Media

Monday is the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary ofCitizens United, the case that dramatically widened the flood of big money in elections. Their confluence is opportune, for while each seems to invite reflection on a different core social problem—respectively racial inequality and the power of concentrated wealth—each teaches lessons relevant to the other.

The SEC should require companies to disclose their political activities.

Two major stories of corporate misconduct toward employees hit the headlines yesterday: in the morning, low-wage federal contract workers filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor alleging that more than 100 employees in the food court of federally-owned Union Station had been victims of wage theft—paid less than the minimum wage or denied overtime pay.

Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini have written a new column for VOX in which they argue that once GDP per capita reaches a certain level, it actually begins to correlate with lower life satisfaction.

If you ask Cato's Michael Tanner, inequality is a non-issue for a bunch of reasons, including because it has nothing to do with unfairness. Tanner writes:

most wealthy Americans earned their wealth through talent and hard work. Roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be worth that much — they didn’t inherit their money.

Could Massachusetts become the next state to enact Election Day Registration? If today’s passage by the Commonwealth’s Senate chamber of omnibus voting bill S.1975 serves as indication, it very well could.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes rejected a proposal by Detroit’s Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr to pay off a complex financial deal that was originated in 2005 and turned catastrophic for the city during the recession. 

Here’s some welcome news. At his meeting with Democratic Senators last night, President Obama indicated that he is giving serious consideration to executive action designed to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, according to one Senator who was present.

One day after a top Obama administration official deflected a congressman’s call for executive action to raise labor standards for contractors, activists Wednesday announced the filing of a new Department of Labor complaint over alleged wage theft in a government building. The complaint alleges that dozens of workers in D.C.’s government-owned Union Station are owed over $3 million in back pay and damages for rampant failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.