Media

There’s been a lot of fighting the last several months about new restrictions on the right to vote. We learn that these laws, including voter ID, rules around registration, and limits on early voting disproportionately impact African Americans, Latinos, youth and other groups, many of which already have lower participation rates than the white population.

We’ve talked often about how true sustainable development cannot be achieved without adopting new metrics for progress beyond GDP. Without valuing things like natural capital and work done within the home, GDP is unable to accurately reflect the true growth of our economy and, more importantly, our progress. Yesterday, at the Rio+20 conference, a new metric was launched that offers a much more nuanced picture of growth and progress.

Call the cops — your pocket’s been picked.

American workers are being ripped off by excessive retirement plan fees — which may force them to work longer or live less comfortably in their golden years, according to a recent study.

For the average US household, the high fees drain about $155,000 from their 401(k) accounts over their lifetimes, the study found.

In one example highlighted in the study, a two-wage-earner household with a median income for their age group contributed an average of 7 percent a year to their 401(k) plan over 40 years.

Malloy wrote in his veto message that he believed parts of the bill to be unconstitutional, potentially infringing on individuals' free speech protections under the First Amendment. Other parts of 5556, he argued, "represent poor public policy choices." He went on, "While I have advocated for transparency in the elections and campaign finance process for a long time, and could certainly support sensible reform in this area again, I cannot support the bill before me given its many legal and practical problems."

New York, NY -- Today, Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy vetoed House Bill 5556, which would have strengthened Connecticut’s laws on disclosure of political spending. In response, Demos President Miles Rapoport, a former legislator and Secretary of the State of Connecticut, issued the following statement:

Screengrabs of Spokeo.comIn today’s economy, it’s hard enough to land a job without companies secretly compiling inaccurate dossiers of information about you, then aggressively selling them to employers, who – based on the false or simply irrelevant data – decide not to hire you.

Dimon’s testimony yesterday before the Senate Banking Committee -- the week of the anniversary of the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 -- is ironic, to say the least. He objected to the Volcker Rule’s prohibitions against proprietary trading by federally insured banks (acting like hedge funds, in the words of Senator Merkley), characterizing the re-instatement of a separation of commercial banks and trading markets as an imprudent act taken by Congress in anger.