Your daily briefing for all the top news in Energy, Technology, Finance, and Politics.
Energy
The Growing Threat From an EMP Attack
WALL STREET JOURNAL
R. James Woolsey and Peter Vincent Pry
Lawmakers and the administration need to move rapidly to build resilience into our electric grid and defend against an EMP attack that could deliver a devastating blow to the U.S. economy and the American people. Congress should pass and the president should sign into law the Shield Act and CIPA as soon as possible. Literally millions of American lives could depend on it.
Proposal Threatens to Aggravate Shortage of Railcars to Move Oil
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Bob Tita
Proposed federal regulations on hauling flammable liquids threaten to aggravate a shortage of railcars for transporting oil. The proposal, which likely will mean scrapping or redeploying thousands of tank cars, could make it more expensive to ship oil and other fuels as crude-by-rail shipments have soared with U.S. oil production. The plan could also extend the wait times for new cars.
Democrats Court Palin in Alaska Oil-Tax Fight
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Reid J. Epstein
Democrats fighting for revenues from oil companies here are reaching out to an old foe: Sarah Palin. The former GOP governor is a natural ally in a ballot fight to restore a law she signed in 2007 that implemented steep and progressive taxes on the biggest Alaska oil producers. Statehouse Republicans replaced her structure with one backed by oil producers, who are the largest contributors to the $14.4 million effort to defeat an Aug. 19 referendum to revert to the Palin-era oil-tax code.
With Natural Gas Byproduct, Iran Sidesteps Sanctions
NEW YORK TIMES
Clifford Krauss
Iran is finding a way around Western sanctions to export increasing amounts of an ultralight oil to China and other Asian markets, expanding the value of its trade by potentially billions of dollars a year.
Technology
As Data Overflows Online, Researchers Grapple With Ethics
NEW YORK TIMES
Vindu Goel
Once forced to conduct painstaking personal interviews with subjects, scientists can now sit at a screen and instantly play with the digital experiences of millions of Internet users. It is the frontier of social science — experiments on people who may never even know they are subjects of study, let alone explicitly consent.
Government+
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Struggling with ObamaCare? Can’t get an appointment at Veterans Affairs? Not to worry. The Obama White House on Monday debuted its latest cure for failing government: a new outfit tasked with upgrading the “digital experience” Americans have with their ever-growing federal bureaucracy. Think Google+ for taxpayers.
Google on the Run
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
Hong Kong’s High Court ruled last week that local tycoon Albert Yeung, whose businesses include pop music, casinos and luxury retailing, can sue Google for defamation over its “autocomplete” feature. … As law professor Eugene Volokh wrote presciently in 2000: “The difficulty is that the right to information privacy—the right to control other people’s communication of personally identifiable information about you—is a right to have the government stop people from speaking about you.” Inviting such government power is no path to greater individual privacy or security.
Tech giants at odds over Obama privacy bill
THE HILL
Kate Tummarello
Microsoft is among those calling for new federal standards, arguing Congress should act to craft “strong, comprehensive privacy legislation.” … But the Internet Association — “the unified voice of the Internet economy,” which includes Facebook, Google and Yahoo — took a different approach, calling for “a flexible and balanced self-regulatory responsible use framework” that protects consumers while allowing for innovation.
Apple’s workforce is mostly white, Asian and male
USA TODAY
Jessica Guynn
Apple’s diversity numbers aren’t much better than the rest of Silicon Valley’s. White. Asian. Male. The difference: CEO Tim Cook has staked his reputation on fixing them.
City, state and federal governments are fighting over Chattanooga’s effort to bring broadband to rural consumers
WASHINGTON POST
Reid Wilson
A quiet battle between telecom giants and a small electric utility over broadband access is blossoming into a national fight over state and municipal rights as rural residents of southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia clamor for some of the fastest Internet speeds in the world.
How Congress could wind up accidentally saving Aereo
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
The Senate proposal, known as “Local Choice,” would ease the pressure on cable companies who currently pay rising fees to broadcasters to get their content. This idea could work in Aereo’s favor; if the courts accept its new argument that Aereo is a cable company, Aereo might find itself lumped in with the other firms that would be affected by Local Choice, too. Local Choice would benefit Aereo by letting it avoid paying those expensive content fees itself, landing it back where it began before it was laid low by litigation. Voila — Aereo emerges more or less intact, though the details are a little more complicated.
Finance
Put the brakes on the auto-lending bubble before it bursts
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
No, a subprime auto-lending bubble probably can’t and won’t cripple the U.S. economy. But the longer it goes on, the more people will get hurt when it abruptly stops. It would be better for all concerned to tap the brakes now than to risk a crash later on.
Medtronic’s Tax Lesson
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
The decision to move the legal address overseas is ironically the best news for Medtronic’s U.S. employees. Notice that even President Obama, while campaigning against “corporate deserters” and “unpatriotic” loopholes, doesn’t claim that American jobs are being lost. He knows U.S. workers win under these deals. The losers are the President and the other politicians who receive less money to spend—though they’re not losing much. Kyle Pomerleau of the Tax Foundation notes that even if you believe the analysis from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation that implies inversions will cost the government about $19 billion over 10 years, “This is compared to the $4.5 trillion the corporate income tax will raise over the same period. That is 0.4 percent of our corporate tax base due to inversions.”
Banks Push to Delay Rule on Investments
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Andrew Ackerman and Ryan Tracy
Bank officials, trade groups and lawmakers are quietly lobbying the Federal Reserve to grant a reprieve of up to seven years from a provision that limits banks’ investments in private-equity and venture-capital funds, according to people familiar with the effort. Absent action by the Fed, the critics warn, banks will be forced to sell their stakes in these funds at fire-sale prices by next summer, when firms are expected to begin complying with the rule.
Banks Retreat From Market That Keeps Cash Flowing
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ryan Tracy
The large and opaque market for repurchase agreements helps keep finance and trading moving, allowing hedge funds, investment banks and other financial firms to borrow and lend short-term funds, often overnight. But there have been increasing signs of trouble. Big banks, which act as middlemen between borrowers and lenders, have been pulling back. In recent weeks, senior bankers have said they are reluctant to participate in the market because of regulatory requirements that make repo trading more expensive.
SEC Launches Examination of Alternative Mutual Funds
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Juliet Chung and Kirsten Grind
The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a broad examination of alternative mutual funds, according to people familiar with the matter, kicking off regulatory scrutiny of one of the hottest and most controversial investment products to be offered to small investors. … Alternative funds, or “liquid alternative funds,” describe a class of mutual funds that employ hedge-fund-like strategies, including betting on some stocks and against others, trading futures contracts and using derivatives to increase leverage.
Banks are slowly welcoming legal marijuana dealers
WASHINGTON POST
Danielle Douglas
A top federal official on Tuesday said that 105 banks and credit unions are doing business with legal marijuana sellers, suggesting that federal rules giving financial institutions the go-ahead to provide services to dealers are starting to work.
Politics
Obama Administration Loosens Ban on Lobbyists in Government
NEW YORK TIMES
Julie Hirschfeld Davis
The Obama administration on Tuesday rolled back part of its ban on lobbyists serving in government, narrowing one of the president’s signature policies in the face of a legal challenge.
On Immigration, G.O.P. Starts to Embrace Tea Party
NEW YORK TIMES
Jonathan Weisman
“This was one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve had in my eight years in Congress,” Mrs. Bachmann said. “We were able to achieve unity across the conference in what is likely to be the most consequential issue of this time: immigration.” For party elders pressing for conciliation to attract Hispanic and immigrant votes, that unity has different meaning. “When you put Raúl Labrador, Steve King and Michele Bachmann together writing an immigration bill, there’s damage done, no question,” said Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary under President George W. Bush who led the failed war room in 2007 trying to get a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws passed.
U.S. has a chance to stop the Islamic State
WASHINGTON POST
Joseph Lieberman
It would be wrong to view President Obama’s decision to order airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and to give weapons to Kurdish fighters as a continuation of the war in Iraq. It is more accurate to see it as a mission to prevent a repetition of the war in Afghanistan. We have a chance to stop the Islamic State before it creates a sanctuary in Iraq and Syria that it could use to strike the United States, just as al-Qaeda used its sanctuary in Afghanistan to kill thousands of Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. That, to his credit, is what the president has begun to do.
Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama: Let’s hug it out
POLITICO
Maggie Haberman
Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman.
