Obama the Hamiltonian


Taking money from an investment bank in the form of a speaking fee is not immoral, it is eminently reasonable. (Huffington Post)


When former President Barack Obama decided to take $400,000 from a Wall Street investment bank for the first paid speech of his post-presidential career, he accelerated an important debate within the political establishment.
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The Evidence is Piling Up: Silicon Valley is Being Destroyed


Silicon Valley is the story of overthrowing entrenched interests through innovation. (Business Insider)


Children dream of becoming inventors, and scientists come to Silicon Valley from all over the world.

But something is wrong when Juicero and Theranos are in the headlines, and bad behavior from Uber executives overshadows actual innovation.

$120 million in venture funding from Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, for a juicer? And the founder, Doug Evans, calling himself himself Steve Jobs “in his pursuit of juicing perfection?” And how is Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes walking around freely?
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Towards Democratic Regulation of the Airline Industry


It’s time for the public to recognize that there is no such thing as “Deregulation.” (Medium)


In the reaction to the the United Airlines fiasco, we see something very powerful. Americans are using words like corporate concentration and monopoly — and antitrust and regulation — to describe the reason David Dao was beaten. And how you ask a question, how you define a problem, leads to what kind of political system you will have.
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Big Corporations Are Making You Poorer


A wave of new research shows how as corporations get bigger, the share of money out there going to actual workers declines. (VICE)


Increasingly, the problem of corporate concentration, and in its more extreme form, monopoly, is returning to the American political debate. In 2016, senators from both parties lambasted the failure of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice for failing to enforce anti-merger laws.
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