Media

Well, that was quick.

One day Standard Chartered bank and its powerful allies are complaining that New York's bank regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, has overreached and saying that, at most, they had laundered only $14 million for Iran. The next day -- as in today -- Standard Chartered is agreeing to pay a $340 million civil penalty to settle Lawsky's suit and agreeing, explicitly, that Lawsky's original figure of laundered funds -- a whopping $250 billion -- was correct. 

Cynics on the left and anti-government ideologues on the right often pound on legislators and bureaucrats for being ineffectual, biased and generally useless. But every so often a real hero emerges that refutes the dangerous and widespread belief that government does not work.

One of the strongest arguments against implementing a cap-and-trade scheme is that it is difficult to structure a program in a way that will meaningfully decrease greenhouse gas emissions due to pushback from entrenched interests. For instance, greenhouse gase emitters want the cap on gas emissions to be high and many credits to be given away, which doesn’t really do anything to decrease emissions but keeps credits fairly cheap to purchase and decreases costs to emitters.

A group responsible for development of the Willets Point space next to Citi Field said Walmart wouldn’t be a part of its conception.

Late last week, the Daily News reported that Walmart quietly lobbied city officials to include them in the development of the area near Citi Field that currently houses auto body shops. Regardless, according to the group responsible for the development project, Walmart’s lobbying efforts are news to them.

One of the most shocking aspects of the foreclosure mess has been the rogue behavior of mortgage servicers. In case you're new to this sorry story, mortgage servicers are the middlemen who handle, well, the servicing of mortgages once money has been lent to a homeowner by a bank. In effect, banks have outsourced the persnickety business of collecting mortgage payments, managing property tax escrow accounts, making sure that homes are insured, and all the rest.

Oh, and if a homeowner can't make payments any longer, mortgage servicers handle the foreclosure process.

American workers continue to give more and get less in our tepid recovery. The Labor Department released its second quarter productivity report yesterday showing workers contributing more hours and effort, even as their wages have stagnated and overall employment (and underemployment) stalled. The report finds that “nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate during the second quarter of 2012,” which entails “increases of 2.0 percent in output and 0.4 percent in hours worked.” 

Think of technology replacing workers and what comes to mind are low-skilled workers who are bumped aside by relatively simple machines: Subway clerks replaced by Metrocard machines, toll workers rendered obsolete by E-Zpass, banker tellers replaced by ATMs, assembly line workers replaced by robots, and so on.

At the beginning of July, we noted that even though just a few days had passed in the month, thousands of heat records had been matched or surpassed.

Demos’ twelve-year history of working to build a robust democracy in which every American has a voice has included, since 2004, state-by-state efforts to ensure the enforcement of the NVRA at public agencies across the country.