The North Carolina legislature has had a remarkable session. In fact, the amount they have been able to accomplish is almost jaw-dropping—not because it was particularly productive but because it was so bold and unabashed it its attack on low and middle income families and basic elements of democracy. Among the legislative lowlights:
When Congress reconsiders the Voting Rights Act this session, they should consider the few pages of history conspicuously missing from Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion—an opinion that relies not only on bad logic but also bad history.
Picking a new chairman of the Federal Reserve may be the most important nomination a president can make. The next Fed chair will play an instrumental role in determining the future trajectory of America’s straggling recovery, and determining how financial regulation gets implemented.
Many people on public assistance do not know that it is federally mandated—under the National Voter Registration Act—that they receive the opportunity to register to vote every time they visit a public assistance agency.
(NEW YORK, NY) – In the wake of the recent passage of disastrous legislation that would repeal North Carolina’s successful Same Day Registration policy and implement barriers to voting, Demos President Miles Rapoport issued the following statement:
How financial market practices not only risk catastrophic systemic failure like 2008, they constitute a massive extraction of value from the real economy by the financial sector.
Financial markets, now heavily dependent on technology, need to be safeguarded against cyberattacks, natural disasters and the more prosaic scourge of human error that can cause massive disruptions, according to experts and a federal panel.
Without a doubt, the big banks should be broken up; the need is even more urgent than it was in 2007 or 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas – hardly an Occupy Wall Street affiliate – titled its 2011 Annual Report "Choosing the Road to Prosperity: Why We Must End Too Big to Fail – Now."
The attack on voting rights in North Carolina is a shameful attempt by the state’s politicians to curtail access to the ballot, in ways devised particularly to discourage voting by African-Americans.
If you think Wall Street has cleaned up its act after a global financial disaster and then sweeping reform legislation, think again. A new survey by Labaton Sucharow, a law firm that represents Wall Street whistleblowers, has revealed that the financial services industry still has profound ethical problems.
This morning, severalmedia outlets rushed to report that Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler had lost his battle to secure robust rules governing the international exercise of the Commission’s jurisdiction to govern derivatives.
Voting rights activists have seized upon a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in an effort to mitigate the damage done by the Supreme Court earlier this month in the case of Shelby County, Alabama v. Attorney General Eric Holder. According to Adam Serwer at MSNBC.com, the state of Texas may still be subject to the federal government’s approval before it can rearrange voting districts or make changes to election law.
The Supreme Court of the United States must be criticized for blindness, perhaps even willful ignorance of reality, in their recent decision gutting the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder is a setback for democracy — especially at the local level.
Overwhelming evidence shows that too many politicians continue to win elections by unfairly manipulating election rules based on how voters look or talk. The Court’s decision makes this problem worse. The biggest problem will be the manipulation of election rules for local offices that are often non-partisan and escape national attention.
Today, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, upending a law that has been central to our nation’s commitment to eradicating the shameful legacy of racial discrimination in voting, especially in the deep South. The Court declared that the so-called “coverage formula” used to determine which states should be required to obtain preclearance for changes in voting laws was unconstitutional, but that Congress retains the authority to update the coverage formula.
Q. How would you summarize the decision in a single sentence?
A. The court effectively rolled back an important provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the act’s formula requiring federal preapproval of election changes for some states but not others was outdated because it was based on data from the 1960s and ’70s.
Q. Did anything in in it — or in the justices’ votes — surprise you?
A. I was not surprised by the votes of the particular justices.
Five Supreme Court Justices just rolled back the most effective civil rights provision in our nation's history. What should we do now?
One option is to declare "mission accomplished" and forget about race in politics.
That, however, will not work. Although we have made amazing progress in the past fifty years, too many state and local politicians still maintain power by manipulating election rules.