The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt
Institute’s top 5 stories of the week.
1. The Dirt on Big
Agriculture
Through “A New Farm
Economy, ”
an agricultural policy plan released this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) aims to dismantle the concentrated power of Big Agriculture,
replace federal subsidies with a supply management program, and pay
farmers to combat climate change. In a blog
post published
earlier this year, Roosevelt Fellow Susan R. Holmberg
and Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy
argue that such structural fixes are vital both to save America’s
farmlands and preserve the planet. “Any set of climate policies, including a Green New Deal, must
simultaneously curb the power of corporations and Wall Street to
control farming on their terms, and redirect the federal government to
economically empower independent family farms over global
agribusiness,” they write.
2. A Global Green New Deal
Reiterating the case that
good
policy is good politics, a New
York Times
piece documents the success of progressive activists in elevating
aggressive climate action—like a Green
New Deal—to priority
status for voters.
The next step: solving this global problem with global solutions. In a
recent working
paper, Roosevelt
Fellow Todd N. Tucker makes the case for a global Green New Deal to
remake a trade infrastructure in crisis and decarbonize the global
economy in a socially sustainable and equitable way. “Although many
specific routes are open, it is vital that the campaign
for a new economy be accompanied by new and more just economic
rules—both at home and abroad.”
3. Student Debt
in Sheep’s
Clothing
Expanding on her recent
blog
post about the
student debt crisis, Roosevelt Fellow Julie Margetta Morgan comments
on income-share agreements (ISAs) in a new MarketWatch article. As explained in the piece, an ISA
is a controversial financial tool by which students pledge a
percentage of their future incomes to funders, rather than taking on
more traditional loans. Though “ISAs seem like an appealing solution
when they’re pitched as an interest-free, debt-free way of going to
college,” notes Margetta Morgan, the agreements are effectively loans
by another name. “It’s just a symptom of how bad
college affordability and the student-debt crisis has
gotten.”
4. Bridging the Digital Divide
The digital revolution has left
millions behind, as explored in a 2017 Roosevelt
report. About
39
percent of rural Americans lack access to high-speed internet, for
example, compared to 2 percent of those in urban areas. This week,
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a targeted digital
divide plan that,
among other measures, would allocate $85 billion in federal funds to
develop broadband networks. Though high-speed internet access is a
fundamental necessity of American life, telecommunications monopolies
and deregulatory policies have exacerbated historical and systemic
inequities along racial and urban-rural lines. To
bridge the digital divide, we
must confront both corporate power and racial
injustice.
5. Curbing Stock
Buybacks
On Tuesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown
(D-OH) introduced the Stock
Buyback Reform and Worker Dividend Act, the latest legislative effort to
curb
stock buybacks and raise worker pay. Since Trump’s 2017
corporate tax cuts, stock buybacks have become a trillion-dollar practice,
while wages for most workers have barely increased over
decades. Sen. Brown’s bill
would require companies to address this outsized gulf by paying a lump
sum to workers: $1 for every $1 million spent on stock buybacks.
JPMorgan Chase, for example, spent $20 billion on buybacks in 2018, so
the company would
have to pay
employees $20,000 each. As Roosevelt Senior Economist and Policy
Counsel Lenore Palladino argues in a recent working
paper, “Pragmatic
reforms to the rules that govern stock buybacks and to corporate
governance are achievable and will benefit not only employees but also
the long-term prosperity of corporations themselves and our economy at
large.”
What We’re
Reading
This week’s merger of America’s two largest newspaper
publishers, Gannett and GateHouse Media, will create a media
powerhouse owning hundreds of daily, weekly, and community papers.
According to the Nieman
Lab, it is also
likely to spark a new era of consolidation in the journalism industry.
If past is prelude, this concentration of power could
threaten the free flow of information and hemorrhage
jobs. As mentioned in the
New
York Times,
“In recent years, GateHouse Media has shrunk newsrooms while pursuing
shareholder value, in part by consolidating operations in regional
hubs and merging newspapers. Gannett, which has been in the news
business for nearly a century, laid off journalists all across the
country earlier this year.”
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