A pillar of medical treatment is under threat →

When you’re sick, you expect the medicine a doctor gives you to work. But the effectiveness of one of the most important types of drugs — antibiotics — is under threat.

In the United States alone, there are 2 million antibiotic resistant infections causing 23,000 deaths each year. You say that you never get sick, so this isn’t your problem. But what if I told you that antibiotics make modern medicine possible, including surgery, cancer treatment and organ transplants? Half of men and a third of women will get cancer in their lifetimes. Many treatments for cancer weaken the immune system, putting you at risk for infection.

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Doctors are a big part of the problem. We’re prescribing broader and broader big gun antibiotics, and this creates stronger evolutionary pressure on bugs to mutate and become resistant, mostly because we aren’t sure what we’re treating. We figure that if we cover all our bases, we won’t go wrong. Better diagnostic tests that were quick, easy and work well would make us feel more confident we haven’t missed something.

Venezuela: Chavismo in Crisis →

A good primer on Venezuela's recent history and its implications for the near future.

Chicago mayor 'welcomes' US Justice Department inquiry into police practices →

Beleaguered Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Monday that he “welcomed” the Justice Department’s investigation into his city’s police practices, hours after it was announced by the attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

The pressure from Washington comes amid calls for his resignation following the release of dashcam footage that showed a white Chicago police officer fatally shooting a black teenager, Laquan McDonald, 17.

Earlier on Monday, Lynch launched the federal investigation into whether the city’s police department was guilty of a pattern of deadly violence against the African American community. She said the inquiry – initially resisted by Emanuel – would proceed with or without cooperation from the city, which has alreadysacked its police superintendent, Garry McCarthy.

The announcement of the sweeping DoJ investigation came after similar responses to police killings in Ferguson, Baltimore and New York. That prompted Lynch to issue a rare warning about the danger of collapsing trust in policing.

“When suspicion and hostility is allowed to fester, it can erupt into unrest,” said the attorney general during a press conference to unveil the latest so-called “pattern and practice” investigation.

Pfizer and Allergan to merge in $160 billion inversion →

Pfizer and Allergan on Monday morning announced they would merge in a massive, $160 billion deal that will create the world's largest drugmaker, producing treatments as varied as Lipitor and Botox.

The deal is structured as a reverse merger, with smaller Dublin-based Allergan buying New York-based Pfizer, and it is likely to renew concerns over "inversions," where U.S. companies are bought by or merge with foreign firms in order to reduce U.S. corporate tax burdens. In a press release, Pfizer said the combined company would generate more than $2 billion in savings over the first three years and would enjoy a tax rate of 17 to 18 percent -- far less than Pfizer's current corporate tax rate of 25 percent.

Just days ago, the U.S. Treasury Department issued rules seeking to crack down on these types of deals, which President Obama has labeled "unpatriotic."

NSA Collected Americans' E-mails Even After it Stopped Collecting Americans' E-mails →

In 2001, the Bush administration authorized -- almost certainly illegally -- the NSA to conduct bulk electronic surveillance on Americans: phone calls, e-mails, financial information, and so on. We learned a lot about the bulk phone metadata collection program from the documents provided by Edward Snowden, and it was the focus of debate surrounding the USA FREEDOM Act. E-mail metadata surveillance, however, wasn't part of that law. We learned the name of the program -- STELLAR WIND -- when it was leaked in 2004. But supposedly the NSA stopped collecting that data in 2011, because itwasn't cost-effective.

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When Turner said that in 2013, we knew from the Snowden documents that the NSA was still collecting some Americans' Internet metadata from communications links between the US and abroad. Now we have more proof. It turns out that the NSA never stopped collecting e-mail metadata on Americans. They just cancelled one particular program and changed the legal authority under which they collected it.

America's gun problem, explained

A good primer which I wish could be taken for granted as a starting point for an honest debate.

Why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it's important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America's very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.

Newly published FBI request shines light on National Security Letters →

An ISP has released the first unredacted National Security Letter attachment ever made public, exposing just how much access US law enforcement asks for in its secretive letters. In 2004, the FBI requested that Nicholas Merrill and his former ISP, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation, submit anything considered an "electronic communication transactional record," and it didn't clarify the vague wording. The agency did, however, explicitly list some examples for Merrill to go off, including his complete web DSL account information, including subscriber information and account numbers, along with his internet service provider and other personal data. He also received, like nearly all other NSL targets, a gag order with the letter, which he directly challenged in his court case.

National Security Letters are controversial among privacy advocates because of their broad powers and minimal oversight. The FBI sends the letters whenever senior officials deem necessary, but no court approval is involved. Although the legal weight of the letters is unclear, the agency's intimidation tactics typically work, said Andrew Crocker, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in an interview with The Verge. Recipients comply, especially when they’re bound to silence and can’t discuss the terrifying letter they just received. "More transparency is really needed, and not just [around] what [the FBI] can get and how many they issue," Crocker said. The gag order and lack of judicial opinions over their constitutionality particularly need to be rethought, he said. Merrill's case is a start.

Challenging the Oligarchy →

Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power. This may sound like straying off the reservation—aren’t economists supposed to focus only on the invisible hand of the market?—but there is actually a long tradition of economic concern about “market power,” aka the effect of monopoly. True, such concerns were deemphasized for several generations, but they’re making a comeback—and one way to read Robert Reich’s new book is in part as a popularization of the new view, just as The Work of Nations was in part a popularization of SBTC. There’s more to Reich’s thesis, as I’ll explain shortly. But let’s start with the material that economists will find easiest to agree with.

Market power has a precise definition: it’s what happens whenever individual economic actors are able to affect the prices they receive or pay, as opposed to facing prices determined anonymously by the invisible hand. Monopolists get to set the price of their product; monopsonists—sole purchasers in a market—get to set the price of things they buy. Oligopoly, where there are a few sellers, is more complicated than monopoly, but also involves substantial market power. And here’s the thing: it’s obvious to the naked eye that our economy consists much more of monopolies and oligopolists than it does of the atomistic, price-taking competitors economists often envision.

...In any case, the causes and consequences of union decline, like the causes and consequences of rising monopoly power, are a very good illustration of the role of politics in increasing inequality.

But why has politics gone in this direction? Like a number of other commentators, Reich argues that there’s a feedback loop between political and market power. Rising wealth at the top buys growing political influence, via campaign contributions, lobbying, and the rewards of the revolving door. Political influence in turn is used to rewrite the rules of the game—antitrust laws, deregulation, changes in contract law, union-busting—in a way that reinforces income concentration. The result is a sort of spiral, a vicious circle of oligarchy...