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“The most Republican-leaning company in the country, based on political donations, isn’t Koch Industries. It’s the company that makes Wonder Bread.

The political action committee of Flowers Foods, a Georgia company that produces the pillowy sandwich bread, Tastykakes and Nature’s Own baked goods, has given more than 99 percent of its political contributions since 1979 to Republicans. Only three Democratic congressional candidates have gotten money from its PAC since 1984, and not one in the past 20 years.”

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“Virtually every media and tech company — content providers like CBS and Disney, video streaming services like Amazon, Netflix and YouTube, and social media and e-commerce sites — has a major stake in the outcome of the government’s review of the merger. The question these companies now face is whether their interests are better served by speaking out about it, or by keeping any possible complaints to themselves as they try to negotiate the best deals they can with Comcast.

For the time being, almost none are publicly speaking out, partly because they are wary of antagonizing a company with which they do business.

Privately, though, media executives are eager to echo Netflix’s concern about the deal, and to cast themselves as victims of the potential megamerger. They use words like “omnivorous” and “rapacious” to describe Comcast, while expressing skepticism on the prospect of the largest cable company buying the second-largest.”

– http://ift.tt/1kqBM93

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“Few things are better at conveying what a nation really cares than how it spends its money. On that measure, Americans like to punish.

 The United States spent about $80 billion on its system of jails and prisons in 2010 — about $260 for every resident of the nation. By contrast, its budget for food stamps was $227 a person.”

– http://ift.tt/1u3GgdY

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“These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?

This doesn’t happen with other genres. There’s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There’s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn’t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion.”

– http://ift.tt/1icDKYU

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Fewer High School Graduates Go to College

Just 65.9 percent of students who graduated from high school in spring 2013 had enrolled in college by last October, the government reported this week. That was the lowest proportion since 2003. But the government also reported that among those graduates who did not go to college, and among new high school dropouts, the proportion with jobs was higher in 2013 than in the previous year, a possible indication that the job market is improving.

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“Reviewing admission data from 30 top colleges in the Economics of Education Review, the researcher Michael Hurwitz concluded that children of alumni had a 45 percent greater chance of admission. A Princeton team found the advantage to be worth the equivalent of 160 additional points on an applicant’s SAT, nearly as much as being a star athlete or African-American or Hispanic.”

– http://ift.tt/1fdOv2H

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“The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.”

– http://ift.tt/1ftA5pS

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“The findings in the four states — all with political races that could tip the balance of power in the Senate — underscore the complex and often contradictory views of Mr. Obama’s principal domestic legislation four years after it became law.

Most people still loathe the law. Questions about it may evoke associations with an unpopular president, the remoteness of Washington from ordinary Americans and extra costs in family budgets. But majorities say they do not want it taken away, even in states that lean Republican in presidential elections.”

– http://ift.tt/1iQ9fN8

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“I believe a critic’s point of view is crucial. My job is not to act as an impartial arbiter of bottles, but as a guide, leading readers on a quest to explore what is most beautiful, fascinating, distinctive, curious, delicious and moving in wine. I hope to inspire curiosity, promote ease and comfort with wine, and provoke discussion and debate. Ultimately my aim is to eliminate the need for wine critics (at least in a utopian sense) by helping consumers become their own best authorities.”

– http://ift.tt/1hhS4DR

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The findings are striking because the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income. With a big share of recent income gains in this country flowing to a relatively small slice of high-earning households, most Americans are not keeping pace with their counterparts around the world.

“The idea that the median American has so much more income than the middle class in all other parts of the world is not true these days,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist who is not associated with LIS. “In 1960, we were massively richer than anyone else. In 1980, we were richer. In the 1990s, we were still richer.”

That is no longer the case, Professor Katz added.

Median per capita income was $18,700 in the United States in 2010 (which translates to about $75,000 for a family of four after taxes), up 20 percent since 1980 but virtually unchanged since 2000, after adjusting for inflation. The same measure, by comparison, rose about 20 percent in Britain between 2000 and 2010 and 14 percent in the Netherlands. Median income also rose 20 percent in Canada between 2000 and 2010, to the equivalent of $18,700.

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– http://ift.tt/1jL4ra0

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