Oscar-nominated writer-director Chris Weitz is known for making popular fare like American Pie, About a Boy and Twilight: New Moon. But last year he made the independent feature A Better Life, which chronicles an undocumented gardener in East LA, as he tries to create better opportunities and a better life for his son. Star Demián [...]

The Republican theory on the Keystone XL pipeline is that the President is holding back the immediate creation of eleventy billion jobs by refusing to give approval to a permit for construction. Under their various pieces of legislation, TransCanada, the pipeline operator, would be able to immediately begin construction and create jobs hauling tar sands [...]

This week marks the end of the public comment period on the Volcker rule. The usual suspects have all delivered their comments. The small advocacy community in favor of the rule sent in their comment through the vehicle of Americans for Financial Reform. The much larger finance lobby delivered their mass of comments, in particular [...]

You’ve heard enough from me. And actually, you’ll hear plenty more later. But I thought I’d line up what some other people are saying about the foreclosure fraud settlement, the terms of which have not yet totally been released (which, I repeat, is a travesty of justice). First, let’s hear from our old friend ___ [...]

Here’s a story that shows the power of pressure on even the loftiest of our financial overlords: Stephen Hester, head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, gave way to heavy political pressure last night to forego his £963,000 bonus. The final straw for the RBS chief executive appears to have been the looming threat of [...]

If you want to see some tremendous activism that acknowledges advances while keeping the big picture squarely in mind, check out CREDO’s statement on the new financial fraud unit. It’s long, but important, so I’m going to put it here in full. After months of activism from people like you, President Obama announced in his [...]

I got a lot of response to my post on the new federal financial fraud unit (not to be confused with the old financial fraud unit) looking into mortgage origination and securitization abuses. I criticized New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for walking into a bear trap, as co-chair of a panel where three of [...]

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and [...]

UPDATE: The update from this morning is that Harry Reid has postponed work on the bill. Go read that. We are very close to being able to predict a loss for the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, in next week’s cloture vote in the Senate. According to the Open Congress whip count, which is user-generated [...]

The official rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from the President has some interesting framing: “As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment,” [...]

The series of anti-SOPA activism going on today has already claimed an early victory. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator and Tea Party favorite, dropped his support after being a co-sponsor of the bill. Home to the Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks, Rubio’s Florida may be the most Hollywood-centric state outside California, and Rubio [...]