Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Note: This episode originally aired in October 2014.

Listeners have been asking for years why textbooks are getting so expensive. Prices of new textbooks have been going up faster than clothing, food, cars, and even healthcare. On today’s show we found out why prices won’t stop rising.

We speak to a student who took a course that required a $310 textbook, professors who pick the textbooks that their students have to buy, and a CEO of a textbook company who, it turns out, doesn’t like talking about books. We also venture into the parallel universe of the high school textbook market.

Music: ‘Bout That Live‘ and ‘Road Coffee.’ Find us: Twitter/Facebook.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Samantha Cannariato has been trying to return her Samsung Galaxy Note 7 for more than a week. All owners have been urged to exchange the device after reports of phones exploding or catching fire. After hours in calls and five trips to the store, Cannariato still can’t get rid of the phone.

Her story — like that of many other U.S. users trying to take part in Samsung’s unofficial recall — winds through a network of stores, interchanging sales reps, bureaucratic intricacies and unclear guidelines. As the world’s largest smartphone maker pushes to reclaim some 2.5 million potentially hazardous units shipped globally, it is facing an enormous-scale process and growing concerns about the recall’s lasting impact.

Cannariato’s Galaxy Note 7 is less than a month old. Its purchase was well-weighed — she calls it her first “fancy phone.” And it is: Waterproof, with curved display, top-rated camera and a practical stylus, Samsung’s latest smartphone is a crown jewel, the company’s “best,” an anticipated rival to Apple’s new iPhone. “A really great phone,” in Cannariato’s words.

But then came several dozen reports that the phones overheated and flared up, particularly while being charged. Samsung Electronics traced the problem to a flaw in the phone’s lithium-ion battery — such batteries have afflicted other devices before, setting ablaze “hoverboard” scooters, electric cars, airplanes and iPods.

“There was a tiny problem in the manufacturing process, so it was very difficult to figure out,” Dongjin Koh, president of Samsung’s mobile business, told reporters on Sept. 2.

The company launched a global recall. “It will cost us so much it makes my heart ache,” Koh said. But “what is most important is customer safety,” he said.

Cannariato, who works in logistics in Port Wentworth, Ga., heard the news a day or two later. First came a Facebook post from a friend who had helped her pick the phone. Then came a message from her carrier, AT&T.

She hurried over to the AT&T authorized retailer where she had bought the device. The clerk asked her whether she was experiencing problems with the phone (she wasn’t) and declined to accept it. Cannariato decided to give it time; the directions might not have trickled down, she thought. When she returned later that week, another clerk referred her to an official AT&T store.

As part of the recall, Samsung is offering to switch U.S. consumers to another Galaxy phone or get a loaner phone until the new, safer Galaxy Note 7 becomes available, plus a gift of $25. Major carriers, including AT&T, have expanded the offer to exchange the recalled Samsung phones for any other phone in the store.

However, AT&T representatives referred Cannariato back to the retailer that had sold her the phone — they couldn’t find her in the system. There, she faced another, almost gleeful, rejection from another clerk, she says.

Then the system was down. The store didn’t pick up the phone. On the fifth visit, a manager said Cannariato couldn’t exchange her phone because it was attached to a business account, not in her name but in her mother’s. Later, she was referred back to the original retailer.

Meanwhile, she continues to use her Galaxy Note 7. “When I use the charger, I put it in a metal loaf pan,” she says, “and leave it there with nothing around that could catch fire.”

Altogether, Cannariato estimates the exchange has subsumed more than 10 hours. “I’ve been in the store, on the phone, waited, been online. I have texted, I have tweeted, I have Facebooked,” Cannariato says. “There’s no one way to do this. There are a million different avenues and it’s easy for each avenue to push the problem to someone else.”

Such complications, to varying degrees, are faced by other customers. Alongside stories of completely smooth transactions floating on Twitter, reddit and Samsung forums are posts about lengthy customer service calls, unnecessary store visits, demands of original boxes or accessories and other hiccups.

“That’s really on Samsung,” says Avi Greengart, consumer devices analyst at market research firm Current Analysis. “They have not been very clear in their communications, in terms of what specifically is a problem, how it will be resolved and what’s the time frame.”

In its announcements so far, Samsung Electronics America refers to the fire-hazard problem vaguely as a “battery cell issue” and to the recall as “a product exchange program.” The company says consumers will be able to get a new version of the Note 7, but its approval is pending without a clear release date.

In a statement, the company says it is working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and “carrier partners to develop and evaluate solutions that are best for US Note 7 owners. No action will be taken without the approval of the CPSC. Customer safety remains our top priority.”

And the CPSC’s involvement is, in fact, part of the challenge. That is the agency that facilitates product recalls.

Traditionally, companies voluntarily work with the government to operate the recall process, providing the details of a problem. That prompts a formal recall notice, which legally halts all sales of the faulty product and creates a central location for consumers to report incidents, learn about remedies and find proper channels to pursue them.

This has yet to happen for the Galaxy Note 7. A week after Koh’s press conference, the CPSC issued a warning to consumers to power down Note 7s and stop charging or using them. Samsung and the CPSC have yet to announce a formal recall. Technically, it’s still completely legal to keep selling the Galaxy Note 7 — and some do remain on sale online.

“This is going to hammer Samsung earnings, but it doesn’t have to permanently damage Samsung’s brand if they react swiftly and clearly,” Greengart says. And so far, he says, “they’ve undercommunicated, rather than overcommunicated.”

Samsung’s shares regained some strength in Wednesday’s trading after taking a nosedive on the news of the recall, which erased billions of dollars in company value.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

A federal agency used her Wells Fargo unit as a cautionary tale, imposing the largest fine it’s ever levied. Her bank fired some 5,300 employees for acting “counter to our values.” But questions are now circulating about the unit’s leader, Carrie Tolstedt, who’s set to depart her post with $124.6 million in stock and options, and whose compensation for the five years targeted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included a yearly incentive bonus of $5.5 million in stock, to go along with her base pay and other bonuses.

Many of those questions were raised in a Fortune story Monday that wondered whether the situation was ripe for Wells Fargo to try to “claw back” some of the stock options it had awarded Tolstedt, who exits after years of heading Wells Fargo’s huge community banking division.

If you’re catching up to this story, here’s how NPR’s Yuki Noguchi reported it today for our Newscast unit:

“When Carrie Tolstedt’s retirement was announced in July, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf called her a ‘dear friend,’ ‘role model,’ and ‘standard-bearer for our culture.’

“Less than two months later, the bank agreed to pay the largest penalty ever imposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — $185 million — for creating more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts over five years. Wells Fargo says Tolstedt’s retirement was a personal decision, and that her stock holdings were earned over her 27-year tenure.”

The Fortune article seemed to hit a nerve: one day later, Wells Fargo announced it will eliminate all product sales goals in retail banking, as of the start of 2017.

That drastic change was announced just two months after Wells Fargo said Tolstedt would retire at the end of 2016. Weeks after that announcement, Tolstedt handed off her duties to another executive.

When we contacted Wells Fargo to ask about the situation Tuesday, senior vice president Mark Folk said Tolstedt is remaining with the company through December to help the transition process.

Folk says Tolstedt’s $124.6 million comes from “stock that she either owns outright” or in the form of options.

As for the size of Tolstedt’s holdings, Folk noted that she was at the company for nearly 30 years. When we asked about a potential “claw back” of millions in compensation for Tolstedt, Folk said Wells Fargo isn’t talking about that today.

Wells Fargo saw a number of changes during Tolstedt’s tenure — particularly at the end of it. Consider that in 2014, around the middle of the roughly five-year period reviewed by the CFPB, Wells Fargo set a record in reporting net income of $23.1 billion, on revenue of $84.3 billion. Tolstedt’s unit accounted for around $14 billion of that year’s net income.

In that year, as in every year in the 2011-2016 period that the CFPB covered in its consent order, Tolstedt collected $5,500,000 in stock as her portion of the performance share award that’s split among Wells Fargo’s top executives, according to the bank’s proxy reports. That stock normally takes a three-year period to vest fully.

As the Fortune piece notes, Tolstedt wasn’t singled out in the CFPB’s actions, and it’s not clear what if any involvement she had with her unit’s use of the tactic of creating fake accounts to trigger incentive bonuses. But the magazine also spoke to a banking reform advocate who asked about claw-back policies, “If they don’t apply here, when will they apply?”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The tables turned for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the weekend. For much of the campaign, Clinton has been sitting back, staying quiet and allowing Trump’s gaffes, offensive statements and flip-flops to take up the news cycle.

But then Clinton had a terrible few days. First, she declared that half of all Trump supporters belong to a “basket of deplorables” that includes racists, sexists, homophobic people and other broadly biased groups — a soundbite that Trump quickly made into an attack ad. Then she appeared weak and wobbly as she left early during a memorial ceremony commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks, emboldening Trump supporters who had been questioning her health for weeks.

While Clinton’s “deplorables” comment and pneumonia made the headlines and cable chyrons on Monday morning, Trump didn’t stay entirely quiet, as he made a bit of under-the-radar news himself. Here’s a roundup of what you might have missed:

Trump claims Janet Yellen should be “ashamed”

On Monday morning, Trump told CNBC that he thinks Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is playing politics with monetary policy, trying to goose economic growth with low interest rates to help President Obama’s legacy.

“Well it’s staying at zero because she’s obviously political, and she’s doing what Obama wants her to do,” he said.

(Trump hasn’t always been so opposed to Yellen; in an April interview, he said she was doing a “serviceable” job as Fed chair.)

While it’s true that presidents can nominate Fed chairs who share their economic views, the president doesn’t control Fed policy.

One safeguard against this is that members of the Board of Governors are appointed for 14-year terms, meaning they will necessarily serve during multiple presidents’ administrations. In addition, the chair’s terms don’t match up to the president’s terms. When Obama took office, the George W. Bush-appointed Ben Bernanke was Fed chair, and Obama later reappointed him. If elected, Trump couldn’t replace Janet Yellen as chair until early 2018.

Furthermore, Trump seemed to imply that the president can change interest rates. He said he believes that the Fed’s current policy is that “the new person that becomes president, let him raise interest rates or her raise interest rates, and watch what happens to the stock market when that happens.”

To be clear: The president does not and cannot set interest rates, which are determined by meetings of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Markets Committee (of which the Fed chair is a member). The next meeting of that committee is next week.

“Washington Post” Reports On Trump Foundation

Trump’s charitable foundation has already been facing scrutiny for a $25,000 donation that violated IRS rules and that some say was politically motivated. Now, the Washington Post has also found what it calls five “phantom donations.”

The Post further reported:

Five times, the Trump Foundation’s tax filings described giving a specific amount of money to a specific charity — in some cases, even including the recipient’s address. But when The Post called, the charities listed said the tax filings appeared wrong. They’d never received anything from Trump or his foundation.

The Post asked Trump’s staff to explain all five of these apparent errors.

So far, they have explained one.

Once again used “Pocahontas” nickname For Warren

While he was on CNBC, Trump once again brought out his nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, referring to her as “Pocahontas.”

The nickname refers to Warren’s claims that she is of Native American heritage. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported that they couldn’t find reliable documentation to confirm that fact.

Meanwhile, many have slammed Trump for his repeated use of the nickname.

“Make no mistake — these jabs were racist,” Simon Moya-Smith, culture editor at Indian Country Today, wrote in May.

Trump says his physical results are coming

Over the weekend, Trump had already said that he would go on The Dr. Oz Show to discuss his “personal health regimen.” But then on Fox News Monday morning, he said he would release yet more health details from a physical he underwent last week.

“This last week I took a physical, and I’ll be releasing when the numbers come in, hopefully they’re going to be good. I think they’re going to be good. I feel great,” he said.

Clinton likewise revealed that she would be releasing more detailed health records this week.

A new “deplorables” ad

The Trump campaign made quick use of the “deplorables” comment, turning around a campaign advertisement that claims Clinton is “viciously demonizing” American voters.

In that remark, Clinton had taken aim at Trump’s supporters, and not Trump himself. In doing so, she gave him a soundbite that he will be able to use for the entire election.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

If you ever saw a Crazy Eddie commercial, then you know the electronics retail giant’s prices were “insane!”

At its height, the chain had 43 stores in four states. Eddie Antar started the chain in 1969 with a store in Brooklyn, N.Y. The chain’s growth was helped by the introduction of the VCR.

In 1984, the chain went public. Stockholders, during a revolt in 1987, took over the company, and shortly after that it was discovered that $45 million in merchandise was missing.

At the same time, federal prosecutors had been building a fraud case against Antar, charging that he had defrauded shareholders through stock manipulation, according to The New York Times.

In 1990, Antar fled to Israel after being indicted on securities fraud and insider trading.

Three years later he was extradited back to the U.S. In 1995, his conviction on racketeering and stock fraud charges were overturned on appeal.

He eventually served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in a plea bargain to one charge of racketeering conspiracy.

Antar died on Saturday but a cause of death was not disclosed. He was 68.

While Antar was the man behind Crazy Eddie, he was not the pitchman who appeared in commercials.

For more than 13 years, Jerry Carroll, a radio DJ, was the man who starred in thousands of radio and TV ads.

Carroll’s fast-talking, shout-at-you style made the commercials memorable.

The ads always ended the same, with Crazy Eddie prices being touted as “in-SAAAANE!”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Voters in Maine and a handful of other states are deciding whether to legalize recreational marijuana this November. One thing that could swing the vote is the possibility of millions of dollars in tax revenue from retail marijuana sales. Colorado was the first state in the country to roll out a tax scheme for legal marijuana in 2013, after recreational marijuana was legalized in 2012. So how are voters in Colorado spending the cash, and what should Maine voters expect?

Maine, like a lot of other states, could always use more revenue, so the possibility of millions from legalizing marijuana is enticing. But many voters there are unsure how that money will be spent. Erin McGee Ferrell spoke to us in downtown Portland. McGee is a foster parent and says she doesn’t get reimbursed much. She says that area is one state program that could use more funding.

“I know there’s a lot of problems in terms of needing more money for health issues and people who are addicted to opioids. I mean, there’s such a lack of money for children, and health issues,” she says.

The mayor of Portland, Ethan Strimling, shares voters’ concern. Specifically, he wants to know, how is the money from marijuana going to be dedicated to individual communities?

“All we have at the local level is property taxes,” Strimling says. “It would be great if some of the revenue that’s generated from this legalization could stay in the community where it’s having the most impact.”

In other words, to fund substance abuse programs to offset any of negative impact of legalization.

In Colorado, it’s a mixed bag with regard to where the money from pot is spent.

The state has a slew of local and state taxes on retail marijuana. Almost everybody through the entire supply chain is paying into the system, including growers, testing laboratories and retail shops. To some extent, pot is paying for schools in Colorado, with much of the state tax revenue going toward school maintenance and construction – paying for things like new roofs and HVAC systems in rural school districts.

But Chris Stiffler, an analyst with the Colorado Fiscal Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, cautions against getting too excited about marijuana tax revenue.

“We like to talk about it as if you were walking home today and you found a $20 bill on the ground,” Stiffler explains. “You wouldn’t go home and buy a new car or new house. But you would maybe go out for a Chipotle burrito with guacamole and a margarita, right?”

He says when voters in Colorado were considering legal marijuana, some of them thought that this was going to be a huge amount of money for education.

“They want to know why they’re not getting new schools, more teachers, why they’re not getting better roads because they were promised so many marijuana dollars were going to fix and pay for the things that really drive their communities,” Stiffler says.

The revenue is basically a drop in the bucket for the state budget. But for local communities, which can levy their own taxes on the marijuana industry, it appears that marijuana tax money can actually make more of a difference.

Take Edgewater, Colorado, a small town of 5,300 people in the Denver metro area. The city has five retail marijuana shops and they’re projected to bring in more than $1 million in marijuana tax revenue this fiscal year. To put that in perspective, their annual budget is $6 million, so that’s one so that’s one sixth that’s coming from marijuana.

Mayor of Edgewater, Kris Teegardin says,”Tax sales have been able to speed up major infrastructure improvements otherwise we that would have to take a very incremental approach to.”

One of those improvements is road paving. Teegardin even jokes that maybe they should be paving the road in green to show people how their marijuana tax dollars are being spent. They’re also putting money toward a brand new civic center and a police station. Other cities in Colorado are funding homelessness programs and mental health centers. But Teegardin is not banking on this money coming in forever.

“This is something that we know could go away in the blink of an eye,” he says. “Or, it could have a downturn when other states legalize it or other municipalities decide to join, so we are really looking at a murky forecast for sales in the next three to four years.”

With that in mind, tax analysts say the possibility of more revenue from pot shouldn’t be the sole reason to support marijuana legalization because it may not be enough to solve big budgetary problems that states face.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

A veteran Volkswagen employee has pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the carmaker’s use of so-called “clean diesel” engines that actually cheated on U.S. emissions tests. Engineer James Robert Liang worked for VW in both Germany and the U.S.

Liang pleaded guilty to criminal charges that he conspired to defraud the U.S., to commit wire fraud, and to violate the Clean Air Act; a grand jury indicted him three months ago, but that document was sealed until today.

As part of the plea deal, Liang faces a mutually agreed-upon sentencing guideline that sets a maximum of five years in prison, according to court records. He also could be forced to pay a fine of up to $250,000.

Liang started working for Volkswagen in 1983; in 2006, he helped design the “EA 189” diesel engine that has been linked to a recall of millions of vehicles worldwide, prosecutors say.

NPR’s John Ydstie reports:

“Appearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit, Liang said he was guilty because he had failed to disclose the software that Volkswagen had installed in vehicles to enable them to fraudulently pass emissions tests. Liang told the court he and his colleagues realized the diesel engines would not meet U.S. emissions standards, so they designed software to recognize when the cars were being tested.

“Liang moved to the U.S. in 2008 to help launch VW’s so-called ‘clean diesel’ vehicles. Nearly 600,000 were sold in the U.S. Liang has agreed to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors, suggesting they are pursuing more VW employees.”

Liang was indicted in early June; later that month, Volkswagen agreed to pay “up to $10 billion to buy back cars and compensate U.S. vehicle owners in the largest civil settlement in automobile history,” in addition to paying nearly $5 billion in environmental reparations, as we reported.

For the past eight years, Liang worked in the U.S. as the Leader of Diesel Competence for Volkswagen’s American subsidiary. He attended meetings with the Environmental Protection Agency to discuss certifying VW diesel vehicles for the U.S. market — meetings at which prosecutors say Liang and his co-conspirators “continued to falsely and fraudulently certify” that the cars met emissions standards.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Alarmed Russians are sharing photos on social media of a Siberian river that has suddenly and mysteriously turned blood red.

Russian authorities are trying to determine the cause of the ominous change to the Daldykan River, located above the Arctic Circle and flowing through the mining town of Norilsk. Photos posted on Facebook by the Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the Taimir Peninsula clearly show the river has turned a vivid red.

As National Geographic reported, two major theories are emerging to explain the change. “The first is that the red color comes from the large quantity of iron that occurs naturally in the ground in that region,” National Geographic said. “The second is a chemical leak.”

Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said in a statement that it suspects the latter explanation: “According to our initial information, a possible reason for the pollution of the river might be a break in the pipeline” belonging to a local factory, which is owned by the nickel and palladium giant Norilsk Nickel.

The ministry did not specify what kind of chemical may be leaking into the river. According to the BBC, the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta suggested that the pipeline could be leaking waste copper-nickel concentrate.

Despite the numerous social media posts and the government statement confirming the red color, Norilsk Nickel maintains everything is normal with the river. “The waters show the natural tone; the river and its mainstream are in regular condition, which goes against the information about any color changes due to an alleged case of large-scale river pollution,” Norilsk Nickel said in a statement. It included photos such as this one, which it said were taken yesterday morning:

The company added that it has “strengthened the environmental monitoring in the area of the river and adjacent production facilities” and would test samples from the river this week.

This isn’t the first time the river has changed color, according to multiple news outlets. The Guardian reported that some social media users said it had also happened in June. “Periodically there are accidents when these pipes break and the solutions spill and get into the Daldykan — that’s why it changes colour,” Denis Koshevoi, a Ph.D. candidate studying pollution in the area, told the newspaper.

“Incidents such as the polluting of the waters of Daldykan River is a common occurrence in the Russian Arctic because of a consistent irresponsible attitude towards environmental standards,” Vladmir Chouprov, head of the energy program of Greenpeace Russia, said in a statement. “The Arctic ecosystem is extremely vulnerable; scars of human impact need decades or even centuries to amend.”

Area residents don’t drink this water, as CNN reported. The network quoted the state news agency, saying “the river isn’t connected to the public water supply and the incident doesn’t pose an immediate threat to the residents’ well-being.”

The area has a tragic history, as NPR’s Michele Kelemen reported from Norilsk in 2000. “Norilsk began as part of the gulag archipelago. Stalin sent prisoners there to extract the mineral wealth of Russia’s frozen north,” she said. “Workers lived in desolate, brutal prison camps. Only after 1956 did Soviets begin to go to Norilsk voluntarily to take high-paying mining jobs.”

Michele described what it looked like during her visit: “As far as the eye can see there are cranes, polluting smokestacks from the smelters and rusty pipes winding through the trashed landscape of this Arctic city.”

And now, a red river flows through it.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)