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For several years, Walmart has placed or tied for last among department and discount stores in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The situation for the workers is even less satisfying. Hundreds went on strike on Black Friday last fall. With the backing of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), thousands of Walmart employees have formed an association called OUR Walmart that works with community activists to pressure the company to make changes.

OUR Walmart has stressed the importance of flexible, consistent scheduling and adequate hours.

On Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee voted out six bills that would make changes to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that could have far-reaching consequences. The bank lobbyists deserve a bonus this year.

Critics of the Affordable Care Act have long been calling it a job killer. First, they claimed, companies would cut jobs altogether because of the mandate that all full-time employees must have health coverage.

If Congress doesn't succeeed in gutting SNAP benefits through the Farm Bill, which now proposes sweeping cuts to food stamps, it seems various state legislatures will do whatever they can to get that job done.  A few weeks ago, I wrote about North Carolina's proposed background checks for SNAP applicants.

The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says. 

Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.

Even with a freeze on basic pay rates and unpaid leave days and repeated attacks on the federal workforce, being a federal employee means you have a good, though as of late, a less-lucrative job.

That can’t be said by everyone in the federal workplace.

As we contemplate the possibly bright future of pre-K laid out in Obama’s state of the union address this year, in which the feds work together “with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America,” along comes a sobering glimpse of what public preschool looks like now. It’s not quite as rosy.

BlackRock, Inc., is the largest asset management company in the world, with nearly $4 trillion under management. It is also a major player in the 401(k) business. So it's worth paying attention to the fact that yesterday, BlackRock's CEO, Larry Fink, gave a speech at NYU in which he declared that the 401(k) system is basically a failure.

For years now, I’ve been asking myself how the federal government justifies charging students nearly 7 percent for loans when banks can get federal funds virtually interest-free (the Fed discount window rate is currently 0.75%).