Dean Baker
The Huffington Post, May 24, 2014

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In their latest article on U.S. government spying for The Intercept, Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras review and publish leaked documents that show that the U.S. government may have used the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to aid the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on U.S. citizens and non-citizens in foreign countries. The NSA is shown to have assisted the DEA with efforts to capture narcotraffickers, but the leaked documents also refer to “a vibrant two-way information sharing relationship” between the two intelligence agencies, implying that the DEA shares its information with the NSA to aid with non-drug-related spying. This may explain how the NSA has gathered not just metadata but also the full-take audio from “virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.”

The authors write,

The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe.

But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.”

What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”

Stephan Lefebvre
The Americas Blog (CEPR), 22 de mayo 2014

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Stephan Lefebvre
The Americas Blog (CEPR), 22 de maio de 2014

Em inglês | Em espanhol

Since May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, CEPR's looked into Census data about AAPI workers and found some interesting tidbits.

For example, the President and some Congressional leaders would like to see the federal minimum wage go up to $10.10 per hour.  If that were to happen, the data show that just over 1 million AAPI workers would be directly affected (that's 13.7% of AAPI workers).  And economic research shows that a significant number of workers making just above the $10.10 line would also get raises.

May 2014, David Rosnick and Mark Weisbrot

May 2014, Janelle Jones and John Schmitt

Dean Baker
The New York Times, May 20, 2014

Larry Summers in his review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century gives Thomas Piketty high marks for demonstrating “absolutely conclusively” that those at the very top – the top 1 percent, top .1 percent, and top.01 percent – have claimed an increasing

The Huffington Post, May 16, 2014

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

The private equity industry is often at the center of a debate over whether it saves failing businesses or undermines healthy companies at the expense of creditors, vendors, workers and retirees. This should not be surprising. Since modern private equity got its start with the first leveraged buyout of a publicly traded company in 1979, the industry’s complex organizational structures allowed for little oversight and government regulation. Much of the analyses available on PEs are positive accounts by industry insiders and slightly more modest takes by finance economists, and as a result, it has been difficult to assess the economic impact of this $3.5 trillion dollar industry.

Noting this lack of transparency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently began an investigation of industry practices. Since 2012, SEC staffers have reviewed roughly 400 PE funds and the results are striking. Of the firms reviewed, general partners at 200 firms collected fees and expenses from the companies they managed without disclosing or sharing these fees with investors.

While the SEC examinations focus on the need for greater oversight of the industry, Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, by CEPR’s Eileen Appelbaum and Cornell University’s Rosemary Batt offers a broader and more comprehensive examination of the private equity business model and its impact on the U.S. economy and labor market. Their analysis draws on original cases, interviews with PE and pension fund managers, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings and academic scholarship.

Eileen AppelbaumHuffington Post, May 13, 2014