, documents the effects of both for-profit and non-profit charter schools that are taking over struggling public schools in Milwaukee.

"I hope people connect the dots," Lafer said by phone from the Milwaukee airport.

Report: Solitary Confinement Used to Punish Female Prisoners Who Report Rape

—By Dana Liebelson | Thu Apr. 24, 2014 7:52 AM PDT

When an incarcerated pregnant woman in Illinois slept too long through mealtime, a guard decided to punish her by placing her in solitary confinement. While in isolation, the woman—who had a long history of depression—was denied access to her prenatal vitamins and was not given water for hours. She soon became highly anxious. This is one of the disturbing ways that US prisons treat incarcerated women who are pregnant, transgender, mentally ill, or who report that they are raped, according to a new report published Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Many of the reasons women are placed in isolation are highly subjective, the reports notes: "Because many cases come down to the word of a prisoner against the word of a corrections officer, a guard’s bad day can easily turn into a solitary confinement sentence for a prisoner for retaliatory reasons, such as a prisoner’s filing a grievance."

Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination

Posted by Tim Wu

In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint F.C.C. commissioners that support open Internet principles like net neutrality?”

“The answer is yes,” Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of net neutrality.” Explaining, he said, “What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites…. And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet—which is that there is this incredible equality there.”

Meet the Banking Caucus, Wall Street's secret weapon in Washington

Lawmakers help industry donors beat back tougher rules

By Daniel Wagner, Alison Fitzgerald - 6:00 am, April 24, 2014 Updated: 10:11 pm, April 24, 2014

The lawmakers were at an impasse.

More than two hours into a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee last month, the members were bickering over two versions of a bill designed to ease a new regulation that affected banks, part of the sweeping 2010 overhaul of financial laws known as the Dodd-Frank Act.

The dispute? Whether to give the banks everything they asked for, or whether to give them even more.

Paul Krugman: The Piketty Panic

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”

Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.

Wall Street's Outrageous Pension Swindle

By David Sirota

April 25, 2014 | In the national debate over what to do about public pension shortfalls, here's something you may not know: The texts of the agreements signed between those pension funds and financial firms are almost always secret. Yes, that's right. Although they are public pensions that taxpayers contribute to and that public officials oversee, the exact terms of the financial deals being engineered in the public's name and with public money are typically not available to you, the taxpayer.

To understand why that should be cause for concern, ponder some possibilities as they relate to pension deals with hedge funds, private equity partnerships and other so-called "alternative investments." For example, it is possible that the secret terms of such agreements could allow other private individuals in the same investments to negotiate preferential terms for themselves, meaning public employees' pension money enriches those private investors. It is also possible that the secret terms of the agreements create the heads-Wall-Street-wins, tails-pensions-lose effect -- the one whereby retirees' money is subjected to huge risks, yet financial firms' profits are guaranteed regardless of returns.

In lab tests, the antimicrobial ingredient triclosan spurs growth of breast cancer cells

Some manufacturers are turning away from using triclosan as an antimicrobial ingredient in soaps, toothpastes and other products over health concerns. And now scientists are reporting new evidence that appears to support these worries. Their study, published in the ACS journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, found that triclosan, as well as another commercial substance called octylphenol, promoted the growth of human breast cancer cells in lab dishes and breast cancer tumors in mice.

Net Neutrality Finally Dies at Ripe Old Age of 45

—By Kevin Drum | Wed Apr. 23, 2014 3:38 PM PDT

Apparently net neutrality is officially dead. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the FCC has given up on finding a legal avenue to enforce equal access and will instead propose rules that explicitly allow broadband suppliers to favor companies that pay them for faster pipes:

The Federal Communications Commission plans to propose new open Internet rules on Thursday that would allow content companies to pay Internet service providers for special access to consumers, according to a person familiar with the proposal.

The proposed rules would prevent the service providers from blocking or discriminating against specific websites, but would allow broadband providers to give some traffic preferential treatment, so long as such arrangements are available on "commercially reasonable" terms for all interested content companies. Whether the terms are commercially reasonable would be decided by the FCC on a case-by-case basis.

Scholar Behind Viral 'Oligarchy' Study Tells You What It Means

Sahil Kapur – April 22, 2014, 1:00 PM EDT

A new political science study that's gone viral finds that majority-rule democracy exists only in theory in the United States -- not so much in practice. The government caters to the affluent few and organized interest groups, the researchers find, while the average citizen's influence on policy is "near zero."

"[T]he preferences of economic elites," conclude Princeton's Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin I. Page, who work with the nonprofit Scholars Strategy Network, "have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do."

TPM spoke to Gilens about the study, its main findings and its lessons.