Media

There’s a lot going down with policing these days. The flurry of action this week included an interim report from the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. It bears both good and bad news. 

One weakness in the report is overarching and unavoidable: the federal government is limited in the actions it can take to address policing because policing is largely within the control of the states; much of what is recommended is ultimately up to the discretion of local law enforcement agencies. 

The talk around Wall Street is that profits at the trading desks of the big banks are down and that regulations are to blame.

There may be some truth to that, at least to the extent that transparency rules have deterred some price gouging. We should be careful about reading too much into the effects of regulation, though. The banks want to spin a story that regulations have forced them to tighten belts and avoid risks. They certainly do not want further regulation and would love nothing better than to roll back regulations that exist.

For about a month now, New England has been pummeled with massive winter storms, leaving large swaths of the region with feet of snow and frequently making travel impossible.

This week a group of former students calling themselves the Corinthian 15 announced that they were committing a new kind of civil disobedience: a debt strike. They are refusing to make any more payments on their federal student loans.

In the wake of the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act, partisans were quick to jump on the opportunity to restrict unfavorable voters. Across the country, conservatives in particular have debated fiercely whether to pursue voter suppression to remain competitive in an increasingly diverse electorate.

Remember when Walmart got panned for running a Thanksgiving food drive for its own employees—overlooking the irony of demonstrating noblesse oblige by asking customers to subsidize the workers the company itself impoverished? The retail giant took a more strategic approach last week when rolling out its latest do-gooder scheme: raising its base wage incrementally to $10 an hour.

Inequality is growing because the increased wealth of the wealthiest no longer spawns income opportunities for the less well-off households and may actually diminish them.

(New York, NY) – Earlier this week, President Obama directed the Department of Labor to begin the rulemaking process for a fiduciary rule, a new regulation that would require financial advisors and brokers to act in the best interest of people saving for retirement. In the new explainer Why the Fiduciary Rule Matters, Demos Senior Policy Analyst Robert Hiltonsmith finds that this new regulation could save Americans nearly $25 billion from lower fees and translate into an additional $60 billion in returns.

The fastest-growing occupation in the U.S. is also among the lowest paid.

The aging of America's baby boomers has led to a surge in demand for home care workers to look after the nation's elderly, as well as the disabled and chronically ill. The work is as essential as it is poorly paid. Home health aides do everything from checking a client's vital signs and administering medications to looking after people's dietary needs and even operating life-sustaining equipment, such as ventilators.