The true cost of the Iraq War: $3 trillion and beyond (WaPo)
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes calculate the full price of the war and how it has contributed to other national crises.

Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs (NYTimes)
President Obama used his Labor Day speech to call for $50 billion in new infrastructure spending in a last-ditch effort to boost the recovery and prevent a Democratic bloodbath this fall.

Obama to call for $100 billion business tax credit (WaPo)
The administration passed on a payroll tax holiday, but it will offer a consolation prize.

Obama’s Economic “Plan”: Ten Times Less Than Adequate and Far, Far Too Late (FDL)
Jim White (and Paul Krugman) are decidedly underwhelmed by Obama’s proposals.

1938 in 2010 (NYTimes)
Krugman notes that today’s Democrats are making the same mistakes FDR made in the late ’30s — even after they promised things would be different this time around.

Making Social Security less generous isn’t the answer (WaPo)
Ezra Klein argues that raising the retirement age only makes sense to those who aren’t exactly straining themselves to begin with.

Kabul Bank: When They Don’t Fear the Regulators Enough to Even Hide the Abuses (Benzinga)
ND20 contributor Bill Black looks into the unchecked corruption at Afghanistan’s biggest and baddest bank.

New council of regulators will take aim at systemic risks (WaPo)
The Financial Stability Oversight Council, the newly created Justice League of regulatory agencies, will have one simple job: keep an eye on everything.

Lehman’s Last Hours (NYTimes)
Andrew Ross Sorkin reports on the “god-awful mess” that was the government’s response to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Does Our Economy Really Have to Run on Fraud? (CounterPunch)
Michael Hudson asks why Lehman was allowed to fail and why most Americans are getting the same treatment.

Let the market crash? (The Economist)
Should the Obama administration really just abandon the housing market and let it find its new level, or should it push for real relief for underwater homeowners?

The Case for Presidential Action (TAP)
With Congress unwilling to pass new labor laws, Robert Kuttner calls on the Obama administration to enforce existing regulations to their fullest extent.

China in the Driver’s Seat (The Nation)
Robert Dreyfuss considers China’s ongoing rise to superpower status and what it means for progressives.

Death By Globalism (CounterPunch)
Stimulus or austerity? Paul Craig Roberts argues that the real problem is that free trade policies are killing American jobs.

A Crash. A Call for Help. Then, a Bill. (NYTimes)
Do you expect the police or firefighters to help if you’re in a car accident? In some municipalities, you’d better be prepared to pay up.

Ultra-Rich in Finance Are Meaner Than Rest of Us (Bloomberg)
Matthew Lynn has a simple explanation for bank executives’ bad behavior: They’re jerks, and they’re powerful enough to get away with it.

Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket (NYTimes)
The GOP has an innovative new plan to put underprivileged Americans to work.

Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

In a recent editorial in the New York Times, former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, writes that this Labor Day promises to be one of the worst in decades. Organized labor, he notes, is down to a mere seven per cent of the private work force; unemployment remains high; and the prospects for a further recovery of the economy remain uncertain at best. Professor Reich goes on to argue that this dismal state of affairs is unlikely to improve until we address the deep structural flaws in our economy; flaws which have made it impossible for the American consumer — i.e. the middle class American worker — to sustain the level of spending needed to keep our economy going.

He rightly blames this state of affairs on the steady decline in working wages that has occurred in the past three decades as US companies brought in new labor-saving technologies or shipped jobs to non-unionized low wage areas overseas. He also correctly points out that much of the economic growth that the US has experienced since the early 1990s — growth that occurred in spite of the fall in wages — was fueled by three basic phenomenon: the vast increase of women in the work force; an increase in the number of hours people worked to make up for lower wages; and the massive use of consumer debt, fueled in part by the housing bubble.

In an eerie parallel to the 1920s, he observes that thanks to this real decline in income, even a return to near full employment will not be enough on its own to get us out of this mess. Why? Because as it stands today the “vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.” Nor, he says, should we look to the rich to stimulate demand, since the rich — who now take in nearly 25% of the nation’s total income as opposed to 9% in the late 1970s — spend a much smaller portion of their incomes than the rest of us.

In other words, what we are now facing is what may best be described as a mal-distribution of wealth. This is remarkably similar to the economic conditions that existed in the “roaring twenties” when the US economy, thanks to an increase in consumer spending and growing speculation in the stock market (fueled in large part by the expansion of credit), underwent a period of significant economic expansion. Unlike today, wages in this period also went up, but not enough to sustain the capacity of the US economy to produce goods. Most workers, in fact, earned wages that kept them and their families just above the poverty line. As a result, when the crash came and the bubble burst, the earning capacity of the average American was simply not strong enough to lift the country out of its economic malaise.

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The New Deal changed this, not, as is commonly held, by merely providing relief to the unemployed through unemployment insurance or work in the vast infrastructure projects of the WPA and other agencies, but by engaging in long-term structural reform; by granting the American worker what he or she needed most: better wages, hours and working conditions. The Roosevelt administration accomplished this through the unprecedented pieces of labor legislation passed during the New Deal: The National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), passed in 1935, which established the Fair Labor Relations Board and guaranteed workers the right to engage in collective bargaining; and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and the maximum hours an employee could work, after which they would be entitled to overtime pay at 1 ½ times their regularly hourly wage. Taken together, these two pieces of legislation vastly improved the lot of the American worker and thanks to the rights granted in the former led to an enormous expansion of union membership in the United States from a mere 3 million when FDR took office in 1933 to over 14 million in 1945 (or roughly 30 percent of non-agricultural work force) . When one adds the other significant pieces of New Deal reform legislation to this-banking and financial reform to make our financial sector more transparent and secure; Social Security to help the aged maintain a basic standard of living; the G.I. Bill, which significantly increased access to higher education — what we end up with is a vastly expanded, better paid and much more secure middle class; a middle class which in the decades after World War Two had the earning capacity (not the borrowing capacity) to propel the US economy through the greatest period of economic expansion in history.

For FDR, then, the key to economic recovery lay not with providing the rich with ever-lower taxes, but in increasing the standard of living of the American worker through concrete measures that made it possible for him or her to earn decent wage and take part in the American dream.

Instead of harping on and on about tax cuts and deficits (especially at a time when the US income tax rates are among the lowest in the industrialized world), perhaps it is time for our well-paid leaders in Washington to take a hard look at the plight of the American worker; to recognize this Labor Day that better wages and job security-in short, a strong well paid middle class-is not some sort of 21st century luxury, but a necessity if we hope to earn our way out the Great Recession.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

The global dependency on the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for oil will rise in the next five to 10 years as production by non-OPEC nations declines, the chief of the International Energy Agency said Friday.

“We have seen an increase in non-OPEC supplies. But in the mid-term, non-OPEC production will decline,” Nobuo Tanaka, the agency’s executive director, told reporters on the sidelines of a conference. “So, dependency on OPEC oil will increase.”

OPEC’s 12 members, who include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, account for about 40% of the global oil (production).

So, I guess a trend that’s been going on for over three decades is news. The increase in non-opec supply is almost entirely due to the global economic contraction. Here’s some better numbers, not that numbers have any relation to economic reality these days, nonetheless, the countries around the Persian Gulf have 60% of known global oil reserves — speaking of unreal numbers — while, the EU, the US, China and Japan, who conveniently enough account for 60% of the world’s economy have only 9% of the world’s remaining oil reserves, and if you cut the US out of that equation it would drop to 3%.

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The entire corporate globalization experiment of the past few decades is built on the premise of cheap oil. The entire global “oil market”, increasingly unable to provide cheap oil, is built on the American military, and the American military is built on debt, which each year becomes ever more unsustainable. Now, we could go to the EU, China, and Japan and say you guys need to start kicking-in to pay for our military service, but I doubt that would go over well with anyone, no one’s going to give money without a corresponding increase in say. Or we can begin to realize that the entire corporate globalization experiment, premised on cheap oil, is at best problematic and more accurately a failure. We as a planet need to begin creating a non-oil based economy, that is, we need to truly become post-modern. But when you have an economy, politics, and culture completely addicted to oil, that’s difficult. Instead you get desperation like ethanol and biofuels, which is the equivalent of the addict selling-off the food, furniture, and soon enough the house. Getting off oil is job 1 for any sustained economic revival and that means a complete redesign of our infrastructure.

Joe Costello was communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004.

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Click here to watch the full interview.

How to End the Great Recession (NYTimes)
Robert Reich writes that after the bursting of the debt bubble, the only way forward is through shared prosperity.

White House considers pre-midterm package of business tax breaks to spur hiring (WaPo)
The administration will possibly, maybe, push for a payroll holiday, R&D credit, or some other uncontroversial measure before November. Feel that momentum shift!

The Real Story (NYTimes)
Paul Krugman notes that critics who warned that the stimulus was too small have been vindicated. Will President Obama learn the right lesson? See above.

Why the Stimulus Ran Out of Steam (The Atlantic)
Joshua Green evaluates the administration’s decision to push a series of small measures instead of making a single bold move.

The odd decouple (The Economist)
Countries like Germany and Britain are giving America recovery envy. Is it justified?

House Democrats to Obama: No Cuts to Social Security (TPM)
Rep. Raul Grijalva is leading progressive Democrats in a pledge to oppose the deficit commission’s recommendations unless they leave Social Security intact.

Megabanks Will Shrink, Bernanke Tells Financial Crisis Commission, Yet Doubts Over Too Big To Fail Remain (HuffPo)
The Fed chairman opposed legislative efforts to break up the big banks, but he maintains that natural selection will take care of it. Just like in 2008?

25 percent of employed were jobless during recession, study says (WaPo)
Even after a brush with unemployment, many Americans are unhappy with their current jobs and have had to adjust to a different lifestyle.

The Path to a High-Wage Society (TAP)
Peter Dreier makes the case that for a healthier economy, we need more unions and tougher labor laws.

U.S. employers push increase in cost of healthcare onto workers (LA Times)
Workers face rising medical costs and reduced benefits as employers cut corners.

Sorry, Kids, No Jobs Here (The Nation)
Liz Shuler explains how the unemployment crisis is hobbling young workers right out of the starting gate.

One Dollar, One Vote? (MoJo)
Kevin Drum observes that while most Americans want tax cuts for high earners repealed, lawmakers only care about the views of those who have money to burn.

Comparing the High-Income Tax Cuts and the Social Security Shortfall (Off the Charts)
Megan McArdle: still wrong about Social Security.

Robert Rubin Demands Government Give $250 Billion to Millionaires (FDL)
Reinstating the estate tax at lower rates is a great way to subsidize the wealthy.

The War’s End (TAP)
Matthew Yglesias praises President Obama’s commitment to disengage from Iraq and stop trying to justify an invasion that never had a clear purpose.

There’s a lot of talk these days about something called the New Normal. Some of it is justified. Consumer spending, for example, will not be going back to pre-crash levels anytime soon. The heedless mass-consumption society looks to be behind us: don’t count on buying that new PlayStation for your kid this Christmas. Or the next one. It’s hard to argue that a profound adjustment in the way we think about spending, saving, and credit is happening whether we like it or not. This we must accept.

But sometimes talk of the New Normal sounds like a cover for the Old Status Quo. Experts tell us that we should understand 9.5 percent unemployment as a “structural” feature of the economy. Or they try to convince us that Social Security has to be rolled back because “we can’t afford it.” Is this a reaction to a new reality? Or is it the kind of thinking that benefits the same old powerful interests that helped drive the country into economic ruin? Like those who want to keep wages depressed, and those who desire to play with our national savings and charge high fees for it.

The Old Status Quo folks tell us that many of us will be jobless for now and insecure when we reach retirement age. “Call us when you get honest work!” wrote Fiscal Responsibility Co-Chairman Alan Simpson to a critic who called into question his views on Social Security and its impact on women. The program, he observed, is a “milk cow with 310 millions tits.” This is the kind of attitude that tells us we had better just accept our economic defeat, even as we watch bailed-out financial institutions and corporate chieftains reap record-breaking profits. We should keep our heads down and realize that crumbling roads, second-rate schools, the destruction of nature, and massive economic inequality are just “the way things are”. This bleak message, discernible in the rhetoric of politicians, the antilabor strategies of the Federal Reserve, and the inequities of globalization says that the lives of American middle and working class people are in decline and that we have only ourselves to blame. In our current unbalanced economy, large banks, multinational corporations, and wealthy individuals won’t have to cope with the consequences of the New Normal. The rest of us will.

Rather than accepting this managing down of our expectations and the effort to make us meek in the face of injustice, maybe we should be thinking a bit more about what is Decidedly Abnormal. Like companies existing solely for profits no matter what burden they place on society. Or government policies that put corporate profits ahead of any other national agenda. If you look at the way things are done in other countries, the state of affairs that seems so natural in America doesn’t look quite so normal anymore. In his latest book, Come Home, America, veteran reporter William Greider challenges us to reconsider how we think about some key fundamentals:

“In the reckoning ahead, Americans are going to find themselves rethinking the meaning of ‘onward and upward.’ We will be compelled to redefine ‘progress’ and ‘plenty.’ The core challenge will be to develop a new national culture and economy that yield more from less by producing more human satisfaction from less wasteful excess and destruction, as well as less greed and extremes of wealth.”

Greider’s book is an essential guide not only to honest conversation about the Decidedly Abnormal, but an inspiring blueprint for the New Possible — a realm where long-held beliefs that no longer serve us can be discarded.

We have done this as a country before. In the 20th century, we moved from a society which tolerated and legitimized the discrimination of women and minorities to one in which civil rights are recognized for all. My grandmother could not vote when she came of age. My mother was barred from attending most colleges and universities. And yet these women did not keep their heads down and accept the status quo. When my mother graduated from high school, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was closed to women, so she attended the Woman’s College in Greensboro. She went on to earn a doctorate in education and became the second female department head at North Carolina State University. Even so, I recall her story of going to the local department store to apply for a credit card. “No problem,” said the store manager. “Just have your husband come on down here to sign for you.” Unwilling to play along, she told him to keep his application. Later, after the manager’s research apparently showed that she earned more money than her husband, Wachovia Bank called to say that she could indeed have a card in her own name. As a result of a hard-won, generations-long struggle against unjust and undemocratic attitudes that were once considered perfectly normal, I did not face the barriers these women who came before me were forced to confront in their daily lives. I reached my 18th birthday with the opportunities of my country open to me in a way that many would have found inconceivable a mere generation before. The struggles and triumphs of my foremothers tell me that if individuals push hard enough and long enough, old beliefs do get left behind. Transformation, we know from so many stories in our nation’s history, is entirely possible.

The most insidious of our current beliefs — one that was dealt a serious blow by the financial crisis — is a cold-blooded ideology which holds that some people are naturally economic losers, and some are winners. Over the course of a generation, this belief gradually became naturalized to the point that it seemed obvious and ineluctable. We learned to accept an economic system based on short-term gains and deceptions that denied our fundamental human needs and values. As Greider put it, we got used to a growth engine that “actively damages anything it does not itself value.” Here is what this growth engine values: wealth accumulation at the top. Here are the things it does not value: justice, equality, morality, beauty, the future, the planet. It tolerates stripped pensions, sick bodies, and polluted oceans. It is not interested in our well-being. Nor even nature itself.

Instead of accepting this regime of false belief — as false as that which viewed women and minorities as less than human — Greider encourages us to embark on a journey of self-discovery in which we ask ourselves searching questions about who we are, how we want to live, and what we will tolerate. Rather than keeping our heads down, he urges us to rediscover our self-confidence by coming out of our isolation to talk to one another about what we think and feel and sharing the stories of struggle that have come down to us from our families and our communities. Uninhibited conversation, self-reflection and remembering the past can ignite the spark that will help us to consider turning our national focus from the accumulation of more wealth to the enhancement of human lives; from unfettered growth to sustainable development; from sitting on the sidelines of our democracy to participating in it — loudly. Greider calls for nothing less that a new conception of progress focused on commonly-shared values about life. In the realm of the New Possible, there are things a child needs much more than new PlayStation. She needs parks to play in, schools to learn in, and bridges that don’t fall down. She needs a sense that she can safely explore the world, develop her abilities, make choices and a lead self-directed, fulfilling life.

Greider’s investigation of the New Possible calls for restoring public obligations to corporations, confronting wage-depressing forces, and guaranteeing that our essential needs for food, shelter, and security are met. It calls for an economic system with less wasteful destruction and more responsiveness to society at large. And for decentralizing the power of the federal government so that states and communities can foster more social and economic innovation. Most importantly, it calls for strengthening our democracy by promoting citizens’ ability to actively shape our social and economic landscape.

Proponents of the Old Status Quo and defenders of the Decidedly Abnormal want us to believe that all this boils down to questions of what we can afford. Champions of the New Possible know that it’s more about what we value. How is it that we could afford to rescue banks in crisis and conduct repeated, unnecessary wars? Because we can afford it, or because these are the things powerful interests have insisted that we prioritize? Other countries do not have guaranteed health care, modern high-speed rail systems and affordable childcare because they are richer than we are. They have them because they have different, more human-centered and life-sustaining priorities embedded in their domestic agendas. Powerful interests want us to remain timid and defeated. They do not want us to be self-directed and to demand change, and they block our efforts with every bit of lobbying power and persuasion they have. They usually get to decide. That is not normal.

The Herculean task of transforming the corporate and financial sectors into partners in our human future will not happen quickly, and it will not happen without patient, sustained struggle. We will have to give them incentives for good behavior and penalize them if they continue their Abnormal ways, such as defrauding us, polluting our environment, or keeping wages down even as productivity rises. We will also have to trade our devotion to mass consumption for a commitment to investing in the hospitals, highways and schools we need for a productive economy and livable society. And most of all, we will need to rediscover that what we think and how we act as individuals matters. When the man at the department store tells us we will have to play his game, we have to firmly say “no.”

The “good times” as we knew them are not coming back. But if we can summon the energy to construct a new framework for American life, better times may await us. Greider has challenged us to start the conversation. Let’s do that. Today.

The WSJ has a must read report from the currency table, which rolls 24/7. The Journal writes,

Currency trading volume around the world has hit $4 trillion a day,…the $4 trillion mark represents a 20% gain from $3.3 trillion in 2007, the last time the global foreign-exchange markets were surveyed, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

….the continued rise in trading reflects the increased globalization of investing. With the big developed economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan struggling, investors are turning toward other markets for returns and generating more foreign-exchange trading in the process.

Now small investors are increasing their foreign-currency exposure. They are piling into mutual funds which make bets on currencies as a core part of their strategy. More broadly, U.S. stock mutual funds that invest overseas have taken in $42 billion over the past year, according to Morningstar Inc.

In addition, exchange-traded mutual funds, whose shares trade like stocks, are making the currency markets more accessible to small investors. There are now 44 currency ETFs, up from 16 in April 2007, according to Morningstar. In 2004 there was only one.

But it gets better. Can you say leverage? Can you say bubble? Boy, just looking at how currency markets are operating, all you can say is thank god for Frank/Dodd, right?

Currency trading usually involves placing bets with borrowed money. That has regulators concerned about individual investors’ ability to handle large amounts of leverage, though action has been limited so far.

On Monday, federal regulators backed off a plan to place stricter limits on how much individual investors who trade currencies can borrow.

Currently, investors can borrow $100 for every dollar they invest. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates foreign-exchange trading in the U.S., tried to cut that amount to $10.

But after a wave of protests from brokers and individuals, it settled on $50 for every dollar invested, which is the amount of borrowing many large brokers currently allow.

No, no, baby! This place is hot! You can’t cut 100 to 1 leverage down to 10 to 1, where’s the fun in that? Hell! You can’t make shit in this stock market, even with all Ben’s pumping!

Kevin Rodgers, global head of foreign-exchange derivatives at Deutsche Bank in London, says funds of all stripes-hedge funds, mutual funds and sovereign-wealth funds — are seeing the currency markets as a distinct asset class and not just a way to make an investment priced in another currency.

Trading among “nondealers,” which includes hedge funds and mutual funds, grew 42% to $1.9 trillion per day…

So, here’s the results when the Fed and other central banks started the last bubble by inflating/deflating currency with ZIRP policies, QE, and other methods of pumping money into deflating global assets markets. They are undermining the value of money itself, while the current structure of currency markets allows them much less control than they think. The question is what happens when this bubble pops? The general answer is economic carnage, what that looks like specifically is the real question, and a money maker, that is, if you can figure out how to keep it in a currency with any value.

Viva! Viva! Viva!

Obama was too cautious in fearful times (FT)
Martin Wolf reflects on Barack Obama’s missed opportunity to take bold action and steer the economy toward a robust recovery.

Stimulus Averted Depression, Romer Says (NYTimes)
Departing White House economic adviser Christina Romer used her farewell speech to call for more spending to alleviate unemployment.

Impediments to Rapid Recovery from Financial Crisis Are More Political Than Economic (Think Progress)
Matthew Yglesias disagrees with the suggestion that slow growth in the wake of a financial crisis is inevitable, as does one of the economists suggesting it.

Banks Playing ‘Foreclosure Roulette’ With Delinquent Homeowners (HuffPo)
Banks don’t really want to foreclose, and they certainly don’t want borrowers to stop making payments, so they’ve devised a sadistic way to split the difference.

Theoclassical Law and Economics Makes the Law an Ass (Naked Capitalism)
ND20 contributor Bill Black examines the growing trend of corporations buying their very own judges. (And see here for Bill’s latest on Wall Street cover-ups.)

Making hard choices on the budget (WaPo)
Ezra Klein finds Megan McArdle being disingenuous on the Internet. And so it goes…

Deficit Commission: If You Won’t Fire Simpson, Hands Off Social Security (HuffPo)
Roger Hickey thinks President Obama should heed public opinion and instruct the deficit commission to take Social Security cuts off the table.

FCC Seeks More Input on Wireless Internet Rules (NYTimes)
Citing the complexity of the issues at stake, the FCC is holding off on implementing any new rules to protect net neutrality.

What Created the Populist Explosion and How Democrats Can Avoid the Shrapnel in November (AlterNet)
Drew Westen recounts the progressive disappointments of the past two years and argues that Democrats must present a new narrative to the American people.

Democrats unlikely to repeal tax cuts for the rich (McClatchy)
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats continue to practice being in the minority.

The Cyclical, Structural Unemployment Problem (Washington Independent)
Is America’s jobs crisis cyclical or structural? Annie Lowrey digs into the unemployment data and concludes that it depends which sector and which region of the country you’re talking about.

New Job Means Lower Wages for Many (NYTimes)
Being lucky enough to find work in a depressed job market still doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to make ends meet.

No holiday for labor unions (WaPo)
Katrina vanden Heuvel writes that instead of attacking unions for their relatively generous wages and benefits, we should demand a better deal for everyone.

The Real Say on Pay (NYTimes)
Opponents of a finreg provision that requires disclosure of executive pay-gaps are being deliberately obtuse about the purpose of the law.

The 10 Highest-Paid CEOs Who Laid Off The Most Workers (HuffPo)
The Institute for Policy Studies presents a rogues gallery of job-cutters.

Marshall says that Bernanke’s speech contained “a few rare glimpses of honesty” about the limited power of central banks and monetary policy, but he is frustrated by Bernanke’s continued attempts to downplay fiscal policy options.  He notes that countries like Australia and Canada, which spent “most aggressively and most proactively” on job and income growth rather than bailouts, have experienced the most robust recovery in the wake of the recession.

As for concerns about excessive spending, Marshall argues that “private sector debt is the most destabilizing thing that’s out there right now,” and that, given the current state of the economy, the government can only facilitate private savings by running huge deficits.  He also dismisses the notion that “the alternative of not spending the money and having 20 or 25 percent unemployment would constitute a more efficient deployment of government resources.”  He explains that decreased tax revenues and steep deficits are the natural result of a recession and that the key to reducing those deficits is to stimulate strong economic growth.

To that end, Marshall supports a Job Guarantee Program, which would ensure that the federal government “stands ready to fund anybody prepared to work for a basic wage level with a series of benefits tied to it.”  The government is going to spend the money anyway, he says, so why not have it “pay people to engage in productive labor that’s actually a huge benefit to society both economically and socially?”

Click here to watch the full interview and let us know what you think of Marshall’s proposals.

Written and passed during FDR’s first term, the Communications Act of 1934 consolidated existing radio, television, and telephone regulations and created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to oversee all interstate and foreign communications. It was intended to streamline the regulatory process and expand affordable access to communication services.

The bill also established regulatory standards for various types of communications, including Title I services, which are subject to looser restrictions, and Title II services, which fall under more rigorous “common carrier” rules intended to protect equal access to these networks.

What’s the significance?

As communications networks came to occupy a more prominent role in American society, the FCC’s influence grew along with them. Throughout its history, it has often provoked controversy due to its efforts to police obscene content, which some see as a violation of free speech. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act amended the 1934 law in an attempt to bring it up to date with modern technology. However, critics noted that the new law also weakened ownership rules designed to prevent the growth of telecom monopolies.

Currently the FCC is at the center of the debate over net neutrality. In 2002, it ruled that most forms of broadband Internet access did not qualify as telecommunications services, and were therefore not subject to Title II’s common carrier regulations. Supporters of net neutrality, who believe that the Internet must be kept free and equally accessible to everyone, argue that the FCC should establish new regulations to include broadband Internet services or that Congress should pass another law to expand the FCC’s authority.

Who’s talking about it?

Sarah Nathan explains how the regulations established in 1934 led to the current battle over net neutrality… Leslie Harris argues that the current limits on the FCC’s jurisdiction are an anachronism… The Boston Globe editorial board urges the FCC to rewrite its rules to include oversight of broadband Internet access… Adam Cohen reminds us that the 1934 law grants the president the power to shut down all communications (including the Internet!) in a time of war.