Since 2011, the CFPB has handled more than 60,000 student loan complaints and, through its investigations and enforcement actions, returned more than $750 million to aggrieved borrowers. Frotman's office was central to those efforts. It also played a role in lawsuits against for-profit giants ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges and the student loan company Navient.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has increasingly sidelined the CFPB's student loan office. Last August, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would stop sharing information with the bureau about the department's oversight of federal student loans…
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The Trump administration has also taken steps outside the CFPB to curb oversight of the student loan industry. The Justice and Education departments have argued that debt collectors should be protected from state efforts to regulate them. And, earlier this month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moved to scrap a rule meant to punish schools where graduates struggle with poor earnings and deep debt…
The Weight of Numbers: Air Pollution and PM2.5 →
Emanating from smokestacks, vehicle engines, construction projects, and fires large and small, airborne pollution – sometimes smaller than the width of a human hair, and very often the product of human activity – is not just contributing to climate change. It is a leading driver of heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory infections the world over. Exposure to such pollution, the most deadly of which scientists call PM2.5, is the sixth highest risk factor for death around the world, claiming more than 4 million lives annually, according to recent global morbidity data. Add in household pollutants from indoor cooking fires and other combustion sources, and the tally approaches 7 million lives lost each year…
How Money Affects Elections →
Campaign spending is out of control. Studies show that the obscene amounts of cash flowing through ad companies actually does little for the vast majority of candidates. Instead, our current system appears to be a legal way for the wealthiest donors to try to buy politicians, and increasingly ensure only the rich run (though we’ve recently seen a few notable exceptions). We should push for a robust, fair public finance system, with clear spending limits, and a much higher standard of transparency for where large donations are coming from.
…If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they know are a sure thing.
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But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races. That matches up with other research suggesting that advertising can have a serious effect on how people vote if the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.
Basically, said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, advertising is useful for making voters aware that a candidate or an issue exists at all. Once you’ve established that you’re real and that enough people are paying attention to you to give you a decent chunk of money, you reach a point of diminishing returns (i.e., Paul Ryan did not have to spend $13 million to earn his seat). But a congressperson running in a close race, with no incumbent — or someone running for small-potatoes local offices that voters often just skip on the ballot — is probably getting a lot more bang for their buck.
Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.
“That may be the biggest effect of money in politics,” West wrote to me in an email…
Alaska Gives Cash To Its Citizens Every Year. The Rest Of The U.S. Could Too. →
There’s now a lot of evidence that inequality is so high in the US that it’s become a drag on the economy. “Too many” people are stuck in poverty—inadequate, full-time job opportunities; mass incarceration; inadequate retirement options; etc…
While the larger and more difficult problem is too much power concentrated in too few hands, we could deal with inequality (to a reasonable extent) right away by implementing a “social wealth fund”: a simple, economically safe way of ensuring everyone a base level of spending cash each year or month.
David Dayen in the Huffington Post, surveying its use, and summarizing a recent report on how it could work across the US:
In one of America’s most libertarian states, people are benefiting from what is essentially a universal basic income. In 1976, Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond, a liberal Republican, established the Alaska Permanent Fund, putting a percentage of all state oil revenues into a fund, which buys stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. Money made on these investments is distributed to every man, woman and child in Alaska in the form of an annual dividend, which since 1982 has ranged between $1,000 and $3,000.
This cash has reduced income inequality in Alaska to the lowest level in America in 2016. And the state’s libertarian bent has not dampened enthusiasm for redistributing wealth from oil companies into money for all. “It’s been described as the most popular program in the history of the U.S.,” said Bill Wielechowski, a Democratic state senator from Anchorage. “It’s hugely relied on for fuel and food. It helps bridge the gap.”
America is struggling with a huge wealth inequality problem. The wealthiest 1 percent of households control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and this gap has been widening over the last few decades.
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…About 30 percent of all income is derived from capital, according to Bruenig’s calculations. When trying to tackle wealth inequality, “liberals tend to focus mostly on labor income,” Bruenig said in an interview. “That’s all well and good but you’re just missing one-third of the pie.”
Here’s how it would work. The U.S. government would gradually build up assets for the wealth fund. Independent fund advisers under the direction of the Treasury Department would manage it. The Treasury could create rules and directives to guide what fund managers could purchase.
Everyone over age 17 and not collecting a Social Security old-age pension would receive a non-transferable share, entitling them to an annual dividend equal to a five-year average of the market value of the fund. (For the first five years, the average would be based on the number of years the fund has been in existence.) The aim would be to prevent the dividend rising and falling sharply depending on the success of the fund.
The paradox of tolerance
Useful to keep in mind, especially now, with white supremacy and fascism-lite back in style:
The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
Stephanopoulos tells Papadopoulos... →
Bernie Sanders introduces ‘Stop BEZOS’ bill to tax Amazon for underpaying workers →
If we were actually serious about a functioning, competitive market-based economy, companies wouldn't be allowed to pay people so little that they have to rely on food stamps and other public services in order to survive. It's corporate welfare, and our bought-off politicians have allowed it for decades. Wal-Mart and McDonalds are two of the biggest crony capitalists in this regard, having cost us billions of our tax dollars, even though the companies are profitable, so could afford to pay their employees a living wage. Same goes for Amazon and its warehouse workers.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced a bill that would tax companies like Amazon and Walmart for the cost of employees’ food stamps and other public assistance. Sanders’ Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated “Stop BEZOS”) — along with Khanna’s House of Representatives counterpart, the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act — would institute a 100 percent tax on government benefits that are granted to workers at large companies.
The bill’s text characterizes this as a “corporate welfare tax,” and it would apply to corporations with 500 or more employees. If workers are receiving government aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), national school lunch and breakfast programs, Section 8 housing subsidies, or Medicaid, employers will be taxed for the total cost of those benefits. The bill applies to full-time and part-time employees, as well as independent contractors that are de facto company employees.
Prisoners Strike Across America & Canada to End Penal Enslavement →
An important movement to watch. Prison serves many purposes (punishment, temporary removal to keep communities safer), but one of them should be reform: it's our moral duty (and it costs less in the end).
Instead, in numerous ways, prison life is unnecessarily degrading and petty; the for-profit vendor supply chain is rife with cronyism, abusing a literally-captive population. If we're trying to rehabilitate those who can be reformed, then we're failing, and these people are taking extreme measures to draw attention to their abuse.