Why We Need a Foreclosure Moratorium
Far from “delaying the inevitable” as some commentators have suggested, a national moratorium on foreclosures would force loan servicers to reevaluate their practices, and clean up the bureaucratic nightmare they now run.
A foreclosure nightmare
The Wall Street Journal’s projection this week that investment banks will pay out a record $144 billion in bonuses this season shows that Wall Street has recovered from the recession. The homeowners whose mortgages were securitized and used to fuel the Wall Street bubble, however, are not doing nearly as well. Foreclosures remain epidemic in […]
Creating Jobs by Investing in Infrastructure
When President Obama took office, the economy was in a tailspin the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression. Back in January of 2008, we were losing 700,000 jobs per month and things appeared to be getting worse. In response to this crisis, President Obama worked with Congress to pass the […]
Cyber self-defense can help U.S. security
Recently, we completed an intensive, bipartisan six-month study on cybersecurity and presented it to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Although the nature of our study requires that most of it be classified, one of our key findings is entirely unclassified, and we hope it will change the way the country acts in cyberspace. Simply […]
It’s crucial to extend jobless benefits
Rhode Island businesses are working hard to recover from the Great Recession, but more than 71,000 people in the state remain unemployed through no fault of their own. Our unemployment rate now stands at 12.3 percent. It has been at more than 8 percent for nearly two years, at double digits for more than a […]
Jobs missing, not motivation
As America continues to recover from the Great Recession, millions of people remain out of work through no fault of their own – including more than 71,000 people in my home state of Rhode Island. Through the recession and its aftermath, Congress has done the right thing and extended unemployment benefits to ensure that families […]
Climbing Out of the Doughnut Hole
This week marked the beginning of the end for the dreaded Medicare Part D “doughnut hole,” which hurts an estimated 15,100 Rhode Islanders each year by stripping them of much needed prescription drug coverage. Starting on Thursday, the federal government began distributing checks for $250 to anyone currently in the doughnut hole and lacking prescription […]
Restore a historical safeguard
As the Senate completes debate on historic Wall Street reform legislation, it needs to address a problem that has caused severe stress for so many American families: runaway interest rates on credit cards. Credit card companies now charge rates that, until recently, would have been illegal in most states. Rates of up to 30 percent […]
Closing the “doughnut hole”
When I ran for the United States Senate in 2006 and during my travels around Rhode Island since then, I met countless seniors who are frustrated and confused by Medicare’s prescription drug program, called “Medicare Part D.” Specifically, Rhode Islanders are too often blindsided by the Part D coverage gap, or “doughnut hole,” which exposes […]
We need to act on cybersecurity
There is an important debate unfolding across government and the private sector over a critical national security issue: how to secure America’s information networks from cybersabotage, espionage and attacks. Cyberassault, from criminal organizations of unprecedented scale and sophistication, and from powerful nations and their proxies, is relentless against American strategic and commercial interests. As an […]
