As we all sit around waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down decisions on a whole handful of whoppers — the Affordable Care Act, the Arizona "Papers, Please" law — it was something the Court didn't do this week that may be the most overlooked matter of all. It has before it a case from Montana whereby that state's supreme court upheld Montana's 100-year-old ban on corporate campaign contributions in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case.
According to all available data, the voter participation rate of the first Americans, American Indians and Alaska Natives, is among the lowest of any ethnic group in the country. There are complex historical and cultural reasons that make the issue of voting among American Indians and Alaska Natives unique.
Most of the coverage last week of the Fed study on household wealth focused on the gigantic financial hit taken by nearly all Americans since 2007. Dig deeper into the report, though, and it makes for even scarier reading, as many of those people losing lots of wealth are older and don’t have much time to recover before retiring.
There’s been a lot of fighting the last several months about new restrictions on the right to vote. We learn that these laws, including voter ID, rules around registration, and limits on early voting disproportionately impact African Americans, Latinos, youth and other groups, many of which already have lower participation rates than the white population.
We’ve talked often about how true sustainable development cannot be achieved without adopting new metrics for progress beyond GDP. Without valuing things like natural capital and work done within the home, GDP is unable to accurately reflect the true growth of our economy and, more importantly, our progress. Yesterday, at the Rio+20 conference, a new metric was launched that offers a much more nuanced picture of growth and progress.
American workers are being ripped off by excessive retirement plan fees — which may force them to work longer or live less comfortably in their golden years, according to a recent study.
For the average US household, the high fees drain about $155,000 from their 401(k) accounts over their lifetimes, the study found.
In one example highlighted in the study, a two-wage-earner household with a median income for their age group contributed an average of 7 percent a year to their 401(k) plan over 40 years.
Malloy wrote in his veto message that he believed parts of the bill to be unconstitutional, potentially infringing on individuals' free speech protections under the First Amendment. Other parts of 5556, he argued, "represent poor public policy choices." He went on, "While I have advocated for transparency in the elections and campaign finance process for a long time, and could certainly support sensible reform in this area again, I cannot support the bill before me given its many legal and practical problems."
Screengrabs of Spokeo.comIn today’s economy, it’s hard enough to land a job without companies secretly compiling inaccurate dossiers of information about you, then aggressively selling them to employers, who – based on the false or simply irrelevant data – decide not to hire you.
Dimon’s testimony yesterday before the Senate Banking Committee -- the week of the anniversary of the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 -- is ironic, to say the least. He objected to the Volcker Rule’s prohibitions against proprietary trading by federally insured banks (acting like hedge funds, in the words of Senator Merkley), characterizing the re-instatement of a separation of commercial banks and trading markets as an imprudent act taken by Congress in anger.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering allowing hydraulic fracking on a limited basis in towns that approve drilling for natural gas. New York currently has a temporary moratorium on all fracking while an environmental review is conducted.
Many high school and college grads face a tough rode ahead, given high unemployment and record levels of student debt. But the future is especially bleak for undocumented students graduating from high school, the so called Dreamers, in reference to the DREAM Act, a bill stalled in Congress for close to eleven years that would allow this population to regularize their status and access a path to citizenship if they meet certain conditions.
Ahead of Rio+20, advocates are coalescing around the idea that we need to change the way we measure what is important to achieve true sustainable development. Currently countries measure economic growth, which is often equated with progress, through GDP. However, growth in GDP is increasingly not resulting in progress.
One of the most often-cited reasons for the STEM achievement gap is a lack of skilled and trained STEM teachers. The greatest percentage of under-qualified teachers at the K-12 level is found in STEM disciplines – 40 percent of high school math teachers and 20 percent of science teachers in high needs areas lack a higher education degree in the subject they instruct.
The Washington Post has a long story today that offers a horrifying glimpse into how one of America's largest banks systematically stripped wealth from the some of the poorest people in the nation. It details the sordid career success of a former star subprime loan officer at Wells Fargo:
The recent Fed report on household wealth contains yet more evidence of how distorted and unequal the U.S. economy has become.
The big headline around the study, which comes out every three years, has been that the household wealth of Americans dropped by 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, and is now basically where it was in 1992, adjusting for inflation.