"The Fisher case invites us all to acknowledge the role public policy has played in widening racial disparities in college access over the past generation, and to press the need for robust policies, from diversity considerations in admissions to debt-free college, to ensure that higher education remains a fair pathway to a diverse middle class in America."
Workers at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center filed a complaint with the Labor Department on Monday alleging a slew of labor violations against their employers, including not being paid the minimum wage and working as many as 80 hours a week without overtime pay.
The Reagan Building is a federal property, but the workers who lodged the complaint are employed by private businesses in the building's food court, like a Subway sandwich shop, a Quick Pita franchise and a Smoothie King location.
When employers check credit as part of their hiring it creates a vicious cycle: out-of-work Americans can’t pay down their debts because they don’t have a job, but they can’t get a job because would-be employers hold their consumer credit history against them.
Today the Supreme Court put another nail in the coffin of the withering body of consumer rights. In the Italian Colors case, the Court held that a plaintiff cannot bring a class action to a court or arbitration when it has agreed to a boilerplate contract waiving its right to litigation or class arbitration, even where the cost of bringing the case as an individual is so prohibitive as to preclude the vindication of important statutory rights.
Can some types of debt cause the blues? Why are people approaching retirement age carrying credit card debt? This column shares results from recent research about credit card debt among older Americans. [...]
NEW YORK -- At a gathering of state leaders in Baltimore, Maryland, last week, Maryland GovernorMartin O’Malley made a strong case in support of the growing movement to rethink and re-orient how we measure economic performance and social progress, which he argues is a crucial step forward in meeting twenty-first century economic challenges. The “GPI in the States Summit” was organized by Demos and brought together public officials, researchers, and advocates representing twenty states from Maine to Hawaii.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court held that corporations were free to use money from the corporation’s treasury on political activity.1 Setting aside for a moment the many criticisms of the decision, Citizens United left open a number of questions about who at a corporation should get to decide when a corporation spends money on politics. It has fallen to our system of corporate law to provide an answer.
One of the most pernicious myths of the past half century is that guaranteeing healthcare for all Americans would strike a mortal blow against this country's system of free enterprise.
Investment negotiators from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries met secretly last week in Vancouver for their 18th round of talks regarding the expansive agreement. Frantic protestors, who caught wind of the conference through the Peruvian media, tried unsuccessfully to locate the talks and instead decided to hold a demonstration outside of the offices of Pacific Rim — a Canadian mining corporation.
When people talk about corporations spending money in politics, it’s commonly assumed that the corporation is a single thing with a clear position on any given issue. This masks the fact that corporations are complex, state-created entities with their own governance structures and a multitude of conflicting interests.
In a keynote address last Friday in Baltimore, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley broke down the reasons behind his administration’s decision to make Maryland the first state in the union to employ a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a quantitative assessment that integrates both the costs and the benefits of economic development into a monetary measure of whether growth is truly enhancing the welfare of individuals and communities.
Last week, I explored the question of whether federal contracting wastes tax dollars. But that post missed at least one key part of the equation -- the high costs of having no institutional memory.
A top government research scientist wrote me in response to the post to make this very good point:
A Supreme Court decision Monday that struck down an Arizona law requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote was hailed by voting-rights advocates as a big win. But several legal scholars say the ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, could in fact set back the voting-rights cause in cases to come.
Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg released a report on how the City could prepare for the rising sea levels that will result from climate change. A Stronger, More Resilient New York is a 438-page blueprint for climate adaptation that covers everything from coastal protection to built infrastructure, like buildings and telecommunications, and community rebuilding and resiliency. It is an ambitious plan, to say the least, and the vast majority of it, if implemented, will be under the next Mayor.
If the NSA leak had happened twenty years ago, Edward Snowden would have been defended by lots of progressives and a few libertarians here and there. But it's unlikely that any major leaders in the Republican Party or the mainstream conservative media would have come out as Snowden cheerleaders.
The current version of immigration reform already includes a decade-plus path to citizenship, not to mention potential fees and fines, but it's progress -- more than Congress has made in years. Unfortunately, some senators have decided that the proposed long and winding path to citizenship wasn't hard enough, and one of them, Marco Rubio (R-FL), is backing away from his own bill, calling it merely "an excellent starting point."
NEW YORK -- Today, the Supreme Court released its decision in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (No. 12-71), striking down an Arizona law that created unnecessary barriers to voter registration in violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
In a 2011 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) eloquently described attacks across the country on Americans' access to the ballot box: "Voting rights are under attack in America.