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.
Here we go again: Financial markets are plummeting thanks to the threat of a government shutdown and, beyond that, another debt ceiling crisis. One of the great bull markets of recent years is being derailed by a bunch of extreme conservatives in Congress. But Wall Street shouldn't just blame the Tea Party for ruining a good thing. It should blame big donors from its own ranks who are bankrolling groups like the Club for Growth who are also responsible for the crisis.
The drive for deregulation during the 1970s found support among Democrats and Republicans alike. And I don't just mean centrist Democrats, by the way. Many liberal Democrats favored deregulation in the face of evidence that elaborate forms of red tape favored monopoly-like corporations and prevented competition. Many deregulatory proposals were viewed as pro-consumer.
Philadelphia Council authorized a public vote on Bill 130532 last Thursday. The bill amends the city charter to provide better wage protections and benefits for subcontracted city workers. The referendum will appear on the Spring 2014 ballot. Council supported this item unanimously.
The Census Bureau has steadfastly resisted calls to end the practice of counting inmates as “residents” of their prisons instead of the cities and towns where they lived and to which they typically return. The bureau’s new director, John Thompson, seems at least open to ending this wrongful practice.
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.
Delano Wingfield, 22, has been grilling up food and cleaning dishes at Roti Mediterranean Grill in Washington D.C.’s Union Station for almost a year. Struggling to get by on $9 an hour, he started encouraging coworkers to strike with him. His manager found out, he said, and slashed his hours.
“It was hard with 35 hours, and now I don’t know what I’m about to do with the 20 hours they gave me,” he said Wednesday. “I’m out here to make myself and everyone else more money.” (Wingfield’s manager did not respond to a request for comment.)
In a speech last July, President Obama vowed that “whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” On Wednesday, an estimated 175 workers who serve food, sell mementos or do maintenance work in federal buildings in Washington D.C. went on strike for the day. Instead of showing up at their jobs, they showed up in front of the White House, where they urged President Obama to live up to his word.
Americans are coming to face the hard reality that they live in a new Gilded Age, with inequality at levels not seen since before the Great Depression. Even worse: Uncle Sam is subsidizing this lopsided economy.
America's huge income gaps are routinely described as inavoidable, thanks to large structural forces like globalization and technological change. Skilled labor has become worth more, unskilled labor is worth less, and that's that.
Of course, though, we know that story is incomplete. Any number of public policies have also fanned inequality, like giving big tax breaks to the rich, and any number of policies could help close the income gap.
It’s their fifth strike in five months, but the workers of Good Jobs Nation didn’t seem the least bit tired this morning. Low-paid employees from the food courts of federal buildings, the gift shops of the Smithsonian, and others employed under federal contracts, concessions, and lease agreements donned matching t-shirts, picked up signs and marched to the White House.
Here’s an easy way for the government to save about $7 billion a year: Tighten the cap on the lavish salaries paid to executives at government contractors.
The cap is currently at $760,000 per contract per executive per year. That’s almost 15 times greater than the average household income – meaning that the federal government is helping to worsen the same income inequality President Obama has decried.
Courtney Shackleford is one of two entry-level employees at the Ben and Jerry’s in Washington, D.C.,’s Union Station, where she makes $8.25 an hour. Like many workers in America’s growing low-wage economy, she struggles to make ends meet: Between her pregnancy and her tuition fees at Trinity Washington University, Shackleford doesn’t make enough to cover basic expenses.
Progressives both in and outside New York City are super excited about Bill de Blasio running City Hall. President Obama summed up those feelings in his endorsement yesterday of de Blasio, saying that his ideas for universal pre-K and affordable housing could make him a "great mayor."
Almost nobody seems to believe that Obamacare can be stopped under any realistic scenario given Democratic control of the Senate. And yet some House Republicans are willing to shut down the government—and possibly inflict a serious wound on their party—in pursuit of that chimerical goal.
What's going on here?
In fact, there is no one explanation. But here are my favorites in descending order.
Cleaning and concessions workers plan to walk off their jobs in federal buildings Wednesday and march on the White House, where they’ll demand President Obama wield his executive authority to raise the labor standards for their taxpayer-funded jobs. Organizers expect turnout for the work stoppage to outstrip the fledgling union-backed group’s first strike May 21, which drew just over a hundred Washington, DC workers. [...]
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. [...]
Why isn't anyone talking about the role of wealthy campaign donors in gridlocking Washington and precipitating a likely government shutdown?
In the standard telling, it's extreme base voters, whipped up by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, who have turned the GOP into what Paul Krugman called the "Crazy Party" on Friday. But there is another reason why hardline members of the House are pushing demands that even John Boehner won't embrace: they fear the big money on the right that is available to finance primary challenges.