Financial markets fluctuate. Investors have good and bad years. Cities and states see their fortunes rise and fall. Banks soar, crash, and are bailed out by taxpayers. The only people who always come out ahead: the consultants.

Meet Kenneth Klee. Klee is the senior partner at Klee, Tuchin, Bogdanoff & Stern, a high-powered bankruptcy law firm based in Los Angeles. He charges around $1,000 an hour—for legal advice. For energy healing, he only charges a tenth of that.

Thanks to some misguided moral philosophy and some excellent lobbying work, it is now almost impossible to discharge your student loans in bankruptcy. They haunt you forever, like the souls of those you've killed. As our national student loan debt balloons further into crisis territory, it become ever clearer that we need to change that rule.

There is no better illustration of the disconnect between our economy's winners and losers than the California real estate market. The winners are bidding up Silicon Valley home prices and resurrecting the house-flipping craze. The losers are just trying to hold their cities together under a wave of mortgage defaults. Is there a solution?

In the case of Joseph Corlett vs. Oakland University, a judge has finally ruled: no, telling your college professor in writing that she is "stacked" and gives you a boner is not speech legally protected by the First Amendment.

A law degree will, on average, earn you an extra $1 million over the course of your miserable lifetime.

A supervisor at a white-shoe law firm accused of sexually harassing one of his employees allegedly sent the woman laminated, illustrated erotic poems with lines like, “I enjoy you so. Your thick legs and all of the voluptuous plumpness that accents your womanhood."

After the Great Recession struck, many "Main Street" types of Americans were mad that the entire global economy managed to melt down without resulting in any "Wall Street" types of Americans being thrown in jail. Finally, the law on this point is changing.

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who gave the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, was the most famous government leaker before Edward Snowden. Today, Ellsberg says that Snowden was right to flee America. No shit!

On Monday, Costa Rican lawmakers passed a bill that concerned various social services for young people. On Tuesday, they woke up to the realization that they had pretty much legalized gay marriage.

A newly released 2011 report from the CIA's inspector general reveals that the CIA embedded four officers inside the NYPD's intelligence division after 9/11. The CIA, of course, is not allowed to spy on Americans. And they didn't, according to the CIA!

Lost amid the uproar over other Supreme Court rulings this week was this: yesterday, SCOTUS let stand a lower court ruling that said that the city of LA cannot just confiscate and destroy the possessions of homeless people. Homeless people may legally have things, huzzah.

For decades now, politicians— particularly those in conservative districts— have galloped into office with promises of being tougher on crime than the next guy. All this has gotten us is the world's highest incarceration rate. And it won't last forever. We can't afford it.

NYPD boss Ray Kelly, not a man known for his commitment to civil liberties, is getting lots of attention this morning for saying that the NSA's top secret electronic spying program should not have been secret at all. Why is Ray Kelly so sanguine?

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing two companies— BMW and Dollar General— alleging that their use of criminal background checks for employees violated the Civil Rights Act. Are criminal background checks, honestly, worth a shit?

One night in March of 2012, US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales walked out of Camp Belambay and shot and killed 16 innocent Afghan civilians in two nearby villages. Yesterday, he stood in court and fully admitted to his crimes— without offering any explanation as to why he did them.

Pay attention, beauty-loving Americans: the jack-booted thugs of Big Government are coming to take away your right to burn people's skin with a laser without any medical training whatsoever.

A comprehensive new report from the ACLU about marijuana arrests in America confirms three key points: A) Weed arrests are overwhelmingly racially biased; B) Weed arrests consume an insanely large amount of money and resources; and C) Weed needs to be legalized, ASAP.

Support for the death penalty among Americans is hovering around a 40-year low. Nevertheless, enthusiastic legislators from Bumfuck all the way to Hickville are taking it upon themselves to help their states execute death row inmates with greater dispatch.

It's shocking to consider, but sometimes employers try to rip off their own employees. And sometimes those employees sue. More employees are suing every year, as a matter of fact. Why? Well, it's definitely not the fault of employers, say employers.