It wasn’t the intention of the White House to only pass the veterans hiring initiative; it was folded into a broader bill that offered tax credits for all hires. But the practical effect of offering a big sum of money to a company to hire a veteran is that a veteran will get privileged in hiring decisions over a non-veteran, when a position needs to be filled. I can’t see how this would boost employment in any way, just favor one type of applicant over another. That’s decent news for veterans, but bad news for anyone who didn’t go into the military.

Visiting an Occupation, even a relatively small one like ours, is a little surreal. The energy is so heated. There’s so much passion, energy, even anger. Then you step away and realize the world continues as normal. Despite the global nature of this movement, people everywhere are living life; Re-entry is jarring when one steps from any temporary encampment to the bright lights of a grocery store.

Democrats are planning to attach a veteran’s hiring preference, one of the original remaining pieces of the Obama Jobs Bill, to a House-passed bill that repeals a law requiring 3 percent withholding from federal contractors. These people aren’t serious.

Bunch of defeatist isolationists who don’t believe in American exceptionalism.

I could hardly keep up with all the reports on housing that came out over the past 24 hours. So let me try to summarize a couple: • A recently unsealed lawsuit shows that banks cheated military veterans by illegally adding attorney’s fees to their refinancing loans. Illegal fee additions have a rich history, especially [...]

The House GOP leadership has written a memo to their caucus picking and choosing what they would be willing to support in the American Jobs Act. The numbers come out to support for 1/44th of the overall price tag, about 2% of the total bill.

As you may know, the AJA is comprised of about 57% tax cuts and 43% spending initiatives. So in the main, House Republican leaders tossed out the spending and embraced a few of the tax cuts. They also rejected the tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for the bill.

A short documentary film, “Incident in New Baghdad,” has been earning critical praise and awards as it goes from film festival to film festival. The short tells the story of Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, a soldier who was at the scene of the “Collateral Murder” incident uncovered by WikiLeaks over a year ago. McCord rescued children, who were injured in the 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed two Reuters journalists along with a “good samaritan” who tried to rescue the journalists that had been fired upon.

Let us consider who else might be looking for jobs today. Today’s jobs report, the President reminded us, showed the private sector added over 150,000 new jobs, but that was offset by state and local governments laying off another 30,000 government employees. Those public sector layoffs have been occurring for months, and it looks like that layoff average will continue for another year or two.

Rather than dwelling on those who have given their lives in wars in the US (I am fortunate that for all the members of my family who have served in the military over the years, I think only my Great Uncle Will died while serving during war time and his death during the Spanish-American War was from disease), I want to discuss the folks who always seem to get lost, the veterans who return from war breathing but damaged in soul.

There is an ongoing Justice Department investigation into these wrongful military foreclosures, and JPMorgan is implicated in that probe, along with Saxon Mortgage, a division of Morgan Stanley. There are criminal penalties attached to violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and legislation from Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) would double those fines.

All of this underlines the extreme measures JPMorgan is taking to rectify the situation with wrongful foreclosures of active duty military. And it also underlines the fact that next to nothing is being done with all the wrongful foreclosures on everyone BUT active duty military.