The Progressive
By Orson Aguilar

I wish all Americans could have seen firsthand the amazing crowd at the Occupy Oakland general strike Nov. 2. Contrary to media stereotypes, this was America — young, old, professional, working-class, black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, lawyers, Ph.D.s, people who barely made it through high school, you name it — and they came for a purpose.

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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

Issues that affect our lives don’t happen in a vacuum. Everything affects everything else, and there’s no area where that’s truer than health and access to care. So I’m going to take a slight detour from the financial and economic issues I write about most of the time to say a bit about the Affordable Care Act, which marks a historic expansion of access to health care.

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La Opinion
By Alexis Dennis Rosa María Martínez

salud

La implementación de la reforma de salud federal—conocida oficialmente como la protección al paciente y Ley de atención Económica (ACA)— está en marcha. Esto representa una gran oportunidad para las comunidades minoritarias, que desproporcionadamente no tienen seguro, pero sólo si lo hacemos bien.

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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

As public anger at Wall Street greed boils over in the form of protests spreading across the nation, the Federal Reserve Board is poised to allow creation of yet another “too big to fail” bank. Worse, that bank has a record of precisely the sort of predatory behavior that has Americans so upset.

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Precinct Reporter Group
By Alexis Dennis and Carla Saporta

The implementation of federal health care reform – officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA for short – is underway. This represents a huge opportunity for communities of color, who are disproportionately uninsured – but only if we get it right.

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The Kansas City Star
By Preeti Vissa

A big part of the American dream is in serious danger – danger fueled by misinformation campaigns that may well lead to terrible policies.

For a long time, owning your own home has been a key part of that dream: One little corner of the world that’s yours, a shelter that not only protects your family from the wind and rain, but also from financial storms. That little bundle of equity can make emergencies manageable and a graceful retirement feasible. And there is plenty of evidence that homeownership helps build stable communities.

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SFGate

Bravo to Zoe Lofgren and her fellow California members of Congress for pushing for long-overdue foreclosure relief (“California Democrats rip Obama on crisis,” Oct. 13).

New statistics show foreclosures on the rise again, and the economy simply will not get off the ground as long as the weight of all these underwater mortgages keeps the housing market dead in the water.

It’s important to emphasize that this problem simply cannot be fixed without principal reduction for underwater mortgages. An effective principal reduction program would help families keep their homes, stabilize the foundering housing market and put cash in the pockets of millions of Americans through reduced mortgage payments, money they could spend on other goods and services, helping to jump-start the economy.

This is a no-brainer. It’s time.

Bruce Mirken, the Greenlining Institute, Berkeley

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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

As I wrote last time, a favorite right-wing talking point in recent years has been the claim that federal efforts to promote lending and investment in underserved communities, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, caused the subprime mortgage collapse and our ongoing recession. Not only is that nonsense, there’s a crucial bit of history that the Rush Limbaughs and Neil Cavutos of this world leave out:

For decades the federal government actively promoted redlining and racial segregation in housing. The CRA is, among many things, an attempt to balance the ugly results of policies that boosted white suburbs at the expense of urban neighborhoods populated by people of color.

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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

There may be no subject that has generated more nonsense from politicians and pundits than the subprime mortgage crisis and housing market collapse. Recently, a new book landed on my desk that cuts through the bull and obliterates a pile of widely-propagated falsehoods.
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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

Anyone wondering why Congress has approval ratings that hover somewhere between cockroaches and the bubonic plague might want to check out the Sept. 6 Senate Banking Committee hearing on the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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