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It's no secret that Facebook's IPO will feed one of the most troubling trends in America today: the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite.

Leaders in the House of Representatives introduced The Voter Empowerment Act of 2012 to protect and promote our freedom to vote. This bill seeks to provide more access to the ballot, more efficiency in our election systems, and more accountability in our elections.

Google "was Occupy Wall Street successful" and you get millions of results. The answer depends on metrics. Was the goal of #Occupy to spur a discussion about income inequity -- no small thing -- or shine a light on perfidy of the banks?

Okay, so the headline overstates things: The problem is not that the booming tech sector fails to produce any jobs; the problem is that one of the most robust parts of our economy isn't producing enough jobs to make a dint in this nation's unemployment crisis.

Big paydays for founders like Mark Zuckerberg have less and less to do with the creation of middle-class jobs for everyone else.

Staring back at me from the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a headline that promised an answer to a puzzle that had endured for more than a month, and which I have explored here and here. The blame for the multi-billion dollar JP Morgan credit default swap fiasco had been discovered.

Cory Booker didn't distinguish himself as a particularly adept politician when, yesterday on Meet the Press, he undercut the Obama campaign's message by criticizing its attacks on Bain Capital. Booker is a surrogate for the campaign after all, and if there's one thing that's expected of surrogates it's that they stay on message.

Oil companies are doubling down on fighting a transparency provision in Dodd-Frank that would require the disclosure of payments made to foreign governments in connection with energy projects in their country. The provision requires information on payments for production licenses, taxes, royalties and other aspects of energy and mineral projects to be disclosed by oil and mineral companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The revelation that Apple chief Tim Cook pulled in $378 million in compensation in 2011, more than any other CEO, has sparked the usual debate about how much CEOs are worth. Cook made $300 million more than the next highest paid exec in America, Oracle's Larry Ellison, leading some to wonder whether he's really that much better than his peers (especially since the late Steve Jobs is widely seen as the genius behind Apple's current success.)

The Credit CARD Act is helping households pay down balances faster, with a third of low- and middle-income households that carry credit card debt reporting that new disclosures have caused them to pay down their balances faster.

David Brooks offers up a spirited defense of private equity today in the Times, and many of his points make perfect sense: In fact, many private equity firms don't set out to laden the firms they buy with debt and cash out before the company goes bankrupt.

Public transit in the U.S. is a classic chicken and egg situation: outside of a few metropolitan areas, transit networks are not dense enough to be useful so few people take public transit. If few people take public transit, there is not enough demand or political will to expand transit networks, leading to low ridership, and so on. With this cycle, it becomes easy for politicians to forgo investing the capital and political will necessary to build out transit networks because they can point to low ridership and say there is no public appetite for it.

One big question at the center of the private equity debate is whether firms like Bain Capital intentionally set out to burden the companies they take over with debt -- or whether things just sometimes go sour amid failed turnaround efforts.

The Senate Banking Committee hearings on Tuesday enlightened the public on one extraordinarily important fact. Politicians can be expected to lie, bully, and engage in character assassination to serve the basest of motivations.

The best defense of private equity is that this industry does both good things and bad things.

Sometimes private equity firms rescue troubled companies, pump in new capital and management talent, and make them better and more productive -- saving or creating jobs along the way.

Other times, though, today's LBO artists buy companies, load them with debt, suck them dry, and accelerate their path to bankruptcy. The bad things private equity firms do are pretty bad; just read Josh Kosmen's book, The Buyout of America.

A trade war is brewing over renewable energy imports between the U.S. and China. Last October, several U.S. solar firms filed a federal trade complaint against Chinese companies for “dumping” solar products on global markets to artificially lower prices with a glut of supply. The complaint also alleged that China unfairly subsidized its industries with land grants, contract awards, trade barriers, financing breaks and supply chain subsidies.

The story as it now stands for Facebook's IPO supports a broader narrative depressingly familiar to most Americans: Which is that the stock market is a rigged game.

David Brooks is no economist and that shows in his recent column about private equity, in which he claims that private equity firms have pushed corporate America to get leaner and smarter. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, nothing of the sort happened -- because, in fact, productivity has not been higher since the advent of LBOs and private equity, starting in the 1980s.