By Jackie Jones
Bad lending practices by banks are increasingly eating up disposable income, not only hurting individual consumers, but also affecting the nation’s overall economic health by diverting funds that could be spent on consumer products to servicing debt.

By Doug Miller
Federal officials say the Obama administration is moving to aggressively combat discriminatory lending practices that have long undermined the ability of black and Latino Americans to become homeowners.

By Doug Miller
Maybe, just maybe, America’s retail bankers really don’t get it. Despite being hauled before Congress, derided by the president and sinking like a bar of gold bullion in an increasingly choppy sea of public opinion, maybe they’re just incapable at this point of seeing the balance sheet for what it really is.

By Karen Hunter
Out of the tragedy and devastation in the aftermath of the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti this week, there is opportunity. There is a chance to make things right.

By Doug Miller
After a recent meeting with U.S. Senate majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, John W. Boyd, Jr., the head of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA) said roughly 80,000 new claims have been filed under a re-energized suit to compensate black farmers for discrimination suffered at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but funds earmarked to settle the claims apparently have been misplaced in the year-end budget shuffle.

By Jackie Jones
The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), heralded as welfare reform during the Clinton administration, comes up before Congress next year for reauthorization.

Whether the program, which was purportedly intended to assist the needy while gradually moving them off assistance and into the workplace, will continue as presently constructed or morph into something else remains to be seen.

By C. Nicole Mason
The Administration is mulling over the possibility of another stimulus bill that would focus on job creation. The likely companion to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 comes at time when the national unemployment rate has hit a record high of 10.2 percent.

By Deborah Rudacille
The Montgomery County Conservation Corps combines job training with intensive counseling and character-building. But it is the promise of earning a GED that gets most corps members in the door.

By TaRessa Stovall
Experts call it “food insecurity … meaning that the food intake is reduced and … disrupted at times … because the household lacked money and other resources for food.” And not surprisingly, it’s on the rise.

By Makani Themba Nixon
A recent Cornell University study finds that half of all US children and 90 percent of black children will eat food paid for by food stamps at some point in their childhoods. You, like the good folk at Cornell, may think this is dire and even shocking news. And for good reason, as the co-authors of the study write in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that food stamp use is an important indicator of poverty and food insecurity.