The poor: Targeted for extraction by lenders and governments

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

http://tinyurl.com/d4bl59n

Suburban protesters converge on NATO summit

Protesters throughout the suburbs have been speaking out against NATO’s current war policy – especially concerning the Middle East.

Cameron Halas, 26, a history major at Harper College in Palatine, is an Iraq War veteran. He joined the Army in 2003 right after high school and served four years, one of them in Iraq.

Halas said he decided during his tour the military strategy was unethical and immoral. He went from being an enthusiastic supporter of the war effort after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to an anti-war protester.

http://tinyurl.com/76s59n8

Nurses’ pre-NATO rally expected to draw thousands

Thousands of anti-NATO demonstrators are expected to converge at a downtown plaza Friday for a rally that promises to be a prelude to a much larger march Sunday, when world leaders begin two days of talks. Meanwhile, many office buildings will be shuttered after workers were told to stay home amid warnings about heightened security, snarled transportation and the possibility of unruly protests.

National Nurses United officials have said they expect about 2,000 nurses to attend Friday’s rally, where they will call for a “Robin Hood” tax on financial institutions’ transactions to offset cuts in social services, education and health care. But city officials have said the rally likely will draw more than 5,000 because of a performance by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, an activist who has played at many Occupy events.

The union had scheduled the rally to coincide with the G-8 economic summit, which originally was to be held in Chicago but was moved to Camp David, Md. Midwest Director Jan Rodolfo said the nurses decided to go forward with the rally in the hope that their message would reach a worldwide audience.

http://tinyurl.com/6wqvcdu

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/18/12” »

Occupy Women: Will Feminism’s Fourth Wave Be a Swell or a Ripple?

What challenges will a fourth wave of feminism face? What lessons have been learned?

Is a fourth wave of feminism rising from an ocean of unrest? The First Feminist General Assembly taking place in Washington Square Park in New York City the evening of Thursday, May 17, may mark a historical turning point. Emerging out of the Occupy Movement, the event brings together a cross-section of the hundreds of thousands of women already mobilized from a broad progressive spectrum since September 17.

On May Day, women filed into the streets by thousands around the world. Indeed, seen and unseen, woman has been on the front lines throughout the Arab Spring, the uprisings in Russia, in Spain and in London most recently, and within the Occupy movement since September 2011. She’s held countless signs in the marches and protests, walked miles, strategized for hours, written hundreds of emails, facilitated many meetings, moderated many discussions. Now, women are launching the 1st Feminist General Assembly.

http://tinyurl.com/7zfavdo

Pharmacists In Kansas Can Now Deny Women Access To Birth Control 

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed a bill yesterday that will allow pharmacists in the state to refuse to fill a prescription they think could be used to induce abortion. But since the “conscience” measure says they cannot be required to provide a drug or devise that they think “may result in the termination of a pregnancy” – but does not define which drug in particular – the law’s opponents say it could allow a pharmacist to interfere with a woman’s health care by refusing to distribute birth control or emergency contraception.

Women who already have difficulty obtaining contraception may face additional hurdles, according to Julie Burkhart, founder of an abortion-rights group in Wichita, Kansas:

Burkhart said the law could create a hardship for women in small towns with a sole pharmacist who may refuse to fill certain prescriptions. In larger cities, women will have to make sure they go to a cooperative pharmacist, she added.

http://tinyurl.com/7c45rn8

Austerity Everywhere: Fiscal Drags Coming Out of Great Recession 

The idea that this is just a problem limited to Europe, without consequences for the United States, has been rendered inoperative by simple math. Jared Bernstein took a look at budget deficits in the US year over year and finds that we’re implementing a significant amount of austerity of our own, despite the fragile economic state:
…what matters in terms of foot-on-the-accelerator is the change in the budget deficit, and the fact is we’ve been letting up right as the economy appears to have a slowed a bit. Add state fiscal drag and the growing unemployment insurance cuts and you get the picture.
On the first point, the figure compares the budget deficit so far this fiscal year with the one from the same months of last FY. Last year’s was $150 billion more negative. Annualized, that’s enough to drive the unemployment rate a half-point higher than it would otherwise be.
Then there are all the state job losses, which are also keeping the unemployment rate elevated, as I show here.
Finally, as my CBPP colleague and UI expert Hannah Shaw points out, over 400,000 long-term unemployed persons in 25 high-unemployment states have lost UI benefits so far this year as the extended benefits program is ending in states across the land.

http://tinyurl.com/bqk3xdd

Children’s Mental Health At Risk From Chronic Financial Instability

Drew McWilliams, a clinician and the Chief Operating Officer at Morrison Child and Family Services in Portland, Ore., suggests that amid the underwater mortgages, chronic unemployment and other fallout of the recent recession, a less obvious but equally worrying phenomenon has emerged: the troubled minds of children.

Since the financial collapse of 2008, McWilliams said his clinic has seen an increasing number of children suffering anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the 6,000 children that the center treats through in- and out-patient programs, McWilliams said many are trying to cope with the stress borne of persistent financial insecurity.

“Parents are struggling with their own issues and that spills over to their kids,” he said.

http://tinyurl.com/cot7fq5

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/17/12” »

Breaking the Taboo on Challenging Capitalism in America

Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.

http://tinyurl.com/chqgegh

Greece on brink of collapse as runs on its banks break out

[Greek president] Papoulias said he had been warned by the central bank and finance ministry that the country faced “the risk of a collapse of the banking system if withdrawals of deposits from banks continue due to the insecurity of the citizens generated by the political situation”.

http://tinyurl.com/d2bnsy8

Report: Global Biodiversity Down 30 Percent in 40 Years

The world’s biodiversity is down 30 percent since the 1970s, according to a new report, with tropical species taking the biggest hit. And if humanity continues as it has been, the picture could get bleaker.

Humanity is outstripping the Earth’s resources by 50 percent – essentially using the resources of one and a half Earths every year, according to the 2012 Living Planet Report, produced by conservation agency the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

http://tinyurl.com/83am2lk

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/16/12” »