Media

At the very least, argues a recent report from Demos, the American government owes employees on its payroll a livable wage. Demos, a research and policy center focused on economic stability, defines low-wage work as “a job paying $12 an hour or less, equivalent to an annual income of about $24,000 for a full-time worker. Nationwide, a family of four trying to subsist on $24,000 a year hovers near the poverty level.

Silicon Valley, better known for big innovation, and big houses, is also falling prey to equally enormous economic inequality. There's been a 20% rise in homelessness in the last two years, and while jobs for the tech-savvy are growing faster than they have in a decade, so is food stamp usage. About 11% of the area's population falls below the federal poverty line. 

The Guardian has a compelling and distressing profile of the harsh reality of climate change that many already face. The story profiles a village on the west coast of Alaska called Newtok that is surrounded on three sides by the Ninglick River.

The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive.

With Jamie Dimon under growing fire from shareholders of JP Morgan Chase, one possibility is that he may relinquish his role as chairman of the board but remain as CEO. That raises an interesting question: Why does Dimon hold both jobs to begin with? 

A JP Morgan Chase shareholder insurrection threatens to split the roles of Chairman and CEO, stripping Jamie Dimon of the chairmanship. People with reputations for wisdom and good judgment like Rupert Murdoch and Hank Paulson have rushed to defend the dapper and aggressive Dimon claiming that he is unworthy of such cruel and unusual punishment.

Mr. Panesso was rejected for jobs at several more big national retail chains. But J. Crew, he said, was the only business to send him an adverse action letter. Did that mean the others rejected his application for other reasons? It’s impossible to know for sure.

A study released earlier this month from the public policy group Demos states that through various forms of government funding in the private sector, nearly two million people are making $12 an hour or less. The number of workers at Wal-Mart and McDonald's together at $12 an hour or less is currently around 1.5 million, according to the report.

"The sheer number of those workers making so little is surprising," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos and co-author of the study.

Regardless of the rationale behind these credit checks, this practice can be discriminatory, say Daniel Garodnick and Amy Traub in the New York Daily News. For instance, "African-American and Latino households are disproportionately likely to report poor credit, a finding some attribute to the nat