America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, these financial institutions draw the most complaints.

| Tue Jul. 29, 2014


If you put out a complaint box for customers of US banks and financial firms, you will get hundreds of thousands of complaints. That’s what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was set up by Elizabeth Warren before she became a US senator—has discovered. And the bank that has drawn the most complaints is Bank of America. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank were other top targets of consumer wrath.

Continue reading America’s 10 Most Hated #Banks | Mother Jones

Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR

By Molly Roberts

When Leanne Brown moved to New York from Canada to earn a master’s in food studies at New York University, she couldn’t help noticing that Americans on a tight budget were eating a lot of processed foods heavy in carbs.

“It really bothered me,” she says. “The 47 million people on food stamps — and that’s a big chunk of the population — don’t have the same choices everyone else does.” Continue reading Cookbook Shows How To Eat Well On A #FoodStamp Budget | NPR

David Cay Johnston: Truths and myths about the rise of part-time #jobs | Al Jazeera America

Aggregate demand is the problem, not ‘Obamacare’

July 31, 2014 6:00AM ET

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 288,000 jobs had been added in June, critics cried foul. They said the news was misleading: The details showed a deteriorating job market, which many critics blamed on the Affordable Care Act requirement that employers provide workers with health insurance or risk prosecution or penalties.

But an examination of the data tells an entirely different story about what has hobbled the recovery from the Great Recession, which started in December 2007 and ended in the summer of 2009.

Continue reading David Cay Johnston: Truths and myths about the rise of part-time #jobs | Al Jazeera America

3 Reasons Subsidized Jobs Should Be Part of an Economic Mobility Agenda | Center for American Progress

By Rachel West | July 30, 2014

The House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee is holding a hearing today on subsidized employment as a tool for boosting economic security. It is high time for Congress to re-examine the evidence on subsidized jobs and to discuss the potential this approach may hold for alleviating our country’s continuing unemployment woes and connecting disadvantaged workers to job opportunities.

Continue reading 3 Reasons Subsidized Jobs Should Be Part of an Economic Mobility Agenda | Center for American Progress

Hillary for Liberals: A Conversation With Walter Shapiro | The American Prospect

This piece originally appeared in The American Prospect
By HAROLD MEYERSON
JULY 23, 2014
“As a campaigner, Hillary can do a shot and a beer better than Barack Obama can,” Shapiro says. So there’s that.

As a reporter and columnist for Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, USA Today, Esquire, Salon, and other publications, Walter Shapiro has covered nine presidential elections and the nation’s politics for four decades. He is currently a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and a lecturer in political science at Yale while he finishes a book about his great-uncle, a vaudevillian and con man who once swindled Hitler.

Shapiro is also an accomplished Hillary-ologist, having first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for Time in September 1992. In early May, Shapiro sat down with Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson to talk about a question he’s internally debated for years: On balance, would a Hillary Clinton candidacy and presidency be a good or bad thing for the liberal cause?

Continue reading Hillary for Liberals: A Conversation With Walter Shapiro | The American Prospect

Jared Bernstein: Financial Market Oversight, Economic Recoveries, and Full Employment: Some Crucial Linkages

“The way to make a train go fast is to keep it from going slow.”
July 29th, 2014 at 2:59 pm

That bit of Zen was told to me by one of the nation’s foremost rail experts back when I worked on that issue. He was explaining that part of developing a high-speed rail system entails straightening out existing curves in the track. But to me, it’s become a metaphor for the importance of financial market oversight.

Continue reading Jared Bernstein: Financial Market Oversight, Economic Recoveries, and Full Employment: Some Crucial Linkages