You lose your balance as the A train stops short, brushing against the newspaper and bag of a fellow commuter as you regain your footing. Have you just stumbled, or have you committed a class A misdemeanor, Jostling? Were a police officer to apply the statute's vague wording and arrest you, and a judge to agree with the officer's interpretation, you could be facing up to one year in prison.
Jostling, along with Criminal Trespassing, Disorderly Conduct, Loitering for the Purpose of Engaging in a Prostitution Offense and several other New York State laws contain broad and equivocal wording. Punishments for the above violations and crimes can potentially including jail time and heavy fines. Timothy Sandefur, the principal attorney of The Pacific Legal Foundation, condemns the serious consequences resulting from many vague laws on the federal and state level. "Vagueness," he wrote in a 2010 Forbes op-ed "turns the law into a sword dangling over citizens' heads."
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Six New York advocacy groups are asking the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to rate JPMorgan Chase as "less than satisfactory" in its upcoming exam under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
CRA aims to reduce redlining—the denial of fair financial services to people in a certain neighborhood—and to meet the credit needs of citizens in low and moderate-income neighborhoods, according to the OCC website.
In conducting CRA examinations, the OCC invites outside comment regarding the bank's service. This month, the New York-based groups Community Voices Heard, Good Jobs New York, Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), South Brooklyn Legal Services and Staten Island Legal Services jointly filed a comment letter outlining the practices of Chase that they deem harmful to low and moderate income citizens in New York City.
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The full impact of the Great Recession is still being calculated, and evidence is mounting that its damage was not equally distributed.
A study out today from the Pew Research Center finds that the wealth of the average white family shrank by 16 percent between 2005 and 2009. For black families wealthy was cut in half. For Latino households, only a third of their wealth remains.
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