As states and cities grapple with budget shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams. Detroit this week became the most prominent example of this trend. Officials in the financially devastated city announced that their […]

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the […]

In politics, as the old saying goes, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies — there are only permanent interests. Few policy debates prove that truism as well as the one now brewing over the Export-Import Bank — a government agency providing taxpayer subsidized loans to multinational corporations. This tale starts 15 years ago […]

Over the past year, the United States government has been in the news a lot for its efforts to undermine the Internet’s basic privacy and security protocols. There were the Edward Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency sweeping up metadata, paying contractors to embed backdoors into their security technologies, hacking various private accounts of […]

Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville’s tech-focused Southland Conference last week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture […]

A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a “remarkable” amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry — aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies. In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that […]

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the proposal to combine Comcast, America’s largest cable and broadband company, with Time Warner Cable, the second-largest cable firm and third-largest broadband provider. For one, there’s ever more consolidated control over content. There’s also the possibility of certain types of content being given special (or worse) treatment […]

The most troubling aspect of 2016 presidential candidate Chris Christie’s refusal this past week to make necessary contributions to his state’s pension system was not the budget maneuver itself — it was that almost none of the debate surrounding the move contextualized what it was really about. Christie depicted the maneuver as a matter of […]

When I went into journalism, one of the first things I was told as a freshman is that journalism is different from stenography. It is supposed to be — or at least has been — about using rights granted under the First Amendment to be a check on government and corporate power. Yet, the hedge […]