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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.”
The domestic employment outlook remains just as frustrating as close to six million Spaniards are unemployed, with a startling 56.1 percent youth unemployment rate. The youth unemployment rate in Spain is twice what it is in the rest of the Eurozone, and with such little prospects in their home country, most are choosing to leave. In the first few years of the Spanish crisis most of the unemployed had chosen to remain in Spain and relied on two-year redundancy packages to survive.
When the Movimento Negro Unificado (United Black Movement) formed in Brazil in 1979, they turned to the anti-apartheid struggle and to Mandela, in particular, for a vision for change and a symbol of empowerment. They looked at the apartheid structure; its separation of the races; the mandatory passes that blacks carried that showed all aspects of their lives; the separation of place and space in social, economic and political spheres, and they concluded that Brazil was an apartheid state.
The center is holding. Despite the enormous stresses of responding to a deep, painful recession while awkwardly implementing a long-sought national health insurance program, America’s politics are moving back toward the middle, fueling frustrated responses from fringe elements who see opportunities for fundamental change evaporating. The economy is coming back. Threats of a government shutdown – or even default – seem to be receding.