It's fair to say most people think of giving to charity as a good thing to do. If we have extra resources, it feels right to help people who are less fortunate.
One of the most unnoticed labor trends in the past few decades has been the rise of “just-in-time scheduling,” the practice of scheduling workers’ shifts with little advance notice that are subject to cancelation hours before they are due to begin.
A year after a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), the nation’s foremost voting rights attorneys say that racial discrimination in voting is rampant, especially in southern states where the the VRA helped to ensure access to the ballot.
Reformers in Washington are looking for a few good scandals.
Watergate led to the biggest overhaul of campaign finance law in the past century. Outrage over donors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom and Enron influence peddling helped spur the 2002 McCain-Feingold overhaul. And the Jack Abramoff affair got Congress to act quickly on lobbying and ethics reform.
On Aug. 12, 2013, a federal court in New York found that the NYPD’s use of the stop-and-frisk practice was unconstitutional racial profiling. Almost one year to the day later, police gunned down Michael Brown — an 18-year-old, unarmed black man — during a street stop in Missouri. Don’t miss the connection, or the cycle of government violence against black Americans might never end.
The Federal Communications Commission has extended the deadline for feedback on the issue of net neutrality by five days, making the new deadline September 15.
This follows reports that the Writers Guild of America was pushing for more feedback on the issue.
In May 2013, low-wage workers in federal buildings in Washington began walking off the job in a series of one-day strikes. Employed by concessionaires and janitorial contractors at places like the Smithsonian and the Ronald Reagan Building, the workers said their rock-bottom wages weren't enough to survive on. Like the Walmart and fast-food workers also going on strike, they asked for better working conditions and a greater share of the spoils.
Los Angeles lawmakers were expected to vote Wednesday on a proposal to renegotiate or terminate an interest rate swap deal from the mid-2000s that critics say now costs the city millions of dollars a year in fees. If successful, the initiative could make the city the nation's largest to challenge ballooning Wall Street levies that accompany similar interest rate swap deals throughout the nation.
I remember the stunned reaction of so many Americans back in the summer of 2005 when legions of poor black people in desperate circumstances seemed to have suddenly and inexplicably materialized in New Orleans during the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina.
Expressions of disbelief poured in from around the nation: "How can this be happening?" "I had no idea conditions were that bad." "My God, is this America?"
From here to the Midwest, the actions of law-enforcement authorities form the big political topic of the summer of 2014.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — often labeled a tea party conservative — drew particular attention for his statements on the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a white police officer. He linked a “militarization of law enforcement” to a more general “erosion of civil liberties and due process.”
There's little debate that college costs have risen over the past decade and that the increase has hit the wallets of families hard — especially those in the greatest need.
President Barack Obama on Thursday called for "peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson," one day before Missouri authorities were expected to release the identity of the officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.
Every rule of government budgeting — not to mention common sense — says using a one-time windfall to finance ongoing commitments is a very bad idea.
It’s the political equivalent of hitting the lottery for $1,000, then rushing to put a down payment on a Ferrari.
So it was disturbing that Gov. Cuomo — when asked how he would spend an unprecedented $4.2 billion in legal settlements flowing into state coffers this year — threw out the following list of options:
The fall out continues over whether Governor Cuomo's top aid interfered with an ethics commission probe, with some now saying that the state's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, could have done more to protect the integrity of the investigations, and whether any actual crimes were committed.
Last week, as I sat and watched the events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown, I went through a range of emotions: rage, grief, depression. Even without the full details of the case, it was upsetting—horrifying really—to see another unarmed black body slain in the broad daylight for the entire world to see. For days and days, I tried to express the emotions that I was feeling, but my fingers went limp.
For a moment, Monday’s funeral for Michael Brown, the young black man shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, pulled our attention away from the protests and militarized police response and back to the body on the street. The police left Michael there in the middle of the road, under the midday sky, for over four hours, blood seeping from his head in a drying rivulet on the asphalt. “To have that boy lying there, like nobody cared about him.
Fewer American high school students are working summer jobs and part-time jobs than a decade ago, and that will likely mean lower wage-earning capacity in their futures, research indicates. In 2000, about 34 percent of high school students age 16 and older held jobs, but that share had fallen to 18 percent by 2012, data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate.