New York City’s paid sick leave bill is backed by grassroots labor activists, a veto-proof majority of the city council, the New York Times editorial board, and even some celebrities. However, Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) is blocking the measure from coming up for a vote, claiming it would have a negative effect on small businesses.

The city’s proposed law would require businesses that employ 20 or more people to give their employees at least nine paid sick days each year; those with 19 or fewer employees would be required to provide five paid sick days. Currently, over a million New Yorkers are left with equally undesirable options when confronted with an illness: go to work sick or go without pay. Passing the Paid Sick Days Act would help New York City employees gain the labor protections that are already nationally mandated in 163 other countries around the world.

Nevertheless, Quinn refuses to bring the bill to a vote in the city council — dealing a blow to struggling service sector employees, who are disproportionately female:

Women in low-wage, service sector jobs make up the lion’s share of workers without sick leave.

“They are waitresses, cashiers and home health aides. Many are immigrants; few have political clout. Yet their work contributes to the economic growth of the city,” said Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

“It’s time to make paid sick days for New York’s working women and men a reality,” Poo added. “We’re going to push and prod and call on Speaker Quinn to bring this important measure up for a vote.”

The National Domestic Workers Alliance has partnered with other progressive allies to launch a petition pressuring Quinn to reconsider her stance and allow New York to join the other cities — including San Francisco, Seattle, and Connecticut — that have already enacted paid sick day laws.

The idea that President Obama’s stimulus package failed is a favorite Republican canard, even as economic consensus and actual fact prove the oft-repeated statement that “the stimulus didn’t work” false. Nevertheless, Republicans and conservative commentators continue to recycle this myth.

The latest example is conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who today published a column in which he blasts the stimulus as a failed policy. Krauthammer’s evidence for that failure is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the stimulus is properly known, didn’t generate a project as big as the Hoover Dam:

First, the $831 billion stimulus that was going to “reinvest” in America and bring unemployment below 6 percent. We know about the unemployment. And the investment? Obama loves to cite great federal projects such as the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system. Fine. Name one thing of any note created by Obama’s Niagara of borrowed money. A modernized electric grid? Ports dredged to receive the larger ships soon to traverse a widened Panama Canal? Nothing of the sort. Solyndra, anyone?

Krauthammer is right that Obama’s stimulus bill didn’t create a Hoover Dam. Instead, it created the equivalent of a dozen Hoover Dams.

The maximum output of the Hoover Dam is about 2 gigawatts of electricity. The increase in U.S. wind-power output under the Obama administration so far has been 25 gigawatts — 12 times as much as produced by the dam. Under normal wind conditions, that’s enough to power over 6 million more homes with renewable, environmentally-friendly energy. That explosion in wind-power didn’t happen by chance: as Michael Grunwald points out in a Time column today, it was “the Obama stimulus bill that revived the wind industry and the rest of the clean-tech sector from a near-death experience.”

Under Obama, the United States has doubled its annual wind power output to 50 gigawatts, thanks in large part to the stimulus bill, enabling us to keep pace with China, the world’s wind power leader.

Krauthammer only asked for “one thing of note,” but Grunwald has more just on the clean energy tip, which was only a fraction of the overall stimulus effort: “The stimulus has financed the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar farms, the nation’s first refineries for advanced biofuels, a new battery industry for electric vehicles, unprecedented investments in cleaner coal and a smarter electric grid, and over 15,000 additional clean-energy projects.”

As far as the right’s repeated insistence that the stimulus didn’t work, that’s false too.

A Republican congressional nominee in Michigan has called not just for investigations into Wall Street bankers, but prosecutions as well.

Kerry Bentivolio, who earned the Republican nomination in Michigan’s 11th congressional district on Tuesday following former Rep. Thad McCotter’s (R-MI) sudden resignation, detailed a surprising agenda for the financial sector during a radio interview late last year. Appearing on the Market Ticker show on October 17, 2011, Bentivolio told host Karl Denninger that Wall Street bankers “need to be investigated and prosecuted,” calling them “probably the biggest problem we have in this country.”

HOST: We talked about everything else, but [Gary Johnson] just would not say those people who committed these frauds and did these things, they need to go to jail.

BENTIVOLIO: On my Facebook page, go to a comment, I said, all those people on Wall Street need to be investigated and prosecuted. And those people outside protesting…[mic cuts out]. I think that says it all right there. The people on Wall Street, I think they’re probably the biggest problem we have in this country.

Listen to it:

That desired scrutiny would make Bentivolio unique as a Republican, given that some of potential colleagues have attempted to gut Wall Street reforms and even asked the banks for alternatives to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act signed by President Obama in 2010. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), for instance, has said that he feels Washington’s role is to “serve the banks.”

Bentivolio’s nomination comes the same week that the Justice Department wrapped up a year-long investigation into mortgage abuses perpetrated by Goldman Sachs without pressing any charges. Goldman isn’t unique: Wall Street’s biggest banks have received miniscule slaps on the wrist to settle fraud charges that resulted from the financial crisis.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing new transparency and accountability rules for banks that handle mortgages, with the aim of cutting down on the number of avoidable or improper foreclosures.

Some of the proposed rules deal directly with how mortgage services deal with their non-delinquent clients. But along with those, CFPB is proposing a set of regulations that address instances where banks have wrongfully foreclosed on people — like the woman with the disabled daughter who was foreclosed on after she’d been offered a modification, the couple that was accidentally foreclosed on for paying a week early, or the many homeowners foreclosed on by people whose only qualifications included pizza slicing.

A press release outlined how that set of rules would work:

Payments Promptly Credited: Servicers generally would have to credit a consumer’s account as of the date a payment is received.

Maintain Accurate and Accessible Documents and Information: Servicers would be required to establish reasonable policies and procedures to provide accurate and current information to borrowers and minimize errors. They would have to submit accurate legal documents that comply with applicable law, help borrowers on options to avoid foreclosure, and provide oversight of their contractors and foreclosure attorneys.

Errors Corrected Quickly: If a consumer notifies the servicer that she thinks there has been an error, the servicer would be required to acknowledge receiving the notification, conduct a reasonable investigation, and, in a timely manner, inform the consumer about the resolution.

Direct and Ongoing Access to Servicer Personnel To Assist Delinquent Borrowers: Servicers would be required to provide delinquent borrowers with direct, easy, ongoing access to employees who are dedicated and empowered to help delinquent borrowers.

Requirements to keep homeowners informed include: Clarifying monthly statements to be more detailed and easier to understand; giving homeowners warnings before adjusting their rate, along with information on how to proceed if the new rate is too high; and providing timely notice and achievable alternatives when a homeowner might be foreclosed on.

The group of Catholic nuns who launched the Nuns On A Bus tour to shed light on the effects the House Republican budget would have on the poor turned its attention to the GOP’s presidential candidate this week, challenging Mitt Romney to join them for a day to learn about the plight of the poor. NETWORK, a Catholic social justice organization, issued the call on Wednesday and was joined yesterday by the Franciscan Action Network, an organization of friars and sisters.

The nuns have now sent a letter to the Romney campaign, asking the candidate to join them during his current swing through Ohio. The letter again challenges Romney’s misleading television ads about welfare reform, which the nuns say “demonize the families we serve and reflect a woeful lack of knowledge about the challenges faced by tens of millions of Americans”:

We are deeply troubled by your campaign’s recent advertisements and statements about welfare, which we believe demonize the families we serve and reflect a woeful lack of knowledge about the challenges faced by tens of millions of Americans. By accepting our invitation, we hope that you will have the opportunity to see firsthand the struggles of those in need and have the compassion to desist your campaign’s harsh attacks.

We are all God’s children and equal in God’s eyes. Efforts to divide us by class or score political points at the expense of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters reveal the worst side of our country’s politics. Please accept our invitation to witness and to serve.

The letter is signed by NETWORK’s executive director, Sister Simone Campbell, who told ThinkProgress this week that Romney “doesn’t have a clue” about the situation facing America’s poorest citizens or the effect his policies would have on them. “He thinks they’re lazy,” Campbell said Wednesday. “It is hard work to keep things together when you’re poor. He doesn’t have a clue. Let him talk to them, and maybe they’ll touch his heart. And his mind too.”

Last month, Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) warned that a congressional effort close the “Amazon loophole” — which allows online retailers to undercut their competition by not collecting sales tax — would lead to government control of the internet. DeMint also penned an entire op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to rant against the effort, calling an online sales tax “taxation without representation.”

Many prominent Republicans, including Govs. Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Mitch Daniels (R-IN) support the measure, which would level the playing field for all retailers, rather than giving online retailers a competitive advantage for no reason. (Current law says that retailers only need to collect sales tax in states in which they have a physical presence.)

Furthermore, since wealthy Americans are more likely to have convenient and reliable internet access, the Amazon loophole makes sales taxes even more regressive:

Even apart from the Internet sales tax issue, poorer families pay a larger share of their income in sales taxes than better-off families do because they have to spend almost everything they earn. Tax-free Internet shopping compounds the problem: many low-income families would love to shop online to avoid sales tax but can’t because they don’t own a computer or can’t afford high-speed Internet access.

Closing the Amazon loophole, which Amazon now actually supports for its own reasons, would allow states to collect billions of dollars in sales taxes that currently go uncollected, while allowing traditional retailers to compete on equal terms. According to a survey conducted this year, many shoppers say that intentionally shop online in order to avoid sales taxes.

After a year-long investigation into Goldman Sachs, the bank singled out by a Senate investigative committee for its abusive mortgage practices in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Justice Department announced Friday that it would not press charges against the bank. Goldman Sachs became of the face of widespread mortgage fraud and abuse that led to the subprime mortgage crisis when evidence that it had made trades described by its own bankers as “shitty deals” came to light during a Senate investigation in 2011.

The Department of Justice, however, concluded that it did not have enough evidence to meet the “burden of proof” required for charges, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report,” the statement read. [...]

In a statement Thursday, Goldman said: “We are pleased that this matter is behind us.”

DOJ’s investigation began after an April 2011 report from the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations revealed that Goldman Sachs had pushed its clients to make trades on risky mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps even as the bank was betting the same securities would lose value. Though Goldman Sachs was “doing God’s work,” according to chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, other bankers described pushing “shitty deals” on customers. In March of this year, a Goldman Sachs trader lambasted the bank’s “toxic and destructive” culture in a scathing resignation editorial in the New York Times; a former Goldman partner followed up the next week by admitting that the bank’s “commercial animals” had duped customers and peddled “junk” to its clients.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also declined to press charges related to the bank’s role in a $1.3 billion sale of mortgage-backed securities, a reversal from last month when it indicated that it would recommend criminal prosecution. In July, Goldman settled a civil suit with the SEC for $550 million, and it faced sanctions from the Federal Reserve in September.

DOJ reserved the right to re-open the case and press charges should new evidence emerges, but for now, the case seems the latest in a string of them in which the biggest purveyors of the toxic assets that led to the financial crisis walk away with minimal penalties and, in many cases, no penalty at all.

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it approved a settlement requiring Google to pay $22.5 million for bypassing the security settings of millions of customers using the Apple’s Safari web and mobile browser, but admit no liability. The penalty roughly amounts to five hours of 2011 revenues for the search giant, according to the Wall Street Journal, despite being the single largest fine to an individual corporation in F.T.C. history.

The penalty comes six months after Google and other advertisers were discovered exploiting a Safari loophole that allowed it to monitor web behavior if a user interacts with a page, regardless of permission settings.

This is not the first time that Google’s forays into social media have been investigated by the FTC — it also settled over Google Buzz violations in 2011 — and privacy missteps have plagued the search giant across the board in recent years. Last month, it was reported that Google failed to delete street view data in France, resurrecting yet another privacy violation scandal, this one about private data collected by scraping unencrypted WiFi networks by Street View vehicles.

Commentators have noted the minimal financial scale of the F.T.C.  penalty in comparison to Google revenues — some citing the potential public relations fallout as a greater threat to the business. It’s no real surprise regulatory action was minimal: Congressional Research Service reports call current privacy protections a “patchwork” policy, with Wired and ProPublica decrying the privacy watchdog as “toothless” in June.

The lack of serious enforcement has led to a market where privacy violations and F.T.C action is par for the course. The F.T.C. settled investigations into other high profile online brands including Facebook and Twitter in 2011.

The visibility of online privacy issues has become more prominent in recent years despite this enforcement gap. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported as far back as 2008 “68% of cloud users are very concerned about targeted ads based on online behavior.”  January’s SOPA blackouts demonstrated the commitment of online news and advocacy communities to online privacy, and their ability to organize an effective grassroots lobbying campaign.