At the Philadelphia School District.
Category: Fuck the Poor
Holy Tom
If only Holy Tom Corbett was as concerned about the people going without food or the school district that’s cutting all “frills” like school nurses and libraries. But he’s a Republican!
HARRISBURG — Women in Pennsylvania will have the right to choose insurance through the state health exchange, but it won’t extend to abortion.
The state Senate on Wednesday voted 31-19 to approve House Bill 818, which prohibits insurance policies offered through Pennsylvania’s upcoming health-care insurance exchanges from offering abortion coverage. The bill, which already passed in the House, goes to Gov.Corbett.
Christine Cronkright, a spokeswoman for Corbett, said the governor will sign the bill.
In an email, Cronkright said the bill would not “place any greater restrictions” on access-to-care for abortion. Abortions will still be allowed in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is at risk.
However, the ban also extends to plans sold by private insurers issued without federal subsidy.
There’s that small-government, market-friendly GOP for ya!
Free market capitalism
SO great that we’re sharing proud traditions like this:
Cambodian police used cattle prods to stun workers protesting over pay at a factory that makes clothing for U.S. sportswear company Nike – injuring at least 23 women and causing one to miscarry her baby.
Police dressed in riot gear were deployed to move around 3,000 predominantly female workers who had blocked a road outside their factory owned by Sabrina (Cambodia) Garment Manufacturing in Kampong Speu province, west of the capital, Phnom Penh, in Cambodia today.
Among the 23 women injured in the incident was a two-months pregnant worker who lost her child after military police pushed her to the ground, Sun Vanny, president of the Free Trade Union (FTU) at Sabrina said.
I’m sure all the right to life conservatives will immediate divest themselves of Nike stock!
A quarter of the people in Greece — and U.S. — can’t afford food
A recipe for revolution, if you ask me:
No matter where you’re from, not having enough to eat is the ultimate signifier of economic distress. Food is the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s the first concern in disaster zones. It’s usually the last thing to go — after the car and the nice apartment — when you lose your job.
If you can’t afford food, there’s really nowhere to go but up. That’s why it’s so shocking just how many more hungry people there are now in what were formerly known as the world’s well-off nations. According to a new Pew report released today, almost a quarter of people (24 percent) in the United States and Greece answered “yes” to the question, “Have there been times during the last year when you did not have enough money to buy food your family needed?”
The levels in other Western countries weren’t quite that high, but the rate at which hunger has swept the eurozone since 2007 is still really dramatic:
http://youtu.be/jOWYcARTwxo
Vitter the Shitter
What a nasty, vindictive piece of shit David “Huggies” Vitter is. Imagine the mind of the person who came up with this punitive way to punish poor people for their past sins, and to further marginalize and isolate them. I feel my blood pressure rising as I write this. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re actually trying to start an uprising so the defense contractors can move some new merchandise. Via Colorlines:
Yesterday, Sen. Vitter of Louisiana offered up an amendment to permanently drop anyone ever convicted of a violent crime from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
According to Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Democrats in the Senate obliged him. The amendment is for a farm bill, which is currently being debated in the Senate.Says Greenstein:
The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since. In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.
So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut.
[…] Democrats accepted it without trying to modify it to address its most ill-considered aspects.
Continue reading “Vitter the Shitter”
Delinquent student loans through the roof
If I had kids in high school right now, I’d make them think long and hard before taking out school loans. There’s still a theoretical edge in getting hired, but enough to justify being in debt servitude for the rest of your life?
Overdue student loans reached an all-time high as students struggle to find work after college, according to a government report renewing alarms about the rising burden of higher-education debt.
Eleven percent of student loans were seriously delinquent — at least 90 days past due — in the third quarter of 2012, compared with 6 percent in the first quarter of 2003, according to the report by the U.S. Education Department. Almost 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds aren’t employed or in school, the study found.
The research is being released amid concern in Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration about rising college costs and $1 trillion in outstanding student loans, the largest category of consumer debt besides mortgages. Borrowers say the burden is affecting their choice of jobs and their ability to buy homes and get married.
“Today’s economy puts young graduates in a difficult position,” Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which published the report, said in a statement. “A college diploma no longer guarantees a direct pathway to the middle class, making it harder to justify the expense of a degree.”
49 schools
Will close in Chicago. They claim it will be more efficient and will allow them to make better use of resources, but it’s really about handing all the money over to the charter schools.
I know you’ll be shocked, but…
Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee’s chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.
But here’s the letter he wrote to the IRS inspector general a year ago about this very thing! He even cited this article in Roll Call.
Meanwhile, the real scandals – millions out of the work force, college grads who can’t get jobs, banks stealing houses unabated — those scandals go unattended. I wonder why.
Thanks to DUI lawyer Kush Arora.
Bernanke to Congress: WTF?
Ben says Congress is the reason for the fiscal drag.
The poors are living in a suburb near you
Not a good place for poor people, because the suburbs are greatly lacking in the kind of poverty programs you can find in most cities, and they’re usually very sporadically served by public transit, making car ownership more of a necessity than it would be in a city:
Bucking longstanding patterns in the United States, more poor people now live in the nation’s suburbs than in urban areas, according to a new analysis.As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.
Authors Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube cited a long list of reasons for the shift.
Continue reading “The poors are living in a suburb near you”