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Elizabeth Warren's Post Office Plan May Revolutionize the Financial Lives of the Unbanked |
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Thursday, 13 February 2014 15:05 |
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Smith reports: "If the post office sounds like a strange place to be going for banking services - it is (at least in this country). But expect more and more Americans to start doing just that in years to come."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Boston Herald)
Elizabeth Warren's Post Office Plan May Revolutionize the Financial Lives of the Unbanked
By Rich Smith, DailyFinance
13 February 14
"Oh, yes, wait a minute, Mr. Postman/Please Mr Postman, look and see/If there's a loan in your bag for me."
 f the post office sounds like a strange place to be going for banking services -- it is (at least in this country). But expect more and more Americans to start doing just that in years to come.
Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.) published a letter on the Huffington Post endorsing a plan (based on a proposal from the Post Office's Office of the Inspector General) to allow the U.S. Postal Service to partner with banks to provide "bill paying, check cashing, [and] small loan" services to customers who lack traditional bank accounts.
As Warren explained in her letter, some 68 million Americans currently have no active checking accounts. That's a direct result of the fact that so few banks offer "free checking" as a standard option anymore, making a traditional account costly for people who can't maintain the fair-sized balance at which banks now forgo fees.
According to Warren, despite their best attempts to avoid the high cost of banking by eschewing bank accounts, many people still end up paying in the end:
"Collectively, these households spent about $89 billion in 2012 on interest and fees for non-bank financial services like payday loans and check cashing, which works out to an average of $2,412 per household. That means the average underserved household spends roughly 10 percent of its annual income on interest and fees -- about the same amount they spend on food."
Round Up the Usual Suspects
That hardly seems fair. Indeed, progressive website ThinkProgress describes the payday lending industry as downright "predatory" in its practices, charging "annual interest rates well north of 100 percent [that] suck billions of dollars out of poor communities every year."
The proposed solution is to partner the Post Office with America's traditional banks to offer loans, check cashing, bill paying, and similar day-to-day financial services at a lower cost to the consumer.
According to consumer financial advice website CreditCardChaser.com, most banks these days charge between 12 percent and 27 percent interest on credit card balances. Those are high rates, to be sure. But they're nowhere near the 300 percent to 700 percent annual rate that payday lenders like Cash America (CSH) or EZCORP (EZPW) charge.
By partnering with banks, the Post Office could generate up to $9 billion annually to plug the gap in its balance sheet. And because the Post Office would be sharing the banks' risk of loan default, banks should be more willing to offer loans at more affordable rates.
Bankers, Rejoice!
If this sounds like good news for borrowers, and for the Post Office, then it may be even better news for bankers who should be jumping at the chance to take advantage of Sen. Warren's offer.
While it's true that bankers on average charge interest rates in the teens and twenties to their customers, the actual percentage-point profits they earn from making unsecured credit card loans (similar to the sort that payday lenders make to people in the bad-credit demographic) can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Losses from defaulting borrowers, you see, eat into the fat interest rates that banks charge on their cards. The result, as revealed in a recent report out of the Federal Reserve, is that on average, big banks like Citigroup (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Bank of America (BAC) earn profit margins of only 2 percent to 4 percent on their credit card portfolios. That's on par with the 3 percent profit margin that EZCORP brought in from its business last year, and significantly below the 8 percent profit margin earned by Cash America.
In 2012, 15 percent of EZCORP's customers failed to pay back their loans. The corresponding figure for Bank of America was 2.6 percent.
Sen. Warren's plan, though, promises to reduce losses from defaults by leveraging the power of the federal government to collect debts. In the event a borrower stops making payments on his or her loan, the Post Office can instruct the Treasury Department to garnish a borrower's tax refund to recover what's owed.
By reducing the risk of loss in this manner, the plan offers bankers a chance to widen their profit margins on unsecured loans, even while lowering rates for (current) payday loan-borrowers. This way, everybody wins. Everyone except the payday lenders.
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FOCUS: Frank Rich | Boehner Surrenders, But the Party of No Will Rise Again |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 13 February 2014 12:54 |
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Rich writes: "The GOP is still the story. It is a hard-right party that will be happy to once again hold the government hostage to its demands if it gains a Senate majority to go with its House majority in November's midterms. It's a party that right now stands essentially for one thing: It is against Obamacare."
New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich. (photo: NY Magazine)
Boehner Surrenders, But the Party of No Will Rise Again
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
13 February 14
 hree years ago, Republican House Speaker John Boehner implemented a strategy of debt-limit brinksmanship, threatening the country with default if the Democrats didn't offer steep spending cuts. Yesterday, Boehner abandoned that strategy, and, amid howls from his party, brought a clean debt-limit bill to the House floor. (It passed, primarily with Democratic votes.) What does Boehner's surrender mean for his party and his speakership? And how big a victory was it for the Democrats and President Obama?
This was a temporary victory for what remains of the Republican Establishment, and that's about it. The right's extortion tactic - give us what we want or we'll blow up Washington - was proven a political fiasco (as if any proof were needed) by the October shutdown. According to Robert Costa of the Washington Post, Boehner told his caucus that this time, "we're not going to make ourselves the story." So his change in tactics was intended to decouple the GOP brand from obstructionism, and to placate Wall Street donors who prefer order to market-roiling chaos. But most of the Republican base doesn't believe in this temporary truce. Nor do most Republican members of the House - 199 voted against Boehner, only 28 with him. (Many among those 28 are either affiliated with the leadership or are retiring from the House at the end of this term). Even some party leaders, Paul Ryan and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (who gave the GOP's rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union last month), sided with the rebels.
So while there's no crisis this time, the fundamental equation remains unchanged. The GOP is still the story. It is a hard-right party that will be happy to once again hold the government hostage to its demands if it gains a Senate majority to go with its House majority in November's midterms. It's a party that right now stands essentially for one thing: It is against Obamacare. What is it for? Not immigration reform, even though demographics pose an existential threat to GOP survival. Not a coherent national-security policy beyond "everything that Obama does is wrong." And it remains unwelcoming to all minorities - and to one majority, which would be women. For all the talk that the GOP is training its troops to stop talking about rape and contraception in a manner demeaning to women, it just can't help itself. This week, one of the most influential editorial voices of the Wall Street Journal implicitly endorsed Todd Akin's view of "legitimate rape," arguing that when a drunken female college student is raped, it is unjust that "the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault."
In other words, to look at the big picture here, yesterday's vote on the debt-limit will be remembered, if at all, as a fleeting pause in the Republican right's Obama-era surge.
The right-leaning Washington Free Beacon mined the papers of the late Diane Blair, a friend of Hillary Clinton's, and released a report in which Clinton (as First Lady) is quoted dissing Monica Lewinsky, speaking in favor of a single-payer health-care system, and opposing intervention in Bosnia. The Blair papers have been open to the public since 2010. Are you surprised no one published their contents until now? And were you surprised by anything they revealed?
I wasn't surprised that it took so long for these papers to surface. Clinton opposition research, on hiatus since her 2008 defeat, is just getting back in business for 2014. And as for the actual contents of the Blair documents: Nothing ever surprises me - or perhaps anyone else - about the Clintons at this point. If Hillary Clinton is indeed running for president again, these revelations, like those in Robert Gates's memoir, those in the new biography HRC, and even those that Hillary herself offers up to feed the media dogs in her forthcoming memoir are more significant politically for their collective weight than their actual substance, negative or positive. If Clinton fatigue sets in more than two years before the next presidential election, that's a hindrance to her presumed presidential run, not a plus. It makes her vulnerable to a fresh, insurgent opponent, much as was the case in 2008.
On Sunday, standout University of Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam came out as gay in interviews with ESPN and the New York Times. Sam is expected to be drafted by an NFL team in May, which would make him the first out gay man to be on an American professional-sports roster. The gay-rights movement has had a string of victories in the courts and at the ballot box over the past several years. Does Sam's revelation still matter?
Of course it does. Pro sports, led by the dominant sport of football, is an arena yet to accommodate itself to homosexuality. Michael Sam is not just a hero (and a powerful exponent of his own character and biography, besides). He has also offered powerful testimony to the brotherhood of his heterosexual University of Missouri teammates, who have known he was gay all season and have set an example for their peers throughout sports in how to take Sam's coming out in stride, as a nonissue.
Because of the remarkable, seemingly weekly advances in the struggle for same-sex marriage - exemplified in recent days by Eric Holder's announcement of more federal benefits for married gay couples - we tend to think the battles over gay civil rights are nearing an end. But they are not, and seeing Michael Sam's announcement in context shows just how much heroes like him are still needed. It only took a few days for Rush Limbaugh to characterize favorable media attention to Sam as an "assault" on heterosexuality. But in truth, the media that Limbaugh reviles doesn't always behave much better than he does. As Deadspin first reported, NBC News went so far as to edit out the firm anti-discrimination remarks contained within the address given by Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee President, who was seated next to Vladimir Putin at the Opening Ceremony in Sochi. NBC has its excuse for this - time constraints - but it did air less consequential passages of Bach's speech, and it has not acknowledged or apologized for a choice that came off as a diplomatic concession to Putin's homophobic agenda. Would NBC have been as quick to edit out Bach's anti-discrimination remarks if Putin's bigotry were aimed at African-Americans or other minorities? In the history of gay civil rights, this may be remembered as a month when a defensive lineman on a college football team was braver than one of the most powerful news organizations in America's so-called liberal media.
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Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 13 February 2014 09:05 |
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Gibson writes: "There is no doubt that [Sandra] Fluke would do a fine job as a state senator in Sacramento, but the endorsement by Emily's List shows the true problem within our movement - our lack of intersectionality."
Should Sandra Fluke have been the choice to replace Henry Waxman? (photo: Getty Images)
Our Movement Must Desegregate, or We'll Lose
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
13 February 14
 hen Sandra Fluke was called a “slut” by Rush Limbaugh for simply demanding contraception coverage, America ran to her defense. When Fluke testified before Congress about her story, she spoke eloquently about how this particular women’s justice issue also impacts the economic stability of women all over the country when threatened. And when she spoke before thousands at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, she proved that she has both the rhetorical skill and the passionate drive necessary to truly stand up for women and the economically marginalized of society. So when Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) announced his retirement, Fluke intended to run to be his replacement.
However, after Emily’s List – the cream of the crop of endorsements for female candidates seeking federal office – made it a point to endorse Wendy Greuel for that seat, Fluke announced she would run for state senate instead. The endorsement of Greuel is particularly short-sighted: she ran as a fiscal conservative in the 2013 mayoral race in Los Angeles. While Greuel may be a champion on reproductive rights and abortion access, which is the single issue of focus for Emily’s List, she proposed eliminating Los Angeles’ business tax and promoted charter schools and “school choice,” which usually means public money funding private schools instead of public education. Greuel’s economic policies would increase inequality, and make life generally harder for both women and men.
There is no doubt that Fluke would do a fine job as a state senator in Sacramento, but the endorsement by Emily’s List shows the true problem within our movement – our lack of intersectionality. If we truly want to achieve our goals of economic justice, reproductive rights, climate mitigation, immigration rights, and an end to poverty, racism and war, we have to think intersectionally.
“If I’m struggling from my issue, and it’s the most important issue to me, because that’s where my wound is, I have to open my heart and say, she’s got a wound too,” said Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues" and lead organizer of One Billion Rising. “My struggle has got to be connected to her wound and her struggle, so we can keep widening and keep strengthening, so we can talk about true justice.”
Ensler was speaking about February 14th’s V-Day, an international day of action known as One Billion Rising for Justice, as part of the “State of Female Justice in America” panel hosted by Columbia University’s Institute on Intersectionality and Social Policy.
In 2013, One Billion Rising – a global dance flashmob – was organized in 207 countries, trended nationally on Twitter in seven of those countries, and made 600 million total media impressions. Ensler said because 1 in 3 women in the world have been raped and beaten, that makes for roughly 1 billion women around the world who she wanted dancing in public. According to Ensler, because women who have been raped are often less confident in their own space, the act of dancing is the act of taking back that public space and showing global solidarity with women all over the world. In 2014, the February 14th action has been changed to “One Billion Rising for Justice.”
“Justice is, for me, is restoring the primacy of connection. We just don’t connect with each other or each other’s issues anymore. We need to look at justice as connective, how we connect causes and connections, how we connect the whole story of violence, and look at the whole history of injustice, and see it as systemic, rather than our own single issue,” Ensler said. “It’s connected to this racist, patriarchal, neoliberal, capitalist framework. Unless we begin to hook this up, we’re never gonna move it further.”
One example of women’s justice intersecting with economic justice is the ongoing strikes organized by fast food and retail workers. In December 2013, fast food workers walked off the job, demanding better wages and the right to organize a union in over 100 cities. And on Black Friday, Walmart workers went on strike protesting the fact that despite being employed by the most profitable company in the history of the world, they have to rely on public assistance to meet basic needs. At least 110 of those workers were arrested in acts of civil disobedience.
“The restaurant industry is the largest employer of young women all over the world, and these women are subject to the treatment of people who feel they can touch or treat them however they want,” said Saru Jayaraman of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), and author of Behind the Kitchen Door. Jayaraman has been working with ROC United for the last decade, organizing restaurant workers to take a stand for better working conditions.
Jayaraman cited what she called “the other NRA,” referring to the National Restaurant Association, the prime opponent of raising wages for tipped workers. In 1996, Herman Cain, who was then the president of the other NRA, made a deal with Congress, saying his organization wouldn’t oppose overall minimum wage increases as long as the federal minimum wage for tipped workers stayed frozen at $2.13 an hour. Even though the restaurant industry is by far the fastest-growing and most increasingly profitable industry, tipped workers have been making $2.13 an hour for over 23 years now. Tipped workers also suffer from 3 times the poverty rate of workers in other industries, and 70 percent of tipped workers are women. 37 percent of on-the-job sexual harassment claims reported come from the restaurant industry.
“If you live on $2.13 an hour, you don’t live on a wage at all, because it’s almost all gone after taxes. You live entirely on your tips,” said Jayaraman. “When you live entirely on your tips, you are at the mercy of the largesse of people who dine in your establishment, who can touch you, treat you, talk to you as inappropriately as they want, and you have no recourse because that is your income, the people who are paying your tips.”
One of the most pressing issues within movements is bridging the gap between what organizers call “silos.” For example, some people work on immigration, some work on workers’ rights, some work on climate change, some work on austerity. Duncan Meisel, environmental organizer at 350.org as well as a former US Uncut organizer, is working on breaking down those silos so movement organizers can more effectively share space, instead of competing for it. Meisel is speaking at the Brecht Forum in New York City on February 20th, 2014, about how climate change and austerity-based social movements can intersect.
“Climate change is not an issue. It’s a global crisis that impacts the fundamental conditions surrounding every major economic and transnational justice issue we care about,” Meisel wrote on his Tumblr. “From the sweatshops of Bangladesh, filled with people displaced by flooding in years of unprecedented storms, to the changing patterns of immigration bringing more people to the US as community support systems are destabilized by changing weather patter[n]s, as well as the immigrant families here who face incredible hurdles in rebuilding from disaster.”
“Much of your work already IS climate work. Adding the climate lens and language to your work is potentially strategic,” Meisel continued. “Not least of all because it bridges a gap to connect our struggles as we confront a global crisis.”
The struggle against neoliberal colonization of economic systems is a global one, as is the fight to reduce the impact of climate change and the fights for a more equitable immigration system and for women’s reproductive rights. The sooner we can get rid of the harmful, counterproductive single-issue politics perpetrated by people like those who make endorsement decisions at Emily’s List, the sooner we can win our goals. We cannot afford to remain so narrowly focused, or we’ll lose not only our own fight, but every other fight that intersects.
Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Rick Perry Lures Washington State Residents to Texas With Thriving Death Penalty |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 12 February 2014 15:13 |
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Borowitz writes: "Responding to the news that Washington Governor Jay Inslee had suspended the death penalty in his state, Texas Governor Rick Perry seized on the opportunity to urge Washington residents to 'vote with your feet and move to Texas, where the death penalty is thriving.'"
Texas capitol building. (photo: file)
Rick Perry Lures Washington State Residents to Texas With Thriving Death Penalty
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
12 February 14
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
  craping" is not a word with a lot of positive connotations. In "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens describes Ebenezer Scrooge as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner." We feel the impropriety of Scrooge's scraping all the more keenly for his wealth and power, since scraping is most often an act of the weak or desperate; we talk of "scraping by" or "scraping the bottom of the barrel," and of "bowing and scraping" to someone more powerful. It's also recently become news: Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden have all found themselves in trouble during the past few years for something called "scraping."
Among computer professionals, scraping means using software to continuously download and save small parts of a large body of data in order to slowly construct a copy; it's typically done when there isn't an easy way to download the information in bulk. A large database grants whoever possesses it considerable power. Facebook's influence, for instance, rests largely with the social graph, its voluminous catalog of social connections between every person on the service. While coders have long built and refined ways to help information flow freely from a data source to a user-the alphabet soup of technologies like RSS and XML-powerful organizations do not always find it in their interest to offer easy access. As a last resort, programmers often turn to scraping.
In 2008, the activist Aaron Swartz scraped the database of Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), a service that charges a small per-page fee for electronic access to the United States federal court system's public records. Swartz, who saw himself as a liberator of public data working on behalf of the people, downloaded and released 2.7 million of PACER's approximately five hundred million documents to the organization Public.Resource.Org, prompting an F.B.I. investigation. The agency ultimately determined that the documents were in the public domain, and Swartz was not charged with any crime. A couple of years later, Swartz attempted a similar feat when he connected a laptop to M.I.T.'s computer network to download approximately four hundred and fifty thousand documents from the online academic-article repository JSTOR. According to some, including Swartz, there was nothing wrong with attempting to download the entire JSTOR corpus: he had an account that provided him access to the documents, and anyone on M.I.T.'s "open" campus was granted access to it through the network. Swartz was arrested by M.I.T. police and the U.S. Secret Service, and was eventually indicted on federal and state charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud, and grand larceny. As Larissa MacFarquhar documented in detail, when Swartz committed suicide, in January, 2013, he was still tied up in legal problems stemming from his scraping of JSTOR. He faced up to fifty years in prison and a million dollars in fines.
Swartz worked to scrape data that was, to a certain degree, intended to be public. Chelsea Manning presents a more ethically complex case. In 2009 and 2010, Manning, a United States Army private known at the time as Bradley, used a similar technique to download copies of the Significant Activities (SigAct) portion of Army Intelligence's secure databases. "This process began in late December 2009 and continued through early January 2010," Manning said in a statement to a court martial last year. "I could quickly export one month of the SigAct data at a time and download in the background as I did other tasks. The process took approximately a week for each table." While the initial scraping was performed as part of Manning's work as an intelligence analyst, it was easy for her to copy the entire archive of classified documents to a thumb drive. In early 2010, disillusioned with the United States' mission in Iraq, she gave the thumb drive to Wikileaks.
Like Manning, Edward Snowden was never supposed to collect, let alone release, any of the information he had access to as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor working for the N.S.A. on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Snowden was a systems administrator, which meant that his job gave him low-level access to the hardware on which the N.S.A.'s data was stored. He was also skilled at copying and managing large quantities of information. At some point before June of last year, Snowden amassed an archive of classified documents-possibly as many as 1.7 million files, according to intelligence officials who testified before the House Intelligence Committee last week.
Swartz and Manning both used a program called Wget, which has been freely available since the mid-nineteen-nineties, to obtain their vast troves of data. If you point it at a network address and select the right options, Wget will download any file it finds, and will follow links to more documents, downloading as it goes. It can be configured to crawl and download an entire Web site-or a trove of classified SigAct reports, if you can give it the credentials to access them. It's a familiar and frequently used tool for anyone who works with computers, because it is specifically engineered to work over slow or unreliable networks. In the prosecution's opening statement at Manning's trial, Captain Joe Morrow called it "a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of documents from classified databases." But here, as is so often the case when we talk about technology, metaphor can obscure the truth as easily as it can illuminate it: Wget cannot "harvest" anything. Just like any document accessed over a network, Wget operates by copying files, leaving the original in place. Likewise, the word "scraping" connotes a harsh removal of information, but data scraping only involves copying.
Unnamed intelligence officials, describing how Edward Snowden collected his archive of N.S.A. files, told the Times, "We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence" and that the process was "quite automated." The officials didn't specify what software Snowden used, but "said it functioned like Googlebot, a widely used web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the web." The difference between a "crawler" and a "scraper" is subtle, but typically a crawler is smarter about the links it follows, what it downloads, and what it leaves uncopied. For the most part, though, "crawling" is just scraping with a fancier name, and Google created one of the world's most valuable companies in part by being better at scraping than anyone else. Google was incorporated in 1998, and by 2002 its Web-scraping "Googlebots" were so ubiquitous and voracious that, in a short story titled "Robot Exclusion Protocol," the programmer and writer Paul Ford imagined one trying to index his bathroom. Some have suggested that Google's recent acquisition of the smart-device maker Nest Labs is effectively an effort to scrape real-world data about our homes and lives, to add to the company's trove of information about us, which now includes information about the Web pages we visit, our e-mails, the books we read, our shopping habits, and more.
With enough persistence, scraping can produce enormous rewards, whether financial or political. Unlike panning for gold, where the objective is to extract the few valuable bits from a large worthless mass, scraping is an accretive process: value is created by the quantity of information. The N.S.A. scrapes and amasses enormous databases of global communications data, while Google constantly crawls the Internet, copying and indexing everything it can reach. With a large enough database of links between Web sites, Google can help searchers find exactly what they are looking for online. With a large enough collection of communications metadata, the N.S.A. can analyze networks and associations between people, identify patterns of interaction and behavior, and possibly spot threats before they happen. The N.S.A. believes they can do this so well that communications metadata alone has reportedly been used to target drone strikes.
Scrooge is haunted by three ghosts, Past, Present, and Future, and by the end of "A Christmas Carol" he has a change of heart, deciding to share his pile instead of hoarding it. The scraping Swartz, Manning, and Snowden did still haunts us. Their work is still bringing unsettling revelations about the secret structures of our world to light. Whether it will bring us a lasting change of heart has not yet been decided.
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ames Clapper, President Obama's top national security official, is probably best known for 
