October 21, 2015

Right-Wing Think Tank Shills for Payday Lenders on New York Fed Website

(The Intercept) The New York Federal Reserve Board, charged with overseeing Wall Street banks, turned over its normally staid official blog this week to a highly contentious argument in defense of high-cost payday lenders, who are partially funded by the same big firms the Fed is supposed to be regulating.

Michael Strain, a resident scholar at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, co-authored the piece. While posts at the New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog always caution that the views expressed do not reflect the position of the regional bank, it is highly unusual to have anyone from an ideological think tank write an article there. A review of the last three months of Liberty Street Economics posts shows no other instance of this happening.

The article, “Reframing the Debate About Payday Lending,” begins by almost taunting the many critics of payday lenders, who charge low-income borrowers upwards of 400 percent interest for short-term loans (typically due within two weeks, or the next “payday”).

“Except for the ten to twelve million people who use them every year, just about everybody hates payday loans,” Strain and his co-authors write, dramatically mischaracterizing what drives users to the services. Payday loan users typically have few alternatives to maintain their bill payments, especially as banks have denied them lending services. It is not love that motivates them; it is desperation. ................(more)

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/20/right-wing-think-tank-shills-for-payday-lenders-on-new-york-fed-website/

October 21, 2015

Youth in Authoritarian Times: Challenging Neoliberalism's Politics of Disposability

Youth in Authoritarian Times: Challenging Neoliberalism's Politics of Disposability

Wednesday, 21 October 2015 10:00
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis






Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life.

The citizen is now urged to become a consumer, politicians are now mouthpieces for money and power (3) and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of compassion, the commons and democracy itself. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but as a private right, and critical thinking is no longer valued as a fundamental necessity for creating engaged and socially responsible citizens. Neoliberalism's contempt for the social is now matched by an utter disdain for the common good. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been replaced by corporate entities whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial culture "that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters." (4)

One outcome of this tangle of forces is that we live at a time in which institutions that were designed to limit human suffering and indignity and protect the public from the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist markets have been either been weakened or abolished. (5) Free market policies, values and practices, with their now unrestrained emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the denigration of social protections and the deregulation of economic activity, influence practically every commanding political and economic institution in North America. Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains. ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33312-youth-in-authoritarian-times-challenging-neoliberalism-s-politics-of-disposability

October 21, 2015

Scary Bill Schuette

from the Metro Times:


Politics & Prejudices: Scary Bill Schuette
By Jack Lessenberry


I've been watching Michigan politics for a very long time, and I can't remember anyone more potentially dangerous than Bill Schuette, our demagogue of an attorney general.

Not that we haven't had a cast of crooks and characters. Yes, there was Kwame Kilpatrick the greedy man-boy mayor, who thought the city of Detroit was his candy store, bank, and harem, and who is now guest No. 44678-039 of the federal government, with a room booked till August 2037.

We've got the two comic-opera defrocked state legislators, at least three more who should probably be in the slam, plus a past passel of crooked prosecutors and penny-ante racists. There was Diane Hathaway, the felonious Democratic state Supreme Court justice who went on the bench in 2009 and into a cell in 2013. And all that's just scratching the recent surface.

But none of those birds had national pretensions. Schuette does. He serves the worst right-wing elements of his party, and seems willing to do anything to please them to try to win as much power as he possibly can. ..................(more)

http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/politics-and-prejudices-scary-bill-schuette/Content?oid=2376694

October 21, 2015

D.C.: District, Maryland and Virginia push bill backing federal oversight of Metro

(WaPo) The District’s congressional delegate and two members of Congress from Maryland and Virginia are pushing a measure that would give legislative backing to the federal government’s oversight of Metro.

Reps. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.) and Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), along with the D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), plan to submit a measure that would implement a decision by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx to take charge of safety oversight for Metro. The measure would authorize Foxx to continue to oversee Metro’s rail operations until the District, Maryland and Virginia develop a state safety oversight agency that would be certified by the DOT.

Foxx stepped in earlier this month at the urging of the National Transportation Safety Board following a series of critical safety lapses, including January incident that engulfed a train in smoke and sickened dozens of passengers, one of whom died.

The proposed measure — entitled the Protect Riders of Metrorail Public Transportation Act of 2015, or the PROMPT Act — tracks the Moving Ahead for Progress (MAP-21) Act allowing the federal agency to take on safety oversight of rail operations. The bill also permits Foxx to use existing funds set aside for rail safety. ................(more)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2015/10/20/district-maryland-and-virginia-push-bill-backing-federal-oversight-of-metro/

October 21, 2015

Face it, Jeb: The Bush brand is irreparably damaged

(Bloomberg) A month of extensive New Hampshire advertising on Jeb Bush's behalf has failed to boost his support and likely Republican primary voters there view him as inferior to frontrunner Donald Trump on most key attributes.

A new Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire Poll also shows Bush's favorability rating among the state's Republican primary voters has dropped to its lowest level—57 percent—since the survey was first taken almost a year ago.

In the horse race, the former Florida governor has seen his overall support drop to 10 percent, from 11 percent in May. That puts him in third place, behind Trump at 24 percent and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 17 percent, despite an advertising push by the pro-Bush Right to Rise super political action committee that has dominated the state's television screens for the past four weeks.

“With such a heavy spend, the Bush campaign was undoubtedly hoping for a bounce,” said Doug Usher of Washington-based Purple Strategies, which conducted the poll Oct. 15-18. “But their candidate is closer to Rubio, Fiorina and Kasich than to the top tier, and his favorables are moving in the wrong direction.” ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-21/ad-blitz-fails-to-lift-jeb-bush-s-poll-numbers-in-new-hampshire-bloomberg-politics-saint-anselm-poll

October 21, 2015

IL: Skokie, CTA Offer Free Parking, Special Ceremony for Yellow Line's Return

IL: Skokie, CTA Offer Free Parking, Special Ceremony for Yellow Line's Return

MIKE ISAACS ON OCT 21, 2015
SOURCE: MCCLATCHY


Oct. 21--When the CTA's Yellow Line train service resumes Oct. 30, riders who get on at the Dempster Street Skokie Swift station will not have to worry about parking fees -- at least not for awhile.

Providing free parking at the Dempster station for the rest of the year is one of the "significant outreach efforts" to be undertaken by the village and the CTA to induce riders back to the Yellow Line, both parties say.

A ceremonial first ride with dignitaries Oct. 30 and free Yellow Line rides for a week following the return of service are also being planned, according to the CTA.

The Yellow Line went down in May due to an embankment collapse, causing inconvenience all summer long to riders who use the train. Many riders have said that the shuttle buses added significant time to their commutes. Some downtown Skokie retailers reported noticeable decline in business while others said they were not impacted.

"We appreciate the continued community support for the numerous businesses near the Yellow Line stations that rely on commuters as customers, and we hope that ridership will quickly return to the levels attained before the unfortunate service interruption," Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen said last week in a prepared statement. ................(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/12128870/skokie-cta-offer-free-parking-special-ceremony-for-yellow-lines-return

October 21, 2015

Bibi goes off the deep end

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/netanyahu_outrageous_claim_palestinian_leader_hitler_burn_jews_20151021





Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu practically exonerated Adolf Hitler in remarks made to a group of Jewish leaders on Tuesday in which he effectively tried to blame Palestine for the Holocaust.

Aside from being historically inaccurate, as experts are saying, Netanyahu’s comments can be seen as an “incitement against modern-day Palestinians” as tensions continue to rise between Israel and Palestine.

From Associated Press:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under fire for suggesting that a World War II-era Palestinian leader convinced the Nazis to adopt their Final Solution to exterminate European Jews. ... Netanyahu told a group of Jewish leaders on Tuesday that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Nazi sympathizer Haj Amin al-Husseini, convinced Hitler to destroy the Jews.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. When Hitler asked al-Husseini what to do, Netanyahu said he replied: “Burn them.”

Read more.

October 21, 2015

The 401(k) Crisis Is Getting Worse

(Bloomberg) Tim Egan has been working since he was 14. He’s now 56 and has spent most of his career as a restaurant manager. He has virtually nothing saved for retirement and, until last month, never had a 401(k) account.

Little wonder: Only two of the 20 restaurants where Egan has worked in the past four decades had retirement-savings plans.
“The restaurant business is what I’m good at, but few owners, especially of small places, offer retirement benefits, no matter how much money you help them earn,” says Egan, who worked his way up from dishwasher to waiter to bartender before rising to manager 20 years ago.

Egan’s story isn’t unusual among the legions of Americans who work part time, switch jobs frequently or earn their livings at small companies, which generated two-thirds of all new jobs last year. Even as people live longer and must save more for old age than prior generations, most can not depend on any help from employers. Almost half of U.S. workers didn’t have a company-sponsored retirement plan in 2013, compared with 39 percent in 1999, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York.

The lack of plans is fueling a retirement-savings crisis. Few workers save anything outside of employer-sponsored plans. Only 8 percent of taxpayers eligible to set aside money in an IRA or Roth IRA did so in 2010, according to the IRS. ...............(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/bad-math-68-million-americans-no-401-k-epic-savings-crisis

October 20, 2015

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee: Americans want to end the country's longest war. Why won't Congress listen?

(Guardian UK) America’s longest war continues to drag on with no end in sight. More than 14 years since the invasion of Afghanistan, our highly capable men and women in uniform have gone above and beyond the call of duty. They have done enough; it’s past time to bring them home.

On 15 October we saw the ramifications of Congress’s blank check for endless war when President Obama announced that thousands of US troops would remain in Afghanistan through the end of his term and into 2017.

This war has already cost our nation so much: 2,350 of our brave servicemen and women have made the ultimate sacrifice, more than 20,000 have been wounded and thousands more bear invisible scars. This war has also taken the lives of thousands of Afghans and soldiers from our coalition partners and Nato allies.

Continuing this war has not made us any safer. Our protracted engagement in Afghanistan undermines our national security by sparking global resentment against the US and spurring unsustainable Pentagon spending. At present, the war’s price tag totals more than $716bn, which continues to prevent much needed investments in critical domestic priorities.

It’s past time to bring our armed forces home to their families and keep our nation’s sacred promise to care for them. The American people agree: a December Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a 56% majority of Americans believe this war has not been worth fighting, a trend that dates back to 2010. Yet despite the strong objections of the American people, this war continues with no end in sight. .................(more)

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/20/americans-want-longest-war-end-congress-wont-listen-afghanistan

October 20, 2015

U.S. South Wages a Long War of Incentives, and Citizens Bear the Brunt

(The Progressive) In the 1930’s, Mississippi, struggling with widespread illiteracy and disease and an under-developed economy heavily dependent on subsistence-level agricultural jobs, implemented a set of incentives including tax breaks and subsidies to lure Northern manufacturers to the state. It worked, although at the expense of unionized Northern jobs, and soon other Southern states followed Mississippi’s “Balance Agriculture with Industry” example. As Joe Atkins explains in his fine book, Covering for the Bosses, this touched off what has become an ever-escalating race to the bottom on corporate taxes, with industry and corporations benefitting from an ever-more hospitable “business climate,” while undermining conditions faced by the majority of citizens across all the states.

The South has continued to fuel this competition, throwing huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to entice corporations. It has had to, because while dirt-cheap wages and a fiercely anti-union environment once attracted a flood of “runaway shops” from the North, the South is now often abandoned by U.S. firms which find even lower wages, more repressive control over labor, and generous subsidies from Third World governments. As Mary Frederickson writes in her book Looking South, “New [U.S.] South industrialization presaged much of what we are witnessing in the Global South.”

This recent “offshoring” has left the South peppered with dying factory and textile-mill towns that have lost their main employers and face a grim economic future with few prospects of escaping pervasive poverty, Paul Theroux details in his new non-fiction account, The Deep South.

But vast publicly-funded incentives, coupled with continuing low wages, have helped the South win the siting of 13 foreign-owned auto-assembly plants. The latest is located in South Carolina, presided over by self-proclaimed “union buster” Nikky Haley. South Carolina has distributed incentives worth at least $208 million in public funding. Shackled by “right-to-work” laws which make sustaining unions nearly impossible, just 2.2 % of workers in South Carolina are union members. Similarly, the unionization rate is a mere 3.7% in Mississippi, and 1.9% in North Carolina (the very lowest of the 50 states). The increasing weight of the low wage South has served as what labor journalist Harold Meyerson described as “an anchor,” pulling down earnings for working families nationally. .................(more)

- See more at: http://progressive.org/news/2015/10/188370/us-south-wages-long-war-incentives-and-citizens-bear-brunt#sthash.mY2Ld05N.dpuf