Why Is Albany Letting These Energy Companies Scam Thousands of New Yorkers?
On a summer day in 2014, Stella So was engrossed in her Korean-language soaps when she heard a knock on her door in Flushing, Queens. She answered it to find a clean-cut young man with a Con Edison...
View ArticleSee and Hear Energy Marketers in Action in NYC
This week we wrote about New York's residential energy services companies, known as ESCOs, an industry that many consumer watchdogs say is rife with abuses. The state's main utility regulator, the...
View ArticleWhy Some DHS Money Is Best Left on the Table
A slap-fight erupted last week between New York leaders and the White House after the latter cut the city's share of a controversial type of antiterror funding. True to form, our local representatives...
View ArticleCuomo Bares Fangs at CUNY, Puts Final Nail in the Coffin of His Own...
Andrew Cuomo, the archetypal politician — fickle, conviction-less, his soul shriveled to a crushing singularity from which only ego can escape — has of late been feeling the political winds blowing...
View ArticleCuomo Denies He Has His Eye on Half a Billion Dollars of CUNY’s State...
As the Voice goes to press this week, funding for the City University of New York, the third largest public university system in America, remains in jeopardy, held hostage to the most cynical elements...
View ArticleCon Ed’s Kangaroo Court: How a Private Company and Our Public Courts Put...
The Brooklyn civil courthouse on Livingston Street is dead quiet at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in mid-March. The cops near the entrance usher people wanly through the metal detectors, but you can...
View ArticleRightbloggers Claim Victory When Tubman Flips Jackson on the $20
How goes the culture war — that endless, awkward struggle of conservatives, armed only with shaking fists and wagging fingers, to turn back America’s surging tide of sex positivity, racial diversity,...
View ArticleBehold: Coney Island's $61 Million Amphitheater Boondoggle
If you've made an early trip to the Wonder Wheel this year, you've probably noticed the giant white wing of the new Coney Island Amphitheater rising just west of the Brooklyn Cyclones stadium. Opening...
View ArticleNew Rules Mean Shady Energy Companies Have to Stop Scamming Low-Income New...
The New York Public Service Commission issued an order Thursday that will keep New York’s hundreds of shady private utility companies from preying on low-income customers, as they’ve done for many...
View ArticleThe NYPD's Civil Forfeiture System Has Taken Millions From Low-Income New...
On the afternoon of May 16 in the south Bronx, NYPD officers stormed into an apartment filled with young men, looking for a parolee. They quickly found their guy and placed him under arrest. Then they...
View ArticleDonald Trump, Chris Christie, and the Amazing Shrinking $30 Million Tax Bill
It’s good to have friends in high places. Even if one of those places is New Jersey. The New York Times has a scoop today about how presidential candidate and racist catcher’s mitt Donald Trump managed...
View ArticleNY's Private Utility Companies Are Facing Extinction
New York's Public Service Commission is considering banning private energy retailers from the state's residential market and plans to hold an evidentiary hearing on the matter, the latest in a series...
View ArticleUber, But For Benefits: NY Tech Companies Propose a Gig Economy Solution
Inder Parmar has driven for Uber since 2013. It's a grueling routine. He puts in about sixty hours a week and drives another ten on side jobs he earns from giving his business card to passengers....
View ArticleIn the Latest Pension-Fund Corruption Scandal, Everyone’s Paying but Wall Street
The intricacies of pension fund malfeasance are not always the stuff that tabloid writers dream about, but the unveiling of the indictment of a director of New York's largest public retirement fund...
View ArticleWhat Free Tuition Can't Buy: Students Need More Than Scholarships to Prep for...
Governor Andrew Cuomo, said to be positioning himself for a run at the White House in 2020, recently announced the Excelsior Scholarship program, which will make state college tuition free for New...
View ArticleNYC’s Climate Research Resources Are Melting Faster Than the Ice Caps
On February 17, Senate Republicans (and two Democrats) confirmed climate change denier Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA, an agency he's vowed to dismantle. The specifics of how Pruitt's distaste for...
View ArticleWhy the NEH and NEA Matter More Than Ever
In 1790, in the first ever State of the Union address, George Washington told Congress he understood that federal support of agriculture and commercial ventures across the nation needed no special...
View ArticleFearless Girl Is Not Your Friend
When the "Fearless Girl" statue first appeared in Bowling Green the day before International Women's Day on March 8, staring down the "Charging Bull" statue on Wall Street, it did so through a city...
View ArticleSmoke & Mirrors: Sixteen Views of Trump's Glittering Fifth Avenue Dream
It’s spring, 1983. My Californian family is on a trip “back East,” a place still exotic to us. During a few days in New York — my first trip here — we visit the United Nations, Windows on the World,...
View ArticleHow the High Line Changed NYC
There is no better illustration of gilded, internet-age New York than the High Line. Anchored on the south by the relocated Whitney Museum and on the north by the high-rises of Hudson Yards, the...
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