The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism By Paul Sabin – NYT Book Review

By Timothy Noah,    Aug. 10, 2021

PUBLIC CITIZENS
The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism

By Paul Sabin

“When you’re a household name for 56 years, you acquire more than one reputation. Ralph Nader has three.

Nader first came to public attention in 1965 when he published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a best seller that said auto companies were building dangerous cars. That’s Nader the consumer advocate. Nader leveraged his fame into a network of nonprofit government watchdog groups staffed by idealistic young “Nader’s Raiders” recruited from top universities. That’s Nader the public citizen. In 2000, having concluded the two major parties were really “one corporate party wearing two heads and different makeup,” Nader waged a third-party presidential bid and took enough Florida votes away from Al Gore to cost him the election. That’s Nader the spoiler, still reviled by many liberals for making George W. Bush president.

It’s past time to put this grievance to rest. Gore’s defeat (by a mere 537 Florida votes) was so narrow that it can be attributed to any stray breeze. Paul Sabin, a professor of history at Yale, suggests in “Public Citizens” that if you want to blame a Democratic debacle on Nader, consider President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980, even though Nader wasn’t a candidate that year.

“Public Citizens” is an elegantly argued and meticulously documented attempt to place Nader within the liberal tradition. Sabin’s thesis is that Nader the public citizen was a principal architect of the adversarial liberalism that succeeded New Deal liberalism. Birthed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, adversarial liberalism was defeated in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, whose antigovernment message (Sabin argues) acquired legitimacy partly through Nader’s spirited attacks on the federal government. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it,” Sabin writes, “but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.” “

How Do You Stop Robocalls? – The New York Times

By Christine Hauser

July 12, 2021, 1:37 p.m. ET

“The calls look vaguely familiar, as if they could be coming from a neighbor’s phone. Sometimes they’re ominous warnings about your Social Security number. A friendly voice pretends to be concerned about the warranty on a car you don’t have.

Americans get millions of illegal robocalls every month, despite attempts by the telecommunications industry and government agencies to stop them.

The latest effort by the Federal Communications Commission — the government agency that regulates communications — to cut down on the calls uses a technology called Stir/Shaken, which went into effect on June 30. While it has nothing to do with James Bond and martinis, it is meant to add to the arsenal of defenses against “bad guys” who trick people.

Here’s how it works.” . . .

The Best Consumer Self-Advocacy Tool You’ve Never Used – The New York Times

“Even semiprofessional consumers like me run into our share of problems. These are particularly irksome, since we should probably know better than to find ourselves on the wrong end of a busted product or poorly delivered service.So this week, I’m pleased to share with you the single best tool I’ve ever found for getting my money back or my money’s worth. In fact, it has never failed me.

It’s called the Executive Email Carpet Bomb (E.E.C.B. for short) — a well-written message to the right group of corporate executives, whose email addresses are often pretty easy to figure out. A group of renegades at a blog called Consumerist first published the concept 10 years ago this month.”

The ‘Fix’ for Net Neutrality That Consumers Don’t Need – by Tim Wu – NYT

“In analyzing the attack on net neutrality, one looks in vain for the problem that needs to be fixed. Net neutrality refers to rules intended to ensure that broadband providers cannot block content or provide faster delivery to companies that pay more. The policy was put in place in the George W. Bush administration, where it enjoyed bipartisan support. In the years since, it has sheltered bloggers, nonprofit organizations like Wikipedia, smaller tech companies, TV and music streamers, and entrepreneurs from being throttled by providers like AT&T and Verizon that own the “pipes.” ”

Rule of thumb. If At&t and Comcast are for it, I’m against it. These jerks think customers are fleecing opportunities.

I recommend a video on youtube by John Oliver last year on this subject.

Here is a comment that I found helpful:

Jerry Xu

UK 1 day ago

Net neutrality is what encourages technological innovation and competition on the open internet.A s the article states, it means that the speed of internet that you pay for is the speed you get for all websites, all the time. How would anyone be opposed to that? Unfortunately, ISPs (internet service providers) such as your Verizons and your at&ts want to be able to get more money out of you and other online websites & companies by charging for the “fast lane” equivalent of internet connections, slowing down & throttling the connections of those who don’t pony up the money. The problem is that this so called “fast lane” of internet connections runs at literally the same speed as internet connections under the Net Neutrality laws. It’s not paying to run faster, it’s paying so you don’t get slowed down.

The point is, should Net Neutrality laws be abolished, ISPs like Comcast & Time Warner will be able to charge more monthly for internet services. So not only will consumer’s be charged the monthly/yearly fee for their internet, but they may be charged more for using certain online services like YouTube and Twitter. This is the internet equivalent of your electric company charging you extra for using it to power your desk fan. The company doesn’t have the right to charge you for what you use it for, only for the service itself. Furthermore, these ISPs most likely own TV & cable services & can dictate what competes & what doesn’t. Killing net neutrality kills the open internet.

• 164 Recommended

Strawberries | EWG’s 2017 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce Graphics

Check out @EWG’s 2017 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce! #DirtyDozen #CleanFifteen http://bit.ly/1VxUO3i

Source: Strawberries | EWG’s 2017 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

Sued Over Old Debt, and Blocked From Suing Back – The New York Times

“Mr. Cain said he never knew the lawsuit had been brought against him until the money was gone. Neither did other Baltimore residents who were among the hundreds of people sued by the collector, Midland Funding, a unit of the Encore Capital Group, in Maryland State Court. Some of them said they did not even owe any money, or their debt had long expired and was not legally collectible, according to a review of court records.In any case, the Encore subsidiary was not licensed to collect debt in Maryland.Yet when Mr. Cain brought a class action in 2013 against Midland Funding, the company successfully fought to have the lawsuit dismissed.If the plaintiffs wanted to try to recover their money, they would have to do so in private arbitration. And because class actions are banned in arbitration, Mr. Cain and the others would have to fight the unit of Encore — one of the largest debt buyers in the country with vast legal resources — one by one.”

Source: Sued Over Old Debt, and Blocked From Suing Back – The New York Times

Key to Opting Out of Personalized Ads, Hidden in Plain View – The New York Times

The AdChoices logo, which allows consumers to opt out of personalized ads, is seen more than a trillion times a month, but critics say the program is too complicated to use.

Source: Key to Opting Out of Personalized Ads, Hidden in Plain View – The New York Times

Is Money Corrupting Research? By LUIGI ZINGALES- The New York Times

“Chicago — THE integrity of research and expert opinions in Washington came into question last week, prompting the resignation of Robert Litan, an economist, from his position as a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.Senator Elizabeth Warren raised the issue of a conflict of interest in Mr. Litan’s testimony before a Senate committee examining a proposed Labor Department rule designed to protect consumers in their dealing with retirement-plan brokers.The testimony was based on a paper Mr. Litan had prepared for the Capital Group, a mutual fund company. Mr. Litan disclosed that the Capital Group, which has a stake in the debate, had funded his paper, but he did not disclose that it had also commissioned it. Mr. Litan concluded that the regulatory rule, while well intentioned, would be too costly. He resigned because he testified as a Brookings fellow, violating a recent Brookings rule change that would have prohibited that.”

Source: Is Money Corrupting Research? – The New York Times

Why Student Debtors Go Unrescued – The New York Times

“A vast majority of the more than 10 million Americans who have defaulted on or are behind on repaying their student loans could have benefited from income-driven repayment plans that are intended to ease pressure on distressed borrowers and keep them from defaulting on their federal loans.These plans can allow borrowers with low income or high debt — or both — to pay less each month, or even nothing, until their finances improve without being penalized or going into default. But many borrowers never even hear about these payment plans, thanks to poor customer service by the companies that are paid more than $600 million a year by the government to manage these accounts, process monthly payments and enroll distressed borrowers in alternative repayment plans.”

Source: Why Student Debtors Go Unrescued – The New York Times

Here is a comment from the Times which I suport:

Vanadias

Maine 52 minutes ago

“Student loan companies are not “failing” borrowers. They’re intentionally obfuscating, mismanaging information, or flat-out lying to borrowers in order to keep them trapped in debt bondage forever. Go ahead and look up the consumer reports of any major debt servicing company. They are filled with tales of grift and harassment; companies that just happen to “lose” huge amounts of money paid towards a principal or that conveniently forget about payment plans in which their borrower participates. In the meantime, these companies can sell massive debts to one another at pennies on the dollar, while charging interest rates that break the orbit of our now permanent zero interest rate policy.

We are way past the point of effete “oversight.” These deadbeat companies should be nationalized, their assets should be redistributed to the borrowers that they have defrauded, and their execs should stand trial. Or, we can wait for this problem to manifest itself, once again, in the streets. ”

• 22Recommended

Dewey, Cheatem & Howe Recent cases of disturbing business practices underscore the need for good regulation, which is at stake in next year’s election. nytimes.com|By Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman: “No doubt I, like anyone who points out ethical lapses on the part of some companies, will be accused of demonizing business. But I’m not claiming that all businesspeople are demons, just that some of them aren’t angels.

There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior, not least so that ethical businesspeople aren’t at a disadvantage when competing with less scrupulous types. But we knew that, right?”

Dewey, Cheatem & Howe

Recent cases of disturbing business practices underscore the need for good regulation, which is at stake in next year’s election.

nytimes.com|By Paul Krugman