Media

With anti-regulatory fervor gripping Washington, it’s difficult to imagine both parties working together to enact successful public safeguards that protect Americans. But it wasn’t that long ago that strong, bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate took action to defend consumers against predatory practices in the credit card industry. Three years ago today, President Obama signed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (Credit CARD Act) into law.

The economy may be growing again, but many Americans are still in a cash crunch.

In the past year, 40% of low- and middle-income households used credit cards to pay for basic living expenses, such as rent or mortgage bills, groceries, utilities, or insurance, according to survey released Tuesday by think tank Demos.

Big paydays for founders like Mark Zuckerberg have less and less to do with the creation of middle-class jobs for everyone else.

Staring back at me from the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a headline that promised an answer to a puzzle that had endured for more than a month, and which I have explored here and here. The blame for the multi-billion dollar JP Morgan credit default swap fiasco had been discovered.

Cory Booker didn't distinguish himself as a particularly adept politician when, yesterday on Meet the Press, he undercut the Obama campaign's message by criticizing its attacks on Bain Capital. Booker is a surrogate for the campaign after all, and if there's one thing that's expected of surrogates it's that they stay on message.

It's no secret that Facebook's IPO will feed one of the most troubling trends in America today: the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite.

Leaders in the House of Representatives introduced The Voter Empowerment Act of 2012 to protect and promote our freedom to vote. This bill seeks to provide more access to the ballot, more efficiency in our election systems, and more accountability in our elections.

Google "was Occupy Wall Street successful" and you get millions of results. The answer depends on metrics. Was the goal of #Occupy to spur a discussion about income inequity -- no small thing -- or shine a light on perfidy of the banks?

Okay, so the headline overstates things: The problem is not that the booming tech sector fails to produce any jobs; the problem is that one of the most robust parts of our economy isn't producing enough jobs to make a dint in this nation's unemployment crisis.