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Take
1200 prisoners from Arizona, hire Indiana at $64 per day to house them, then
ship them 1500 miles from home and loved ones to a private prison in New
Castle, Indiana run by the GEO Group, a private prison company that has been
repeatedly cited for
substandard conditions. When a
riot
among 500...
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Arizona
Governor Janet Napolitano recently
vetoed
a measure that would have barred people from "disrupting traffic" while
seeking employment along public roadways. While focusing on traffic
disruptions,
HB 2589
was meant to target day laborers, who are often undocumented
immigrants. ...
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A
federal
judge has
put up a roadblock to the first-in-the-nation New
Hampshire
law
that makes the prescription-writing habits of physicians confidential and
banned "data-mining companies" from selling those records to
pharmaceutical companies. Given the
billions
of dollars drug companies...
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Legislative sessions are beginning to end, so we thought we'd use this
Dispatch to highlight some of the accomplishments of a few legislatures around
the country.
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As the United States falls behind the
world in broadband deployment, a serious obstacle to reversing that slide, as
we
highlighted
in February, is that we have
remarkably poor information on which neighborhoods and families have
broadband access and what the challenges are to overcoming the...
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While the Bush Administration has reduced taxes on the wealthiest Americans
and undermined social welfare programs over the past 6 years, 5 million
more Americans have fallen into poverty, bringing the total to 37
million. That means at least one in eight Americans are now living in
poverty.
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On Earth Day, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
revealed
his plan to create the "first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city,"
and integrate an estimated population growth of 1 million people by 2030.
PlaNYC is
comprised of 127 proposals for environmental improvements in six...
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We
reported
last week that Washington was on the verge of becoming the second state to
enact family leave. The bill has now been signed by the Governor.
While the bill was a compromise, with lower weekly payments (up to $250 per
week) than is ideal and, unlike a House version originally...
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With new leadership in state legislatures across the country, we are seeing
impressive new progressive legislation, from
environmental
to
voting
rights to
family
leave to
budget
reform laws.
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This past week, the Washington State House voted to
approve
five weeks of paid leave for parents with a new born or adopted child,
following earlier approval of a broader Senate measure,
SB
5659, that would have also included paid leave to to take care of a
seriously ill parent. Another...
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In a blow to consumers, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that mortgage lending subsidiaries of national banks are exempt from state regulation. Every state attorney general and bank regulator had urged the High Court to protect these state laws, especially in light of federal inaction in the face...
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We
highlighted
the problems of predatory lending industry a few weeks ago and now, problems
are coming to light with the student loan industry. In one of the more
egregious examples, Student Loan Express, a student loan company that is a
unit of CIT Group, Inc, is alleged to
have paid...
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