In terms of domestic policy, Barack Obama has had the most successful first year of a presidency since Jimmy Carter. This might seem like damning with faint praise. Although he is not remembered as a very successful president, Carter pushed through important environmental regulation in his first year, such as the Clean Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Even more impressively, Congress that year passed major legislation regulating corporate behavior with the Corporate Reinvestment Act and the Unlawful Corporate Payments Act of 1977.

Obama likewise shepherded through important domestic legislation.

A report by the Free Press, a think tank that tracks media reform, says the deal would give Comcast too much control over the market, which would mean unregulated rate hikes for consumers.

“I don’t see it as concern as [to] whether consumers will pay for [content] or if it’s free, but [rather] how much will it cost,” says Ben Scott, policy director for the Free Press. “When you have that kind of market power, you can raise rates above what competition will normally produce in the free market.”

“Nonprofit organizations that stand up for the powerless in our society and that provide vital services in our communities have never been needed more than they are today,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice. “As ACORN takes steps to get its house in order, Congress should take a deep breath and give this process time to work.”

At a gathering of Bay Area employment experts held by The Chronicle this week, Gay Plair Cobb, chief executive of the Oakland Private Industry Council, said Oakland’s unemployment rate is 17.5 percent.

Angela Blackwell, chief executive of the Oakland nonprofit PolicyLink, which researches social policy solutions, said many groups with higher unemployment rates need special help.

On the positive side, Obama marked his first day on the job with memos directing agencies to rely on technology to create a more open government and to administer the Freedom of Information Act with a bias toward disclosure. The Food and Drug Administration established a task force in June to develop recommendations for enhancing the transparency of the agency’s drug approval process. And an advisory board, on behalf of National Security Adviser James Jones, held a summer online forum to seek input on revisions to the executive order governing classified national security information.

In addition, the Federal Communications Commission has started an open, multimedia dialogue to design a plan for expanding high-speed Internet access. Workshops with stakeholders, including industry, advocacy groups and community organizations, are hosted online and the public is encouraged to post questions online, live.

“I think it’s a great step in the right direction. And their motives are pure. They are experimenting with ways to bring more voices into the commission,” said Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press, a nonpartisan organization that promotes independent media ownership and universal access to communications.

First, we should acknowledge the obvious: The bill is awful. It gives away permits to greenhouse gas emitters that should instead be auctioned. As a result, money that could be rebated to taxpayers or used to fund the development of clean technologies instead goes to the industries that are the source of the problem.

But a bad bill is almost certainly better than no bill. If Waxman-Markey doesn’t get through, it is very difficult to see another bill getting through this Congress. And there is no reason to believe that the Congress that gets elected in 2010 will be any less indebted to the corporate lobbyists.

As one of the last strongholds of union jobs shrinks, we have to confront a brutal truth about work in the U.S. Across the economy, workers of color are overrepresented in occupations with high unemployment rates: the service sector, construction and transportation. That’s a great deal of the reason why Black workers have been hit especially hard by layoffs and closures. Losing auto industry jobs strikes a massive blow to the ability of workers, especially Black workers, to earn middle-class incomes, to save enough to pass on to their children and to achieve some financial stability.

The Sentencing Project opposes sentences of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) because they declare that young people are beyond reform.  All other nations have devised strategies to hold youth accountable, promote public safety, and prioritize rehabilitation to limit recidivism without resorting to this extreme punishment.

Our country’s juvenile justice system was founded on the majority view that children, even those responsible for grave acts, are fundamentally different from adults.  The imposition of life without parole sentences on young people is especially cruel and misguided because it ignores the fact that children are different from adults in critical ways. Behavioral research confirms that children do not have fully matured levels of judgment, impulse control, or the ability to accurately assess risks and consequences.  Because of these characteristics among young people, the threat of a JLWOP sentence does not serve as a deterrent.

The excess health care spending comes to more than $1.2 trillion a year or the equivalent of more than $16,000 for a family of four. Paying too much for health care has the same economic impact as a health care tax. In effect, we have a health care waste tax that is about 10 percent larger than the projected federal revenue from the personal and corporate income tax combined. In short, this is real money.

Fewer than 13 percent of workers in the U.S. today belong to a labor union, a statistic that anti-union forces will point to as evidence that unions are relics of the past, and no longer appeal to most Americans.

But a new report from Cornell University suggests another, darker reason for the steep decline in union membership in recent generations: the aggressive, often illegal tactics used by employers determined to keep their companies union-free.

“[T]he overwhelming majority of U.S. employers are willing to use a broad arsenal of legal and illegal tactics to interfere with the rights of workers to organize, and … they do so with near impunity,” writes author Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell.