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LPE Blog

Local Electricity and Bottom-up Energy Planning

To build an electric system that meets the needs and opportunities of the 21st century, we need proposals that strengthen public control and improve regulation of Investor-Owned Utilities. Yet on their own, such proposals ignore a fundamental issue: almost all federal, state, municipal, and coop utilities currently operate with the same centralized, top-down. . .

Weekly Roundup: July 11

Bijal Shah on how the Supreme Court enables Trump’s illegal immigrations actions, Fumika Mizuno on the consolidation of the dialysis market, and Morgan Harper on building the movement that Democrats won’t. Plus, cool new CFPs, jobs, books, and think pieces on your favorite mayoral candidate.

Beyond The Ballot: Building The Movement Democrats Won’t

The MAGA movement has preyed on the economic decay and social malaise plaguing America’s neighborhoods, offering a suite of real and imagined villains to drive Trump’s ascension. The left must get back to basics, rebuilding the trust lost by the Democratic Party through genuine community building and connection across difference.

A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power

For the half-million people in the U.S. with kidney failure, survival rests in the hands of two powerful corporations — DaVita and Fresenius — that control over 70% of the outpatient dialysis market. But the history of dialysis isn’t a simple narrative of corporate consolidation; it’s a case study of how public funding can entrench private power. . .

State Efforts to Rein in Corporate Medicine

Private equity firms are acquiring dominant shares of physician practices, creating conflicts between shareholder value and physicians’ professional and ethical duties. While longstanding state laws that prohibit lay ownership of medical practices have been under-enforced and evaded, recent litigation and legislative proposals suggest they could be. . .

Consolidating Care: A Symposium on Medicine and Market Power

From the dialysis market to the pharmaceutical industry, health care is seeing growing consolidation and corporatization. Over the next month, this symposium will explore the financialization of various health care industries and begin to sketch the contours of a progressive pushback—how law, policy, and regulatory action can help erect guardrails to. . .

Weekly Roundup: June 27

Ilias Alami on the new state capitalism, Sabeel Rahman on anti-domination and the administrative state, and Jonathan Glater on Students for Fair Admissions. Plus, Jacob Hacker and Patrick Sullivan on the lowlights of the Republican budget reconciliation bill, Adam Bonica on the war between the Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary, Alyssa Battistoni on. . .

Anti-Domination and the Future of Progressive Administration

The Trump administration is simultaneously dismantling, weaponizing, and centralizing state capacities in order to enact a reactionary vision of administration — one which seeks to roll back efforts by prior generations to equalize economic and social relations. In contrast to this vision, progressives ought to aspire to a regulatory state whose purpose. . .