Last week, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer unveiled a new plan to regulate financial advisers, the first of its kind, that tries to protect the average investor from advisers who don’t have to put their clients’ best interests first.
“Put some mustard on it.” That’s the advice that Chicago McDonald’s worker Brittney Berry allegedly received from her manager after suffering a scalding burn on her arm from the grill used to make eggs. And this was no minor burn – she was eventually taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and had to miss work for six months.
President Obama’s recent comments on universal voting have spurred a debate about how such a policy would influence elections. On the Monkey Cage blog, John Sides examines the partisan consequences and argues that turnout would generally benefit Democrats, but that the effect would be modest.
The median white household has $111,145 in wealth holdings, compared to $7,113 for the median black household and $8,348 for the median Latino household, according to a recent study called The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters. [...]
Last Year, Germany announced it was making its university system free. Given mounting college costs in America, ATTN: wanted to interview a higher education expert to learn whether any best practices could be applied domestically. We spoke with Mark Huelsman from the New York-based think tank Demos for answers. [...]
Yesterday, the federal court in New York appointed Demos co-class counsel in Floyd v. the City of New York, the landmark case challenging the NYPD’s use of the stop and frisk tactic. We now represent the thousands of mostly Black and Latino pedestrians who have been or will be unlawfully stopped by the NYPD.
Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a blueprint for new regulations pertaining to payday loans and car title loans. The regulations will not include an interest rate cap, the holy grail for advocates, because industry allies watered-down the provisions (I discuss the fight over payday lending in my recent Atlantic article).
Last week, Massachusetts became the latest state to either settle or lose in litigation over complaints that it wasn’t providing adequate voter registration services at welfare offices.
The settlement is part of a broad effort by voting rights groups to reverse the decline in voter registrations at public assistance offices, which Congress intended to serve as a mechanism for signing up low-income voters. National voting rights groups argue that the decline in registrations is because of improper implementation by staff at government welfare offices. (...)
Rolling back reform of the financial system is at the top of the agenda for the new Congress. Opponents of a safe and honest financial system have waited until the abject horror of autumn 2008 faded from memory to deal the financial sector regulation a death of a thousand cuts. From time to time, the new Congress may attempt large rollbacks. But their likely strategy is that, after a couple of years of piecemeal repeal, financial regulation will be gutted and the good old days of financial markets that operated like casinos will return.
Recently, chilling videos surfaced online of young University of Oklahoma students, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, reciting a racially-charged chant. The story appeared surprising for numerous reasons. Among them, education is supposed to reduce racial resentment (or at least temper outward expressions of it), and young people, known as Millennials, are supposed to be uniquely tolerant. The incident offers an opportunity to reevaluate how we think about racism in America, and how we can fight it.
BOSTON, NEW YORK, and WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, voting rights advocates announced a settlement with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) that will ensure that hundreds of thousands of eligible Massachusetts citizens are provided opportunities to register to vote in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In light of the settlement, the parties have jointly requested that U.S. District Court Judge Denise J.
Yesterday, President Obama said, in a speech at the City Club of Cleveland, “In Australia, and some other countries, there's mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted." Obama is right to point to voting as a mechanism to fight elite domination of politics.
The Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance has settled a 2012 lawsuit with voting rights organizations by agreeing to distribute voter registration forms to people applying for public assistance, to help people complete the forms and to provide oversight to ensure that public assistance workers abide by the requirements of a federal voting rights law.
The Department of Transitional Assistance will also pay $675,000 in attorneys' fees to the voting rights organizations.
Policies like this would incent states to return to an era when college could be funded through a summer job, part-time employment, and maybe modest savings when available, for the largest and most diverse generation of students in our history.
What does the minimum wage really buy a full-time worker? Not a two-bedroom apartment, anywhere in the United States, according the National Low Income Housing Coalition. This study uses the minimum wage for each state, and the Fair Market Price of apartments in each state (which is below the average rent). It bases affordability on the renter paying no more than 30% of their wages on rent, allowing for food and other living costs to be taken into consideration.