Last week, I wrote about the “separate but equal” two-tiered voting system that Arizona and Kansas want to implement that would create two separate ballots for elections; one with federal, state and local races for eligible voters who show proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport, and another with only federal races for remaining voters.
On September 15, the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, progressives toasted a victory.
True, thanks to Congressional timidity, the biggest banks have only gotten bigger since the financial crisis five years ago, and the men (yes, mostly men) in charge of them are mostly still in charge. But Larry Summers, the architect of a good chunk of the deregulation that set the stage for the crisis in the first place, had withdrawn his name from consideration to be chair of the Federal Reserve, thanks to a populist uprising within the Democratic Party.
Three and a half years have passed since the afternoon when the stock markets went into a trillion-dollar free fall and just as suddenly reversed course, recovering 80 percent of that loss. It all happened in less than 45 minutes.
In 2005, Indiana passed a law requiring voters to present a government issued photo-ID before they would be allowed to vote. The law was challenged by voting rights advocates and was upheld by the Appellate Court and ultimately, the Supreme Court. The Appellate Court concluded that the burden placed on potential voters to show a photo-ID was outweighed by the state’s interest in reducing voter fraud.
Assuming some short-term deal emerges in Washington to avert a default, pending later budget talks, we all know what comes next: Another dead-end debate over taxes.
Why? Because if there's one issue that conservatives in Congress are even more implacable about than Obamacare it's taxes -- as in, no new taxes, ever.
The CATO Institute styles itself as the nation's leading defender of personal liberty, but don't count on these libertarians to watch your back in the face of any threats you may face from powerful private actors. No, CATO is only worried about threats posed by public entities.
Those Bush tax cuts are a gift that just keeps on giving. They are a big reason the national debt is so high, requiring huge interest payments, and a big reason that the Treasury faces such large shortfalls every month between what comes in the door and what goes out.
Yet, somehow, conservatives have managed to spin the national debt strictly as a "spending problem." And strangely, Democrats have largely let them do that with barely a word about how low taxes got us in this jam.
One of the most alarming aspects of a possible default is also one that gets the least attention: A default would raise the cost of federal borrowing, perhaps for years to come, and send the deficit soaring.
If Treasury securities become, well, less secure, the United States will have to pay investors more to buy them. Hence higher interest rates on new debt that is issued.
The federal lawsuit filed to block North Carolina’s restrictive new voting laws is set to test the government’s ability to protect voting rights in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act.
The student loan default rate is soaring, and it's flying highest among for-profit schools.
The U.S. Department of Education reports that across the nation, the share of borrowers who default within two years after college loan payments become due has risen nearly a full percentage point to 10 percent, while the rate for people who default within three years is up to 14.7 percent.
For some recent college graduates, this fall’s back-to-school season marks the beginning of the back-to-living-at-home stage of their lives. But with careful financial planning, that stage doesn’t have to last long, advisers say.
How taxpayers are bankrolling the paychecks of already-wealthy executives instead of supporting more livable wages for American workers struggling to get by.
So much has been accomplished by Occupy and other social justice movements in the past two years that it is incredible the corporate media and their pundits do not report on what is happening around them. Despite the lack of corporate media coverage, the movement is deepening, creating democratic institutions, stopping some of the worst policies from being pushed by the corporate duopoly and building a broad-based diverse movement. [...]
Fiscal hawks love to remind us that interest payments on the national debt will be a major driver of future U.S. budget deficits. Just last week, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) published a doom-and-gloom paper that noted that interest payments were the single fastest growing part of the U.S. budget and the most volatile area of future spending.
Weill Cornell Medical College last week accepted $100 million from the Weill Family Foundation to help "translate research breakthroughs into innovative treatments and therapies for patients.” More precisely: A college dean who also served on the board of a big-pharma firm while it defrauded Medicaid, bribed physicians, promoted off-label use of anti-psychotics and sent a library full of FDA regulations out with the garbage allowed one of the
If you're going to have a raucous, costumed march in New York City, Midtown makes for a great setting. Nurses and HIV activists in Robin Hood hats took the streets yesterday, blocking traffic as they called for a financial transaction tax to fully fund healthcare and other public services. Chants of “People, not profits! Medicare for all!” filled rush-hour streets as business-suited professionals dodged through the crowds.
Like so many young Americans, Derek Wetherell is stuck.
At 23 years old, he has a job, but not a career, and little prospect for advancement. He has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, but no college degree. He says he is more likely to move back in with his parents than to buy a home, and he doesn't know what he will do if his car—a 2001 Chrysler Sebring with well over 100,000 miles—breaks down.
Five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers and the worst financial crisis since 1929, one thing seems certain: another meltdown of the financial system will eventually happen. Why? Because we still haven't fixed many of the problems that led to the last crisis.