Media

It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And forFelix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood.

The job market has been tough for older workers, but did you ever imagine that you wouldn’t land a job because of your credit report?

It’s possible.

As I wrote about in my Forbes blog, Bad Credit Can Cost You a Job, if you’re looking to change careers, find a new job, get promoted, or just hang onto the one you have, a messy credit report can trip you up.

With public attention focused on the Voting Rights Act, many have overlooked a second critical voting case that will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.   

Last night, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a searing 300-page report on JP Morgan Chase’s London Whale episode. The bank lost at least $6.2 billion through trading credit derivatives in a business unit tasked with reducing firm-wide risk, the Chief Investment Office.

When Barack Obama won a second term in the White House in November 2012, many observers concluded that new voting ID laws hadn't had much effect on turnout. After all, the election had swung in Democrats’ favor, and young and minority voters comprised a larger share of the electorate than four years earlier. So identification requirements aren’t the threat to voting rights that many feared, right?

New York City is often ahead of the national game in areas ranging from finance to art and culture, but unfortunately, according a report for the Coalition for the Homeless, it's also leading a national rise in homelessness. The number of people sleeping each night in shelters rose to 50,000 in 2012 the highest in nearly 30 years, and a 19% jump from the previous year. Twenty one thousand of them are children. That's a 22% jump for the children's numbers from 2011. 

What's all the fuss down there in Washington? Reading the news, you might think there's a huge ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans over taxes and the size of government. 

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Mainstream congressional leaders in both parties agree that taxes should be kept near historic lows while government is steadily downsized. 

Consider the new budget plan just released by Senator Patty Murray -- the supposed great Democratic alternative to Paul Ryan's plan. 

Retails sales surged by a solid 1.1 percent last month, and that's being hailed as great news. But great news for who, exactly? 

Given the weak labor market, with millions still unemployed, it is unlikely that higher retail sales and profits will translate into higher wages for retail workers, who make up a growing slice of America's workforce. Instead, those gains are more likely to be reflected in bigger bonuses for executives and higher share values.

More data from the 2012 election is in, and it’s tough to deny that the health of democracy and safety of your voting rights vary widely depending on where you live.

That finding comes through clearly in a new report from Nonprofit VOTE, a nonpartisan group that encourages nonprofits to engage voters. The report parses the latest data on the 2012 elections, and it should be required reading for the legion of state lawmakers considering changes to election laws this year.