After a week in which the President dealt out unusually harsh criticism of members of his own party for opposing free trade deals — though these deals, in fact, threaten to undermine U.S. consumer protection laws and hand a lot more power to multinational corporations — the administration's trade agenda failed a crucial test in […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
A big victory for consumers, as the New York Times explained late last week: Two of the nation’s biggest banks will finally put to rest the zombies of consumer debt — bills that are still alive on credit reports although legally eliminated in bankruptcy — potentially providing relief to more than a million Americans. Bank […]
Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Rep. Maxine Waters of California introduced the Court Legal Access and Student Support (CLASS) Act of 2015, which would eliminate forced arbitration clauses and class-action bans from college enrollment contracts. This protection, if enacted, would particularly timely in light of all the schools that have been discovered […]
The FBI has announced it will be submitting to greater oversight (i.e., seeking warrants for) its practice of scanning cell phone signals from airplanes to sweep up information about thousands of individuals. The detailed Wall St. Journal story on this is behind a paywall, so here's an accessible report.
In the first federal appellate ruling on the issue, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the federal law authorizing government record collection does not cover the bulk collection of Americans' metadata. (The collection program, you'll recall, was revealed as a result of the leaks by Edward Snowden). The ruling […]
A lot of interesting stuff in this week's issue, including the G.E. Capital column I mentioned earlier in the week, plus these two stories that may be of interest: -A political profile of Elizabeth Warren that chronicles her rise as a champion of the consumer, the fight for the CFPB, and her efforts to push […]
A thought-provoking op-ed in The Hill argues that a perspective is missing from the debate about whether government regulation and informed consumer choice is the more appropriate means of addressing public health issues such as obesity. The problem with the debate is the uncritical acceptance of the premise that consumers are being effectively informed. The […]
In certain types of bankruptcy proceedings, the debtor who is seeking relief must propose a plan to pay off a portion (or sometimes all) of his debt over a period of years. If the Bankruptcy Court confirms such a plan, dissatisfied parties (such as creditors) can appeal. But what if the court rejects a debtor's […]
… is how this piece in the Huffington Post characterized General Electric’s announcement last month that it would sell GE Capital, thus getting mostly out of the banking business and back to its core manufacturing business. This week, the New Yorker has this similarly laudatory analysis, which details the rise and fall of GE as […]
We've written before about the dangers of transporting oil by rail car. On Friday, DOT issued new regulations for trains carrying oil, requiring new brake systems and requiring cars to be designed for this purpose (as opposed to the old ones, designed for hauling corn syrup). Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take, calling the rules […]