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Energy

Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests
NEW YORK TIMES
Andrew Higgins
Pointing to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protest, Romanian officials including the prime minister say that the struggle over fracking in Europe does feature a Goliath, but it is the Russian company Gazprom, not the American Chevron.

 

The Global Shakeout From Plunging Oil
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Daniel Yergin
The decision by members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countrieson Thursday not to cut production reflects a profound shift in the world oil market. The demand for oil—by China and other emerging economies—is no longer the dominant factor. Instead, the surge in U.S. oil production, bolstered by additional new supply from Canada, is decisive. This surge is on a scale that most oil exporters had not anticipated. The turmoil in prices, with spasmodic plunges over the past few days, will likely continue.

 

Despite Glut, U.S. Firms Aren’t Likely to Slash Oil Output
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Erin Ailworth
New pressure from OPEC will cause a lot of pain for U.S. energy companies, but they probably won’t slash American oil output anytime soon, experts said this weekend.

 

EPA’s goofy green-energy rules
WASHINGTON TIMES
Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett-White
If you think President Obama’s unilateral exercise of executive powers granting near-blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants was an abuse of power, get a load of what this administration is doing over at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan regulations are the most expansive and economically disruptive rules in four decades from an agency that is notorious for its reckless disregard for the financial consequences of regulation under the Clean Air Act.

 

Wind Power Is Intermittent, But Subsidies Are Eternal
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Tim Phillips
It would be a mistake for Congress to renew the PTC again, and it is time to let the wind industry compete with other energy industries in a fair market. Congress should ignore the hot air surrounding the PTC and let it flutter away forever.

 

Optimism Faces Grave Realities at Climate Talks
NEW YORK TIMES
Coral Davenport
For the next two weeks, thousands of diplomats from around the globe will gather in Lima, Peru, for a United Nations summit meeting to draft an agreement intended to stop the global rise of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The meeting comes just weeks after a landmark announcement by President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China committing the world’s two largest carbon polluters to cuts in their emissions. United Nations negotiators say they believe that advancement could end a longstanding impasse in the climate talks, spurring other countries to sign similar commitments.

 

 

Technology

GOP’s tech hurdle: They don’t always get it
POLITICO
Tony Romm
Republican presidential prospects like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio have tapped the tech industry’s fat wallets and mined its big-data expertise — but these 2016 hopefuls couldn’t be further from Silicon Valley when it comes to policy. A series of major divides — from the fate of net neutrality to the future of surveillance reform — still splits this trio of prominent pols from Internet giants in the country’s tech heartland, which helped catapult President Barack Obama to well-funded victories in 2008 and 2012.

 

Shades of complexity dominate the debate over ‘net neutrality’
WASHINGTON POST
Steven Pearlstein
After a decade, the noisy “net neutrality” debate is reaching a crescendo. President Obama has weighed in against the cable and phone companies. While his own appointee as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a former cable industry lobbyist, searches for a Solomonic compromise that is sure to usher in another decade of political combat, legal challenges and regulatory gamesmanship. This is a debate that has come to be dominated by hypocrisy, half-truths and impenetrable complexities.

 

Halfway to Wrecking Internet Freedom
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Gordon Crovitz
The Obama administration is so uncomfortable with American exceptionalism that it violated the cardinal rule of good government: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Under U.S. protection, the Internet became the wonder of the modern world. The U.S. should retain stewardship over the Internet and postpone any fixing of the Internet until there is a problem to fix.

 

A Blockbuster Wireless Auction
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
The eye-popping bids in the current auction of wireless frequencies by the Federal Communications Commission are a testament to soaring demand for mobile Internet service. As of last week, bids in the auction exceeded $38 billion, far more than the $10.5 billion reserve price set by the F.C.C. These frequencies, also known as spectrum, are needed to expand cellular networks so they can carry more phone calls and data.

 

US retailers target Alibaba over sales tax ‘loophole’
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
Barney Jopson
A new ad from a campaign group whose members include Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and JC Penney tells US lawmakers that Alibaba will “decimate” local retailers unless they pass a bill to prevent online shoppers avoiding sales tax.

 

 

Finance

Janet Yellen faces a tough year ahead
POLITICO
Ben White, MJ Lee and Kate Davidson
Republican leaders and staff said in interviews that they plan to use their new dominance on both sides of Capitol Hill next year to target the Fed for much greater scrutiny, including aggressive hearings and possible passage of bills to drag the central bank’s secretive policymaking process out into the open.

 

GOP puts Fannie, Freddie in sights
THE HILL
Vicki Needham
Housing industry experts expect congressional Republicans to focus on oversight of housing market regulators next year, instead of legislation. Given the struggle to reach a consensus on what to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, industry officials are betting that House and Senate committee leaders will spend most of their time monitoring Mel Watt, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). Republicans are worried that Watt could push Fannie and Freddie back into their past practices, which led to a nearly $190 billion taxpayer bailout and government conservatorship in 2008.

 

Democrats assail Wall Street ties in Obama administration
THE HILL
Peter Schroeder
President Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss to serve as the Treasury Department’s top domestic finance official is drawing fire from an unusual sector: his fellow Democrats. … But an underlying thread to the Democratic opposition is a fatigue with filling top-ranking administration spots with officials that have spent significant time working for or on behalf of Wall Street titans.

 

Get the SEC Out of the PR Business
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Russell G. Ryan
Press releases are par for the course when the Securities and Exchange Commission files a case in federal court that it must later prove to a judge or jury. But the agency is increasingly shunting cases into its own administrative proceedings, where it initiates the prosecution and ultimately decides guilt or innocence—along with the severity of any sanctions—subject to only limited review in court.

 

States, U.S. Beef Up Cybersecurity Training for Bank Examiners
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Robin Sidel and Ryan Tracy
Federal and state regulators are ramping up plans to train bank examiners about cybersecurity risks at a time when the financial institutions they oversee face growing threats from hackers. The government agencies are also hiring information-technology experts who may be better equipped to analyze a bank’s preparedness against such threats than traditional examiners, who have long focused on other issues, such as the quality of a loan portfolio.

 

A Federal Guarantee Is Sure to Go Broke
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Alex J. Pollock
How is the PBGC insurance program doing on its 40th anniversary? Well, it is dead broke. Its net worth is negative $62 billion as of the end of September. That is even more broke than it was a year ago, when its net worth was negative $36 billion.

 

 

Politics

Funding Deadline Tops Congress’s Agenda
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Kristina Peterson
Lawmakers returning to Capitol Hill on Monday will have less than two weeks to figure out how to keep the government funded amid an acrimonious fight between Republicans and the White House over immigration. With government funding set to expire Dec. 11, top Democrats and Republicans had hoped to pass a so-called omnibus measure that would tie together tailored spending bills to fund the government through September 2015, the end of the fiscal year.

 

Boehner Faces the First Days of New Power in Congress
NEW YORK TIMES
Carl Hulse and Jeremy W. Peters
“Shutting down the entire government over something never did make sense to the American people, still doesn’t and won’t in the future,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican who is part of Mr. Boehner’s inner circle. Like other Boehner insiders, he believes that the speaker, bolstered by election victories, is looking beyond the immediate fight. “There is certainly an opportunity for him to put his mark on the largest Republican House majority in a long time,” Mr. Burr said. “To me, that is a big motivating factor.”

 

Republicans Push to Update Education Law
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kimberly Hefling
The No Child Left Behind education law could be making a political comeback. Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is the incoming chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education, says his top education priority is fixing the landmark Bush-era law. His goal? Get a bill signed by President Barack Obama early next year.

 

Congress could halt Obama amnesty through budget action, legal advisers say
WASHINGTON TIMES
Stephen Dinan
Congress could use its power of the purse to halt President Obama’s executive action on immigration despite the president’s use of a fee-based agency to do most of the key work, the Capitol’s legal research team has concluded. In a letter last week to Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, the Congressional Research Service said federal courts have recognized broad congressional powers to stop the president by denying him funding for his proposed actions.

 

HealthCare.gov’s insurance marketplace for small businesses gets off to a slow start
WASHINGTON POST
Amy Goldstein
A year after the Obama administration temporarily shelved an unfinished part of HealthCare.gov intended for small businesses, it has opened with reports of only modest technical flaws — but with doubts that it will soon benefit the millions of workers at little companies with inadequate health insurance or none at all. Insurance brokers are, at times, having trouble getting into their accounts and, in scattered cases, are not showing up in the computer system’s lists of local insurance professionals available to coach small businesses. More broadly, interviews with brokers and others suggest that, in the two weeks since the marketplace’s health plans went on sale for 2015, interest within the niche they are intended to help seems scant.

 

Obama’s 2012 DACA move offers a window into pros and cons of executive action
WASHINGTON POST
Jerry Markon and Sandhya Somashekhar
The 2012 initiative has given temporary protection to slightly more than 700,000 people brought to the United States illegally as children. They say that program has helped them emerge from the shadows, making possible a work permit, a Social Security number and enhanced self-respect. But hundreds of thousands who advocacy groups say are eligible have not applied under the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Some immigrants say they are afraid they will be rejected and deported, while others are daunted by the $465 application fee and educational requirements. Still others remain unfamiliar with the program because of language and cultural barriers.