Protesters urge MBTA to avoid cuts, fare hikes

Public transit riders and their advocates pleaded with the MBTA’s board of directors on Wednesday to avoid or minimize fare hikes and service cuts that officials of the agency have said are inevitable.
. . .

Members of Occupy Boston, which held a 10-week vigil in Dewey Square last year, stood at the outset of the meeting and demanded public transportation remain “accessible to all of the 99 percent.” Another large group held a noisy protest against the fare hikes and service changes outside the packed hearing room.

At one point during the meeting, a group calling itself the “Fast Five” and dressed in superhero costumes asked the board to consider `saving’ the T by adopting alternative money-saving solutions such as renegotiating bank debt, tapping the state’s unused snow removal funds and transferring control of Boston Harbor ferries and Silver Line service to the Massachusetts Port Authority

http://tinyurl.com/7ho3ezv

UMass Boston occupiers move their encampment outdoors

After camping out in their campus center for 50 days, the Occupy UMass Boston University of Massachusetts Boston movement has shifted outside.

Wednesday marked the third day the group has claimed a spot on the school’s plaza in a military tent that was used as a kitchen during Occupy Boston’s encampment downtown. They city cleared out the downtown encampment in December.

“We’ve been talking with the administration and decided to take the movement outside,” said Matthew Gauvain, 29, a UMass Boston student originally from Lynn.

http://tinyurl.com/7gorefb

Report Warns Of Threat Income Inequality May Pose For Massachusetts Economy

A new report from the Boston Foundation warns that growing economic inequality remains the greatest threat to the region’s long-term prosperity.

According to the report, released Wednesday, Boston’s richest 20 percent earned more than half of the region’s income in 2010. The poorest 20 percent made just over 2 percent of the income.

That income disparity means the vast majority of workers remain vulnerable to economic downturns. It also means that the economic recovery is leaving many people behind.

http://tinyurl.com/7b7fehb

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 3/15/12” »

Occupy Boston plans ‘flash mob’ protest

Group members are staging a pre-arranged “flash mob” protest at 12:30 p.m. today in front of the state’s Transportation Building.

Today’s lunchtime rally will be the controversial group’s first major public action since police ousted several hundred occupiers from their encampment in Dewey Square on Dec. 10.

Group members say the T protest dovetails with their anti-Wall Street platform. They say banks that received government bailouts now hold most of the T’s debt and want to see the debt forgiven or restructured to spare people who need the T to get to work. Occupy Boston member Gunner Scott said other plans are under way for an April 4 rally at the Massachusetts State House.

http://tinyurl.com/7v79af3

The new urban militarism of local law enforcement in Western society

Many observers were surprised and even shocked by police methods used to subdue various “Occupy” demonstrations across the U.S. and Europe. There seems to be increasing dependence on methods of local policing that is eerily similar to how western militaries behave in the battlefield.

We took a look yesterday at the city of Chicago’s exploding surveillance camera systems. Today, we broaden the discussion with a look at increased militarization of local law enforcement in Western-societies. Stephen Graham is professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K. He examines the increasing influence of military technology on domestic police forces in his book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.

http://tinyurl.com/7yj4vpr

What Has Occupy Been Up To? 6 Great Actions You Can’t Miss This Spring

The early days were beautiful, they were inspiring, but it is now that we are being deliberate, that we are building relationships with each other and with our communities, it is now that we are building our infrastructure, it is now that we are doing the internal work that we need to do in order to be smarter, faster, better at bringing people together, better at sustaining ourselves as a movement, it is now that we are more committed then ever. And we have been planning for the spring. So below I present you with a list of things to look out for from Occupy in the coming weeks and months and as it goes from winter, finally, to spring:

http://tinyurl.com/6n4jt4t

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 3/14/12” »

Scholarship competition for best essays about the Occupy Movement open to students nationwide

More than $25,000 in scholarships will be awarded to high school juniors and seniors who place in the regional and national competitions. All students must submit an essay about the “Occupy Movement” by March 31, 2012 to compete.

[This is a correction to an earlier Media Rundown article that incorrectly identified the competition as being only open to students in one state.]

http://tinyurl.com/73nhhlq

Housing Crisis Pushed Black Homeownership Rate Below 1990 Level

During the housing crisis, Black and Latino homeowners were twice as likely to be foreclosed on. Indeed, in California Black and Latino homeowners are said to make up 50% of foreclosures but only 30% of homeowners.

During the housing crisis, the Center for American Progress found, there were huge racial disparities in the makeup of high-priced lending with banks targeting people of color. One of the banks that received a government bailout, was even accused of having steered people of color toward subprime loans. Undoubtedly, these dubious and racist banking practices led to the homeownership numbers we see today.

http://tinyurl.com/7v23klu

Watchdogs, unions, Occupy groups vow to expose corporate money in campaigns

Liberal interest groups, watchdogs and unions on Monday threatened to boycott, protest and publicly embarrass corporations that spend money trying to sway the outcome of the November election.

Gathered Monday at the Washington headquarters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the groups issued a call to arms for the 2012 campaign, vowing to aggressively challenge companies that contribute to super-PACs and 501(c) nonprofit groups.

“If you secretly contribute and scheme to buy our elections, we’re going to come knocking on your door,” said Aaron Black of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “And it’s not just going to be a couple of us. It’s going to be thousands of us. Everywhere you turn your head.”

http://tinyurl.com/7wl63lo

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 3/13/12” »

Market Fundamentalism Threatens U.S. Liberty

Market fundamentalism not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns, but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness, and a Hobbesian “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. Free-market fundamentalists now wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract, the welfare state, any notion of the common good and those public spheres not yet defined by commercial interests. Within neoliberal ideology, the market becomes the template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line, cost-effective terms. Freedom is no longer about equality, social justice or the public welfare, but about the trade in goods, financial capital and commodities.

http://tinyurl.com/7pqwqjb

Stage set for widespread, devastating austerity cuts at county and city levels

Even as there are glimmers of a national economic recovery, cities and counties increasingly find themselves in the middle of a financial crisis. The problems are spreading as municipalities face a toxic mix of stresses that has been brewing for years, including soaring pension, Medicaid and retiree health care costs. And many have exhausted creative accounting maneuvers and one-time spending cuts or revenue-raisers to bail themselves out.

The problem has national echoes: Stockton, Calif., a city of almost 300,000, is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Jefferson County, Ala., made the biggest Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing in history in November and stopped paying its bondholders. In Rhode Island, the city of Central Falls declared bankruptcy last year, and the mayor of Providence, the state capital, has said his city is at risk as its money runs out.

http://tinyurl.com/7psaztt

Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain

Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee Mellor, and their rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown row houses, announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which serve 800 children.

Like many cities and institutions around Britain, Manchester is searching for savings to close the gap created by the national government’s withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion, in support to localities this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough austerity program. Billions of pounds more are to vanish by 2015.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a requirement that the municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start children’s centers, which offer services including prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement of the Labour government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped local councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back.

http://tinyurl.com/7wcrorh

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 3/12/12” »

Editorial: Time to make birth control pills available over the counter

Partly because birth-control pills are available only by prescription, people tend to think they’re more dangerous and less well understood than they actually are. In fact, “more is known about the safety of oral contraceptives than has been known about any other drug in the history of medicine,” declared an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health back in 1993. That editorial accompanied an article arguing for over-the-counter sales.

Unlike most medications, the article noted, birth-control pills require no medical diagnosis: “A woman herself determines her need for oral contraception; she assesses her own risk of pregnancy … and the costs and benefits of both pregnancy and alternative contraceptions.” Nearly two decades later, birth- control pills look even safer than they did then, and recent research indicates that women are both able and eager to manage their own purchase decisions.
. . .

Going to the doctor is costly in time, money and sometimes in dignity. Not surprisingly, the prescription requirement deters use of oral contraceptives. In a 2004 phone survey, 68 percent of American women said they would start the pill or another form of hormonal birth control, such as the patch, if they could buy it in a pharmacy with screening by a pharmacist instead of getting a doctor’s prescription. Two-thirds of blacks and slightly more than half of whites and Latinas surveyed said they chose their current, less-effective method of birth control because it didn’t require a prescription.

http://tinyurl.com/799vxtt

98 Major Advertisers Dump Rush Limbaugh, Other Right-Wing Hosts

Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments.” The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway). As you’ll see in the note below, those “environments” go beyond the Rush Limbaugh show –

“To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory. More than 350 different advertisers sponsor the programs and services provided to your station on a barter basis. Like advertisers that purchase commercials on your radio station from your sales staff, our sponsors communicate specific rotations, daypart preferences and advertising environments they prefer… They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.”

http://tinyurl.com/7srzu4w

Rush, Peter Gabriel, Fab Thunderbirds, Philadelphia Orchestra, want off Limbaugh’s show

First the money walks, now it’s the music. Rush, Peter Gabriel and the Fabulous Thunderbirds have all demanded that their music immediately stop appearing on Limbaugh’s program. (And lest you think it’s confined to rockist quarters, the Philadelphia Orchestra, which bought a package of ads through CBS Philly, has also “taken steps to ensure that our ads no longer run on the Rush Limbaugh show,” according to its Twitter feed.)

http://tinyurl.com/7lury3p

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 3/11/12” »