At INET Conference, Warren Adds Two Pieces to Her Financial Reform Framework

Posted on May 6, 2015 by David Dayen

The reason I’m filling in today and tomorrow is that Yves is in Washington for the INET Finance and Society conference, which is unique because it features a dozen and a half speakers, every one of them a woman, from Fed Chair Janet Yellen to IMF Chair Christine Lagarde to the SEC’s Kara Stein to CFTC’s Sharon Bowen to Treasury’s Sarah Bloom Raskin to many more, from the U.S. and around the world. Anat Admati of Stanford University organized the event, and you can watch the webcast tomorrow at this link. Maybe you’ll spy Yves stalking the halls.t

As INET’s Rob Johnson said by way of introduction at tonight’s opening dinner, “the old boy’s club was not a committee that saved the world.” He quipped that the best think you could do for financial reform is to only have women regulate it. While gender does not define a willingness to go hard at the banks for their practices, it certainly appears that a group of them represent outsiders, unwilling to accept elite spin and able to fight the prevailing wisdom. So I’m pretty excited about this conference and bummed that I couldn’t make it out to D.C.

Traditional universities quietly join with for-profit colleges to roll back regulations

Alec MacGillis, ProPublica

The Obama administration is set to achieve one of its top domestic policy goals after years of wrangling. For-profit colleges, which absorb tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants and loans yet often leave their students with little beyond crushing debt, will need to meet new standards or risk losing taxpayer dollars.

But as the July 1 deadline approaches, the troubled industry has been mounting a last-ditch effort to avert or roll back the new rules. And suddenly it’s getting a lift from a set of unlikely allies: traditional colleges and universities.

Chemistry student in sun harvest breakthrough

Faculty of Science - University of Copenhagen

The Sun is a huge source of energy. In just one hour planet Earth is hit by so much sunshine that humankind could cover its energy needs for an entire year if only we knew how to harvest and save it. But storing sunshine is not trivial. Now a student at Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen has researched his way to a breakthrough which may prove pivotal for technologies trying to capture the energy of the sun, and saving it for a rainy day.

Anders Bo Skov has recently started studying for his Master's degree in chemistry at University of Copenhagen. Together with his supervisor, Mogens Brøndsted Nielsen, he is publishing the paper "Towards Solar Energy Storage in the Photochromic Dihydroazulene-Vinylheptafulvene System" in the journal "Chemistry - A European Journal".

Lynn Stuart Parramore: The New Corrupt Elite That Is Running Our Economy

Talking about old systems of power and corruption doesn't begin to capture new realities.

Social anthropologist Janine Wedel, author, most recently, of Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security, has spent decades getting to the bottom of how powerful people wield influence. In her view, old ways of talking about formal systems of power and corruption don't begin to capture new realities. Truth and transparency, she warns, have devolved into performance art. The buck stops nowhere. Could women be particularly suited to disrupt the unaccountability structured into the DNA of many of today's financial, corporate and governmental organizations? Wedel weighs in. (Accountability is a key topic in a May 5-6 conference sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, " Finance and Society," which features Brooksley Born, Elizabeth Warren, and other influential women who have challenged corrupt systems of power.)

Lynn Parramore: You've discussed a fascinating new kind of power broker on the world stage—a nimble, opportunistic person who floats between private and public institutions. How has this figure operated in the financial arena? Are such players different from lobbyists and other traditional influence peddlers? Can you give some examples?

Janine Wedel: In the financial arena, a well-known duo is Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both former treasury secretaries. Rubin reached the heights at Goldman Sachs. He then went to Treasury in the 1990s, then on to Citigroup. In the lead-up to the financial crash, both Goldman and Citigroup earned billions on the unregulated derivatives he and Summers (and others) championed while in public office.

New report: Forests could be the trump card in efforts to end global hunger

One billion people worldwide depend on forests and trees for balanced diets and sustainable incomes

Burness Communications

New York/Vienna (6 May 2015)- About one in nine people globally still suffer from hunger with the majority of the hungry living in Africa and Asia. The world's forests have great potential to improve their nutrition and ensure their livelihoods. In fact, forests and forestry are essential to achieve food security as the limits of boosting agricultural production are becoming increasingly clear.

That's according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date on the relationship among forests, food and nutrition launched today in New York at a side event of the United Nations Forum on Forests. The new report released by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), the world's largest network of forest scientists, also underlines the need for the most vulnerable groups of society to have secure access to forest foods.

Corinthian Colleges Secretly Funded D.C. Think Tanks, Dark Money Election Efforts

By Lee Fang

The spectacular crash of Corinthian Colleges after years of systematically deceiving thousands of students into enrolling into low-quality, high-cost education programs has once again raised questions about how the for-profit college industry staved off stronger rules governing the $1.4 billion per year in federal loans that helped keep Corinthian afloat.

Some hints emerged today in the giant chain’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware. It shows that Corinthian made secret payments to an array of political consultants, think tanks and political dark money groups.

16 Million Refugees Are Not Some Other Country's Problem

A Marshall Plan now is cheaper than military action to deal with collapsing states later.

Gershom Gorenberg

The world today is facing a crisis of people fleeing their home countries in the greatest numbers seen since World War II. How is it responding?

Item: Two Eritrean refugees who reached Israel by crossing the Sinai desert went to court Thursday, asking for an injunction preventing the government from deporting them to Rwanda. The policy of forced deportation is new, but a recent report by Israeli refugee-rights organizations shows that in case after case, Sudanese and Eritrean asylum-seekers who supposedly left voluntarily in 2013-2014 did so under pressure, including threats of indefinite detention. Those sent to Rwanda were in turn expelled by authorities there almost immediately. Others were sent back to Sudan, where some were imprisoned and tortured for the crime of visiting an enemy state—Israel. Dozens of refugees who "voluntarily" left Israel for Africa are now trying to reach Europe: by land to Libya, then across the Mediterranean on smugglers' boats.

The Case That Blew the Lid Off the World Bank's Secret Courts

By Jim Shultz, Foreign Policy in Focus | News Analysis

There's an international awakening afoot about a radical expansion of corporate power - one that sits at the center of two historic global trade deals nearing completion.

One focuses the United States toward Europe - that's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) - and the other toward Asia, in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Both would establish broad new rights for foreign corporations to sue governments for vast sums whenever nations change their public policies in ways that could potentially impact corporate profits.

How Gilded Ages End

Protecting democracy from oligarchic dominance is, once again, a central imperative of American politics.

By Paul Starr

Rising inequality seems to pose an insurmountable political problem. If the underlying causes are technological change and globalization, the forces appear to be unstoppable. Alternatively, if the causes are primarily political and involve the power of corporate and financial interests, the forces driving inequality may also appear to be overwhelming. Some people may conclude in despair that, for all practical purposes, nothing can be done.

That conclusion, however, is unjustified for two reasons—first, because things have been and can be done to check increased inequality even in the short term; and second, because limiting the political power of concentrated wealth is a cause with deep American roots and wide support that is a difficult but achievable long-term goal.

The Five-Step Process to Privatize Everything

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Law enforcement, education, health care, water management, government itself -- all have been or are being privatized. People with money get the best of each service.

At the heart of privatization is a disdain for government and a distrust of society, and a mindless individualism that leaves little room for cooperation. Adherents of privatization demand 'freedom' unless they need the government to intervene on their behalf.

How to Truly Eradicate Poverty

We need more than just a safety net. We need a blueprint to create good jobs for all.

Dorian T. Warren

As a 19-year-old single mom, Kelvishia struggles to make ends meet for herself and her toddler, Jarvis. While working, Kelvishia was studying for her GED through a program for parents who receive financial help. That is, until she was fired from her job because she had to miss work to take care of Jarvis. With her job went the government help. Without that aid, Kelvishia’s hopes for a GED were dashed. She was striving to get ahead, but the realities of life just made it too hard.

This spiral of despair has to stop—for Kelvishia and for far too many Americans like her.

The Wealth Problem

Aspiring to own a home and pursue an education are quintessentially American ideals. It's time to make those dreams accessible again.

By Robert Kuttner

The postwar boom was a time of broadly shared prosperity, when working- and middle-class people not only enjoyed steadily increasing incomes but were also able to accumulate lifetime wealth. The measures that made possible this wealth-broadening included expansion of homeownership under a reliable, well-governed system of mortgage finance; the development of a retirement system, with Social Security complemented by private pensions; debt-free higher education; and rising real wages. Each of these instruments interacted with the others.

Today, these mechanisms have all gone into reverse. Meanwhile, the capacity of the already-rich, the parentally endowed, and the well-situated to accumulate financial wealth has only intensified. Wealth inequality gets less attention than income inequality, but it is every bit as important. And the two are related. Wealth helps generate income and the capacity to earn income. Decent income increases the capacity to save and to amass wealth. As public systems for wealth-broadening collapse, private wealth within families provides asset endowments to the young and positions the next generation to become upper-income earners like their parents.

21 States Will Take Away Your Driver's License If You Can't Pay Your College Loans, But Activists Are Fighting Back

A grassroots project in Montana is a blueprint for activism across the country.

By Michael Arria / AlterNet

Thanks to the work of local organizers pressuring lawmakers, Montana residents will no longer have their drivers licenses suspended if they fall behind on their student loan payments. This April, a Montana law that allowed the state to revoke licenses for that infraction was scrapped. However, in at least 21 states, similar laws remain on the books.

The criminalization of low-income Americans’ everyday life has experienced a fair amount of coverage lately in the wake of the Department of Justice's report on Ferguson. That report detailed how steep fees and fines for nonviolent offenses inevitably strapped residents of Ferguson with ridiculous debts. Those debts are then criminalized in a process the report called "illegal and harmful.” If poor people fall behind on their payments, they could even face jail time. Although student debt is not generally interpreted in quite the same way, portions of it have certainly been criminalized. Perhaps nothing showcases this fact more than states’ ability to suspend people’s licenses if they default on their loans. Nearly 30% of US workers now need a license in order to perform their jobs, which means that defaulting on a student loan could effectively mean losing a job.

Corporate Media Blacks Out Coverage of Bill to Overturn Corporate Personhood

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 4, 2015

Last Wednesday, the grassroots organization, Move to Amend, held a press conference at the National Press Club to announce that six members of the U.S. House of Representatives were introducing legislation to overturn Citizens United v FEC to make free speech and all other rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution available only to “natural persons,” not corporations or limited liability companies. The legislation would also give Federal, state and local governments the ability to limit political contributions to “ensure all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process.”

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer Pushes To Give Wall Street More Pension Cash

By David Sirota, Matthew Cunningham-Cook

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has a relatively low public profile, but he’s the official in charge of one of the largest pools of capital in the world: When he speaks, the financial sector listens. So when he issued a report last week condemning the $2.5 billion in pension fees paid by New York City to Wall Street firms, he touched off national headlines about whether such expenditures by public retirement systems make financial sense.

“Money managers are being paid exorbitant fees even when they fail to meet baseline targets,” said Stringer, a Democrat. “Fees have not only wiped out any benefit to the funds, but have in fact cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost returns. It’s clear that the status quo needs to change.”

Baltimore Activists Recount How Police Unions Crushed Accountability Reforms

By Lee Fang

Only weeks before Freddie Gray’s death while in custody of Baltimore police, cops from around the state filled a committee hearing room in Annapolis to aggressively lobby against a wave of reform bills aimed at increasing police accountability in Maryland. The police won: every bill to make it easier to investigate and prosecute police misconduct went down to defeat, leaving the state’s extraordinarily cop-friendly laws in place. (It’s a measure of the egregious circumstances of Gray’s death and the public outcry afterward that six police officers have nevertheless been indicted.)

Civil rights advocates say they were heavily outgunned — metaphorically — by the police.

Rumors have it

Study: Trying to correct political myths may only entrench them further

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bad news, fans of rational political discourse: A study by an MIT researcher shows that attempts to debunk political rumors may only reinforce their strength.

"Rumors are sticky," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT, and author of a paper detailing the study. "Corrections are difficult, and in some cases can even make the problem worse."

In Baltimore and other cities, police have used 'rough rides' as payback in the past

By Joseph Tanfani

For about 44 minutes, a police wagon carrying a handcuffed Freddie Gray traveled the city's streets. By the time it arrived at a police booking station, Gray had stopped breathing, suffering from a catastrophic spinal injury that would kill him a week later.

Now, the six officers who were involved in Gray's death have been arrested — with the most serious charge, second-degree murder, falling on the driver of the van, Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. Prosecutors say Gray, left unsecured and shackled on his stomach on the floor of the van, suffered his “severe and critical neck injury” during the trip.

1 in 4 U.S. Renters Use Half of Income to Pay for Housing

Average hourly wages have risen 2.1 percent, while rental prices have increased 3.7 percent in the past 12 months

Josh Boak / AP

(WASHINGTON)—More than one in four U.S. renters have to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities.

That’s the finding of an analysis of Census data by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. The number of such households has jumped 26 percent to 11.25 million since 2007.

Bernie Sanders Calls For 'Political Revolution' Against Billionaire Class

Self-described socialist and 2016 presidential candidate takes aim at influence of big money and criticises Clinton Foundation, Koch brothers and others.

By Martin Pengelly / The Guardian | May 3, 2015

Heralding what he called “the most unusual political career in the US Senate”, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidateBernie Sanders on Sunday called for “a political revolution” against “the billionaire class”.

He then seemed to include the overwhelming favourite for the Democratic nomination, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in that “billionaire class”.

Paul Krugman: Race, Class and Neglect

Every time you’re tempted to say that America is moving forward on race — that prejudice is no longer as important as it used to be — along comes an atrocity to puncture your complacency. Almost everyone realizes, I hope, that the Freddie Gray affair wasn’t an isolated incident, that it’s unique only to the extent that for once there seems to be a real possibility that justice may be done.

And the riots in Baltimore, destructive as they are, have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.

The Investor Arbitration Clauses in TPP Are Indeed Very Bad

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Lambert Strether

I like Tyler Cowen’s restaurant reviews a lot, but sometimes I think he should stick to doing them; I think that right now, in fact. Here’s a throwaway post from Cowen on ISDS provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). tl;dr: Move along people, move along. There’s no story here. In longer though not very long form, after posing this rhetorical question in the headline:

How bad are the investor arbitration clauses in TPP?

The Myth Of The Absent Black Father

by Tara Culp-Ressler, Posted on January 16, 2014 at 4:53 pm

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published new data on the role that American fathers play in parenting their children. Most of the CDC’s previous research on family life — which the agency explores as an important contributor to public health and child development — has focused exclusively on mothers. But the latest data finds that the stereotypical gender imbalance in this area doesn’t hold true, and dads are just as hands-on when it comes to raising their kids.

That includes African-American fathers.

Digby: Right Wing Populism in a Nutshell

Howie at DWT featured a piece this morning about a fatuous right wing attempt to co-opt the legacy of the great Barbara Jordan in the cause of bigotry. (Don't ask ... ) He quotes a piece from the National Review that spells out their thinking:

On April 15, the editors of the New York Times felt compelled to denounce a Washington Post op-ed by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), in which he called for reduced immigration to help raise the wages of American workers. The Times' editors were particularly miffed that “Mr. Sessions accuses the financial and political ‘elite’ of a conspiracy to keep wages down through immigration” (“elite” is put in sneer quotes, as if there were no elite). What is important to note is not the Times’ ad hominem attack on Sessions (“choosing . . . to echo an uglier time in our history”) but the fact that the editors believed that the senator’s populist argument required an official response.

David Suzuki: How to Save the Monarch Butterfly

The monarch butterfly is a wonderful creature with an amazing story. In late summer, monarchs in southern Canada and the northern U.S. take flight, traveling more than 5,000 kilometers to alpine forests in central Mexico. The overwintering butterflies cling to fir trees there in masses so dense that branches bow under their weight.

The monarch’s multigenerational journey northward is every bit as remarkable as the epic southern migration. Three or four successive generations fly to breeding grounds, lay eggs and perish. The resulting caterpillars transform into butterflies and then take on the next leg of the trip. Monarchs arriving in Canada in late summer are often fourth or fifth generation descendants of butterflies that flew south the previous year.

Anti-Science GOP 'Eviscerates' NASA Spending on Climate Change Research

NASA administrator says proposal 'guts' crucial Earth science program and 'threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate'

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

Reinforcing the GOP's reputation as anti-science, Republicans in the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on Thursday voted to slash NASA spending on the branch that studies climate change issues.

According to news reports, the NASA authorization proposal, passed along party lines, would cut between $300-500 million in funding to NASA's Earth Sciences division, which researches the planet's natural systems and processes—including climate change, severe weather, and glaciers. The bill will now go to the full House for a vote.

The Policy Machine

The dangers of letting algorithms make decisions in law enforcement, welfare, and child protection.

By Virginia Eubanks

Public services are becoming increasingly algorithmic, a reality that has spawned hyperbolic comparisons to RoboCop and Minority Report, enforcement droids and pre-cogs. But the future of high-tech policymaking looks less like science fiction and more like Google’s PageRank algorithm.

For example, according to the Chicago Tribune, Robert McDaniel, a 22-year-old Chicago resident, was surprised when police commander Barbara West showed up at his West Side home in 2013 to warn “the most dangerous gangbangers” to stop their violent ways. McDaniel, who had a misdemeanor conviction and several arrests on a variety of offenses—drug possession, gambling, domestic violence—had made Chicago’s now-notorious “heat list” of the 420 people most likely to be involved in violent crime sometime in the future. The list is the result of a proprietary predictive policing algorithm that likely crunches numbers on parole status, arrests, social networks, and proximity to violent crime.

Paul Krugman: Ideology and Integrity

The 2016 campaign should be almost entirely about issues. The parties are far apart on everything from the environment to fiscal policy to health care, and history tells us that what politicians say during a campaign is a good guide to how they will govern.

Nonetheless, many in the news media will try to make the campaign about personalities and character instead. And character isn’t totally irrelevant. The next president will surely encounter issues that aren’t currently on anyone’s agenda, so it matters how he or she is likely to react. But the character trait that will matter most isn’t one the press likes to focus on. In fact, it’s actively discouraged.

David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.”

By Bill Keller

David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood”1 (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the HBO television series “The Wire” (2002–2008). Simon is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday.

BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?

DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.

Fracking Titans Spend Millions Proselytizing School Children

by Brie Shea, Investigative Reporting Fellow, RH Reality Check

For more than 30 years, Dennis Prager has been a conservative radio host and author. His broadcasts air three hours a day, five days a week across the country, beating the conservative drums against what he sees as a host of “liberal” evils—marriage equality, feminism, and multiculturalism. He has called campus rape culture a “gargantuan lie to get votes” promoted by the “feminist left.”

More recently, Prager has developed an ingenious method of getting his conservative opinions to a new kind of audience, one harder to reach via traditional media channels.

Pesticides alter bees' brains, making them unable to live and reproduce adequately

New research in The FASEB Journal suggests that the neonicotinoid class of pesticides do not kill bees but impair their brain function to disturb learning, blunt food gathering skills and harm reproduction

Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

In research report published in the May 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal, scientists report that a particular class of pesticides called "neonicotinoids" wreaks havoc on the bee populations, ultimately putting some crops that rely on pollination in jeopardy. Specifically, these pesticides kill bee brain cells, rendering them unable to learn, gather food and reproduce. The report, however, also suggests that the effects of these pesticides on bee colonies may be reversible by decreasing or eliminating the use of these pesticides on plants pollenated by bees and increasing the availability of "bee-friendly" plants available to the insects.

New survey: Percentage of Texans without health insurance drops dramatically

Rice University

HOUSTON - (April 30, 2015) - The percentage of Texans without health insurance dropped 31 percent since enrollment began in the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Health Insurance Marketplace, according to a new report released today by the Episcopal Health Foundation and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

The report found that from September 2013 to March 2015, the percentage of uninsured adult Texans ages 18-64 dropped from 25 to 17 percent.