I grew up just outside Detroit and have felt an ache in my heart for this bleeding city for so many years now. It's long been one of the country's designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was "urban blight," a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.
A recent ProPublica article points to a number of pending lawsuits aimed at restoring key federal protections against racial voting discrimination. Up until last summer, certain states and jurisdictions with histories of preventing African Americans from voting were forced to have all election changes cleared by the federal government before implementation.
Biola Jeje, 22, graduated Brooklyn College last May with a degree in political science and a mission: Force lawmakers to address the $1.2 trillion student debt crisis. [...]
Jeje left college with $9,500 in student loans, less than half the $29,400 national average for four-year college graduates. She and her fellow activists are mobilizing support to march on Albany, New York state’s capital, to deliver a message to legislators. [...]
NEW YORK, NY—Today, national public policy organization Demos released a new report detailing the impact of state disinvestment in higher education since the beginning of the Great Recession. The report release coincides with the launch of Higher Ed, Not Debt, a campaign with over 60 organizations dedicated to supporting borrowers, addressing unfair lending practices, and reining in soaring costs in higher education.
As we await a decision from the Supreme Court in the McCutcheon v. FEC money in politics case, the Justices themselves heard from a protester who rose in the courtroom to proclaim that “money is not speech, corporations are not people” and to urge the Court to “overturn Citizens United.”
The ink is barely dry on the report from President Obama’s election administration commission and states are already disregarding its blue-ribbon recommendations, namely around early voting. The endorsement of expanding the voting period before Election Day was one of the strongest components of the bipartisan commission’s report.
Through the Procurement Act, Congress centralized management of government contracts and gave the president license to use his judgment in setting federal contracting practices.
This week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered continuing evidence of the student debt crisis. Outstanding student debt again topped $1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2013, making it the second-largest pool of debt in the nation behind mortgages. This has tripled in just a decade, as higher-education prices increased faster than medical costs, up 500 percent since 1985.
ALBANY—Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced new legislation to restore accountability and ensure access to the ballot box by eliminating baseless and intimidating challenges to voter eligibility at the polls on Election Day. Under current law, voters who are challenged at the polls are required to recite an oath affirming their right to vote. The challenger, on the other hand, has no such obligation.
NEW YORK—Today, Demos released the following statement applauding Attorney General Eric Holder’s support for restoring the voting rights of people with past felony convictions. Holder spoke at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., saying “It is time to fundamentally reconsider laws that permanently disenfranchise people who are no longer under federal or state supervision.”
Demos’ Vice President of Legal Strategies, Brenda Wright, said this of the news:
When Louisiana lawmakers convened in 1898 to update the state constitution, one of the major complaints among them was that the recently ratified 15th Amendment prevented them from disenfranchising black people as they desired. The president of that convention, E.B. Kruttschnitt, proclaimed that a white majority would eventually overcome the 15th amendment’s voting rights mandate. Said Kruttschnitt:
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) includes 26 indicators to give a broader picture of the sustainability of growth. It is a better measure than GDP.
As long as there have been markets, people have been driven by greed to make irrational investment decisions. When enough people get in on the action, valuations -- the prices of securities -- go haywire, soaring to obscene heights and then crashing in a shower of crushed dreams.
Chasing performance, taking on excessive risk and selling at inopportune times are all as old as capital markets themselves. What is new is the modern regulatory environment and financial innovations such as high-frequency trading. Is today's stock market the same beast it was 20 or 30 years ago? [...]
As more states across the U.S. (and more countries across the world) begin adopting alternative measures they find that while GDP has been increasing, other measures of well-being have remained flat.
When millions of Americans stood in lines for hours to vote yet again in the 2012 elections, President Obama recognized that “we need to fix that.” Today, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration released a report with their recommendations on ways to improve election administration. The Commission’s recommendations are welcome but much more work remains to be done to ensure every eligible voter can exercise their right to vote.
Just three days before Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to run the fiscally strapped city, filed thelargest municipal bankruptcy case in history, he signed a forbearance agreement with UBS and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch establishing a process to settle possible claims on default of $800 million of interest rate swaps.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes rejected a proposal by Detroit’s Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to pay off a complex financial deal that was originated in 2005 and turned catastrophic for the city during the recession.