Commentary By Julianne Malveaux October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the proliferation of pink ribbons is about to start. Predatory capitalists will make breast cancer their cause, producing pink t-shirts, pocketbooks, everything. It’s a mixed blessing, this awareness, because too many will make this both a marketing and a profit-making opportunity, while others will ...

By Julianne Malveaux The US House of Representatives passed the Securing America’s Fair Elections (SAFE) Act in June by a nearly totally partisan vote of 225-184 in late June. Only one Republican voted for legislation that would mandate paper ballots, increase election security, and create safeguards to prevent foreign interference in our elections. Senate Majority ...

By Charlene Crowell A second major disclosure of major consumer data breach was announced on July 29 by Capital One Bank. That same day, the FBI arrested a suspect was charged with stealing the personal information on March 22 and 23. The apparent focus of the financial theft was credit card applications filed with the ...

By Charlene Crowell The struggle to eliminate high-cost predatory debt is a daunting one – particularly for Black America. As access to affordable credit, loans and mortgages seem ever elusive across the country, lying in wait are countless predatory lenders eager to fill the personal finance void. But in recent days, two unrelated developments awarded ...

By Charlene Crowell Anyone who works for a living knows that their money goes a lot quicker than the time it takes to earn it. And for low-to-moderate income workers, the costs of everyday living creep higher and quicker than pay raises or cost-of-living adjustments. These and other kitchen table finance concerns are part of ...

By Charlene Crowell Although Memorial Day is considered by many civilians as the unofficial start of summer, the true intent of the holiday is to annually honor those who lost their lives fighting for our country.  The men and women who wear or have worn this nation’s uniform in military service across wars and generations ...

By Charlene Crowell The annual season of college commencements have a unique way of bringing together multiple generations of families in celebration. For the 135th graduating class of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, commencement marked another event that was as unexpected as it was generous. Robert F. Smith, the event’s speaker who is also Chairman and CEO of ...

By Julianne Malveaux Sixty-five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled, in the Brown v. Board of Education case, that the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) doctrine of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. That ruling ended legal segregation in public facilities, but it did not necessarily accomplish its goals in terms of school desegregation. Indeed, Richard Rothstein, ...

By Julianne Malveaux The April unemployment rate, at 3.6 percent, is at its lowest rate since December 1969. Payroll employment increased by more than 250,000, outperforming expectations and reversing the disappointing job creation numbers of last month. First quarter growth was reported at 3.2 percent, a robust figure that exceeds estimates, earlier this year, that ...

By Julianne Malveaux It is unfathomable that the federal minimum wage has not been increased in more than a decade, since 2007. That the wage, at $7.25 per hour, has remained flat through recession and recovery, through extremely high unemployment rates and much lower ones. Republicans have absolutely refused to consider minimum wage increases, and ...