I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A piece of bad economic news: Industrial production dropped unexpectedly in September:
Next year, for the second year in a row, America’s seniors won’t be getting any bigger checks from Social Security. Last week, the Social Security Administration announced that the cost of living had not risen, with inflation low due to the sluggish economy. (The consumer price index, the measure used to determine cost-of-living-increases, takes into [...]
Today, the Obama administration lays out the case against a nationwide foreclosure moratorium. In the Huffington Post, Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, argues that the government is investigating the foreclosure fraud crisis and that a moratorium would prove counterproductive in terms of helping homeowners in the meantime — only driving down [...]
Over the past year, Democrats in Congress have fought three times to reauthorize federally extended unemployment benefits, which provide up to 99 weeks of unemployment insurance to millions of jobless workers. Each time, Republicans have put up resistance, arguing that Democrats need to pay for the benefits by cutting spending elsewhere, rather than adding to [...]
In a long speech this morning in Boston, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke implied that the central bank will take additional action to help the economy, in the face of sustained high unemployment rates, below-target inflation and sluggish growth. As always with the Fed, the statement came in cagey, somewhat confusing language. But here it [...]
The scandal threatens to bring the housing market to a standstill and wipe out banks’ bottom lines, possibly necessitating another bailout.
This morning, the Department of Labor announced that initial unemployment insurance claims rose to 462,000, an increase of 13,000 from last week’s 449,000, itself revised up from 445,000. The four-week moving average, which smooths out the jumpy weekly data, rose to 459,000.
The National Association of Business Economists has lowered its growth outlook for the entire U.S. economy, forecasting persistent high unemployment and sluggish growth for the next two years, if not beyond. From the summary:
In light of last week’s dismal September jobs report, Heidi Shierholz, of the Economic Policy Institute, updates her estimates of how many jobs the United States needs to create to get back to where it was, employment-wise, when the recession started.
Attorney General Richard Cordray has filed a suit against GMAC Mortgage. “There is evidence that this company has illegally ousted people from their private property,” he told TWI.
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