NLRB, the independent agency of the U.S. government that protects the rights of American workers to organize and to “prevent and remedy unfair labor practices” hasn’t had a fully staffed five-member board for a decade now. (A quorum of three members is required for the panel to issue decisions in labor disputes.) Republicans keep blocking President Obama’s appointments. And last week, a second an appeals court said the president can’t make recess appointments to the board either.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont described Republican opposition as part of a long-term strategy by Republicans to make it harder on the middle class.

“The minority is doing everything they can in this case to make it impossible for working people who are on the job to have their rights protected,” Sanders said at May 16 confirmation hearing. “So that tomorrow, if some fella out there, some woman tries to organize a union and gets fired against the law, that worker will have no recourse.”

Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, says a vital NLRB is critical to 80 million American workers.

“Not just [for] union workers, but [also for] workers who speak out in places like Starbucks or McDonald’s; fast food workers,” Cohen told The Ed Show. “If they speak out and are fired or intimidated in any way, the only place they have to go is the NLRB. That’s really what`s at stake here.”

Cohen says the only way to fix the NLRB is fillibuster reform where Majority Leader Harry Reid would get 50 votes and get a full complement of five members on the board.

Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, agrees.

“Because Republicans are apparently going to block confirmation of the nominees, the board will not have a quorum to function,” Greenhouse told The Ed Show. “So the workers are kind of left without a real remedy.”

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Wednesday approved Obama’s five nominees to the NLRB ((full disclosure: one of the nominees is related to a staffer on The Ed Show), splitting along party lines. The confirmation process now moves to the full Senate.

“I will be very distraught if we do not seat them because of another filibuster,” say Sanders.

It’s not that women aren’t capable, Jones said in April at a University of Virginia panel discussion in front of students, “they are very capable,” but babies are a “killer” to a trader’s focus.

Jones posited that having children hurts the success of women just as traumatic emotional events, like divorce, affect male traders.

“As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it,” Jones said, recalling two women who worked with him in the late 1970s. “They both got married,” he said, “and then they both had—which in my mind is as big of a killer as divorce is—they both had children.”

The billionaire who tops the Forbes 400 list at number 108 said men aren’t affected by their children in this way.

“Every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience,” he said, “which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby.”

A video of a panel discussion obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“The emotional distraction that comes from divorce is so overwhelming,” he said. “You can just automatically subtract 10- to 20% from any manager if he is going through a divorce.”

Jones responded to the newspaper, saying “my off-the-cuff remarks at the University of Virginia were with regard to global macro traders, who are on-call 24/7 and of whom there are likely only a few thousand successful practitioners in the world today. Macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance.”

The Morning Joe panel discussed the comments with a panel of powerful women. Watch below.

The city’s famed Fleet Week, scheduled to run May 23-30 this year, was canceled due to federal budget cuts. As sequestration put the military (and domestic) budget on the chopping block, the pricey tradition—which typically costs the Navy $7 to $10 million—got axed. That means no Navy ships gracing the Hudson River, and no swarms of sailors and Marines in Times Square.

But while the Navy is tightening its belt, New York City’s restaurants and bars are getting hit in the gut. Fleet Week brings in $20 million in annual revenue to the city, according to New York’s Economic Development Corporation. That sum includes hotel and restaurant spending, plus tax revenue.

U.S. Navy sailors from the USS Philippine Sea, in town for Fleet Week, greet a well wisher on the boardwalk at Coney Island, New York May 29, 2010. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Some businesses are hoping to ride the faux-Fleet Week wave through Memorial Day, honoring servicemen in other ways. The museum that is the USS Intrepid—a World War II-era aircraft carrier docked off the west side of Manhattan—will kick off its annual summer-long “Salute to Heroes” as usual, along with its traditional Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, sans sailors.

Last year, more than 6,000 officers, sailors, and crew members arrived in New York City to celebrate the 29-year-old tradition.

“Hope to see you next year!” reads Fleet Week’s website. Here’s hoping.

This year the magazine wrote that it chose women that go “beyond the traditional taxonomy of the power elite.”

The influential women hail from seven categories or power bases: billionaires, business, lifestyle, media, nonprofits and NGOs, politics, and technology. Forbes applied money, media presence, and impact to determine the rank within each category.

Several U.S. leaders made the annual list, including first lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Chairman of the NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment Group Bonnie Hammer, author J.K. Rowling, New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust, designer Tory Burch, singer Beyonce Knowles, and comedian Ellen DeGeneres were also recognized as powerful women.

The winners were selected from a preliminary group of more than 250 candidates from around the world.

Are you making things happen like these women? Join the conversation and tweet us your brilliant ideas on today’s topics to #AfternoonMoJoe.

• The median CEO pay in 2012 was $9.7 million.
• That’s up 6.5% from the previous year.
• The highest paid CEO is Les Moonves from CBS with $60.3 million.
• The median pay for female CEOs was actually higher than it was for men with $11.2 million.
• Men averaged $9.6 million.
• Health care CEOs are the highest paid at $11.1 million.

In a speech at the historically black, all-male college, the president had some tough love for the 500 or so men seated in front of him.

First, he heaped praise on the class of 2013. “Your generation is uniquely poised for success, unlike any generation of African-Americans that came before it,” he said.

But then he said they—and others in the black community—needed to keep striving for more and used himself as an example.

“We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” the president said. “And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself.  Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.”

This message of empowerment, delivered directly to the black community, is not a new theme for this president; it’s just the latest iteration of the effort.

First Lady Michelle Obama speaks at the commencement ceremony for Bowie State University on May 17.

In 2008, while first campaigning for the presidency, then-Sen. Obama said this during a Father’s Day speech at a church in Chicago: “There’s a reason why our families are in disrepair and some of it has to do with a tragic history, but we can’t keep on using that as an excuse.”

It’s clear that Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have realized that, even as the president has to face tough questions about mismanagement at the Internal Revenue Service and resources at diplomatic facilities around the world, they can still use their recognition to encourage blacks to help themselves.

And, in the last week, it seemed like a coordinated effort by the first couple to push this message. On Friday, the first lady got into the act while speaking at another historically black university, Bowie State University in Maryland.

“We need to once again fight to educate ourselves and our children like our lives depend on it,” she said, “because they do.”

And she paraphrased this line her husband used back in 2004 when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention: “Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”

Even if Washington can’t get anything done, it seems both the president and the first lady are determined—with just three years to go until they leave the White House—not only to inspire, but to inform.  By deliberately choosing to speak at historically black universities, they force a light to be shined on these places that represent some of the best of the African-American community.

President Obama usually includes specific references to the stories of graduates in the audience during commencement speeches and Sunday’s was no different.

“When Leland Shelton was 4-years-old, social services took him away from his mama, put him in the care of his grandparents,” Obama said. “By age 14, he was in the foster care system. Three years after that, Leland enrolled in Morehouse. And today he is graduating Phi Beta Kappa on his way to Harvard Law School.”

The words are important, but what was captured on video was a teary Leland Shelton surrounded by his capped-and-gowned Morehouse brothers cheering him on.

The importance of cameras capturing African-Americans celebrating education and beaming that around the world is not lost on this First Couple, and it’s one of the goals of these speeches. The other goal: to make sure everybody, but particularly African-Americans, keep striving for excellence and helping each other succeed in a world that is still full of challenges.

Shawna Thomas is a producer with NBC News in Washington. See her on-air report above. This article originally appeared on NBC News’ First Read blog.

In the United States, we’ve seen notable growth since the recession. We are very sluggishly moving back from the lows of the financial crisis. Even that modest progress stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, which is, by and large, still suffering.

The major flaw of our recovery has not been the pace, although certainly it could have been much faster. Instead, the major flaw is distribution. The economy is growing, but corporations and the richest Americans are capturing the lion’s share of the proceeds from that growth. You’ve likely heard a lot about the one percent–in the first year of the recovery, they captured 93% of the income gains—but the story of America’s corporations is even more troubling.

We’ve seen systemic inequality in our country growing for decades, even before the latest financial crisis. Between 1979 and 2007, income for the top 1% grew by nearly 300%, while it grew by just 18% for the bottom quintile of earners. This is, of course, worrisome in itself, and not just as an economic problem. Our founders feared the political consequences of yawning inequality and class conflict, of allowing wealth to aggregate in the hands of the few. Referring to people who own property and those who don’t, James Madison wrote in 1787:

The most difficult of all political arrangements is that of so adjusting the claims of the two classes as to give security to each, and to promote the welfare of all.

We are seeing the consequences of systemic, growing inequality play out now in our politics. Inequality has been slowly corroding the basic project of collective governance for three decades. A more recent and perhaps even more troubling problem, though, is the aggregated prosperity of American corporations.

Neoliberal economic theorists will tell you that keeping corporate taxes low is good for the economy. The more money corporations have, they say, the more they will be able to reinvest in the economy, make new things, create new jobs and grow opportunity broadly for all. But that’s not what’s happening right now. Since the early 2000s, corporations are gobbling more cash than ever before, and rather than reinvesting it, they’re just sitting on it.

No one knows quite why. There are a number of plausible theories. Paul Krugman told Up in February that it may be as simple as this: corporations are “making so much money, they don’t know what to do with it.” At the end of 2012, for example, Apple had accumulated nearly $140 billion in cash, and was doing absolutely nothing with it.

In a consumption-based economy,  this trend is untenable. When people make money, they buy things; demand for products goes up, so companies make more products, hire more people, and so forth. That is the basic model upon which our economy is founded. But right now it is broken. A cog somewhere is not turning, but no one knows which cog it is.

In the meantime, corporate profits continue to soar. The higher corporate profits soar and the more cash corporations hoard, the less they reinvest in the economy. Workers, meanwhile, make less and less. The divergence between employee compensation and corporate profits, as illustrated in the chart above, is at an all-time high.

The economic and political consequences of this divergence cannot be overstated. One simple first step would simply be to try to re-capture some of those aggregated profits by raising taxes on corporations, and by taxing off-shore profits. Right now, we have a peculiar system that taxes the profits corporations make here on American soil, but allows them to pay only foreign taxes on profits they make overseas. Which brings us back to the story of Apple.

The moneyed class and their patrons in Washington are arguing that we can fix the corporate tax problem not by taxing off-shore profits, but by allowing corporations to repatriate those profits back to the U.S. without having to pay American taxes. They argue that bringing that money back to the U.S. will allow corporations to reinvest it in the economy. We may lose some potential tax revenue, they say, but we’d make up for it in all the new jobs and economic activity we would get.

Except, of course, the experience of the last decade or so tells us otherwise.

Apple argues that its off-shore profits should only be subject to off-shore taxes. As if those off-shore profits had nothing to do with America. Of course, they do. Apple may sell products across the world, but the company is based in America for a reason. Apple enjoys, indeed exploits, countless legal and economic benefits by operating in America, benefits Apple wouldn’t enjoy anywhere else: basic legal protections, a judiciary that safeguards and enforces the rule of law, an intellectual property regime that affords generous—in fact, overly broad—protections for new ideas and innovations, a world-class system of higher education, a (somewhat) open immigration policy, reliable security, an advanced infrastructure for business development, and countless other benefits  from operating in a functional, developed society with a genuine social contract.

As Elizabeth Warren famously put it, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In the same way, there is no company in this country that got rich on its own. Corporations like Apple are hampering the economy and corroding our political system by hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. They owe the American people back payments.

Sal Gentile is a senior producer for Up w/ Steve Kornacki.

Sixth-grade teacher Rhonda Crosswhite was among those who stayed behind. She hid in a bathroom stall with six of the children and draped herself across them as the tornado struck. Students screamed and begged for her not to die. She shouted reassurances back and prayed. By the time the tornado had passed, it had completely shredded the school building around them. There were children who didn’t survive. But Crosswhite and the children she protected all lived.

Crosswhite’s story is already one of the best-known examples of teacher heroism to emerge from Monday night’s devastation in Moore, Okla. There are others: educators at Plaza Towers and Briarwood Elementary pulled children out of the rubble, shielded them from harm, or just comforted them in the face of unimaginable destruction. Last December, several teachers and a principal at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., died along with students when a gunman entered the school and opened fire. Other teachers hid their students in classrooms and closets, helping them to be quiet and safe until the shooting stopped.

“You don’t go into teaching for the money,” Oklahoma Education Association president Linda Hampton told MSNBC Tuesday. ”You go into teaching because you care about the kids. You spend more of your waking hours as a teacher with those children than anyone does, and they become your children. And just like any parent, you’re going to protect them at all costs.”

Yet the role of protector during the hours in which children are in their care sometimes seems to have been lost in the public debate about education.

Rarely recognized as champions of their students, public educators are more often targets of small-government conservatives and education reformers. Teachers across the country have watched their profession chipped away by school closures, mass layoffs, budget cuts, and other measures. Pressure to deliver top test scores has led to backlashes in some areas of the country. And cheating scandals, in which some educators altered scores to help advance their schools or protect themselves, harmed the reputations of teachers nationwide just as many were struggling to keep their jobs.

Since 2009, local and state-level budget cuts have cost public educators more than 300,000 jobs. Tens of thousands more could disappear as a result of the federal government’s across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester.

In Chicago, teachers are currently fighting what could be the largest round of school closures ever to occur in a single American school district with 54 schools on the line. In Michigan, more than 50 districts face budget deficits and the specter of a state-imposed Emergency Manager who could order further cuts. In 2011, teachers in Wisconsin lost the right to collective bargaining. And across the country, educators are being squeezed by high-stakes testing, concessionary contract bargaining, and charter schools which sap their student populations. These policies are usually implemented in the name of fiscal prudence and school reform.

“The biggest trend that has impacted [teachers] has been the cuts to education funding, and that translates into a whole lot of different things,” including mass layoffs, larger class sizes and limited resources, said National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel.

An equally significant issue for teachers has been years of education policy focused on test results. Teacher assessment tied to test scores, educators argue, undercuts traditional methods that emphasized a greater connection between students and their teachers.

“We see everything being standardized,” said Xian Barrett, a public school teacher and community activist in Chicago.  The metrics being foisted upon teachers and students have little to do with a real education, Barrett said.

In Chicago, the city government has been locked in a prolonged struggle with labor and community activists over the future of public education; the Board of Education may soon close dozens of schools deemed “underutilized.” For the city school system, which supports the closures, this is a simple math problem. There are no longer enough students in the city to justify keeping that many school buildings open, so the student population should be “consolidated.”

“The changes we are making will allow us to focus our resources on our children and their education, and I look forward to parents and community members continuing to play a significant role in moving our work forward,” said the head of the school system, Barbara Byrd-Bennett.

What Byrd-Bennett ignores, says Barrett, is that at-risk students need to be able to build stable bonds with educators. When students are uprooted from their older schools, it “has devastating effects on young people, and their future is very much in doubt.”

Van Roekel was quick to stress that he does see value in testing and evaluations. However, he emphasized that those tests should not be imposed from above without any reference to the concerns of local educators.

“Nobody knows better what’s happening in the classroom than the people who work there, the educators, so we need to trust them,” he said. One-size-fits-all evaluations and high-stakes testing disregards the differences between different populations of students.

“I remember watching my two little boys when they were young, going to school, and thinking: Gosh, I’m giving the adults in that site the two most important things in my life,” said Van Roekel. Any parent who sends a child to school, he said, gives teachers “the most precious thing in their life, their children, and we ought to respect and honor that profession.”

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, resplendent in her ceremonial cap and gown, explored on Sunday’s show just how tough the financial situation is presently for outgoing students–and will be going forward.

The average amount of college debt for 70% of the class of 2013 tops $35,200, according to a new study. That should come as no surprise since the total amount of student debt in the United States has hit $1 trillion dollars.

Dorian Warren, an associate professor at Columbia University, says this creates a whole new system for people riddled with debt. “We are literally trapping in a caste system in some ways, today’s students.” When asked what students should do to combat rising college-related debt Warren said, “I think what we need to convince graduates is that they need to organize.”

The rising level of debt has led to increased levels of default. In the first two months of 2013 alone, “banks wrote of $3 billion in student loan debt.” According to the new report “Graduating Inequality” by Suzanne Mettler of the Century Foundation, those who default on their loans varies by school. The top defaulters are those who attend for-profit schools with a whopping 23% of them missing payments.

While it is the contractual duty of the borrower to pay back the loan at times it’s not possible. “I think the most important thing we gotta tell people is it ain’t the borrowers faults,” said One Wisconsin Now executive director Scot Ross. “Student loan debt is a clear and present danger to the American economy.”

How much of a danger can student loan debt be to the economy? In 2004, student loan debt accounted for 3.1% of consumer debt. That number now stands at 8.8%.  According to Warren, “We’re putting a whole new generation of folks in lifetime debt before they even get started.”

While African-American students borrow at a rate of 81%, they are hardly alone. Latino students are at 67%, white students are at 65% and Asian students at 67%.

When it comes to jobs, the good news for college graduates is that they have half the unemployment rate of high school students. The bad news is that the number of college graduates that were working minimum wage jobs was 284,000 in 2012.

Auburn Seminary’s Valarie Kaur said college graduates are finding ways around this. “We are finding ways to be entrepreneurial in spaces outside of institutions of power,” she said.

When it comes to the job market Wake Forest University career development executive Andy Chan thinks schools can better prepare students. “The number one thing that I think that most schools have not really kept up with is the fact that their faculty need to actually get connected to the employers. They actually have to know what’s going on in the outside world.”

See more of the Sunday discussion below.

On the same day that the Good Jobs Nation campaign was officially launched, Demos published a report finding that federal contracts directly subsidize over half a million low-wage jobs, defined as jobs which pay below $12 per hour. Once Medicare spending, infrastructure funds, and similar programs were included, the federal government was found to subsidize nearly 2 million such jobs.

“I can’t even afford to get an apartment or raise my daughter properly because of the money that I’m making,” said Jonathan Ross, one of the D.C. strikers. Ross works at the Constitution Café, a privately managed restaurant in the Smithsonian Institute’s American History Museum. He told MSNBC that after four years of being employed at the restaurant, he still makes only $9.71 an hour.

“For the four years I’ve been here, I’ve had a 10-cent raise, a 15-cent raise, and another 10-cent raise,” he said. While he doesn’t receive federal assistance in the form of food stamps or subsidized housing, he said he struggles to provide for his 15-year-old daughter, over whom he has sole custody.

To lift up their wages, Ross and his fellow strikers are asking that Congress and President Obama impose new requirements on federal contractors. One proposal for action comes from the Demos report, which suggests “[a]n executive order requiring federal agencies to take all possible steps to raise workplace standards and ensure that companies comply with applicable labor and employment laws.”

According to the report, the largest number of federally subsidized low-wage jobs are concentrated in the health care industry: Government funds support nearly 800,000 low-wage jobs in hospitals and nursing homes, and close to 400,000 such jobs in home health care. Construction is next up with over 80,000 federally supported low-wage workers, and retail accounts for 60,000 low-wage, federally funded jobs.

A release from Good Jobs Now claimed support for their campaign from House Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Keith Ellison, D-Minn. The two are expected to hold an “ad hoc hearing to investigate the federal government’s role in promoting low-wage jobs” Tuesday afternoon along with fellow House Democrat members Eleanor Holmes Norton of D.C. and minority whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

The federal contractor strike follows in the wake of several high-profile and historically anomalous labor actions within the low-wage fast food and retail industries.  Well over 1,000 fast food workers across the country have struck in the past few months, most recently in Milwaukee.

“I read these stories, I’m like damn, this sounds like me,” said Ross of the fast food strikes. “They’re in the same predicament that I’m in. There are people outside standing up, so I’m thinking if they’re standing up, why can’t I?”