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Fine print can keep customers from taking companies to court

Contracts with credit card companies, banks, cellphone providers and others often include terms preventing customers from taking a company to court, alone or as part of a class with other customers. The contracts instead require customers to pursue any claims through another legal avenue, called arbitration, where a third-party assesses and decides how to resolve the dispute. The clauses […]

Traders are putting money on Maine’s elections. They think legal pot and a higher minimum wage will pass.

Supporters of legalizing marijuana and raising Maine’s minimum wage have raised at least $5 million seeking to influence the election, with lots of money riding on the outcomes. But there’s another group of people with a stake in how Maine voters decide the two questions: prediction traders. And they think both questions are set to […]

Welcome to my nightmare: Unraveling the mess of donors to Maine’s referendum campaigns

It was a waking nightmare Halloween weekend. At the grisly hour of midnight Friday, ballot question groups and others filed terrifyingly dark election finance reports. I KNOW.  The reports really were dark — as dark as they’d ever been. Nonprofit “dark money” groups who are not required to disclose their donors continued to give most of the cash coming into the registered campaigns. And […]

Most 2014 business tax filers in Maine made less than $200,000

Question 2 would affect plenty of high earners who run small businesses, which has been a concern of opposition groups. But most small business owners earn too little to get hit with the tax hike, according to the latest federal tax data for Maine. Business owners can “pass-through” business income to be taxed on their personal […]

If you live in these Maine towns, you might want to snag more candy

Many thousands of children around the state will be thinking of one thing tonight: candy. How many children? By a census estimate, it’s about 143,567 to be exact. That’s the number of children estimated at ages 5 to 14 last year (of course, the number of likely Halloween candy hunters is higher). For a spooky Halloween experiment of our own, we looked at those […]