Reformers in Washington are looking for a few good scandals.
Watergate led to the biggest overhaul of campaign finance law in the past century. Outrage over donors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom and Enron influence peddling helped spur the 2002 McCain-Feingold overhaul. And the Jack Abramoff affair got Congress to act quickly on lobbying and ethics reform.
Nate Silver has already dubbed the 2014 election as "the least important in years." But this year's midterms are still breaking records for at least one thing: Secret political spending.
The state-appointed Detroit Emergency Manager has commenced a program of shutting off the water of a large portion of the 138,000 delinquent accounts, up to 90,000 of which are poor households and largely African-American.
This report presents new research on the scope of federally-supported employment in the private economy and shows how, using our over 1.3 trillion dollars in federal purchasing, the President of the United States can place over twenty million Americans on a pathway to the middle class.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Citizens United v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC, this amendment is a necessary counterbalance to the deluge of money that wealthy individuals, corporations and special interests have flooded into our elections.
Competition and innovation in bank payments risk being undermined if the system’s new regulator is too heavy handed, a report from Demos Finance warns.
The government is setting up a regulator to ensure new and smaller banks get a fair deal when using larger rivals’ systems. But analysts at Demos worry some actions to address this could backfire, prompting banks to withdraw services rather than comply. The think tank also wants the new regulator to consider potential uses for collecting tax data.
When a city is forced to spend more on Wall Street fees than on basic public services, it is the sign of trouble. When that city is one of America's biggest population centers, it is the sign of a burgeoning crisis.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, East Egg represents inherited wealth and privilege, while West Egg represents wealth earned through innovation and hard work, a distinction at the core of the American ideal. We have always embraced a dynamic capitalism, marked not by stasis but rather “creative destruction,” lionizing trust-busters as heroes of competition.
Thomas Piketty’s wildly popular new book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” has been subject to more thinkpieces than the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” Progressives are celebrating the book — a
Here's a quick question about your retirement savings: When was the last time you checked the fees on your 401(k)?
If you're like most Americans, chances are you're not sure what exactly your plan is charging you. Even though employers are now required to disclose more information about 401(k) fees, only about half of workers said they actually noticed the data, while just 14 percent made changes after reviewing the information, according to a 2013 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Michael Lewis’ new book, “Flash Boys,” relates a real-life techno thriller in which a trader who identifies and ultimately thwarts a scheme deployed by piratical “High Frequency Traders” to squeeze a relatively small amount out of many stock transactions being executed electronically. As our hero’s trade bounced around hyperspace looking for the best price, the HFTs would detect its path, use their speed to get in front of the trade, and buy up the inventory so that the price of our hero’s trade could be dictated.
The Supreme Court just decided an incredibly important case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (FEC). The Court's ruling will allow unprecedented amounts of money to flow directly into our political system. [...]
McCutcheon struck down the limit on the total amount that one wealthy donor is permitted to contribute to all federal candidates, parties, and political action committees (PACs) combined.
When the McCutcheon ruling came down I was sitting in a room with several young African American men and women East Harlem talking about their struggles with employment in a world they said was stacked against them. They constantly talked about race, class, and power—but ultimately believed they couldn’t do much about it. All too often in fact, they shrugged off the notion that they any agency to change the system, with one guy noting, “we’ve just gotten the short end of the stick.”