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LPE Originals

The Rising Threat of Antisemitism Investigations

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In the fall of 2023, the Department of Education launched more antisemitism investigations into colleges and universities than in all previous years combined. This record was surpassed in 2024 and is on track to be broken again in 2025. While the Biden administration wielded these investigations as a cudgel to crush student-led protests in support of Palestine, Trump has turned them into a battering ram in his attempt to remake American higher education.
LPE Originals

Title VI Turned Upside Down

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Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Today, however, it has become one of the most powerful forces against desegregation. How did this vertigo-inducing inversion come about? And how might we prevent similar civil rights perversions in the future?
LPE Originals

From the Vault: LPE & Criminal Law

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We reach into the vault and highlight some of our favorite posts on the entanglements between criminal law, political economy, and social inequality. Featuring Angela Harris, Noah Zatz, Jocelyn Simonson, Joanna Schwartz, Anthony O’Rourke, Guyora Binder, Rick Su, Zohra Ahmed, Dorothy Roberts, Judah Schept, Andrew Crespo, and Amna Akbar.
LPE Originals

What Stands in the Way of Abundance in Healthcare?

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Recent public initiatives to manufacture insulin highlight both the promise and pitfalls of the new politics of “abundance.” Although states are capable of producing high-quality, affordable medicines, these efforts inevitably face resistance from powerful private interests. Without recognizing this as a central obstacle and building the political will to overcome it, plans to expand public production, in healthcare or elsewhere, are unlikely to succeed.
LPE Originals

The Same Script: Value-Based Payment, Managed Care, and Neoliberalism

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Though heralded as a policy innovation, value-based payment has not succeeded in lowering costs and has instead fueled corporate consolidation, as many physicians are ill-equipped to assume the financial risk that the payment model requires. Embodying the core tenets of neoliberalism, VBP is ultimately a failure of policymakers to equitably and efficiently administer a public health care program.
LPE Originals

Local Electricity and Bottom-up Energy Planning

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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 planning and system control as Investor Owned Utilities. Unless that changes, public ownership will do little to remove the barriers that now largely block the evolution of decarbonized, resilient, and more equitable electric service.
LPE Originals

A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power

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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 in health care.
LPE Originals

State Efforts to Rein in Corporate Medicine

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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 revitalized to address today’s forms of corporatization.
LPE Originals

Consolidating Care: A Symposium on Medicine and Market Power

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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 protect us from both illness and insolvency.
LPE Originals

The Tax Struggle and Renewable Power

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As the Trump administration moves to roll back clean energy tax credits, the real question isn’t whether renewable energy will survive, but who will own and control the infrastructure that powers America’s future.
LPE Originals

Yardsticking It to the Man, Then and Now

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In Democracy in Power, Sandeep Vaheesan argues that New Deal rural electrification efforts can serve as a model for public power in today’s energy system. There are, however, important differences between the political economy of rural electrification and that of today’s climate crisis. Understanding these distinctions can help us be clear-eyed about the political hurdles facing modern public power movements.
LPE Originals

From the Vault: LPE & Housing

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A collection of our favorite posts about the legal underpinnings of today’s housing crisis, and about what might be done to restore a conception of housing as shelter, not commodity. Featuring Angela Harris, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, David Stein, Kathryn Sabbeth, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, Tara Raghuveer, and more!
LPE Originals

Why Public Ownership?

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Calls for public ownership often highlight the downsides of private ownership: how capitalist firms prioritize profit over providing quality services at fair prices. But what, specifically, do we value in its public counterpart? While Sandeep Vaheesan defends public ownership in the power sector primarily on democratic grounds, the left should emphasize its potential to address key obstacles to rapid decarbonization.
LPE Originals

Democratic Abundance

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What can the history of publicly-governed electrical utilities in the twentieth century teach us about today’s struggle for an accountable power sector? Sandeep Vaheesan kicks of a symposium on his new book, Democracy in Power, by tracing the history of electrification during the New Deal and offering a blueprint for a publicly-led path to decarbonization.