This article by Michael Fletcher discusses a new report showing that incomes in the U.S. haven't come close to recovering from the government-determined official end of the recession in mid-2009. Here's an excerpt and then two charts depicting income levels and unemployment over the last 12 and 1/2 years: The buying power of Americans continues […]
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by Brian Wolfman We have covered the interaction between consumer protection law and efforts to stem the obesity epidemic, including NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's effort to ban large-sized sugary drinks (which has failed so far in the New York courts). If that topic interests you, I think you'll want to watch two videos, which are […]
At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, one political party was anti-litigation, the other more friendly. Why? By last year's election, the issue had faded away, at least nationally. Why? These issues are taken up in "Unspoken Truths and Misaligned Interests: Political Parties and the Two Cultures of Civil […]
As the Consumerist reports, "[b]ecause there are apparently not enough studies to convince the Food and Drug Administration that controversial chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA) should not be used in just about every form of food packaging, yet another study has been published linking BPA to childhood obesity. Meanwhile, a separate study released today showed a possible […]
Read about it here. Here are excerpts: The closed-door meeting [with President Obama] included Richard Cordray, the newly-confirmed director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as the chairs of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Securities and […]
By Paul Bland @PblandBland The last few years have often been pretty discouraging for consumer advocates who are trying to preserve their clients’ rights to take disputes to court. As the Supreme Court majority’s madcap love affair with forced arbitration just keeps getting more passionate (ick), courts at all levels seem to be enforcing […]
by Brian Wolfman The Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) provides jurisdiction in federal district court (originally and by removal) for most minimally diverse class actions and for so-called "mass actions." Under CAFA, a mass action is, as relevant to this post any civil action … in which monetary relief claims of 100 or more persons […]
The country suffers from continuing high unemployment. The current official unemployment rate is 7.4%. The real unemployment rate is considerably higher because some unemployed people have stopped looking for work and don't get counted as unemployed. So, that's a lot of unemployed people. The unemployed people looking for work have trouble finding it in part […]
In the three-and-half decades since enactment of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, airfares have plummeted in real terms. That reduction in price includes those dreaded fees for baggage, seat upgrades, etc., which make up only a small fraction of consumers' overall cost of travel. But beginning in 2009, fares began to creep up, as indicated […]
by Paul Alan Levy Clark Baker is a lone voice in the wilderness, proclaiming that the relationship of HIV to AIDS is a myth, that it is scientific fraud and the desire of big Pharma to pump up its profits that created this myth, and hence that there is nothing wrong with HIV positive people […]