By Tim Price, originally published on Next New Deal
Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.
Telecom's Big Players Hold Back the Future (NYT)
David Carr profiles Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford and explores her crusade against the telecom monopolies that offer high fees instead of high speeds. Every time you wait for a video to buffer, you're experiencing the magic of the market at work.
Sheila Bair: Dodd-Frank really did end taxpayer bailouts (WaPo)
Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal talks to the former director of the FDIC about why skeptics are wrong to doubt the agency's commitment to winding down failed banks and why it's important to raise leverage requirements so it doesn't have to prove it.
Obama Urged to Make Economy a Bigger, Bolder Topic (AP)
Jim Kuhnhenn reports that with the CBO projecting a lower deficit and the GOP scrounging for scandals in the couch cushions, Obama advisers and critics are asking the president to change the conversation by laying out a real second-term economic agenda.
The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem (NYT)
Timothy Noah argues that while runaway wealth at the top contributes to rising inequality in the U.S., there's also the growing educational divide and resulting skills-based gap. But if the left and right discuss both problems, they risk an agreement breaking out.
Boom or Bubble? (New Yorker)
James Surowiecki has good news (1) and bad news (2) for analysts who think stock prices are overinflated because GDP isn't keeping up with corporate profits: (1) corporate profits are only barely connected to the real American economy these days, and (2) see (1).
Global Capital and the Nation State (Robert Reich)
Reich notes that big corporations are hiding their money from tax collectors while extorting sweetheart deals from national and local governments, but right-wing nationalist parties are convincing more and more voters that cooperation is the new exploitation.
Food Stamps Get Licked by Cuts (Prospect)
Monica Potts writes that the House and Senate farm bills would make food stamp funding less generous and kick millions off the rolls even as more Americans are going hungry. In other words, let them eat cake, just as long as they're paying for it out of pocket.
This Week in Poverty: Fighting Poverty Through Wall Street Accountability (The Nation)
Organizer and activist Stephen Lerner tells Greg Kaufmann that one of the challenges in fighting poverty is that there are so many different root causes, but one advantage of focusing on Wall Street is that behind most of these big problems there's a big bank.