Our guest blogger is Joanna Venator, an Economic Policy Intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A recent MSNBC article cited a poll from Monster.com that claims 8 percent of Americans frequently call in sick to enjoy the summer weather, 11 percent do so occasionally, and 30 percent have done so once or twice in their whole careers. The article builds these unrepresentative statistics into the claim that summer hooky is a widespread phenomenon affecting the productivity of businesses. But is that really the case?

The MSNBC article paints a picture of employees sloughing off work to instead work on their tans, but most employees who have access to sick days do not actually use them. Worker with access to five paid sick days on average use only 2.4 of those days. Half of workers with access to paid sick days do not even use any of them. So MSNBC’s portrayal of workers abusing the system is a gross exaggeration at best.

In fact, data from the National Partnership for Women and Families show that employees are more likely to be the victims of unfair sick leave policies than to abuse the sick days they do receive. Some 40 million workers do not have the ability to call out of work even while sick, never mind for a day at the beach. Four in ten private sector workers do not have access a single paid sick day, and the ratio reaches 80 percent for low-wage workers. One in five workers report losing their job or being threatened with losing their job for taking time off while sick.

By perpetuating this myth of rampant misuse of sick days, the article misleads readers and pulls attention away from the very real problems facing American workers. Workers without access to paid sick days are forced to choose between their livelihood and their health. Often, they choose to go into work sick, which is a loss for the employee, the productivity of the firm, and the health of the sick person’s coworkers and/or customers. The media’s focus should be on the millions of people who can’t take leave when they really need it, not on the non-existent ‘problem’ of summertime sick day abuse.

A new report from National Journal shows a huge pay disparity between men and women on Capitol Hill — a disparity that is far larger in Republican offices than it is in Democratic ones.

The real-dollar disparity, on average, between male and female Republicans working in the House of Representatives and the Senate is about $10,000. National Journal offers the key findings from the report:

• For all House staff, women made on average $5,862.56 less annually than men.
• Female Republican House staff made on average $10,093.09 less annually than male Republican House staff.
• For all Senate staff, women made $7,277.69 less annually on average than male staff.
• Female Republican Senate staff made on average $9,805.85 less annually than male Republican Senate staff.

Off the bat, it’s easy to conclude that women are paid less than men for doing the same job. But it’s actually more complicated than that: Republican women don’t make as much, on average, because they tend to hold lower-paying positions than the men in their field.

Men and women are paid roughly the same amount in government. That means, particularly for Republicans, there are more women in administrative roles and fewer female Legislative Directors or Chiefs of Staff, for example:

And it’s not as though there is a lack of experienced women: Women are earning more graduate and bachelors’ degrees than men, make up nearly half the workforce, and are a majority of DC residents.

But women in Washington politics will be the first to tell you that discrimination exists. Fifty one percent of women polled for the National Journal report believe they have been discriminated against based on their gender, including being passed over for promotions, and 73 percent said men have more opportunities in DC.

Today’s report that Mitt Romney remained at the head of Bain Capital for as many as three years longer than his campaign claimed calls into question the Romney’s past defense of Bain Capital’s job-killing business practices.

Critics have highlighted a number of businesses that were bought by Bain Capital and then reorganized to maximize profit for the investment firm, with several falling into bankruptcy and vanishing entirely. In several instances however, Mitt Romney defended his candidacy by pointing out that he left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympics, before those companies began their collapse. With a new timeline that shows Romney was the CEO and principle owner of Bain Capital as late as 2003, that defense now sounds much more questionable. Here are four companies that folded or downsized in the three year period after Romney claimed to have left Bain Capital:

– GS Industries – 750 Jobs Lost: In a series of ads earlier this year, the Obama campaign hit Romney over Bain Capital’s purchase of GS Industries, a steel company that closed its Kansas City plant and eliminated 750 jobs in February 2001. The Romney campaign responded by claiming that Romney had left Bain Capital well before 2001, and was therefore not tied to the collapse of the GS. Bain Capital and its executives, including Mitt Romney, earned at least $12 million on the initial investment.

– KB Toys – Up to 3,500 Jobs Lost: During the primary season, Newt Gingrich’s 30 minute documentary on Romney and Bain Capital spent a significant amount of time focused on KB Toys, a retail chain bought by Bain in 2000. At the time, the Romney campaign, with an assist from fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, pointed to the calendar. As these new filings show, Romney was still very much at Bain Capital when they purchased KB Toys, and profited mightily when the company took out crippling loans to pay Bain Capital an $83 million dividend.

– Dade International – 1,700 Jobs Lost: Months after Romney claims to have left the company, Bain Capital received a $242 million bounty for its stake in the medical supply company. Romney profited substantially from the deal. In 2002, Dade International filed for bankruptcy, costing more than 1,700 people their jobs. At the time, Romney was the 100 percent owner of Bain Capital, the new documents show.

–DDi Corporation – 275 Jobs Lost: In 1996, the circuit board manufacturer was bought by a group of investors, with Bain Capital in the lead, for more than $40 million. By December 1999, DDi closed a Colorado plant and fired 275 workers. Bain Capital, with Romney still listed as Chairman and CEO, then proceeded to take DDi public, raising $170 million during the company’s IPO in 2000. Over the next few months, Bain began selling off its stock, raising almost $100 million, more than doubling its investment. The stock plummeted shortly thereafter.

In all, as many as 6,000 jobs were lost at these four companies during the period between when the Romney campaign alleges he retired, and when the Globe’s report suggests he actually stepped down.

Our guest blogger is Daniel Pereira, Managing Editor at Brafton Inc.

Revelations of corruption, rate-fixing, regulatory collusion and outright fraud continue to spread across the global banking industry. But still, the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal hasn’t grabbed the same amount of attention as the robo-signing debacle that effectively locked down foreclosures actions in the U.S. or the JPMorgan Chase “London Whale” losses, which could reach $9 billion or more.

Yet the LIBOR case, for all the complexity and financial subtlety behind it, affects a breadth of products and sums of money that dwarf those previous episodes.

In effect, LIBOR (the London InterBank Offered Rate) is the baseline pulse of a significant chunk of the global economy — it sets the basic interest rate for products in the United Kingdom, Europe, much of Asia and even some U.S. assets. Private banks (like Barclays or JPMorganChase) report to the British Banker’s Association the rates they believe they could get borrowing from other banks. The estimates are collated by the BBA — a private group — and published each day, setting the basic interest rate from which all others are calculated.

So rigging the LIBOR is akin to a doctor lying about a patient’s blood pressure to make his treatment look more effective. AccountingDegree.net has a cute but damning infographic laying it all out.

The U.S. has a similar but distinct system for the federal funds rate, which is more tightly managed by the Federal Reserve. Imagine, however, that the Fed was colluding with the banks to tweak that number up or down. The effect would be massive, although not necessarily catastrophic in the short-term. It would, however, affect the rates consumers pay on pretty much every kind of debt, from mortgages to student loans to credit cards.

When the banks gamed LIBOR up, consumer credit became more expensive. And while the instances when they manipulated LIBOR down may have helped some consumers, it hurt those who had investments based on LIBOR, as NPR explained:

When the rate was going down during the crisis, consumers might have gotten better deals on their loans. But that doesn’t mean we should celebrate. A lot of cities and pension funds and transportation systems had money in LIBOR based investments. They would have made a lot less money if LIBOR was manipulated down. The City of Baltimore, for instance, is suing and claims to have lost millions of dollars in the manipulation.

Halah Touryalai at Forbes added, “if you have a 401(k) or a pension fund or bonds benchmarked to Libor you are getting paid less” when banks push LIBOR downwards.

Most worrying, as economist Simon Johnson pointed out, is the implication that rate-fixing wasn’t just a hobby at Barclay’s. It was a pandemic across the industry. That’s not one doctor lying about his patient’s pressure to make his tactics look better. That’s an entire hospital administration colluding to lie about all their patients’ conditions in order to make more money and avoid scrutiny.

Today, the House Agriculture Committee approved the final version of the 2012 farm bill, complete with its draconian cuts for families struggling to put food on the table. The proposed bill cuts $35 billion from the federal food and nutrition budget, about $16.5 billion of which come from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps.

The cuts work by eliminating “categorical eligibility,” which provides assistance to families whose assets or income put them slightly above the technical line for SNAP eligibility. Repealing categorical eligibility means that between two and three million Americans will lose access to food stamps and roughly 280,000 children will drop out of their automatic enrollment in the free lunch program at school. So the House bill has anti-hunger advocates up in arms:

“With the economy being in such bad shape, depriving that many people of nutritional assistance is going to have a devastating effect,” said Eric Olsen, [Feeding Hunger]’s senior vice president of government relations and public policy.

One needs simply to look to the story of Dorothy Moon, a stay-at-home mother in Texas who depends on food stamps to feed her six children while her male partner looks for new work, to understand Olsen’s point. Of course, some in the GOP want to ignore “sob stories” about the plight of people who struggle to put food on the table.

SNAP assistance saved five million American from poverty in 2010 and halved the number of children in poverty in 2011.

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney repeatedly lies about policy matters. He falsely claims that President Obama is adding regulations at a “staggering rate,” making “ the economy worse” and is constantly apologizing for America. He even claims that his tax plan is not a tax cut for the rich, when it is just that.

But according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents uncovered by the Boston Globe, TPM, and Mother Jones, Romney’s misrepresentations extend beyond partisan policy disagreements. He has lied about his main qualification for seeking the presidency: his own business record:

1) Mitt Romney left Bain Capital later than he claims. Securities and Exchange Commission documents show that Romney remained Bain’s chairman and president, owning 100 percent of Bain as late as 2002, the Boston Globe reports. Romney has contended he left in February 1999 in order to fend off attacks that he is responsible for Bain layoffs or outsourcing.

2) Mitt Romney said he created 100,000 jobs at Bain. But he downgraded that number to “thousands” after even Sarah Palin doubted its veracity. His campaign now admits the number is completely bogus. Romney’s tally did not even begin to include the thousands of layoffs at companies in which Bain invested.

3) Mitt Romney said his business investments aren’t responsible for outsourcing jobs. Romney’s campaign hoped to have the Washington Post retract its story on his outsourcing record. The paper, however, refused, after the Romney camp could provide no credible evidence to contradict the Post’s reporting.

When the United States Olympic Team enters the Games’ opening ceremony at Olympic Stadium in London, it will be outfitted in official uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren. And though the 530 men and women who make up the team are the best athletes the country has to offer, the same cannot be said for the uniforms they’ll be wearing.

That’s because Ralph Lauren manufactured each piece of the uniform, from the unique hat to the designer jacket to the shoes, in China:

The classic American style was crafted by designer Ralph Lauren. But just how American is it? [...]

Every item in those uniforms? Made overseas.

Watch the ABC News report:

The U.S. Olympic Committee didn’t exactly have an explanation for why its uniforms were made in China. “The U.S. Olympic team is privately funded and we’re grateful for the support of our sponsors,” the committee told ABC News. “We’re proud of our partnership with Ralph Lauren, an iconic American company.”

Outsourcing practices like those used by companies like Ralph Lauren have resulted in the loss of 2.8 million jobs to China since 2001, and the apparel and accessories and textile industries were among the hardest hit. China is notorious for its lack of labor standards — its workers often toil for long hours for low pay in horrendous working conditions. But even with American workers struggling to regain a foothold after millions of jobs were lost in the Great Recession, Ralph Lauren and the U.S. Olympic Team think its more important to make more money than make their products in the United States.