African Americans have been pummeled by the recent financial crisis, including facing the most adverse consequences of credit card debt and higher interest rates, according to a recently released study by the NAACP and Demos, a U.S.-based research and policy center. Findings from “The Challenge of Credit Card Debt for the African-American Middle Class,” indicate that Black Americans suffered disproportionate economic losses since the Great Recession, weathering the highest jobless rates, steepest declines in income and deepest cuts into their assets and investments.

While the week before Christmas is a time when most Americans begin to pay less attention to the outside world in order to focus on friends and family, 1.3 million people will find that nearly impossible. That’s the number of the long-term unemployed—individuals who’ve been jobless for more than six and a half months—-whose unemployment benefits will expire just days after Christmas. The long-term unemployed are disproportionately people of color.

Detroit is a city that is very familiar with poverty, especially in its low-income and minority communities. Among other financial ills, the city is suffering from a rapidly shrinking tax base as people flee the city to go to other cities where more job opportunities are present. But Detroit has an opportunity to turn its situation around by embracing technology and reinventing itself as the “Technology Hub of the Midwest.” Detroit needs to position itself as the place where technology meets the future economy. 

“Before the revolution,” said the 28-year-old, “I worked so hard that I begged for one day off a month and the company always said no. Now I get to do three jobs a month and I have to beg them to pick me.” It’s a phrase you hear often in Egypt. “Before the revolution,” locals say, things were bad but manageable. Before the revolution, everyone hated the same regime. After the revolution, hope has turned to fragmentation and fear. And tourism – once a mainstay of the economy – has slowed to a trickle. 

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions in our national gun control debate. The issue is not whether we should have gun control laws in this country — or what they should be.The issue, really, is why so many white middle-American men view any effort to regulate firearms as an assault on their very identity – and thus fight sane and rational laws as if their lives and liberties were at stake.

Thousands of Marylanders, mostly African-American, are denied housing based on their source of income, but efforts to mitigate such discrimination are finally making headway, advocates say. For 20 years, advocates have been waging a battle to pass legislation, the Maryland Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) Act, to stop source-of-income discrimination across the state.

This past spring Summit Series co-founders Elliot Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeff Rosenthal, and Jeremy Schwartz made headlines for buying Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah. The largest ski resort in the U.S. came with a price tag of $ 40 million dollars. What made the purchase especially newsworthy though was the fact that the company, then only five years old, was run by four entrepreneurs all under 30. To some, the thought of a young start-up buying a mountain in Utah might seem daring and even somewhat audacious, but this kind of thinking epitomizes the Summit Series. 

A report is out that the Internal Revenue Service of the US is, after all, running after Manny Pacquiao for unpaid taxes to the tune of $18.3 million (over P770 million) covering the period 2006 to 2010. TMZ, a popular TV show in the US covering the lives and saga of Hollywood celebrities and political personalities, said it has obtained documents to prove that Pacquiao’s camp failed to settle Pacquiao’s tax obligations in the US despite lucrative purses he got from fighting as a marquee fighter and a top pay per view (PPV) attraction during the period covered by the IRS levy.

The dream standard, which Obamacare does not aspire to meet, is a system that provides any care requested from any provider without worrisome costs.  Such care would include eyeglasses, hearing aids, dental work and unlimited physical and mental therapy, all conveniently available at sites where cost was never a barrier. There is no existing insurance plan in America that provides such a broad menu of services.  While these services may solve real problems, insurance typically limits or excludes them.

Economic development funds created under the policy, called tax increment financing (TIF), had an unspent balance of $1.7 billion at the end of last year. In the wake of record school closures, teacher layoffs, and other city service cuts, Grassroots Collaborative thinks some of that money should go back into city and school budgets, an option that Mayor Rahm Emanuel publicly dismissed this summer. “Increasingly, Chicago is a tale of two cities,” says Patel. “One for those who have wealth and resources, and another for those who are struggling with poverty.”