Those armed men were police, and the man Maye shot and killed was Officer Ron Jones.

The police were executing a so-called “no knock warrant” where officers will go into a home without announcing themselves because of fear that a suspect will flush drugs. It turned out that Maye had a small amount of marijuana.

The police had gotten a warrant for Jamie Smith, who lived in the apartment across from Maye, while Maye and his girlfriend were only identified as occupants of an apartment adjacent to the suspected drug dealer’s. Although there was considerable reason to believe that Maye acted in self-defense, Maye was indicted and prosecuted for capital murder, convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

What happened to Maye, however, was hardly atypical for a black man accused of shooting a white cop in Mississippi. According to Radley Balko, who was largely responsible for publicizing Maye’s story with an article in Reason, Maye’s trial was rife with misconduct by the prosecution and procedural shortcomings; due to incompetence on the part of his defense attorney, Maye was convicted. Maye, however, is not completely doomed.

Because of sustained uproar and the persistent work of a new legal team, Maye was able to get the death penalty thrown out because he did not have an adequate defense in the penalty stage of his trial. But life in prison without parole by no means seems just for a man whose house was probably illegally invaded by police and in all likelihood only fired in self defense.

Maye, following a ruling by the Mississippi State Court of Appeals, will now get a new trial, this time in his home county. The prosecutors are still going to try Maye, barely shamed by the shady story behind the warrant and the considerable evidence that Maye acted in self defense.  They won’t even take the face-saving route, suggested by Balko, of offering Maye a plea and letting him out after serving time. But Maye, at least, has a chance at justice.

Cameron Todd Willingham was not so lucky. Willingham was convicted of murdering his three daughters by burning down their house one night in December 1991. He was given the death penalty and executed in 2004. The linchpin of the case was forensic evidence that apparently showed that Willingham had burned down the house — this evidence has been vigorously disputed by many of the most highly regarded arson scientists.

Willingham, like Maye, has prominent defenders in the legal and journalistic worlds. In an article published in the country’s most venerable and respected newsweekly, considerable doubt is cast upon the central thesis of the prosecution. Many now think him to be innocent. One of the country’s most prominent forensic arson investigators has prepared a lengthy report saying that the evidence left by the fire which consumed the Willingham home and killed his three young daughters is unsubstantiated.

Govenror Rick Perry, of Willingham’s home state of Texas, is under fire for removing three members from a state commission charged with investigating the forensic evidence that was at the heart of state’s case against Willingham. The former head of the commission has accused Perry and his legal staff of interfering with the commission’s work.

But Willingham, unlike Maye, is dead. Even if he can be redeemed, in the eyes of the public and perhaps, one day, legally, he will never be able to enjoy it. Maye and Willingham are two of the most prominent likely-innocent men who have been railroaded by criminal justice systems that are practically designed to secure convictions, and after that, death sentences. Maye, purely by the luck of getting attention for his case and being sentenced in a state where the gears of death are not as well oiled as in Texas, is still alive and has a chance to plead his innocence in front of a judge.

Both cases are examples of where journalists have been responsible for bringing these cases attention beyond the areas where they occurred. The New Yorker didn’t publish their article until only a few months ago, more than five years after Willingham’s execution in February of 2005. The Chicago Tribune in 2004 had published an article reporting the opinions of several legal and forensic experts that it was highly unlikely that the fire that killed Willingham’s three kids could have been intentionally set.

The best the heroic journalistic efforts of the Tribune and New Yorker can lead to is future faulty death sentences being exposed before they are carried out, or better yet, such prosecutions never being initiated in the first place. But who will be able to do this type of leg work? The New Yorker and Tribune, like just about every other print news title these days, are not profitable ventures. Even worse, such investigations of criminal sentences are some of the most expensive pieces for a magazine or newspaper.

A possible alternative to print newspapers and magazines are universities, which have both the resources and the inclination to perform this type of public-spirited work. One of the best examples of universities picking up where the press and the criminal justice system collide is, of course, the Medill Innocence Project, which is being famously hounded by Cook County prosecutors.

There may be no great way to promote and sustain the type of boring, unglamorous and expensive work that, more cases than not, ends up with little actual news produced. But it’s imperative that we find a way to do so. If we simply didn’t think that holding prosecutors and the criminal justice system as a whole accountable was worth anything, Cory Maye would be dead and Cameron Todd Willingham would be forgotten.

There’s also the commander of the international troops in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who has requested a 40,000 troop increase on top of the total of 68,000 U.S. troops. While Obama probably won’t give McChrystal everything he wants, his personal appointment by Obama basically assured that there would some sort of increase. But is the war in Afghanistan really necessary? Should we perhaps be withdrawing our troops instead of putting more in?

More than eight years after the war in Afghanistan started, it’s worth remembering why we went there in the first place. Pretty simply, it was to destroy Al Qaeda and not allow the Taliban to continue ruling the country. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, this rationale made sense. We couldn’t allow a terrorist organization that had already shown itself capable of inflicting huge damage on our country to have free rein in a country that’s conveniently on the border of one of the most unstable and dangerous countries on earth: Pakistan.

And while we were quickly successful in removing the Taliban from power, we were never able to actually crush Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, not to mention Mohammed Omar, the head of the Afghani Taliban, are still free (probably in Pakistan), even if their capacities for inflicting harm have been diminished.

As for the efforts in turning Afghanistan into a stable country that’s more than a factitious, drug-exporting hellhole, they have been even less successful. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, “won” a recent election that was marred by accusations of fraud. After a runoff election was announced, his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the race, giving Karzai another term as president by default. Karzai not only has questionable legitimacy, he does not even have complete control of his own country; corrupt as he is, he’s still dependent on local warlords to keep the peace.

These extra troops’ mission would be to help a central government with questionable legitimacy centralize its power and hunt down and kill terrorists and Taliban who have managed to survive eight years of American and allied assault. But is this a worthwhile goal to pursue, especially at the cost of more American lives and money?

The main justification for our continued engagement in Afghanistan is that we cannot allow Al Qaeda to have a “safe haven” there. The thinking goes that, from the mid 1990s through the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was able to plan and execute attacks because they had a country whose leadership did not care about their presence. Even though the U.S. fired the occasional cruise missile into a training camp, their safe haven remained relatively unmolested.

But there’s a problem with this analysis. A terrorist group can do all the planning, funding and training they want in their landlocked, Central Asian safe haven — but in order to actually execute terrorist attacks, some of them have to to be in the United States. The 9/11 plotters, for instance, did most of their planning in Hamburg, Germany, not Afghanistan. Would occupying Hamburg make sense as a response to 9/11? They learned how to fly planes in Florida, but does that mean we should attack Florida? The point is that to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States, you have to be in the United States in the first place. And while sending more troops to Afghanistan might make things more difficult for potential terrorists and their leaders, it is simply impossible to eliminate all potential safe havens.

And it’s not like our adventure in the Graveyard of Empires is free. David Obey, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put it best: “As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it?” In America, the political system seems to assume that money spent on wars doesn’t really count. But that’s obviously not true. Democrats in the House and Senate spent months agonizing over how to get a health care bill that had a price tag of 900 billion dollars or less over ten years, even though their final bill is deficit-neutral. An increase of troops to Afghanistan, not to mention continued engagement there at current levels, would add considerable cost to the some 223 billion dollars we have already spent there.

There are, of course, reasons to stay in Afghanistan besides the possibility of a safe haven for Al Qaeda. There are worries that if we leave Afghanistan, Pakistan could further destabilized. There are also concerns about the human rights of Afghans, especially girls and women, which could suffer a setback if we left and the Taliban was able to regain control of Afghanistan. But while these concerns are compelling, it’s unlikely for the American public to support wars unless they can be convinced that our national security vitally depends on military engagement. It’s just not at all clear if that’s the case in Afghanistan.

Considering the kids applies to more than just haunted houses and Southern rappers — it is also a good way to think about economic policy. In conventional political conversation, it’s often presumed that the policy that matters most to young people is the deficit. After all, if there’s a mismatch between revenues and spending that cannot go on forever, it will be young people and future generations who end up making the painful sacrifices to put the country’s budget back in order. So, when it comes to the most pressing economic policy debate, whether or not the government should continue to stimulate the economy through deficit spending, anyone thinking of the kids should prefer to cut down the deficit, right?

Wrong. Here’s the thing — deficits are bad, but an economy floundering with unemployment hovering around 10 percent is even worse. If there is a short-term tradeoff between larger deficits and lower unemployment due to increased government spending, we should err on the side of spending more to get unemployment down.

An economy where unemployment is high won’t grow fast enough to help eat back at deficits through increased tax receipts. If the economy’s output is higher and wages go up, it will be easier to reduce the deficit in the future. The first stimulus, which Obama’s own economic advisers thought was too small, is probably responsible for much of the recent 3.5 percent jump in GDP which officially signaled the end of the recession and kept unemployment from potentially spiraling out of control. But just because we are not in an official recession does not mean the economic situation — especially unemployment — is no longer dire. For instance, the last time unemployment was this high, following the 1981-1982 recession, it took six quarters of 5 percent plus growth just to get down to 7 percent unemployment.

Decreasing unemployment and getting the economy back on track, even if doing so creates higher deficits, is not just good economic policy for everyone, but it’s essential for the kids as well. That’s because people who enter the job market during a recession see decreased wages for their entire time in the labor force. Also, young workers tend to have the least skills and experience, so they are the least likely workers to get hired and the first to get fired during a downturn. If anyone cares about the economic welfare of college students and recent graduates, they should be committing all their efforts to decreasing unemployment.

Government stimulus, of course, is not a solution to all our problems and certainly is not the preferred method for keeping unemployment low in the down-turn. In a world, however, where all other tools to goose the economy have been exhausted — namely lowering real interest rates — then stimulus spending is all that’s left.

But there’s a more immediate concern associated with large deficit spending, especially when it’s used to employ more people and buy more stuff — inflation. If, at the end of the day, inflation just bites back the gains from stimulus, then it was all pointless. But, oddly enough, if you’re really thinking of the kids, a little inflation might be a good thing.

I’m not arguing for the double digit inflation of the late 1970s, but instead that we are perhaps a bit too inflation-obsessed. Chris Hayes of the New America Foundation has argued that America is incredibly saddled down by debt — both personal and national — and that steady economic growth will not be able to resume until the value of this debt is lowered. And the best way of decreasing debts is through inflation; because loans are issued in set dollar amounts, if the dollars become less valuable because of inflation, then the loans are easier to pay back. If you view the issue of low versus moderately low inflation through “what’s best for the kids,” the answer becomes even clearer. The kids will benefit from moderate inflation if it means more economic growth, less unemployment and a lower value for their often crippling credit card and student debt.

So, if you hear anyone advocating more stimulus and less concern about the possibility of modest inflation, you have to remember that even if they didn’t growed up the way Trick did, they love the kids.

Towards the end of the 2008 and in early 2009, the government gave trillions of dollars in either direct support for banks, such as the roughly $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program or indirect support worth more than TARP, such as loan guarantees, lowered interest rates and “quantitative easing.” While the implicit guarantees given to “systematically important” financial institutions stating that they wouldn’t be allowed to fail can’t be clearly valued, it’s clear that much of the American financial industry is or has been subsidized by the American government.

So are financial institutions, in the wake of irresponsibly losing trillions of dollars and almost bringing down the world economy, shrinking their size and devoting themselves to a more conservative vision of what the financial sector is supposed to achieve?

Of course not.

While some financial institutions are still struggling under the weight of a poor economy and massive losses, some are making it rain like it’s 2006 all over again. Goldman Sachs, for instance, earned some $3.19 billion in the previous quarter. And, just like old times, their employees are seeing the benefits. The Wall Street Journal reported that “31,700 employees are on track to earn an average of about $700,000 apiece in 2009, a record for the 140-year-old firm.” And while they have paid back their TARP money, they are still indirectly on the government teat. For example, they were allowed to make themselves a “bank-holding company” which let them access the Federal Reserve’s “discount window,” which are essentially cheap loans directly from the federal reserve.

But how are they making all this money? Trading, with “strong results in its fixed-income, currency and commodities business, where revenue more than tripled to $5.99 billion.” Now, in principle, there is nothing wrong with banks and other financial institutions trading commodities or currencies; if the banks are small enough and losses don’t threaten to take down the entire financial system, these people can make and lose as much as money as they want. Problems arise when investment houses, like Goldman, are making these large bets and making lots of money with an implicit government guarantee that they will get bailed out if the bets go south.

The problem gets bigger when you think beyond the simple fiscal risk entailed by financial institutions that are “too big to fail,” and are virtually unaffected by their flirtation with destruction a year ago. It’s not quite clear if we want a big financial sector.

It’s worth looking at Goldman. It basically has two functions – on one hand, it’s a classic investment bank which provides advice and capital for corporate mergers and acquisitions, as well as initial public offerings. This is activity that has a pretty clear justification: corporations need advice and if they want it and pay for it, they should get it.

But when you have exploding salaries in the finance qua finance sector, basically trading, you get problems. For one, these traders can destroy the world through their stupidity. But even worse, at a certain point, trading is no longer just allocating risk from people who don’t want to bear it to those who do (which is the classic justification for a well developed financial sector). Instead, it’s just a highly abstract casino that lets smart people get rich betting other people’s money. This, of course, is great for people in the financial industry. But it may have some negative effects for society as a whole. Unlike failure in, say, starting a new website or company, failure in finance can have horrible systemic effects.

If the banks that primarily do what banks are supposed to do — make loans — were doing well because of their lending business, then maybe the return of a profitable financial sector wouldn’t be all bad, but that’s hardly the case. Banks like Citigroup and Bank of America are still struggling.

There’s another problem with a large, hyper-profitable financial sector — it doesn’t do anything for us. While risk-taking entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley come up with innovations that improve society as a whole, finance, past a certain point, does nothing like this. What it does, instead, is drain the smart, ambitious young people from those fields which improve the well being of everyone to one that doesn’t. It’s this basic problem, not so much the moral problems with the recipients of massive largesse making it big, which should trouble us.

The United States Chamber of Commerce, which is a lobbying organization that represents some three million companies, has long been known for its intense support for, well, business-friendly policies. Accordingly, they are always on the barricades fighting whatever new safety or environmental regulations or labor protections are being proposed by Congress. And while it’s not surprising that they aren’t exactly enthusiastic supporters of regulating the emission greenhouse gases or of a cap-and-trade plan which would necessarily increase the costs of carbon intensive businesses, their hostility to both pending legislation and climate science is troubling and bizarre. Thankfully, some companies are publicly splitting with their organization to protest their revanchist line.

Some of the most notable splitters are Exelon, PG&E and PNM Resources, three utility companies. While energy and utilities companies like Exxon Mobil or Peabody Energy have traditionally been the loudest voices opposing climate legislation, there is no hard and fast rule that energy producers must or should oppose cap-and-trade policies.

If you’re a shareholder of Exelon, which is the “nation’s biggest nuclear-plant operator by output,” then a world where carbon-emitting forms of energy are more expensive is a good one. So it only makes sense that companies which will directly benefit from a high price on carbon emission would protest the Chamber’s anti cap-and-trade efforts. But perhaps it’s not too noteworthy that companies who will see their product get relatively cheaper because of massive legislation are not in-tune with the Chamber’s efforts.

One hopes that a wider range of companies will realize that their interests are not being served by an organization that proposed a courtroom-style debate over climate science. After all, everyone is worse off if the planet experiences a climatic cataclysm.  And some companies seem to be looking past their immediate self-interest and are realizing that a congressional impasse on climate legislation is not a good thing. Apple, a company whose shareholders probably won’t be disproportionally affected by the presence or absence of comprehensive climate legislation, left the Chamber. Nike resigned from the board in protest of their climate stance, but still remains a member.

Perhaps it is these latter defections which aren’t driven by a straightforward consideration of profitability that should give us the most reason for hope. Apple and Nike are two companies that depend on their image and marketing to sell products. If they can start a trend that punishes companies which support an organization that is so committed to stopping all cap-and-trade legislation and rewards those companies which split from the Chamber, then maybe more companies which are on the fence about climate legislation will realize that sticking with the Chamber is not in their interest.

But we shouldn’t have to depend on narrow, shareholder self-interest for American business to get climate change right. After all, climate change is more than just a business opportunity or something that consumers are worried about. It’s the possibility that we radically alter our climate and environment with disastrous results of unpredictable severity and scale. Doesn’t sound like a good investment — for anyone.

Here’s what happens. It used to be that many banks just didn’t cover overdrafts, but what many — 462, according to the Wall Street Journal — do now is enroll their customers into “overdraft protection” programs so that they will cover the overdrafts, but also charge a fee, which can range from $10 to $38. Since 2001, these programs have become widespread; about 70 percent of banks that have such programs have adopted them in the past eight years. (For all you U.S. Bankers out there, they have let you opt out of overdraft protection since 2007. Here’s a form for opting in.)

For small to medium withdrawals, the bank is basically loaning money to the most disadvantaged and under-informed customers and charging absurdly high interest rates on them. If you overdraft by $50 and get hit up with a $30 fee, it’s a cash loan with a 60 percent interest rate. And these relatively small withdrawals are typically what put people in the red. The median ATM withdrawal that triggers “overdraft protection” because of non-sufficient funds is only sixty dollars, and the median fee is twenty-seven dollars.

In any other situation, we would find such practices unconscionable (paid off over two weeks, such a transaction as described above would result in would incur an APR of 1,173 percent). But because customers are largely opted into these programs, they aren’t aware of the risks they face until they’re hit up with the fees. Among big banks, these type of automatic, opt-in programs are pervasive. According to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study, nearly 77 percent of large banks were more likely to have automated overdraft programs, which means that your typical bank customer is enrolled in such a program.

Even more scandalously, banks can charge these fees on multiple withdrawals per day. So, if you make a series of small overdrafts, each and every one of them would be charged the flat withdrawal fee, which could total up in the hundreds.

So, why do banks let their customers access money they don’t have? What’s weird is that, in many cases, banks could easily inform their customers that they don’t have sufficient funds for a transaction, and then refuse to let them withdraw money or at least inform them of the repercussion. The same FDIC study says that 81 percent of banks that operate these automatic programs “allowed overdrafts to take place at automated teller machines (ATMs) and point-of-sale (POS)/debit transactions.” But did these banks inform their customers that they were about to take out a high-interest loan? Once again, according to the FDIC, “most banks whose automated overdraft programs covered ATM and POS/debit transactions informed customers of an NSF only after the transaction had been completed.”

Clearly, banks wouldn’t operate these programs in such a way to encourage their customers to overdraft if they weren’t making money from them — and they are. A Center for Responsible Lending study shows that banks and credit unions collected $34.3 billion dollars in overdraft and non-sufficient fund fees in 2008.

Since banks are suffering in their core business, taking in deposits and loaning money, they have to turn to more shady ways of keeping up revenue. I’ve already discussed the explosion of exploitative credit card fees and penalties which are just a way for banks to squeeze money out of the disadvantaged and under-informed, and overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees are just the same.

Consequently, banks don’t have the best public image, so lawmakers are becoming a bit more bold in going after them. In response to public pressure, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan are voluntarily reforming their overdraft practices. The Wall Street Journal article on the changes shows just how bizarre and exploitative the banks practices were: “The changes include no fees at BofA if customers overdraw their account by less than $10 in one day, and no fees for J.P. Morgan customers if their account is overdrawn by $5 or less.” Remember, before the banks decided to change their act, they could charge fees much larger than the five or ten dollars that someone overdrew. There is also a proposed bill in the House of Representatives which would make banks get their customers’ permission before enrolling them in an overdraft protection plan.

While the J.P. Morgan and Bank of America policy changes as well as Congressional attention are welcome, they are hardly enough. Concerted public and congressional effort will be needed to shift our financial services industry from one that is primarily concerned with finding sneaky and hidden ways to sneak away money from their customers to one that actually serves them. Such a financial sector would probably be much smaller, but that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, does it?

Remember the finance industry? The one whose highly leveraged shenanigans brought the world economy to a standstill and caused the worst economic downturn since the Tigers had a Jewish first baseman (and inspired me to write some incredibly long and boring columns)? Well, after the finance industry struggled back to its feet with hundreds of billions of dollars of implicit and explicit government support, Tim Geithner and the Obama administration are now trying to regulate it.

Appropriately, the proposed regulations cover a wide range of activity. But since neither you nor my dear editors really want to read whether the Federal Reserve should be in charge of regulating systemic risk or if capital requirements should be increased, let’s focus on one specific proposed regulation: the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Hell, let’s get even more specific, the now-dropped requirement that financial institutions offer “plain vanilla” products to consumers.

So did Tim Geithner and Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who’s chair of the House Financial Services Committee, remove a arduous government mandate that forces your local bank to offer a bean extract when you try to get money from the ATM? Not really.

Instead, the plain vanilla mandate was supposed to have required banks to offer some basic financial products: namely 30 year, fixed rate mortgages and low interest, minimal fee credit cards to consumers. So, why should you care about this obscure requirement?

Modern financial innovation is a tricky thing. In some ways, the explosion of new financial products following a deregulation process that started in the 1970s has been a boon to just about everyone. The 30 year mortgage and its variants allows more and more people to purchase homes. Credit cards offer convenience and allow consumers easy access to credit if they want to make a big purchase and “smooth” their consumption when their income varies or want to make investments.

But banks can’t make megabucks on these basic products. So, we saw a proliferation of mutated cousins of these sensible offerings: subprime mortgages, adjustable rate mortgages, teaser rates for credit cards, massive overdraft fees and the like. Instead of banks competing on the basis of the price and convenience of their products, they compete on their ability to best screw over customers and get them to start paying obscure and backbreaking fees.

The tragedy of the current financial services market is that it essentially is banks selling customers things they don’t want. If customers actually knew how bizarre and arduous their credit card terms were (in all fairness, progress has been made on this front) and were offered a plain vanilla alternative, I imagine they would insist on getting the latter option. In that world, banks would then be forced to compete on who could provide the best and cheapest service.

Perhaps Frank and Geithner, aware of the financial services industry’s fury at any regulation, figured that if they wanted any meaningful financial regulation to survive, they would have to offer up an Iphigenia. Maybe that’s the real problem: the industry that almost destroyed the world economy is now furiously obstructing even the most basic attempts to domesticate its behavior.

In a totally abstract way, this basic principle of “dumb” networks and smart terminals seems important. It also just so happens that the “end-to-end principle” — where discrimination between packets of information happens at the “ends” of the network —  is a defining characteristic of the Internet. Net neutrality is the policy implication of this organizing principle and refers to the idea that, in the words of legal scholar Tim Wu, that a “maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally.” Basically, an Internet provider like Verizon or Comcast can’t discriminate between the content and information that you want to access.

The net neutrality issue is a strange one. As of now, the Federal Communications Commission has established certain “principles” which basically mandate that networks be neutral, even if enforcement of these principles is slipshod. But with a new, regulation- and consumer-friendly administration in power, there is a new surge of interest in net neutrality. The commissioner of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, recently gave a speech laying out how the administration and the FCC plans to turn these vague principles into hard and fast rules.

The principles, summed up by Genachowski, are, “Network operators cannot prevent users from accessing the lawful Internet content, applications, and services of their choice, nor can they prohibit users from attaching non-harmful devices to the network.” What Genachowksi wants the FCC to do is turn these principles into rules, meaning that Internet companies (which were released from FCC regulation because of the FCC’s traditional mandate to regulate telephone companies), would be brought back under the FCC umbrella.

The fifth principle that would be added would be non-discrimination, stating, in the words of Genachowksi, “…that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.” This principle is supposed to hedge against the possibility of service providers, like Comcast or AT&T, from establishing preferential access to certain types of content. In short, all data coming through your iPhone has to be treated the same. It’s enshrining this principle that’s perhaps most important going forward. Since Internet and cable companies are getting into the business of producing content, and since the possibilities for generating content on the Internet are always expanding, there’s a fear companies could try to hurt their competitors by having preferential network speed for their content or degraded speed for their competitors.

The sixth principle the FCC wants to adopt is that “providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.” Because there are relatively few Internet service providers, the big ones have a large amount of power and influence, and since they provide a crucial public service – the Internet. It’s imperative that they manage their network in an open way.

But what does all of this mean? Is there an epidemic of broadband providers discriminating between individual packets? Should we be scared of broadband providers preferring packets that come from content they generate instead?

Yes and no. Generally, there are many opportunities and motives for this type of chicanery. Since so many people are getting their Internet, phone and cable service from the same provider, it’s only natural that ISPs would want to take advantage of this opportunity. For example, if you get Internet from Verizon, they would have a clear incentive to degrade or slow down information transmitted by Skype, so that you would spring for Verizon phone service as well.

Hypotheticals aside, there have been some clear cases of ISPs violating net neutrality principles. Most noticeably, Comcast was discovered to have been interfering with the operations of Gnutella, a peer to peer network and BitTorrent. While they had clearly violated FCC principles, it was unclear if the FCC had the authority to sanction Comcast, because the principles are not enforceable agency rules.

Although companies like AT&T and Comcast are complaining about government over-regulation of the Internet and the possibility that mandating equal access could remove the incentive for developing more, bigger and better content, what the FCC is proposing to do is merely a recognition of a basic fact about the Internet. It’s something that all the public relies on, and so regulators should, at every step, create rules that benefit users and allow for the Internet to be as free and open as possible. As the it becomes our gateway for more and more information, a clear signal from regulators that the World Wide Web won’t be carved up into separate niches or tiers by competing service providers is imperative.

Unlike other, über-exotic financial instruments, credit cards are relatively easy to understand and are directly used by millions of people. There is also a very clear connection between the use of credit cards and economic expansion. Credit cards give consumers access to more money than they would otherwise have, which lets them stimulate the economy through spending or build the economy through investing in a small business. But the positive effects of credit cards do not justify a credit card industry that preys on irresponsibility and dishonesty. The Credit CARD (Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure) Act recently passed by the House and Senate, which curtails credit card companies’ ability to engage in shady and dishonest practices, is a a step in the right direction.

Some of the most drastic changes will apply to students. The bill bans credit cards for minors, unless they’re emancipated. For adults less than 21 years old, they can only apply for a card if they can prove income, and their credit limit is capped at 30 percent of that income. And unless a parent or another adult signs for joint responsibility of the card, the credit limits will be capped at $500 or 20 percent of per year income for students, whichever is greater. Although these reforms will significantly curtail the spending power of students, it will also take away the opportunities for credit card companies to lure young people with the possibility of low teaser rates and increased ability to spend, only to trap them in a revolving cycle of higher interest rates and fees.

But credit card companies’ shady practices are targeting more than just students. Those who pay the entirety of their balance every month, and thus don’t pay interest or any fees, are showered with various rewards and benefits, from airline miles to discounts on gas. But the profit margins credit card companies earn on these customers are low. So, for the customers that only make minimum payments, not only are they hit with interest payments, but their card issuers can change the rates retroactively, and any notification of the change is often buried in fine print that most people ignore or cannot discern.

There are also the infamous low teaser rates, which banks will then raise with little or no clear warning. The bill mandates that any promotional rate must last for at least six months. Another clear example of how credit card companies encourage and then profit off of consumer irresponsibility is by letting consumers exceed their credit limits without any warning. For credit card companies, this makes sense; once a customer goes over the limit, the company can start hitting them up for more and more fees and interest rate increases. Now, under this bill, credit card companies have to give 45 days of notice before interest rates go up.

Even though all these practices are all a little sketchy, they reflect a basic principle. The riskier a cardholder is, the higher interest rates should be. If a customer falls behind on his payments, the card issuer should be able to charge fees and a higher rate, but only to a certain extent. But when you read the practices the bill reforms or bans, it quickly becomes clear that credit card companies aren’t just pricing risk.

For example, the bill mandates that all agreements and terms be printed in 12-point font, that customers not be charged for paying their fees online, that banks have to disclose that only paying the minimum payment will result in higher interest rates, that bills must be sent 21 days before they’re due and that if the check clears at 5 p.m., the bill is on time. Each of these practices that the bill bans have nothing to do with pricing risk, and had everything to do with making it as easy as possible for cardholders to act irresponsibly and then start paying fees and higher rates.

So what are the likely outcomes of this legislation? For one, the credit card industry will be worse off. As the economy took a turn for the worse, companies cast their lots by trying to trick and connive their way into as much money as possible from the people least able to provide it and are now going to pay a price. Also, there’s a chance that responsible and wealthier cardholders, who pay off their entire balances every month and benefit from numerous reward programs, could be negatively affected. Banks are planning to bring back annual fees and pare back on the perks they give to their most reliable customers.

But would this really be so bad? If people are just using credit cards for convenience and rewards, we shouldn’t feel too sorry for them if they’re slightly inconvenienced, especially if it means that credit card companies will stop preying on the disadvantaged, naive and under-informed. A credit card industry that cannot scam its customers will certainly be smaller, but maybe, just maybe, that’s a good thing.

Although few expect gay marriage to be recognized or authorized at the federal level any time soon, many thought that banning discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation could happen federally. Twenty states have passed laws that expand employment discrimination protections to cover sexual orientation. But despite an employment discrimination bill passing the House in 2007, the federal government still hasn’t included sexual orientation along with race, gender, age or national origin as categories that are protected against discrimination. The fate of employment discrimination protection is just a small example of how Congress and the White House have generally been slow to move or downright hostile toward the demands of gay rights activists and their supporters.

While no one expects movement on these issues when Republicans are in office, more is generally expected of Democrats. That’s because the overwhelming majority of gay and lesbian voters vote for Democrats, and gays and lesbians have ascended to fairly lofty positions in the Democratic apparatus. Bill Clinton famously pledged to revise the military’s ban on homosexual soldiers and was the first president to win with substantial open gay support. But he also turned out to be the movement’s biggest disappointment. Despite having prominent gay supporters and acquaintances, Clinton was responsible for two of the biggest setbacks at the federal level for gay rights.

The first was his squirrely compromise on gays in the military. His Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, authored by the late Charlie Moskos, which banned open disclosure of a soldier’s homosexuality as well as inquiry by superiors into a soldier’s sexuality, has been infamously ineffective at protecting the privacy of gay soldiers – in fact, an Arabic linguist has recently been expelled under the policy, making him the first casualty of this misguided policy since Obama took office.

The second capitulation of gay rights was the Defense of Marriage Act, which exempted states from recognizing same-sex marriage performed in other states and banned the federal government from recognizing gay marriage. Traditionally, marriage had been a province of the states, and other states (as well as the federal government) tended to recognize marriages performed elsewhere. On a practical level, this meant that some 1,138 benefits granted to married couples at the federal level are denied to same sex couples, even if they are legally married or are in a civil union in their home state. And even if it weren’t constitutionally dubious, it represented a sop to regressive forces in response to (at the time) a purely hypothetical threat. For the second time, Clinton sold out his gay supporters for the sake of looking like a centrist.

Obama, during his campaign, promised to be different. He pledged to support the overturning of DADT, the repeal of DOMA and passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. So, after more than 100 days of his term, what’s happened? Nothing. Sure, there’s been speculation about him picking a lesbian for the supreme Court, but on the signature gay civil rights issue of his campaign, there has been no movement.

Now, perhaps one shouldn’t get too agitated over this. Barely 1/15^th of his term has passed and Obama has a lot of other stuff on his plate. But the explanations proffered by members of the administration as well as important Democrats in Congress indicate that we won’t be seeing any efforts on the gay front for a while.

Let’s look first at Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There’s basically a consensus that the policy is pointless when it comes to maintaining cohesion in the military, not to mention the fact that it’s blatantly discriminatory. Even before it was discovered that Arabic linguists were being discharged under DADT, the military and defense communities started realizing what a big mistake they had made. Two of the legislation’s biggest supporters, Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, and Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when DADT was passed, have both urged revisiting the law, while many retired officers support its outright repeal.

But what has the Obama administration done? First, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “I think the president and I feel like we’ve got a lot on our plates right now… Let’s push that one down the road a little bit.” It then came out that, by the beginning of April, Gates and Obama had had only one conversation on DADT. Although it’s true that Obama has a lot to worry about regarding the military, it’s likely that he’ll have a lot on his plate for the entirety of his first term, so there will always be an excuse not to push on DADT right now. But if right now lasts for eight years, then we’ll be stuck with this horrible policy. So much for the “fierce urgency of now.”

But what about federal benefits for same-sex couples? Surely the administration and Congress could show some urgency on this basic issue of fairness. Once again, however, now just isn’t the time. Nancy Pelosi, who is generally perceived as being very gay friendly, plainly stated when asked about pushing through an anti-discrimination bill, “Right now our agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.” And while it’s true that Congress has a lot of work to do in supporting Obama’s economic agenda, it’s not like eventually they’ll have nothing left to do and will be able to get around to protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

And just to put the hypocrisy and disappointment in stark perspective, the White House altered language on its Web site that turned what had previously been calls for repeals of DADT and DOMA to just “change” to DADT and DOMA. Even though the original commitment for the repeal of DADT was restored after activists complained, there was perhaps no better signal of how the Obama administration has become unwilling to take political heat over implementing his campaign promises.

Gay rights are one of those issues that should make you sad about politics. Even when the party in power of the White House and Congress has made a public stand on expanding rights and protections for gays and lesbians, and even when they personally believe that it’s the right thing to do, they still find an excuse to procrastinate and prevaricate on their commitment to basic fairness and equality. And if we don’t call them out on it, they’ll continue to do so.