Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.

Energy

Greens gird to oppose opening Atlantic to oil drilling
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Andrew Restuccia
The environmental community is gearing up for what may be the last major energy battle of the Obama administration: preventing the president from green-lighting expanded offshore oil and natural gas drilling.

 

Corralling Carbon Before It Belches From Stack
NEW YORK TIMES
Henry Fountain
If there is any hope of staving off the worst effects of climate change, many scientists say, this must be part of it — capturing the carbon that spews from power plants and locking it away, permanently. For now, they contend, the world is too dependent on fossil fuels to do anything less.

 

Rep. Jared Polis’ anti-fracking crusade riles Colorado
WASHINGTON TIMES
Valerie Richardson
Rep. Jared Polis and his personal fortune were instrumental in helping Democrats wrest control of Colorado from Republicans, but now Democrats fear that he may jeopardize everything they’ve worked for with his anti-fracking crusade.

 

 

Technology

Tech’s message muddled on net neutrality
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Tony Romm
More than a million comments have flooded the FCC on net neutrality — but Google, Facebook and other major Internet firms aren’t among the bunch. Instead, many of the nation’s leading tech companies have chosen to speak through their trade groups, which at times have sent conflicting messages to the FCC about how it should proceed. The muted, back-seat response contrasts with the aggressive lobbying by consumer advocates and telecom firms — and raises questions about why some of the biggest Web brands aren’t weighing in more directly.

 

Net neutrality defenders actually fine if Internet users decide what goes fast
WASHINGTON POST
Nancy Scola
As the Federal Communications Commission wraps up its open comment period for its net neutrality proceedings, AT&T is in with its 99-page contribution. And there’s one section in particular that has caught the attention and earned the ire of some fans of neutrality regulations. It has to do with the idea that in some cases, some of its customers might chose to, say, dedicate more of the bandwidth that they pay for to certain applications, effectively degrading others. … But AT&T cites support for such “user-directed prioritization” on the part of high-profile net neutrality advocacy groups like the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Tech and the Massachusetts-based Free Press.

 

9/11 Commission report authors warn nation of cyberattack threats
WASHINGTON POST
Adam Goldman
The authors also describe the threat of a cyberattack as a significant concern, likening it to the threat of terrorism before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They describe the “cyber domain as the battlefield of the future” and say the country needs to take further steps to prevent the cyber equivalent of 9/11. “We must not repeat that mistake in the cyber realm,” wrote the authors, including Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, who together chaired the 9/11 Commission.

 

 

Finance

Wall St money backs Senate Republicans
FINANCIAL TIMES (Subscribe)
Gina Chon and Richard McGregor
Wall Street donors are concentrating their firepower on backing conservative candidates to flip control in the US Senate to Republicans in the November midterm elections, as Democrats struggle to raise money from the financial industry, according to lobbyists and political groups.

 

Wall Street Adapts to New Regulatory Regime
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Victoria McGrane and Julie Steinberg
Four years after the Dodd-Frank financial law became reality, Washington’s regulatory machine is altering Wall Street in fundamental ways. Banks are selling off profitable business lines, pulling back from the short-term funding market, cutting ties with businesses that could attract extra regulatory scrutiny, and building up defenses to help weather future crises. While profits are up as firms slash costs and reduce funds set aside to cover future losses, their traditional profit engine—trading—is showing signs of weakening as banks step away from some activity amid regulatory pressure.

 

Senate Inquiry Faults Hedge Funds’ Tax Strategy
NEW YORK TIMES
Alexandra Stevenson
Between 1998 and 2013, more than a dozen hedge funds conducted hundreds of billions of dollars in trades using hundreds of structures, known as “basket options,” created by Barclays and Deutsche Bank, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a report on Monday. Over a period of more than a decade, Renaissance avoided more than $6 billion in taxes alone, the subcommittee estimated in the 93-page report.

 

Did Dodd-Frank Work?
NEW YORK TIMES
Joe Nocera
One person who does believe is Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the F.D.I.C. “I do think they could handle a big bank failure,” she told me. “It would be messy and difficult, but they could do it.” Which is the ultimate problem: We have no way of knowing whether “too big to fail” still exists until we have another crisis. Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out anytime soon.

 

How Can the U.S. Stop Corporate Tax Flight?
NEW YORK TIMES
Room for Debate
In recent months, several big U.S. companies have reached so-called inversion deals that will allow them to reincorporate in countries like Ireland and the Netherlands, where corporate taxes are lower. Are these deals a sign that corporate taxes should be lowered so American companies can compete on a level playing field with foreign companies, or are they an example of self-serving greed that should be outlawed so companies built with American support pay their fair share?

 

Inversion Wave Puts Tax Growth at Risk
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Emily Chasan
The U.S. expects to rake in $332.7 billion in corporate income tax this year, more than 20% above the $273.5 billion it collected last year. That figure could rise as high as $528 billion by the end of 2017, according to White House projections. But as more companies, such as medical-device maker Medtronic Inc., aim to leave U.S. shores for lower tax havens, that figure could shrink.

 

Tax Inversions Must Be Stopped Now
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Edward D. Kleinbard
Thus fundamental corporate tax reform is urgently needed, but the path forward has two prongs. First, Congress should enact a temporary law to preserve the status quo, and thereby the corporate tax base, by treating inversions according to their economic substance, and by foreclosing the “hopscotch” strategies described above. Without this, there will be no corporate tax base left to reform. Then both parties need to get serious about substantive reform, lowering the rate to say, 25%, and imposing a stable international regime that works well with territorial systems in other countries.

 

Reforming the Proxy Advisory Racket
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Last summer we told you about SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher’s campaign to reform the proxy advisory racket. A 2003 SEC rule, combined with misguided advice from SEC staff, had all but required many investment fund managers to hand off voting decisions in corporate elections to outside proxy advisers. Similar to the SEC’s disastrous anointing of private credit-rating agencies to judge bonds before the financial crisis, the commission was once again steering business to favored firms while giving them undeserved market power. The SEC policy has been a boon to the two firms that dominate the proxy advisory game, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass, Lewis. For investors, not so much.

 

 

Politics

Terror threat enters danger zone
USA TODAY
Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton
Ten years ago today, we released The 9/11 Commission Report to the government and the American public. Many of our 41 recommendations have been adopted, leaving our government better equipped to fight terrorism. That is progress, but we must not become complacent. Terrorists are still plotting attacks on our homeland and aviation systems. The trend lines overseas are pointing in the wrong direction.

 

Has Congress gotten so pathetic that even the protesters aren’t bothering to show up?
WASHINGTON POST
Ben Terris
Code Pink activists have gone through the cost-benefit analysis and determined that making a scene outside of the Capitol isn’t worth it. Congress, it seems, has gotten so pathetic that even the protesters aren’t bothering to show up.

 

… And Congress punts
POLITICO
Burgess Everett
Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are united on one thing: The best strategy this election year is to punt on any big decisions.

 

The West needs a strategy to contain the world’s newest rogue state — Russia
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
What’s needed is a broad strategy for putting a stop to Mr. Putin’s aggression and, where possible, rolling it back. That begins with sanctions designed to inflict damage on the Russian economy, such as the “sectoral” sanctions Mr. Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel threatened months ago but never deployed. Military measures are also necessary, including rapidly supplying the Ukrainian army with the material it has requested. It’s time to treat Mr. Putin’s Russia as what it has become — a dangerous outlaw regime that needs to be contained.

 

How to break Hamas’s stranglehold on Gaza
WASHINGTON POST
David Ignatius
Hamas’s biggest weakness of all is its unpopularity among Palestinians in Gaza now. A poll taken in June, before the latest fighting began, showed that 70 percent of Gazans wanted a continuing cease-fire with Israel; 57 percent wanted a Fatah-Hamas unity government to renounce violence against Israel; 73 percent thought nonviolent resistance had a positive impact, and large majority thought Hamas had failed to deal with crime and corruption.