Media

The credit reporting industry has given us plenty to complain about:  credit reports too often contain errors,  the errors are fiendishly hard to fix, reports and scores are not accessible enough to consumers, and credit information is increasingly being used for a variety of extraneous purposes, among numerous other problems (for the full bill of complaint, see my paper

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Civil and voting rights groups today commended Clear Channel Corporation for agreeing to take down a number of billboards placed in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods in Cleveland, Columbus, and Milwaukee. The groups had mounted a campaign over the past week to persuade Clear Channel to take down the billboards, which warned of criminal penalties for voter fraud and were designed to stigmatize and intimidate minority voters. The billboards were anonymously financed.

COLUMBUS, OH – Voting rights, civil rights and labor organizations are joining forces to erect get-out-and-vote billboards in four Ohio and Wisconsin cities this week, pushing back against an anonymously-financed billboard campaign aimed at intimidating voters and depressing voter turnout.

Judging by all the complaints about the Dodd-Frank Act, you might think that Washington over reacted to the financial excesses of a few years ago and that the Feds can now ease up on Wall Street.

In fact, though, bad behavior among America's money men -- and yes, those doing wrong are typically men -- continues onward at a furious pace. Consider just the past month at the SEC:

Other outside dark money groups get the press, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce gets results. That's because the Chamber, the biggest lobbying organization in the country, doesn't disclose its donors, among whom are the most powerful companies in the country. Those corporations use the Chamber's to anonymously funnell money into competitive races. In the beginning of October alone, they've spent almost $5 million dollars on political races. But that's not the source of their unmatched influence.

The Roberts Court's campaign finance jurisprudence has one over-arching theme: morphing the First Amendment into a tool for powerful and wealthy.

Lorraine C. Minnite, a Rutgers University political scientist and a senior fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank, looked for a turnout effect in a 2009 paper she co-authored with Columbia University political scientist Robert S. Erikson. They didn't turn up definitive evidence, concluding, "our data and tools are not up to the task of making a compelling statistical argument for an effect."

A new report from the Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) has bad if not suprising news for recent and future grads: average student debt for the class of 2011 rose 5 percent to $26,600 up from $25,250 in 2010. 

TICAS points out that this number could be even higher, since their findings rely on data provided voluntarily by colleges and universities and many declined to report. 

The National Retail Federation is bearing glad tidings for the upcoming holiday season: America’s stores are expecting solid growth in holiday sales and may hire more than half a million seasonal employees. Non-seasonal employment in the sector is also improving, as retailers, led by clothing and clothing accessories stores, added 9,400 new jobs in September.