Move to Amend

Seems sort of excessive.

"In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. In some cases, we actually draft them for them, she said, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe. The Georgia law had eigh...t key provisions that Heritage recommended, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration." See more

"The Court finds, based on the totality of the circumstances, that the NRA's bankruptcy petition was not filed in good faith but instead was filed as an effort to gain an unfair litigation advantage in the NYAG Enforcement Action and as an effort to avoid a regulatory scheme," Judge Harlin Hale wrote in a 37-page decision. Hale's decision follows a weeks-long hearing that revealed details about alleged mismanagement and excessive spending by top officials at the influential gun lobby, including Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's controversial leader for the past three decades."

"Days before the November 2020 election, the Trump administration issued a new rule that paved the way for a surge of predatory payday lending. Now, hundreds of consumer advocates, more than two dozen Democratic and Republican state attorneys general, and numerous Democratic lawmakers are calling on Congress to roll this rule back, ahead of a fast-approaching government deadline that allows lawmakers to invalidate Trump-era regulations. Their concern is that the true lender... ruleone of the last moves by the Trump-era Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a federal office that supervises nationally chartered banksupends more than a century of legal precedent to make it easy for non-bank financial institutions, like payday lenders or fintech companies, to evade state-level interest limits, lending at sky-high rates and trapping low-income customers in debt. If the rule is not overturned, then predatory lending will explode in all 50 states, says Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center. According to its many critics, this rule enables what are referred to as rent-a-bank schemes. These first cropped up in the early 2000s, and they work like this: In 45 states and the District of Columbia, long-term loans from companies that are not banks are subject to strict interest rate caps. To get around these limits, payday lenders began partnering with bankswho are exempt from state interest rate capsin a sort of loan ownership hot potato: The payday lenders bring in customers willing to borrow money at high rates, and then ink a deal with a bank that will dole out the loan money to those borrowers. The loan paperwork lists the bank as the originator of the loan. Once that paperwork is complete, the bank sells most of the loan back to the high-cost lender (or an affiliate). The result, then, is that the payday lender has masqueraded as a bank for the purposes of charging borrowers more money. Payday lenders and others find one rogue bank to put their name on the loan agreement and claim that gives them carte blanche to charge 200 percent [interest] in states that only allow 36 or 24 percent, explains Saunders."

Pay your fair share, #ElonMusk #ElonSNL

"As the Texas power grid collapsed under a historic winter storm, Jose Del Rio of Haltom City, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, saw the electricity bill on a vacant two-bedroom home he is trying to sell slowly creep up over the past two weeks. Typically, the bill is around $125 to $150 a month, he said. But his account has already been charged about $630 this month and he still owes another $2,600. ... If worse comes to worst, I have the ability to put it on a credit card or... figure something out," Del Rio said. There is no one living in that house. All the lights are off. But I have the air at 60 because I don’t want the pipes to freeze. Royce Pierce and his wife, Danielle, who live in Willow Park, west of Dallas, have been watching their electricity bill tick up by nearly $10,000 in the last few days for their three-bedroom home. While the family told NBC News they consider themselves lucky because they’ve had power, the financial burden has come with additional challenges. Since the family is on a variable rate plan with Griddy, the company automatically debits the bill as they use electricity. Danielle said she closed the debit card connected to their electricity bill because Griddy wiped it out. The family has been using separate accounts and credit cards to pay for necessities as the storm goes on."

"I was under the impression that I was going to get an additional 30 cents per mile after Prop 22, said Valdez, but he hasn’t received that extra compensation because, according to Uber’s metrics, his pay exceeds their calculation of 120 percent of minimum wage. A study by labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2019 found Prop 22 guarantees a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour, as only engaged time is accounted for in the wage calculations. A lot... of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage, said Valdez. They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees. See more