The good news is the uninsured rate in the U.S. has fallen to a record low. The bad news is the benefits of health care reform aren't reaching a large swath of the country.
Over the last year, the uninsured rate in the U.S. fell 3.5 percentage points, from 17.3 percent in 2013 to 13.8 percent in 2014, according to the latest data from Gallup. That's the lowest yearly rate that's been recorded by Gallup's Well-Being Index.
According to Gallup, much of the decline can be linked to President Obama's health care reform law, which implemented a number of new policies to help Americans afford health insurance. But some states' refusal to adapt Obamacare's key provisions are causing a startling gap in uninsured rates across the country.
The states with the highest uninsured rates in 2014 are pretty much all found in the South, the Gallup poll found.
Not coincidentally, all 10 of the states with the highest uninsured rates have refused to carry out two key parts of Obamacare.
"States that have implemented two of the law's core mechanisms -- Medicaid expansion and state health exchanges -- are seeing a substantially larger drop in the uninsured rate than states that did not take both of these actions," Gallup announced. "Consequently, the gap in uninsured rates that existed between these two groups in 2013 nearly doubled in 2014."
That said, two southern states -- Arkansas and Kentucky -- saw the sharpest declines in their uninsured rates, which fell by 11.1 and 10.6 percentage points, respectively. Both states expanded Medicaid and had implemented state exchanges. (Arkansas had a state-federal partnership in 2014 and is transitioning to a state-run exchange.)
Ten out of the 11 states that saw their uninsured rates fall the most had expanded Medicaid and offered either a state-run exchange or a state-federal partnership.
WASHINGTON -- In a move that could alter the minimum wage debate and improve the image of the world's largest retailer, Walmart announced it will raise the baseline wage of its current store employees to $10 per hour, bringing pay hikes to an estimated 500,000 workers.
The company said in an announcement on Thursday that it would raise its wage floor to $9 in April, followed by a second boost to $10 by next February.
The decision follows similar moves by other major retailers such as Gap and IKEA, but the sheer size of Walmart sets the company apart. The Arkansas-based retailer is the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., with an estimated 1.4 million employees, and it is largely seen as a trend-setter in the retail industry.
On a quarterly earnings call aligned with the announcement, Doug McMillon, the company's CEO, said raising wages would be good for both employees and customers.
"Overall, these are strategic investments in our people to reignite the sense of ownership they have in our stores," McMillon said. "As a result, we firmly believe that our customers will benefit from a better store experience, which can drive higher sales and returns for our shareholders over time.
"Right now we want to make sure everybody is crystal clear [on] how vital our store experience is for our future," McMillon added in a later CNBC interview. "Customers need to be served, and associates need to be happy and love their job."
According to a Walmart spokesman, the new wage floors will apply to current employees. New hires next year will be earning at least $9, but will be bumped up to at least $10 per hour after roughly six months of training.
In the CNBC interview, McMillon suggested that the improving U.S. economy -- with unemployment falling recently to 5.7 percent from a peak of 10 percent after the recession -- was also pressuring Walmart to raise wages.
"It's great to see the job market getting better, and the market works, so we're adjusting to that market," he said.
Walmart has long been saddled with a reputation as a low-wage employer, and its battles with labor unions -- in particular the United Food and Commercial Workers union -- stretch back decades. In recent years, labor groups have organized high-profile worker strikes to coincide with the company's Black Friday shopping events, pillorying the retailer over its pay practices.
The across-the-board pay hikes should help rehabilitate that image. They will probably also help Walmart improve customer service in its stores. Over the past two years, bare shelves in Walmart supercenters have become a common sight. A report from a research firm last year traced the troubles in part to a lack of investment in the company's labor.
"We know that this wouldn't have happen[ed] without our work to stand together with hundreds of thousands of supporters to change the country's largest employer,” Emily Wells, an OUR Walmart member, said in a statement Thursday from the group. Wells said she's currently earning $9.50 per hour and will now see a raise, though she added that workers still face erratic scheduling.
A $10 wage would still leave many workers and their families below the poverty line, but it's well above the $7.25 federal minimum wage that still prevails in states without a higher one.
The fact that Walmart is raising its base wage could help lawmakers in Congress in their push to raise the federal wage floor, which hasn't been raised since 2009. Democrats have proposed hiking it to $10.10 per hour and tying it to an inflation index, but Republicans in both chambers have blocked the measure from moving forward.
The proposal is extremely popular among Americans in general, polling with broad approval that crosses party lines. The decision by Walmart could make Republicans look even more out-of-touch.
"It is encouraging that the nation’s largest employer, Walmart, has recognized what Republicans in Congress fail to acknowledge: that $7.25 is significantly too low an hourly wage for any American worker," said Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "We hope that this move will help convince Republicans to stop blocking efforts to raise the wage."
With Congress gridlocked, many states have moved ahead with raises to their own minimum wages, with a slate of ballot measures passing in the November elections. For the first time ever, a majority of states now have a higher minimum wage than the federal level.
HuffPost readers: Did you receive a raise due to the recent minimum wage hikes on Jan. 1? Tell us how much it changed -- or didn't change -- your paycheck.
This story has been updated with statements from Emily Wells and Drew Hammill.
Millions of Americans are plagued by student loans, an albatross hindering them from taking adult financial steps like buying a house or moving out of Mom and Dad’s basement. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday that outstanding student loan balances recently grew to $1.16 trillion in the U.S. But one group is disproportionately affected by student debt.
More than 40 percent of African-American families had student loan debt in 2013, compared with 28 percent of white families, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank studying issues of education, health policy and low-income families. African-American families also typically take on more student debt -- $10,295 on average, compared with an average of $8,020 for white families.
The student debt disparity is just one factor adding to a yawning gap in wealth between black and white Americans.
One big reason black families are more likely to borrow for college is because they’re less likely to have access to traditional sources of wealth such as inheritances, or wealth-creating tools such as homeownership, according to the Urban Institute. Once black students graduate, the extra debt may prevent them from activities that build wealth -- for example, buying a house or saving for retirement.
“Student loan debt can have ripple effects. It can delay when people buy their first home and when they begin to start saving seriously for their retirement,” said Signe-Mary McKernan, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “This disadvantage means that African-Americans are getting a late start in wealth accumulation.”
The Urban Institute analysis relies on data from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors' survey of consumer finances. One critique of the survey is that it underestimates total outstanding student loan debt.
One important caveat: The Urban Institute analysis relies on data from the Federal Reserve's survey of consumer finances. One critique of the survey is that it underestimates total outstanding student-loan debt. A recent New York Fed study found that lenders report higher levels of debt.
All students who weigh whether to borrow for college face a catch-22. Research shows it’s much harder to get a decent-paying job without a college degree, yet saddling oneself with loans can be daunting. Among African-American students, the choice can be particularly acute.
For one thing, African-American students are less likely to graduate from college, according to the Urban Institute, meaning they won't have a degree to help them land the kinds of jobs that will pay off loan debt. That, says the Institute, is in part because African-American students are more likely to attend for-profit colleges. Those schools often have lower graduation rates than nonprofit counterparts, and they’ve come under fire in recent years for not delivering on promises to get jobs for graduates.
And black students who do get a degree often face discrimination in finding a job. Recent black college graduates face an unemployment rate double that of their white counterparts, according to a 2014 analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that this may be due partly to a subconscious bias against black job applicants.
The first few years of a career are extremely important in determining how much money a person will make over their lifetime, and whether there will be enough to do things like buy a house or save for retirement. This combination of factors makes it especially difficult for black college graduates to gain wealth.
“That wealth translates into opportunity,” McKernan said.
It's rare to get a company-wide email from your boss reminding you to sleep. But that’s exactly what happened last week to the employees at Lightspan Digital, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency.
Mana Ionescu, the president of the company, is a big fan of shut-eye and a devotee of celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels. So when Michaels sent a message to her followers extolling the benefits of a good night’s sleep, Ionescu, 37, forwarded it along to her staff.
“I’m a huge advocate for sleep, and I prioritize it the same way I would prioritize going to the gym and seeing my friends,” said Ionescu, who aims for eight hours a night but estimates she gets closer to seven. “It’s so hard because it’s the thing that seems the easiest to sacrifice.”
Ionescu said she’s even been called lazy and weak after expressing her views about sleep. It’s easy to see why -- the American work culture seems to give more value to people who grind away at their jobs at the expense of sleep.
The business leaders who say they get by on very little sleep, such as Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, seem to get a lot more airtime than those who say the opposite. Everywhere are headlines about “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep,” “Do history's greatest figures owe their success to sleeping LESS?” and “The secret of success: Needing less sleep?”
But sacrificing sleep could be hurting more than just the executives in need of a good night’s rest. When people don’t sleep, they don’t function at their highest levels, research shows. In a work context, that means missing opportunities to make money. American companies are losing $63.2 billion a year due to sleep deprivation, according to a 2013 study from Harvard Medical School.
That may be why a growing number of bosses, like Ionescu, are waking up (pun intended) to this reality and extolling the virtues of a decent night’s sleep. In the most prominent recent example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told ABC News earlier this month that he sleeps on average eight hours a night. Other renowned business leaders including Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg have told interviewers in recent years they’ve realized the value in getting a good night’s sleep if they want to operate at their highest levels.
These leaders follow in the footsteps of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who have been bragging about their eight hours of rest a night at least since 1999, when they discussed their sleep habits with a Wall Street Journal reporter.
More and more research indicates that they’re taking the correct approach. Bosses can get mean and workers less productive when they don’t get a good night's sleep, according to one recent study. Sleep is such an important predictor of the ability to get our jobs done well that getting one extra hour a night can increase wages by 16 percent a year on average, according to a study by economics graduate students at the University of California at San Diego. That’s more than the boost from an extra year of education.
“Sleep is as important as water and food,” said Pat Byrne, the founder of Fatigue Science, a company that works with athletes and companies to help them use sleep to increase performance. But many people struggle to prioritize it.
It’s hard for people who sleep very little each night to detect the consequences, Byrne said, because after a while their bodies “re-norm” so they can continue to go through the motions during the day, even while they’re getting just four or five hours of sleep a night. But that doesn't mean the sleep-deprived person is functioning as well as he or she could be.
“It’s very insidious in that it creeps up on you,” Byrne said of the effects of a prolonged lack of sleep. That dynamic may explain why executives and others think they’re operating just fine on a prolonged lack of sleep.
Of course not everyone has the luxury of a good night’s sleep. Parents of young children and people scraping by on multiple jobs may find it difficult to get eight hours a night. But why is it so common for some of the most powerful people in the world to deprive themselves?
“One common approach to sleep is ‘I’m too dedicated to my job and too important to spend my time sleeping,’” said Christopher Barnes, a management professor at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Barnes’ research finds that when bosses get less sleep, they’re meaner to their employees, who end up disengaging from their work as a result.
“They might be partially correct, they might be doing really important stuff, but they might not be appreciating the fact that if they’re not getting enough sleep,” they’re probably not at their highest level, Barnes said.
Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto software, has a more blunt term for business leaders’ tendency to claim they survive on just a few hours of sleep a night: “Bravado bragging.” Parsons’ experience raising three young children taught her that functioning normally on a few hours of sleep a night is nearly impossible.
Now, Parsons tries to get seven or eight hours every night. She encourages her 55 employees to do the same, and to take breaks during the day to exercise or do other activities if they’re feeling sluggish.
She does this to keep workers from getting burned out -- and also to “call bullshit on everybody else” who claims to do their job well despite being sleep-deprived.
“I don’t think you really have someone who sleeps four hours every night for months and months and years and years, who is a functional person,” she said. “You’re not doing that, and if you are, then you’re not being productive.”
Laurie Zabawa says she'd been working at a Hilton Garden Inn in Bozeman, Montana, for seven years when the owners outsourced the management of the hotel in 2012. For Zabawa, the hotel's banquet manager, this meant that any parties that took place in the hotel would now be overseen by an outside firm, an Ohio-based company called Gateway Hospitality Group.
The banquet workers whom Zabawa oversaw weren't being let go, so the service-industry lifer says she took the change in stride -- that is, until Gateway explained the new policy on gratuities.
By tradition, when clients of the hotel ran up banquet tabs, they'd be subject to an automatic gratuity of 18 to 20 percent. That money was then distributed among the waiters, bartenders and other food workers who handled the event, according to Zabawa. For workers earning close to minimum wage, these tips could equal half their base pay, and they were essential to making a living.
But according to Zabawa and a lawsuit she's filed in Montana state court, after Gateway took over, the automatic gratuity was renamed a "service" or "setup" fee, and the house stopped distributing that money to staff. Zabawa claims that workers were told to sign papers accepting a new flat wage that didn't include gratuities. Most workers were given a nominal raise of about $1 per hour, but it didn't come close to making up for the lost tips, she says.
As banquet manager, Zabawa says she was tasked with implementing the new policy.
"It was awful," Zabawa, 50, told The Huffington Post. "Just imagine working there with those people for years. They were my family. It was horrible to go through, and I had no options."
Zabawa claims she was pressured to quit her job after telling management she believed the new policy violated Montana wage laws. She is suing over what she deems wrongful termination, and she's asked the court to declare the hotel's use of service fees illegal.
Hilton and the hotel's operator, Bozeman Lodging Investors, did not respond to requests for comment about Zabawa's allegations. Bob Voelker, Gateway's CEO and a Hilton veteran, told HuffPost he would not comment on ongoing litigation. According to the company's website, Gateway has contracts with at least 17 Hilton-brand properties in four states.
In the service industry, it's become fairly common for the house to present customers with a charge that's implied to be a tip for the workers -- only to turn around and keep that money for itself. Such add-on costs often come in the guise of a "service" fee, and the charge tends to match what most of us would associate with a typical gratuity.
For businesses, these fees often function as a surreptitious price increase, allowing them to charge customers more while maintaining the same base price. Though these fees don't go to workers, people like Zabawa believe their presence makes customers assume that the bartenders, servers and others who rely on tips have somehow been covered.
"I had employees who quit," Zabawa said. "They just weren't willing to work there anymore."
Zabawa's employees weren't the only workers feeling burned by such fees. In 2010, catering employees who worked the U.S. Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York sued the concessions company there for allegedly pocketing a 21 percent service fee that was tacked onto customers' bills. The workers, who also claimed they were shorted on overtime pay, argued that the service fee was portrayed as a gratuity. The class-action lawsuit was settled in 2013 for $600,000.
As HuffPost reported in 2011, beer and hot dog vendors at New York's Yankee Stadium claimed they were victims of a similar scheme. The stadium's concessionaire, Legends Hospitality, was attaching a 20 percent service fee to the drink and food orders in the stadium's luxury boxes, but the vendors who sold those orders were only taking in 4 to 6 percent in commission. According to a lawsuit filed by the vendors, the remainder of that 20 percent fee was going to Legends, which, at the time, was jointly owned by the New York Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys and the investment bank Goldman Sachs. (After it was sued, Legends made clear on its menus that only a small portion of the fee went to servers.)
The practice has even made its way into the pizza delivery business. As HuffPost reported last year, Pizza Hut, Papa John's and Domino's now commonly tack nominal "delivery fees" onto the tabs of delivery orders. Those fees, which are usually between $1.50 and $3 a pop, do not go to the drivers, even though many customers forego a driver tip believing that they do. Many career drivers told HuffPost they believe the practice has helped depress wages in their field.
HuffPost readers: Do you work in a job where "service fees" do not go to workers? Tell us about it.
One former catering worker at the U.S. Open said the use of service fees not only hurts workers' paychecks, but also creates confusion and tension among clients.
"In this industry, it happens a lot. A client will have the assumption that the service fee is indicative of some type of gratuity going to the employee," said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous due to the litigation. "They're feeling that they're already being forced to pay a tip. A strange sort of animosity can build up between the client and the server."
Several states have recognized the problems stemming from service fees and tried to address them in their own ways, with laws now on the books in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New York and Washington state.
In Hawaii, any hotel or restaurant that tacks on a service fee is required to distribute that fee in full to employees. A similar statute in Massachusetts applies the same rule to the service industry at large, while also barring management from sharing in employee tip pools. In Washington state, service fees may be used, but receipts must show clearly how much of the fee goes to employees.
Recently, the hotel workers' union Unite Here has worked to insert language into local wage laws to ensure that service fees stay with workers. According to the minimum wage ordinance passed last year in Los Angeles, which established a $15 wage floor for large hotels in the city, any such fee belongs to the workforce, regardless of what management chooses to call it -- be it a "service charge," a "delivery charge" or a "porterage" fee, to name a few examples.
The Montana law, which would cover Zabawa's hotel, defines a service fee as "an arbitrary fixed charge added to the customer's bill by an employer in lieu of a tip." According to state code, such a fee "must be distributed directly to the nonmanagement employee preparing or serving the food or beverage or to any other employee involved in related services."
"Defendants admit they do not provide the 20% arbitrary fee to the nonmanagement staff members," Zabawa's lawyer, Jason Armstrong, wrote in a court filing, referring to Gateway and Bozeman Lodging Investors. "The question then becomes one of law; is the policy legal or not under the law?"
According to Zabawa, the hotel lost many of its servers under the new gratuity policy, since for them it effectively translated to a pay cut. Zabawa said she was simply instructed to hire new employees.
After workers lost their tips, one of the servers brought the language of the Montana statute to Zabawa, she claims in her lawsuit. Zabawa, in turn, took the server's concerns to a manager for Gateway. Zabawa alleges in her suit that she was then instructed to "write up" the "problem employee" and fire her. Zabawa says she refused.
Zabawa says she then lost her position as banquet manager and was switched to a sales job. In her lawsuit, she argues that leaving "was the only reasonable alternative" at that point. Under Montana law, such a voluntary termination could still be considered wrongful discharge if the employer created an intolerable situation.
After eight years at the hotel, Zabawa wound up working part-time at Pier 1 Imports before finding a new job in banquet work. Her income has taken a sharp drop, she says, but that's something she's managed to live with.
"I go to sleep at night knowing that I'm not apologizing [to my employees] and that I'm not sorry every day," she said.In the service industry, it's become fairly common for the house to present customers with a charge that's implied to be a tip for the workers -- only to turn around and keep that money for itself.
NEW YORK -- The lobby of the Ace Hotel was bustling on a recent Monday afternoon. Twenty- and 30-somethings in scarves, chunky sweaters and jeans typed at laptops and huddled around French-press coffeepots at communal tables.
Not the typical hangout of a corporate executive. But then Kat Cole -- the former Hooters waitress who in 2011 became president of Cinnabon, Inc. -- is not the typical corporate executive. And that may be the key to her success.
In blue jeans, boots and a black top, Cole, 36, blended so well into the Ace Hotel’s hipster hive that she was difficult to spot. She was in New York promoting Cinnabon’s starring role in the pilot of AMC's eagerly anticipated “Breaking Bad” spinoff, “Better Call Saul.”
Cinnabon gave away mini-bons Monday in honor of the brand's appearance on the show.
A week earlier, after four years running Cinnabon, Cole had been given a bigger job, overseeing licensing, manufacturing and e-commerce at Focus Brands -- the company that owns Cinnabon and other chains.
She’s come a long way in a short time, and took an unusual route to get there. She started her career as a teenage waitress at Hooters. By age 20, she had dropped out of college and at age 26 she became a vice president at the wing chain. Cole eventually earned her MBA at Georgia State University, graduating shortly after she started at Cinnabon as the company's chief operating officer in 2010. But today she’s still a rarity in the highest echelons of corporate America, which are largely populated by middle-aged white men, many of whom have elite degrees.
This atypical career path has not hurt Cole. In a lot of ways, it seems to have helped. Cole thinks her background has made it easier for her to find solutions that somebody with a classic pedigree might have overlooked. And her experience has taught her that any one of her employees is worth consulting -- because, who knows? They too could be corporate-executive material.
Cole at an event in 2013.
“When you’re not used to having doors opened for you," Cole told The Huffington Post, "you will do things and have meetings with people and spend your time in places that maybe someone with a more traditional path would think is too small or not deserving of their time or their energy."
Cole said she has developed a “really tough skin,” a quality that she credits with helping her handle failure more constructively.
“When you have people who question why you are where you are, or who treat you very differently, as if you don’t deserve to be there because you’re young, or female, or in my case, a Hooters girl, it’s really interesting the muscle that that builds,” she said. “You have to develop that over time to not be totally shaken every time you walk into a boardroom, or every time someone is an asshole.”
Research suggests that traditional backgrounds don’t always help corporate leaders succeed. For example, CEOs with Ivy League degrees do no better than other CEOs when it comes to things like stock performance and profitability, according to a study from Brian Bolton, a finance professor at Portland State University’s School of Business.
Still, boards seem to love hiring alums of elite schools. Fifteen percent of CEOs at the nation’s 1,500 largest companies in 2012 had at least one degree from Harvard, according to Bolton’s research. More than one-fourth of the CEOs in the sample with MBAs got them at Harvard. And Bolton estimates that only 3 or 4 percent of CEOs lack a college degree. Less than 2 percent of the CEOs in the sample were women.
“It’s hard for boards or for executives to hire unknowns,” Bolton told HuffPost. “They default to what’s safe, and hiring an MBA from Harvard is safe. It’s going to be accepted by stockholders and employees.”
But if Cole’s success is any indication, the safe option may not always be the best one.
Cole took the reins of Cinnabon four years ago during what she calls a “really shitty” time. The sluggish economy was keeping people away from the malls and airports that are Cinnabon’s typical environs.
Her plan to turn the company around involved reaching out to others for partnerships -- a tactic she believes was heavily influenced by her background. She speculates that leaders with a more typical pedigree might have been less willing to look outside the company for help.
Cole approached it differently. She and her team pitched packaged-good companies and other fast-food chains on the idea of working together to create a line of Cinnabon-branded products, such as Cinnabon-flavored Green Mountain coffee, Cinnabon Air Wick and Cinnabon Vodka. (And in some cases the companies came to Cinnabon as well).
It worked. Sales of those products grew to more than $1 billion by 2013, and now they make up about 75 percent of Cinnabon’s total global product sales.
“We had this serious humility -- we weren’t too good for anything,” Cole said. “I’ve seen other leaders not be that scrappy and take much longer and spend a lot more money trying to turn something around.”
It turned out to be a trendsetting approach. Darren Tristano, executive vice president at the market research firm Technomic, said he expects McDonald’s and other chains to get more branded products into grocery stores down the line.
“That’s something we’re going to see a lot of,” Tristano said.
Cole’s experience has also given her a healthy respect for the rank-and-file worker. When she took over Cinnabon, instead of shelling out for consumer research, she spent 60 days visiting franchises all over the country, meeting with owners and workers, making Cinnabons and ringing up customers to get a feel for what the company needed.
“It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been that hourly employee," Cole told HuffPost. "I remember that people doing the work every day are the ones who really know what the answers are."
Cole’s days as a server are so fresh in her mind that it still hits a nerve when she sees a customer treating one poorly. She recalled an incident a few years ago, in the same Ace Hotel lobby, when a man sitting next to her berated a waitress for not bringing sugar with his coffee.
“As I was watching her and sitting so close, I just remembered it. I remember people yelling at me, I remember people being unnecessarily disrespectful and looking at me -- because I was in orange shorts, serving chicken wings -- like I was the scum of the earth,” Cole said, sipping coffee about a foot away from where the incident took place.
Cole said she scolded the man and gave the waitress “the biggest tip I think I’ve ever given in my life,” in the hope that it would encourage her to stay positive.
As her career advanced, more and more people began asking Cole to speak about her history, which included watching her mother feed her and her siblings on just $10 a week for three years after she divorced Cole's father who was an alcoholic at the time. A year or so ago, Cole, wary of overexposure, briefly considered taking a break from talking to the media. Then a mentor criticized her for not using her platform to inspire others. That mentor died just weeks after giving Cole that piece of advice.
Other executives may want to embrace aspects of their past that don’t fit the CEO stereotype, Cole said. She suggested that her story may not actually be that unique.
“A lot of executives were waitresses and bartenders and hostesses, but they don’t connect those things” to the success they’re having now, said Cole.
Raising her hand slightly above her head, she added, “It’s like they have to stay so up here."
This story was reported with Roxana Olivera, a Toronto-based investigative journalist living in Peru.
SOROCHUCO, Peru -- On a remote farm deep in the Peruvian Andes, in a region where sheep outnumber people by a comfortable margin, a very small woman is foiling the plans of one of the biggest mining companies in the world.
Máxima Acuña, who stands just over 5 feet tall -- if one includes in the measurement the traditional wide-brimmed hat she almost always wears -- has withstood threats, beatings and legal challenges in her improbable bid to hang on to what she declares is her property: 67 acres of windswept grass framed by rolling hills and several high mountain lakes.
Last week, dozens of private security officers working for Minera Yanacocha, a Peruvian company that is majority owned by Newmont Mining Corp. of Denver, ripped apart the foundation of a new home the family was building as Acuña stood nearby, crying.
The cause of the conflict is the same that has haunted Peru since Spanish conquistadors first landed on its shores 500 years ago. There is gold on Acuña’s land. Or, more accurately, under it: at least 6 million ounces, here and on adjacent property, according to Newmont.
The company wants to build a $4.8 billion mine, known as Conga, to extract the precious ore. Buenaventura, a Peruvian company, and the International Finance Corp., the private-lending arm of the World Bank., hold minority stakes in the project, which is meant to replace a depleted mine nearby.
Acuña’s neighbors seem to have gotten the message that standing in the way of such a lucrative development is a losing proposition. They are long gone. But Acuña, who is 44, and her husband, Jaime Chaupe, have declared they won’t be intimidated into leaving.
“The Yanacocha clan can hire all the lawyers in the world, but let them produce documents to show that I sold them my land," Máxima Acuña said recently. "They claim that I am squatting on their property. They claim that they are the legitimate owners, but they don’t show any papers that indicate that I sold them my land.”
Newmont says it purchased the Acuña property and surrounding acreage from the local community in 1997. Peruvian courts have twice affirmed its ownership, the company says.
Stories of individual resistance to lucrative construction projects in developing nations rarely end well for the stubborn holdout.
Acuña claims Yanacocha and its security forces, as well as allied police, have engaged in a campaign of harassment. In 2011, Peruvian police moved onto the disputed property and beat Acuña and her daughter "without compassion," Acuña told the New Internationalist in an interview the next year.
In more recent years, even as local activist leaders leading the fight against the mine adopted her as their spiritual leader -- at one point, she was even flown to Paris for an event -- the endgame seemed to grow near. A 2012 court decision seemed to seal the family's fate. The Acuñas, the judge declared, were squatters. Another court ruling in 2014 affirmed the same thing, the company says.
In December, however, a judge in Cajamarca, the regional capital, threw out a criminal complaint that Yanacocha, backed by Newmont, had filed against the Acuñas. The family and their attorneys from a nonprofit legal group for indigenous people celebrated the ruling as vindication that their claim to the land was valid. (In Peru, private parties can sue alleging criminal conduct, unlike in the United States, where such claims are reserved for government authorities).
The Acuñas live in a tiny grass and earth hut, highly vulnerable to the cold that is a steady presence at these high altitudes of more than 12,000 feet. In January -- mid-summer in the Southern Hemisphere -- they started to build a new home a few hundred feet away.
On Feb. 5, Yanacocha dispatched its security forces to the site. They wore face masks and carried riot shields.
What exactly happened next isn’t clear. Photographs taken by the company’s agents and posted on Yanacocha’s website depict the security forces facing off against two young men.
Acto de defensa posesoria se llevó sin violencia de nuestra parte http://t.co/ffRWb49kW3 pic.twitter.com/EDhyGX0jEf
— Minera Yanacocha (@MineraYanacocha) February 3, 2015
A photo tweeted from Yanacocha's account shows two people who appear to be throwing dirt or rocks.
Eventually, the security forces ripped apart the house's foundation, and left.
Newmont claims the new house was being built on Yanacocha land, outside the bounds of the property the Acuñas claim as their own. The December court decision changed nothing with respect to earlier rulings that confirmed its ownership of the property, the company says.
"Yanacocha remains committed to demonstrating respect for human rights and host communities, and will continue to seek measures to minimize conflict," Newmont spokesman Omar Jabara said in an email. "At the same time, the company will take respectful, lawful and prudent measures to manage its lands safely, and prevent future -- and new -- unauthorized occupation on company property."
The family and their attorney claim the structure was on Acuña property.
[ENVIVO]Conferencia de prensa de Yanacocha en #Cajamarca sobre defensa posesoria, sÃguela aquà http://t.co/3x7W4owLuX pic.twitter.com/QDQAB0rGbA
— Minera Yanacocha (@MineraYanacocha) February 4, 2015
Another photo of the confrontation, tweeted from the Yanacocha account. The foundation of the planned Acuña home that mine security destroyed is in the foreground; the family's current house is in the distance.
In Peru, the incident has dominated the news cycle, provoking condemnation even from some media outlets traditionally seen as business-friendly. At a press conference earlier this week, the father of Peru's president declared that Acuña is a "heroine" for standing up to the mine.
For Newmont, the episode is another public relations mess in a region where its reputation is already tattered. For more than 20 years, it has pulled gold out of the ground of a huge mine near Conga, a development local peasant farmers blame for polluting their water and land.
In 2012, Peruvian police shot and killed five people protesting Conga, including a teenage boy. In the aftermath, Newmont declared that Conga was on indefinite hold while it builds reservoirs meant to replace water lost when several mountain lakes at the Conga site are dug up. There is no time frame on when the project will start up again, but Newmont has said it wants to marshall public support first.
Now, Newmont faces the prospect of more protests and turmoil. In Lima last week, a group gathered in support of Acuna outside of Yanacocha headquarters. Lynda Sullivan, an activist who lives in the town of Celendin, near the proposed Conga site, said organizers are attempting to stage a similar rally outside of Newmont's Denver headquarters on Thursday, and at Peruvian embassies around the world.
For Acuña, the mantle of resistance hero is weighing heavy. She recently sought medical treatment for symptoms relating to exhaustion and stress. In recent days, her family has sought to deflect a swarm of reporters seeking interviews.
But this past weekend, she talked with a visiting journalist and issued one of the defiant declarations that have endeared her to supporters.
"Yanacocha wants to have my land for free,” she said, her eyes swelling with tears. “But I will not leave my land. I am the rightful owner of this land. I have property papers to prove it. God is my witness.”
With the idea of postal banking becoming more mainstream in the U.S., the head of the largest union of postal workers says he plans to make a revived banking service part of his union's upcoming contract talks with the U.S. Postal Service.
Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), told The Huffington Post that postal banking -- when post offices also offer simple banking services like checking and savings accounts -- is "an idea that should be reborn and whose time has come."
"Basic postal banking is done in many countries around the world, and in many of those countries it's a revenue-driver for the post office," Dimondstein said. "We think it's a win-win-win situation. It's great for the public. It's great for the post office. And it's great for postal workers."
Dimondstein's plans to make postal banking part of contract talks were first reported by Salon's David Dayen.
The U.S. Postal Service once offered simple banking services to the public, but federal reforms abolished the services in 1966. With the postal service now facing a drop in first-class mail and costly mandates from Congress, the notion of restoring banking has been bandied about as a way to get the agency on more solid footing while extending some basic services to underbanked communities.
In particular, it's been pitched as a potential alternative to the high-interest payday loans that poorer Americans rely on.
Last year, the postal service's Office of the Inspector General recommended that the agency consider offering check cashing, money transfers and modest loans to customers who don't have their own banks. The idea has gained currency not only with postal service boosters, but also with critics of Wall Street, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
In an op-ed last year, Warren argued that the postal service is the one organization with "the public mission, the infrastructure, the experience and the well-trained employees needed to help address this problem" of predatory lending aimed at the poor.
One interested party that hasn't endorsed the concept of postal banking is the postal service itself. Patrick Donahoe, the postmaster general until earlier this month, "scoffed" at the idea during a press conference late last year, according to the Associated Press. "Our role is delivery," not banking, Donahoe said.
It isn't apparent yet how receptive Donahoe's replacement, Megan J. Brennan, might be to reviving postal banking services. Asked whether the agency's new management would entertain such a discussion, an agency spokeswoman said, "We'll just have to wait and see what's addressed during the negotiation process" with the union.
The divide over postal banking is part of a broader philosophical disagreement over the future of the post office. Heading an agency faced with red ink -- most of it due to a requirement imposed by Congress that the agency pre-fund retirement benefits years in advance -- Donahoe sought more latitude to streamline the postal service, pushing proposals that would eliminate Saturday delivery and close more mail processing facilities.
Postal unions have staunchly opposed such moves and argued that they will lead to the so-called death spiral, in which reduced services inevitably lead to the agency's demise.
APWU will begin negotiations for a new contract with the postal service next week, and the union expects the agency to seek concessions in employee health and retirement benefits -- a common feature in nearly all union contract talks these days. Though it isn't clear how postal banking could fit into such a contract, Dimondstein said he believes the negotiations will provide a good opportunity to put the proposal before postal management.
"We think it's most appropriate that the needs of [postal customers] are talked about at the bargaining table," Dimondstein said. "And I can tell you this: I haven't met a single person -- though I don't run into Wall Street bankers often -- who think this is a bad idea."
Keith McCullough is nothing if not committed. “For better or worse, I’ll die here,” he says in reference to Hedgeye Risk Management, the independent investment research firm he founded in 2008. "Sink or swim, that’s what we have."
McCullough sees himself as fighting for the little guy over entrenched interests. He tends to describe his Stamford, Connecticut-based firm, which sells investment advice to institutions and individuals, in antagonistic terms: against traditional Wall Street research, against financial media, against pretty much every market pundit.
In turn, McCullough attracts antagonism. A former hedge fund manager, he is largely known in certain segments of the financial media for his social media feuds with certain segments of the financial media: CNBC’s Jim Cramer and Steve Liesman, their former colleague Ron Insana, blog ZeroHedge, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, hedge fund manager Doug Kass and prospective-customer-turned-critic Carmine Pirone, to name a few. (The fight with Pirone escalated to the point where McCullough sued him for defamation.)
Through it all, McCullough has been called a self-promoter, a fraud, a charlatan and the P.T. Barnum of finance. But he's convinced that he's right, and that his critics are some combination of dead wrong and jealous.
It's that conviction -- along with McCullough’s frustration with CNBC, where he used to be a frequent guest -- that led him to focus on building his own ways to “tell the truth first in the most efficient formats.”
Hedgeye now has an online video channel aimed at individual investors, and has hired producers away from CNBC to run it. An outgrowth of work the company has been doing since 2010, the videos' combination of mass-audience appeal and high-level sources, McCullough says, “is our ESPN’ing of finance.”
The Hedgeye CEO likens the company's approach to that of Fox football commentator and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, who explains strategy on camera for a mass audience, then in the privacy of the locker room assumes the role of confidant and mentor to current players.
“I think what I have is more that pro-to-pro, buy it or sell it” dialogue with institutional clients, McCullough told The Huffington Post.
One of Hedgeye's daily videos.
Polemics are part of the furniture at Hedgeye. Though much of the office looks like standard-issue Connecticut finance -- where young men in dress shirts and Vineyard Vines fleece vests sit at white desks and stare at multiple monitors -- the space also includes a Republican-themed conference room complete with club chairs, a cowhide ottoman, an antler chandelier, a silver-plated AK-47 table lamp and portraits of GOP leaders from Lincoln to Nixon. (There's a Democrat room as well.)
The tone of the firm's analysis is brash and conversational. The morning research note is probably alone in the industry in combining Bayesian analysis, hashtags like #globalslowing and #deflation and image macro memes. And Hedgeye is likely the only research firm that employs its own cartoonist.
A Hedgeye cartoon on falling U.S. government bond yields.
A Hedgeye chart showing U.S. utilities' performance against the S&P 500 in 2014.
Those who watch Hedgeye's video channel or pay to subscribe to its research won't hear the advice most retail investors need. They won't get someone calmly and cheaply telling them to trade less, ignore pretty much all short-term investing advice and just buy low-cost index funds. Instead, McCullough thinks it's his job to tell retail investors who trade frequently how to do it better, and to help institutions boost investment returns.
“We’ve branded ourselves as being Mac versus PC,” McCullough says. The PC in his analogy stands for both traditional Wall Street research, which he calls “conflicted, compromised and constrained,” and the financial media. Hedgeye is the Mac.
The main thing that attracts people to Hedgeye, though, is McCullough himself.
Jim, I am formally warning u - unblock or everything u say will be audited by Hedgeye Risk Mgt police @jimcramer
— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) June 14, 2013
@rinsana @CGasparino yeah, u were in the room - when I walked out, I said to the guys, Ronnie better have inside info b/c he's f'n clueless
— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) November 7, 2014
Talking with McCullough, it’s clear he enjoys being a Twitter pugilist.
“Yeah, I led Yale in points. But I also led Yale in penalty minutes,” he says, referencing the days when he was the captain of his college hockey team. “That’s who I am.” He’s energetic and direct, occasionally laughing boisterously at his own jokes and insights.
An equity hedge fund manager who has a very small ownership stake in Hedgeye described McCullough slightly differently.
“He’s bombastic, but it’s tactical. He’s doing it to get attention for Hedgeye, and hopefully that leads to more subscriptions,” said the investor, who asked to remain anonymous. Two other hedge funds and the seed fund 500 Startups also have small stakes in the company.
McCullough thinks Hedgeye's critics in the financial media overlook his ability to attract subscribers and talk to big players. That's because the critics usually come across Hedgeye through "our main marketing channel," Twitter, where they encounter McCullough at his most antagonistic.
"Sometimes when I’m on the ice punching you, I look a little more like the person that they want me to be, which is just another lying Wall Street scumbag, which is false,” he says, adding that investors who get to know him find out he's "self-effacing to a fault.”
Even if that's true, McCullough certainly isn't shy when he thinks he's right.
“Investigative research and investigative journalism, what’s the difference? We’re trying to get to the same point,” he says, comparing Hedgeye’s aggressive short calls against energy companies Kinder Morgan and Linn Energy to Ida Tarbell’s crusade against Standard Oil. Though Kinder Morgan stock is up about 16 percent since Hedgeye’s bearish call in September 2013, the bet against Linn has worked out better for McCullough. Linn is down about 70 percent since Hedgeye’s March 2013 short call on the back of an SEC investigation into the company’s accounting practices.
McCullough is also proud of his prescient call earlier in 2014 that bond yields would fall, a prediction that was out of the mainstream at the time.
He has had big misses too. In 2010, he predicted that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program could, over an undefined period of time, lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy. So far, of course, it has not. A close analysis of his 2013 recommendations showed that if you’d traded only on Hedgeye’s suggestions, you would have made just 0.3382 percent. In contrast, the S&P 500 was up 31 percent that year.
But McCullough says his buy and sell signals shouldn’t be used to create a portfolio.
The portfolio he currently recommends is 52 percent in cash and just 6 percent stocks, an asset allocation that goes beyond conservative and into territory a financial doomsday prepper would appreciate. But even that's not McCullough at his most extreme: In 2012, he recommended a 100 percent cash portfolio.
The Hedgeye CEO is unperturbed by criticism about the quality of his product or how he presents it. He believes he has always accurately represented Hedgeye. “We have never said we are a hedge fund,” he says in response to allegations that language in his real-time alert product implied he was making trades, rather than recommending them. “I’m basically the journalist of the buy-side,” he adds.
Independent research is a business which has always seemed almost on the verge of being about to break through, but it's never really been able to stick. McCullough thinks Hedgeye’s mix of single-stock research, macroeconomic analysis and daily alerts can be different. “There’s no top to this, in terms of our ability to grow content,” he says.
Hedgeye currently has 23 analysts and 57 employees in total. The company says revenues grew about 25 percent to more than $12 million last year. McCullough sees those dollars as a vindication of his views.
Hedgeye has hired an executive recruiting firm to help attract new hires, and McCullough says his company has no problem luring in talent. Perhaps, he says, that’s because “we’re in Stamford, so we’re kind of the only game in town.”
Though Stamford is teeming with hedge funds, McCullough doesn’t seem to think he has much competition in building the ESPN of finance -- a point he makes with a reference to hedge fund giant Citadel and college hockey.
“If the captain of Cornell, who’s elected by his teammates, was running money at Citadel and decided to open up Hedgeye II, that would be my first very relevant competition.”
The electronics retailer, which filed for bankruptcy protection last week, will sell up to 2,400 stores. Many of those stores are slated to stay open and be operated by Sprint. The rest of the stores are scheduled to shut down.
Store closures will start as soon as February 17, according to court documents. In total, 1,784 stores could potentially close by the end of March.
Below is RadioShack's "potential store closure list," which can be found on the company's website. The list is grouped by sale termination date (ie. when the stores are planning to close), with the first bunch of stores scheduled to close on February 17, the second group scheduled to close on February 28, and the third group scheduled to close on March 31.
According to The Wall Street Journal, liquidation sales have already begun. Head on over to the WSJ's site for a searchable map of which RadioShack locations are planning to close.
RadioShack did not immediately respond to The Huffington Post's request for comment.
San Francisco is still a renter’s worst nightmare, and it’s kicking 2015 off with yet more record-high price tags.
According to real estate listings site Zumper, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco jumped to $3,410 last month, up 0.6 percent from December. That’s about $400 more than the median one-bedroom in New York, which San Francisco surpassed in rent prices for the first time last September.
The median price of a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco also rose 0.9 percent over the last month, making it about $1,000 more expensive for two-bedrooms than New York.
It’s a slight but unwelcome uptick in a city where rent prices shot up 13.5 percent in 2014. San Francisco has become increasingly unaffordable for many of its long-time residents and low-wage workers as an influx of Silicon Valley wealth floods the city. Income inequality in San Francisco is so great that it’s on par with that of developing nations, the city’s Human Services Agency found last summer, and demand for affordable housing is so unmanageable in San Francisco that the city was just able to reopen its public housing waitlist last month for the first time in four years.
But the nation’s fastest rising rents, Zumper reports, may be in Denver. The city experienced a 7.4 percent increase in the median one-bedroom rent over the last month, bringing the median price to $1,300.
America's skyrocketing student loan debt may be keeping young people from moving out of their parents' homes.
There's "a clear positive correlation between a state’s student debt growth and the rate at which its twenty-five-year-olds live with their parents," according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which analyzed what factors are to blame for keeping millennials living at home. While housing costs and a tough job market may also be fueling the trend, the dramatic rise in student debt being shouldered by college graduates was most closely associated with the rise of young people living with their parents.
The report compared parental co-residence rates for 25-year-olds from 2002-2003 to 2012-2013. Here's a GIF that shows rates rising over the last decade across the 48 contiguous states (darker shades of blue indicate a higher rate of 25-year-olds living at home):
As you can see, the situation has become a lot more common over the last 10 years.
"In 2003, between 20 and 30 percent of twenty-five-year-olds lived with their parents (using our measure) in twenty-five of the forty-eight states," according to the New York Fed. "By 2013, all forty-eight states had parental co-residence rates of more than 30 percent."
In Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Vermont, the share of 25-year-olds living at home had grown by 20 percentage points over the 10 years.
One caveat of the data is that the New York Fed considered a person to be living with parents if he or she was "living with any individual who is at least fifteen years older." This older individual in some cases could be a grandparent, an aunt or uncle or some other older housemate, the report said.
The Fed compared three economic trends -- student debt, county unemployment rate and zip code housing price index -- to the overall growth in the percentage of 25-year-olds living with parents. As you can see in the following graphs, the nearly straight line showing the growth in student debt is most closely correlated with the line showing the share of young people living at home.
Looking more closely at the relationship between student debt and parental co-residence, the Fed researchers found that a $10,000 increase in student debt per graduate correlates with an increase of 2.9 percentage points in the rate of co-residence for 25-year-olds.
Forty million Americans now have student debt with an average balance of $29,000. And these numbers have climbed rapidly in recent years. Americans carry a total of $1.2 trillion in student debt -- up 84 percent since the recession.
The economy may be improving, but finances are still a stressful burden on Americans -- especially among young adults and parents, according to the American Psychological Association's new Stress in America survey.
The report highlights a growing health problem when it comes to well-being and financial security. Nearly three-quarters of participants reported feeling stressed about money at some point, with some respondents saying they went as far as sacrificing health care because of finances.
"When people are financially challenged, it makes sense their stress level could go up," Norman Anderson, Ph.D., the chief executive officer and executive vice president of the American Psychological Association said in a press conference Wednesday. "Many industries in the economy have shown improvement, but we still know many people aren't benefiting and are still concerned about economic well-being."
The 2015 report, which was conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of the APA, surveyed more than 3,000 American adults in August 2014. While the APA reports that stress is down overall, there are still some major health concerns. Below are some of the survey's biggest findings about financial anxiety, general stress and well-being:
Money is the No. 1 stressor overall, but particularly for millennials, those in Generation X and for parents.
Nearly 1 in 5 Americans say they have skipped or considered skipping going to the doctor in the last year when they needed heath care due to financial problems.
Those who reported experiencing extreme money concerns were also more likely to resort to unhealthy behaviors to manage their stress.
A third of Americans said a lack of money prevents them from living a healthier lifestyle.
Women are more stressed than men overall, with 51 percent reporting that stress has kept them awake at night, compared to only 32 percent of men.
When financial worries become too much of a barrier to a healthy lifestyle, experts recommend seeking social support to mitigate stress.
"You may not be able to change your financial situation but you may be able to better manage it," said Katherine Nordal, Ph.D., executive director for professional practice at the APA. "I think having a support system -- some people who believe in you -- gives you that extra emotional strength to be able to get through the day and do the things you need to do to try to improve your situation."
There's ample research to support her claim, not to mention that emotional support is beneficial for issues beyond financial concerns. Studies show a close-knit support system can improve your longevity, encourage you to be active and even lower your risk for heart disease.
"Emotional support helps with managing stress from a variety of sources," Anderson said. "It's one of the most generally positive things one can do for their health and emotional well-being."
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Bottles of Walmart-brand echinacea, an herb said to ward off colds, were found to contain no echinacea at all. GNC-brand bottles of St. John's wort, touted as a cure for depression, held rice, garlic and a tropical houseplant, but not a trace of the herb.
In fact, DNA testing on hundreds of bottles of store-brand herbal supplements sold as treatments for everything from memory loss to prostate trouble found that four out of five contained none of the herbs on the label. Instead, they were packed with cheap fillers such as wheat, rice, beans or houseplants.
Based on the testing commissioned by his office, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Tuesday he has sent letters to the four major store chains involved — GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreens — demanding that they immediately stop selling adulterated or mislabeled dietary supplements.
Schneiderman said the supplements pose serious risks. People who have allergies or are taking certain medications can suffer dangerous reactions from herbal concoctions that contain substances not listed on the label, he said.
"This investigation makes one thing abundantly clear: The old adage 'buyer beware' may be especially true for consumers of herbal supplements," the attorney general said.
The herbal supplement industry criticized the method used to analyze the samples and raised questions about the reliability of the findings.
Walmart's vice president of Health & Wellness, Carmen Bauza, said testing by Walmart suppliers hasn't revealed any issues with the relevant products, but the company will comply with the attorney general's request to stop selling them in New York.
"We take this matter very seriously and will be conducting side-by-side analysis because we are 100 percent committed to providing our customers safe products," Bauza said.
Walgreen pledged to cooperate with the attorney general, who asked the store chains for detailed information on production and quality control.
"We take these issues very seriously and as a precautionary measure, we are in the process of removing these products from our shelves as we review this matter further," Walgreen spokesman James Graham said.
GNC said it, too, will cooperate, but spokeswoman Laura Brophy said: "We stand by the quality, purity and potency of all ingredients listed on the labels of our private-label products."
Target said it can't comment without reviewing the full report.
Nutritionist David Schardt of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said the tests show that the supplement industry is in urgent need of reform, and until that happens, consumers should stop wasting their money.
A 2013 Canadian government study estimated there are 65,000 dietary supplements on the market, consumed by more than 150 million Americans. The nonprofit American Botanical Council estimated 2013 sales of herbal supplements in the U.S. at $6 billion.
The Food and Drug Administration requires companies to verify their products are safe and properly labeled. But supplements are exempt from the FDA's strict approval process for prescription drugs.
Schneiderman said tests found no echinacea or any other plant material in bottles of Walmart's Spring Valley Echinacea. He said no ginseng was found in 20 tests of GNC's Herbal Plus Ginseng, which is taken to boost energy.
Other supplements tested included garlic, which is said to boost immunity and prevent heart disease; ginkgo biloba, often touted as a memory-booster; and saw palmetto, promoted as a prostate treatment.
DNA tests found such substances as rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant, wild carrot and unidentified non-plant material — none of which were mentioned on the label.
The store chain with the poorest showing was Walmart, where only 4 percent of the products tested showed DNA from the plants listed on the labels.
The investigation looked at six herbal supplements sold at stores across the state. Testing was performed by an expert in DNA technology, James Schulte II of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.
The DNA tests were done on three to four samples of each supplement purchased. Each sample was tested five times. Overall, 390 tests involving 78 samples were conducted.
Steve Mister, president and CEO of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a dietary supplement trade group, criticized the testing procedure and accused Schneiderman of engaging in a "self-serving publicity stunt under the guise of protecting public health."
"Processing during manufacturing of botanical supplements can remove or damage DNA," Mister said. As a result, he said, DNA analysis "may be the wrong test for these kinds of products."
Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association, said identification of an herb through DNA testing must be confirmed through other means, such as chromatography or microscopy.
But Arthur Grollman, a physician and pharmacology professor at Stony Brook University, called the study "a well-controlled, scientifically based documentation of the outrageous degree of adulteration in the herbal supplement industry."
For the not-so-sports-obsessed people out there, Super Bowl XLIX is as much about the newest buzz-worthy commercials as it is about the Patriots and the Seahawks.
But for those of you who use those breaks from the game to, you know, eat wings or deal with non-football-related responsibilities, we've compiled the 2015 Super Bowl commercials you need to see.
Some of the most memorable spots took on a darker tone, with Nationwide's "Make Safe Happen" not exactly receiving the warmest reception from audiences.
Happy commercial-viewing.
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