Media

There is a brand new housing crisis looming on the horizon and none of the financial or foreclosure reforms being considered get anywhere close to solving it. 

The Center for Responsive Politics compiles data on the 50 top interest groups giving money to Congress. Near the top of the 2012 list are the usual suspects—finance, insurance, real estate, and Big Oil. Near the bottom are casinos and the building materials industry (along with "Women's Issues.")

Women remain a scarcity in the top rungs of Corporate America. Females held only 14.3 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies in 2012, a smidge more than in 2011, according to 2012 Catalyst Census, a report from nonprofit Catalyst, which promotes women in business. Women at these companies also only held fewer than 1 in 5 board of director positions, at 16.6 percent—reflecting only half a percentage point of growth over 2011. And more than one-quarter of Fortune 500 companies had no women executive officers.

Extending the partial payroll tax holiday was not part of President Obama's most recent fiscal cliff offer, delivered this week, and that needs to change.

President Obama's most recent fiscal cliff offer would cut Social Security benefits by changing how that program calculates cost-of-living increases. This is a bad idea, for reasons I'll get to. But the bigger problem is that Social Security doesn't have anything to do with current budget deficits and shouldn't be part of any fiscal deal. 

In a properly working economy, a booming business would be good for everyone involved in building that business: shareholders, executives, and workers. 

In a broken and dysfunctional economy, the shareholders and executives would get richer and richer while the workers lived in poverty. 

However intense the calls for gun control reforms are now, they will soon fade in intensity.  

A few months ago, we detailed the fracked up process underway in New York State to determine the health impacts from fracking. Since the results of the health study are not ready for release, the state had to open a public commenting period to extend the rule-making process. Until January 11th at 5pm, the general public can submit their comments on the proposed regulations.

While Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was never exactly beloved by all, voters liked him a lot more before last week. That’s when Snyder signed legislation radically undercutting the state’s labor unions – a so-called “right-to-work” law – that he had previously insisted was “too divisive” to enact.