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The job of reforming Wall Street is far from finished. The most profitable investments for the big banks continue to be Washington lobbyists chipping away at reform and litigators challenging every major rule in court.
During the Presidential campaign, conservatives continued to falsely claim that oil and gas drilling had been restricted during the Obama Administration. In fact, as we pointed out, oil and gas production is at the highest level it’s been in decades.
Whatever your opinion of the election’s outcome, there seems to be have been a lot of agreement this year with President Obama’s assertion that the voting process itself is something “we have to fix.” One place to get a bird’s-eye view of Election Day chaos—besides your local polling place—was at one of the call centers set up by the Election Protection Coalition, a collection of voting and civil-rights advocates that runs a hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, to help voters on Election Day.
WASHINGTON – A new analysis of data through Election Day from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and other sources by U.S. PIRG and Demos shows that just 61 large donors to Super PACs giving an average of $4.7 million each matched the $285.2 million in grassroots contributions from more than 1,425,500 small donors to the two major-party presidential candidates.
NEW YORK -- Today, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it will review the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark law in the advancement of voting rights.
In response to this decision, Vice President for Legal Strategies Brenda Wright released the following statement:
President Obama's biggest failure in his first term was to not forcefully stem the flood of foreclosures that has been devastating lives, prolonging the economic slump, and stripping vulnerable groups -- particularly blacks -- of financial assets that took years to build up.
In turn, that failure was the result of another devastating mistake by Obama: picking Timothy Geithner to be Treasury Secretary and allowing that department to be way too cozy with the big banks.
Are you breathing a sigh of relief, job applicants? If a prospective employer runs a background check prior to hiring you, the chances they’ll falsely learn that you’re an armed robber, “a sex offender who [is] in prison at the time” or something similarly misleading are “less than 10 percent” according to an attorney for the National Association of Background Screening Professionals.
The tax cuts enacted by Congress under George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 stand as the greatest achievement ever for small government conservatives. While a good chunk of Reagan's historic tax cuts had been cancelled out before he even left office, Bush's tax cuts have lived on and on, draining trillions from the U.S. Treasury.
These cuts have not, as hoped, triggered deep cuts in government spending and "starved the beast." Instead, they have simply fed the debt.