Help The Middle ClassNews and Information For The Heart Of America
Fannie Mae Executives Face Probe. Must Explain Risky Mortage Decisions (Yahoo! News)
Two former Fannie Mae executives said Friday that competitive pressures, combined with the political goal of increasing homeownership, were to blame for the company’s decision to back riskier mortgages that fueled the housing bubble.
Daniel Mudd, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, and Robert Levin, the company’s former chief business officer, testified before a panel examining the [...]
Obama Still Plans On ‘Redistribution Of Wealth’ To Pay For Deficit (Los Angeles Times)
Reporting from Washington
With enactment of his signature healthcare law, President Obama has also made good on another major campaign promise: to ease the tax burden on middle-class Americans and pay for his domestic agenda by raising taxes on the wealthy. And for upper-income taxpayers, the tab for healthcare is just the beginning.
Families earning more than [...]
Obama’s Nuclear Policy, Something For The ‘Left & Right’ (Los Angeles Times)
President Obama and his senior aides introduced a new nuclear weapons policy Tuesday with the promise that America would no longer build new nuclear weapons.
“No new testing, no new warheads,” Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pledged in a Pentagon briefing.
Yet officials said later that the policy could allow [...]
7 New Taxes Laws You Need To Know About (Bankrate.com)
Facing a struggling economy, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., turned to the tax code to help get it, and us consumers, moving again. Most of the tax changes were part of the stimulus package enacted last February, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. There are seven new tax laws you should know, and some [...]
Why The Unemployment Rate Will Continue To Be High For Sometime (U.S. News)
Why the Unemployment Rate Refuses to Budge – US News and World Report.
Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say (New York Times)
With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.
Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined [...]
USA/Gallop Poll: More Now Blame Obama For Economic Woes (USA Today)
Seven months before the midterm elections, Americans seem disaffected about nearly everything political.
A majority disapprove of both political parties, their leaders and most members of Congress, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.
Attitudes are reminiscent of those in 1994 and 2006, when control of Congress switched from one party to the other.
The favorable rating for the Democratic [...]
CNN/OPINION: U.S.-Mexico ‘War On Drugs’ A Failure (CNN)
Editor’s note: Charles Bowden is the author of 11 books, including “Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family”; “Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future”; “Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing” and his latest, “Murder City,” about Ciudad Juarez. He is a contributing editor of Esquire and writes for newspapers and magazines such [...]
Unemployment Holds Steady At 9.7%. Temp. Hirings Up March Job Figures (Politico)
President Barack Obama got the first unequivocally good news on the nation’s employment picture Friday, as new government figures showed the nation gained 162,000 jobs in the month of March.
The unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent. That’s the first time the nation has gained, rather than lost, in jobs since late 2007, with the [...]
New Poll Shows People Believe America Is Going In The ‘Wrong Direction’ (MSNBC)
The health-care debate has generated intense levels of frustration among the bill’s opponents, and those who say they are outright angry almost universally believe that the country is going in the wrong direction — some say toward an America they no longer recognize.
Of the 26 percent of people who described themselves as “angry” about the [...]
