Overall, women get paid 77 cents to a man’s dollar, but we’ve pointed out before that the pay gap is worse for some. And the professions that wind up paying women less can be surprising — the financial and lobbying industries, for example, are among the worst offenders.

Unfortunately, even when women make it to the top of large companies, they still face massive pay gaps. Women CEOs make only 69 percent of what their male counterparts make. This chart from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones points out how that number compares to other professions:

It’s particularly disheartening that a job to which many aspire, and which is known as a rain-making career, is so unbalanced. There’s no need to cry over the amount of money CEOs are earning– it’s still egregiously more than everyone else– but in all cases, no matter the profession, there should still be pay equity.

An Atlanta-area family facing foreclosure was evicted early Wednesday morning as sheriff’s deputies attempted to avoid activists affiliated with the Occupy Our Homes movement. Christine Frazer received a foreclosure notice on her home from One Corporation in October 2011 and has been fighting it in federal court ever since.

Protesters set up camp outside her home in January, but around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, only one protester was present. At that point, between 25 and 30 sheriff’s deputies descended “from every direction” on the home, a group spokesperson said, and evicted the family. Atlanta’s WSB-TV reports:

Around 3 a.m., deputies turned out in large numbers at the home on Wellhaun Road. Later, members of Occupy Atlanta showed up to rally against the eviction. [...]

Her lawyer, Joshua Davis, said the eviction shouldn’t have happened because of the pending litigation.

“They treated my client like she was some type of drug dealer, some type of criminal, came in as if they were executing a warrant to find drugs. It makes no sense,” Davis said.

According to Occupy Our Homes, four generations of Frazer’s family — including her 83-year-old mother and four-year-old grandson — were evicted in the middle of the night. Sheriff’s deputies then took her dogs to the pound and blocked off the street, refusing to allow anyone to secure the family’s possessions that remained in the house. Frazier was able to stay with a friend but was “completely distressed” throughout the day Wednesday, according to a spokesperson for Occupy Our Homes. Protesters were able to gather and salvage her belongings.

Protesters went to the DeKalb County executive’s office yesterday and were told the sheriff’s department was carrying out a judge’s orders, the spokesperson said, but they received no further information. Occupiers are planning to meet with Frazier this afternoon to discuss how they plan to move forward.

Republicans have spent the last month blocking the reauthorization of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which helps companies access capital to help boost their exports to other countries, under the guise that it represents government intrusion into free markets. Despite conservative claims, the Ex-Im Bank isn’t financed by taxpayers (federal dollars are only used to guarantee its loans), but that hasn’t stopped the GOP from blocking Democratic efforts to reauthorize the bank for another four years while boosting its lending capacity from $100 billion to $140 billion.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) instead proposed a one-year, $113-billion reauthorization earlier this year — and today, Cantor and Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) are reportedly nearing a compromise that would reauthorize the bank, though details of the plan aren’t yet clear, The Hill reports:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are close to striking a deal on reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, sources said Thursday.

Although the deal was not finalized as of Thursday, a House vote is considered likely next week.

Cantor has been among the GOP’s leaders in the fight against Ex-Im, pushing an agenda favored by Delta Airlines, with which he is a “close friend and supporter.” Reauthorization of Ex-Im has in the past been largely uncontroversial, and the Obama administration made lifting the loan limit a priority to help small businesses boost their exports and create jobs (Ex-Im also helps large businesses like Boeing, but it is especially crucial for small businesses that are trying to access financing in a tough economy). Cantor has also suggested reaching agreements with major trading partners to end export programs like Ex-Im, though as the Center for American Progress’ Sabina Dewan notes, that plan is hardly feasible.

Though details of the compromise aren’t yet clear, falling well short of the $140 billion target so Cantor can throw Delta another bone would, as Dewan has noted, jeopardizes Ex-Im’s expanded efforts to help America’s small businesses.

Federal regulators in charge of writing the Volcker Rule, which would ban federally-insured financial institutions from risky proprietary trading, are moving at a faster pace than expected and could have the rule finalized by September.

Wall Street banks have been lobbying to weaken the rule since it was originally proposed by its namesake, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and now that it is just months away from finalization, their efforts are getting stronger. The chief executives of six major Wall Street banks, led by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, traveled to Washington yesterday to personally lobby the Federal Reserve on multiple issues — weakening the Volcker Rule chief among them — Bloomberg reports:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon led Wall Street bosses in a closed-door meeting to personally lobby the Federal Reserve about softening proposed reforms that might crimp their profits.

The contingent, which included Bank of America Corp.’s Brian T. Moynihan, 52, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd C. Blankfein, 57, pressed the Fed on rules they said would overstate trading risks and harm financial markets, the central bank said yesterday in a statement. They also discussed what they see as flaws in Fed stress tests designed to gauge the strength of the nation’s largest lenders.

Wall Street banks, with the help of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R), were able to water down the Volcker Rule even before it became law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Since the law passed, they have pushed to make it even weaker, falsely arguing that it poses a major risk to the American economy. The banks have been so successful weakening the rule that Volcker himself was disappointed in its outcome.

Not all bankers oppose the rule. Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs trader who publicly resigned from the firm, unknowingly made the case for the rule in an editorial in the New York Times, and a former Merrill Lynch banker recently said the rule was “necessary to correct a mistake that poses a danger to our economy.”

Compensation for chief executives at American companies grew 15 percent in 2011 after a 28 percent rise in 2010, part of a larger trend that has seen CEO pay skyrocket over the last three decades. Workers, on the other hand, have been left behind.

Since 1978, CEO pay at American firms has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker pay over the same time period, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute:

From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, a rise substantially greater than stock market growth and the painfully slow 5.7 percent growth in worker compensation over the same period.

In 1978, CEOs took home 26.5 times more than the average worker. They now make roughly 206 times more than workers, EPI found. The pay isn’t always tied to the performance of their businesses — as ThinkProgress has noted, CEOs at companies like Bank of America often pocket huge pay increases even as the company’s stock price plummets and jobs are cut.

Workers’ wages aren’t tied to productivity either. Despite substantial gains in productivity since the 1970s, worker pay has remained flat. According to Labor Department data cited by the Huffington Post, inflation-adjusted wages fell 2 percent in 2011.

As a result, American income inequality has skyrocketed, growing worse than it is in countries like Pakistan and Ivory Coast. Wealth inequality is worse than it was even in Ancient Rome. And, as pay skyrockets and tax rates fall for the richest Americans, the rising inequality has left the bottom 95 percent of Americans saddled with more debt than ever before.