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.
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."
Ahead of Rio+20, advocates are coalescing around the idea that we need to change the way we measure what is important to achieve true sustainable development. Currently countries measure economic growth, which is often equated with progress, through GDP. However, growth in GDP is increasingly not resulting in progress.
As wary as the public may be of Wall Street, it is not wary enough because the financial industry rips people off even more than most of us realize -- specifically, in 401(k) fees.
On April 19th, a coalition of national voting rights groups working on behalf of Georgia residents and advocacy groups secured a landmark settlement to ensure that voter registration opportunities are offered to all public assistance applicants, as is required by the National Voter Registration Act.
The story as it now stands for Facebook's IPO supports a broader narrative depressingly familiar to most Americans: Which is that the stock market is a rigged game.
The J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -0.68% & Co. unit whose wrong-way bets on corporate credit cost the bank more than $2 billion includes a group that has invested in financially challenged companies, including LightSquared Inc., the wireless broadband provider that this month filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The full details of JP Morgan’s trading strategy aren’t known, but Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and currently a fellow with public policy think-tank Demos, doesn’t buy the bank’s explanation that it was simply hedging. “How can you possibly lose that kind of money on a hedge?” he asks. “The answer is, they weren’t off setting risk.
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.
It’s hard to imagine that an industry that has spent over $28 million on federal and state campaign contributions this election cycle alone would be victimized by government regulation, but that is the cry coming from the oil and gas industry. Well, more accurately, that is the cry coming from politicians in the pockets of those industries.
Last summer, a Western Beef store in the East Tremont section of the South Bronx became the first supermarket in the city to receive funding through the city’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program. The FRESH initiative provides financial and zoning incentives to entice supermarket chains to build new stores in neighborhoods that lack access to fresh, wholesome foods.
Last summer, on her final day as the Chairman of the FDIC, Shelia Bair decried the short-termism that has overtaken both Wall Street and Washington, where “[o]ur financial markets remain too focused on quick profits, and our political process is driven by a two-year election cycle and its relentless demands for fundraising.” This short-termism has taken hold of the reins of our larger political system and increasingly characterizes policy initiatives at every level of government.
The derivatives industry is squeezing Washington like a python. Desperate to control the tone and thrust of derivatives regulation, industry lobbyists have been swarming over the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which is writing derivatives rules as mandated by the Dodd-Frank reform law.
By now it's pretty clear that Mitt Romney's recent claim about female job losses during the Obama presidency has more to do with selective number fudging and electoral pandering than factual accuracy.
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
A lesson in how not to reduce gas prices: the White House is backing TransCanada’s bid to build the southern portion of the controversial pipeline Keystone XL pipeline. The section to be built will run from Cushing, Oklahoma to Texas and carry crude oil pumped in the Midwest to refineries in Texas and be completed by late 2013—so it will have virtually no impact on the current high gas prices.