Posts Tagged ‘politics’

At Public Citizen’s Watchdog Blog, Graham Steele & David Arkush point out the problematic tendency of the press to treat issues of civil justice as clashes of special interests. Insurance companies vs. trial lawyers. Doctors vs. trial lawyers. Debt collectors vs. trial lawyers.
Always somebody vs. trial lawyers. Not “insurance companies vs. patients” or “debt collectors [...]

It’s not just Barack: Consumer debt an issue for some of state’s congressional delegation, too | MinnPost

Press release from Americans for Fairness in Lending. Full release after the jump (it is not yet up on AFFIL’s website, so I cannot link to it).

Alright, maybe Elizabeth Warren isn’t a superstar to everyone. But she is the unequivocal rock star of the consumer movement. So it is totally appropriate that she’s now palling around with the most rockin’ politician since JFK. She appeared with Senator Obama Wednesday in Chicago to discuss credit cards, and I can only imagine the [...]

I recently had the privilege of attending a small conference at UMass/Amherst in honor of progressive financial guru Jane D’Arista. Details about the conference (The Political Economy of Monetary Policy and Financial Regulation) and about its sponsor, the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), are available here.
Jane worked for a dozen years as a key [...]

Maybe Senator Coleman reads this blog, maybe not. In either case, I just received a reply to my e-mail. While the Minnesota Financial Crimes Task Force is obviously a state organization, I wanted to alert my federal legislators to the newly-created void in mortgage fraud enforcement in case they wanted to address it at a [...]

When I write about an issue I tag “consumer activism,” I usually try to start the activism myself. So when I reported that Minnesota’s Financial Crimes Task Force is shutting down its mortgage fraud investigations, I went and fired off an e-mail to my state and federal representatives.
Usually when I do this, the response is [...]

In case you have been living in a box for the last 12 months, mortgage fraud is a big problem. It is very hard, sometimes impossible to help the defrauded consumers, since fraudsters tend to refuse to cooperate in civil lawsuits, and judges are reluctant to compel them to do so. Uncollectible default judgments are [...]

We saw that the 2008 presidential candidates seemed generally uninterested in consumer issues when we examined their voting records. However, the three remaining front-runners have been devoting some rhetoric to issues like credit cards and the subprime mortgage mess. The Red Tape Chronicles put together a summary of the candidates’ plans to address consumer issues.
McCain [...]