Sunday, August 2, 2020
Consumer Bureau Scraps Restrictions on Payday Loans
To my friends who have thought all along that President Trump was on their side —
These insidious payday loans, with an average interest rate of 391% (yes, 391%) and often made to military personnel and their families, were scheduled to be controlled by pending regulations which the Trump Administration just reversed.
These loans are designed to lock people into a perpetual state of financial turmoil.
This reversal was not made to protect struggling Americans, but rather to protect the profits of greedy lenders.
From the article:
“Those loans can leave borrowers trapped in cycles of debt, incurring fees every few weeks to replenish loans they cannot afford to pay off.”
“Trump appointees were so determined to eliminate the rule that they manipulated the agency’s research process to steer it toward their predetermined outcome, a bureau employee claimed in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times. The memo’s disclosure prompted congressional Democrats to call for federal watchdogs to investigate.”
“The Pew Charitable Trusts, which has long pushed for curbs on high-interest loans, called the decision “a grave error” that exposes millions of Americans to unaffordable payments with triple-digit interest rates.”
“Payday lenders have contributed $16 million to congressional candidates, mostly Republicans, since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Community Financial Services Association of America held its 2018 and 2019 annual conferences at the Trump National Doral golf club.”
“The scrapped rules could be revived, in some form, if former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency in November. A Supreme Court ruling last week granted the president the power to fire the bureau's director at will.”
HONEST GOVERNMENT AD
At first I thought this was fake news. I couldn’t believe it. The city of Philadelphia firebombed an entire black neighborhood in 1985 and the police commissioner told the Fire Dept to “let it burn.” Men, women, and quite a few children were killed in the ensuing flames, their bodies burned to “ashes” due to the intensity of the fire. 250 people left homeless. All of this to destroy MOVE, a black liberation movement, whose members were arrested on bogus charges and acquitted. Nothing has changed.
No one was ever held accountable and no one ever apologized. So, let’s talk about sending in DHS troops to protect racist statues and stifle protesters... and how many times the racist members of this administration inflame the tensions and carry out atrocities.
We need Markey to stay in the game
Communities across America are facing problems caused by systemic issues. These challenges arise from racial injustice, economic disparity, environmental degradation, and more. Finding solutions won’t be easy, and getting started in Congress requires progressive leadership that’s unafraid to fight for what is right.
Ed Markey is one of those leaders. Last year, he took a chance on a first-term Congresswoman by leading the charge for a Green New Deal in the Senate. That wasn’t an easy choice, but it’s the one that our climate crisis demands.
That’s why Alexandria has endorsed Ed Markey – because his ideas are vital for our progress. Will you rush a split contribution to help Markey’s campaign prepare for the final stretch of this primary?
Your support is critical here. Losing Ed Markey, the original cosponsor of the Green New Deal, would be a massive blow to the climate movement and environmental justice. Nearly every poll shows that this race is incredibly close.
Meanwhile, Ed Markey’s opponent is flooding the airwaves with television ads fueled by high-dollar donations. Your grassroots support could be the difference between victory and defeat.
That’s why we’re asking for your support. With just over one month left in this primary, will you step up today to help ensure a Markey victory?
Progressive leadership isn’t about your age, it’s about the age of your ideas. Ed Markey is listening to a generation of young people who demand that we protect their future with solutions that rise to the scale of our challenges. That’s who we need in Congress.
In solidarity,
Team AOC
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To contribute via check, please address to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress, PO Box 680080, Corona, NY 11368.
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RSN: FOCUS: Bill McKibben | The Next Election Is About the Next 10,000 Years
02 August 20
FOCUS: Bill McKibben | The Next Election Is About the Next 10,000 Years
Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine
McKibben writes: "It is a cliché at this point to describe an election as 'the most important of our lifetimes.' Every election is key - they're how we take stock of where we are as a nation. They're part of a chain stretching into the past and into the future."
Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine
McKibben writes: "It is a cliché at this point to describe an election as 'the most important of our lifetimes.' Every election is key - they're how we take stock of where we are as a nation. They're part of a chain stretching into the past and into the future."
Dramatic climate action is critical because we’re about to cross tipping points that are not reversible.
he upcoming election looks to be an apocalyptic turning point for our democracy—and our planet. In Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency, political visionaries and movement leaders such as Bill McKibben define the urgency of this moment and provide a manual for turning out voters in an age of extreme inequality, climate change, and pandemic.
But if you wanted to make the argument—and I do—that this year actually is special, the climate crisis might be as good a place as any to start. And that’s because it comes with a feature that most political issues don’t: a deadline. In October 2018, the world’s climate scientists issued a special report, assessing our chances of meeting the targets set at the global climate talks in Paris a few years before. Those targets were modest—they called for attempting to hold the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since we’ve already raised the temperature 1 degree, and that’s been enough to melt half the summer sea ice in the Arctic, kill off vast swaths of coral reef, and set big patches of the Earth on fire, it’s not like the Paris targets are desirable. (Desirable was the world many of us were born onto.) They’re crucial. And if we hope to meet them, the scientists were quite explicit: We have to fundamentally transform our energy systems by 2030. They helpfully defined that fundamental transformation: We need to cut our carbon emissions in half. In 10 years.
Anyone who has ever spent time around governments knows that speed is not one of their hallmarks. If we have any hope of meeting that target set for a decade out, we need to be hard at work just about … now. If another four years of inaction passes, the chance is over, and with it the planet as we’ve known it.
The past four years, of course, have been more than a time of annoying stasis—it’s been a period of active regression. The Trump administration has tried, with a good deal of success, to undercut every environmental law on the books, paying particular attention to climate change. A rogue’s gallery of coal lobbyists and oil executives have taken the top jobs in the environmental and energy bureaucracies and used the posts to give their industries free rein across the landscape. Where the Obama administration had scored modest successes—ratcheting up the gas mileage for cars, for instance—they’ve sprinted in the opposite direction.
Above all, of course, they’ve removed America from those Paris climate accords, in an act of breathtaking vandalism. It took decades for the international community to reach those agreements, and now the country that has poured the most carbon into the atmosphere is also the only country not engaged in the only global effort to do something about it.
Our vote is our chance to have a say.
It’s not that the Paris accords were so amazing—even the people negotiating them acknowledged at their signing in 2015 that they fell short of the task. Even if all the countries on Earth kept their pledges, the mercury would still rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius. But the calculation was that perhaps once countries began implementing renewable energy on a large scale, they’d find it cheaper and easier than they reckoned, and a virtuous spiral would ensue, allowing much faster progress. At first, it seemed to be working—throughout the past decade the world’s engineers kept dropping the price of sun and wind, and the pace of installations started to quicken. But then appeared Trump, who labeled global warming a hoax manufactured by the Chinese and who believed that wind turbines caused cancer. It was as if the road along which we were supposed to be accelerating was suddenly filled with potholes; momentum slowed, not just here but in much of the rest of the world. (The appearance of Trump-like figures in other countries didn’t help—Brazil’s Bolsonaro, for instance, started opening up the Amazon to intense exploitation, an act as reckless as opening a new fleet of gas-fired power plants.) Having lost three decades to the oil industry’s campaign of disinformation, we were now losing time again.
And time, as I have indicated, is the most precious asset here. Most of our problems linger—my entire adult life we’ve been engaged in the fight to try to provide medical care to Americans. It’s infuriating that we haven’t done it yet; Trump’s efforts to cut back access will, of course, kill many and bankrupt more. But at least they won’t make it harder to solve the problem once we finally decide to—the day will come when some president is able to make our country match every other industrialized nation, and the preceding decades will not have made it harder. The climate crisis isn’t like that—as a team of scientists reported in November, we’re about to cross a whole series of tipping points, ranging from destabilizing Antarctic ice sheets to slowing down vast ocean currents. These are not reversible; no one has a plan for refreezing the poles.
Every election that passes, we lose leverage—this time around our last chance at limiting the temperature rise to anything like 1.5 degrees would slip through our fingers. Which is why we need to register and vote as never before. It’s also, of course, why we need to do more than that: many of us are also hard at work this year taking on the big banks that fund the fossil fuel industry, trying to pull the financial lever as well as the political one. And even within the world of politics, we need to do much more than vote: no matter who wins, Nov. 4 and 5 and 6 are as important as Nov. 3; we have to push, and prod, and open up space for the people we work to install in office.
But in the autumn of an even-numbered year, we have a superpower that will wither as soon as Election Day passes. Our vote is our chance to have a say. In the case of the climate, that is not just about what will happen for the next four years. It’s about what will happen for the next 10,000 years.
This excerpt by Bill McKibben from Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge, 2020) edited by Matt Nelson, Suren Moodliar, and Charles Derber, appears by permission of the publisher.
They want to spend COVID-19 relief money on what?
On Tuesday, Senate Republicans released their long-awaited coronavirus relief proposal.
Buried in the 177-page document are BILLIONS of dollars for weapons of war wish list: fighter jets, helicopters, and missile defense systems.
That’s right, Republicans in the Senate are ready to hand out $30 BILLION for Pentagon pet projects completely unrelated to COVID-19 — while they’re nickel and diming families who desperately need protections and benefits to put food on their tables and keep roofs over their heads.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the power to reject this absurd proposal and stop it entering the final bill, because none of these proposals can become law without House approval. Together, we spoke out against pandemic profiteering in the COVID relief bills in April - and won. Let’s do it again.
Add your name to tell Speaker Pelosi: Reject the GOP’s giveaway to the Pentagon in COVID-19 relief!
Why, might you ask, do Senate Republicans want to give the Pentagon 30 billion dollars? For one, to replace money President Trump redirected to build his ego-filled, racist border wall.
The $30 billion also includes: $11 billion to reimburse contractors for profits lost as a result of the virus (despite little indication of losses) and $686 million for the bungled F-35 fighter jet program. And, by sheer coincidence we’re sure, one of the projects that’d be funded is a ship built in Alabama, the home state of Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby.
At the end of the day, that’s $30 BILLION not spent on PPE or ventilators. $30 BILLION not spent on keeping our families afloat during an economic collapse. $30 BILLION not spent on housing relief in the midst of an eviction crisis. $30 BILLION not spent on human needs.
Pandemic relief dollars should NOT go to the Pentagon FULL STOP. Add your name to ask Speaker Pelosi to ensure no COVID-19 relief money goes to weapons of war.
If families across the country have to adjust their budgets, surely the Pentagon — as recipient of three quarters of a TRILLION tax dollars — can do the same.
Appropriating a dollar more to the Pentagon is throwing critically needed resources away.
Rebuilding our futures lies in what we choose to support and resource right now. Let’s make sure Speaker Pelosi knows: we continue to choose, and need, investment in PEOPLE over investment in weapons and war.
Let’s do everything we can to make sure we build the world we desperately need and want: a just, equitable, and peaceful world, for all.
Thank you for working for peace,
Sara, Annika, Samuel, and the Win Without War team
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(202) 656-4999 | info@winwithoutwar.org
It was all a lie
It was all a lie
By Globe Columnist,Updated August 1, 2020
“The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice . . . the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership.”
“If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we’d all still be celebrating the queen’s birthday.”
“One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.”
But they come from “It Was All A Lie,” a new book by Stuart Stevens, a political consultant who has spent much of this adult life trying to get Republicans elected to office, including a number of presidential candidates.
Stevens’ book is a blistering attack on the modern Republican Party and its wholesale surrender to Donald Trump.
For Stevens, that surrender hardly comes as a surprise. The GOP is, at its heart, a “white grievance party,” he writes. And with Trump’s victory in 2016, it could “breathe a sigh of relief that no longer did it need to pretend that it must reach out more to nonwhite voters.”
Nominating a morally challenged, credibly accused sexual predator to be president might seem discordant for a party that has long talked about the importance of “family values” and character. But for Stevens it just showed how little Republicans cared about the principles they so loudly proclaim.
Talk of fiscal responsibility is another lie, says Stevens. In reality, neither Republican voters nor their leaders are all that interested in cutting federal spending or balancing the budget.
Stevens even takes on the intellectual heavyweights of the conservative movement like Bill Bennett, who in the 1990s bemoaned the coarsening of American culture and lacerated Bill Clinton for his moral failings. Rather than be aghast at Trump’s rise, Stevens notes, Bennett lauded it and attacked fellow Republicans who failed to get on board. A party so bereft of an ideological underpinning, Stevens says, is little more than a rabid fan base intent on defeating its key rival. Winning is now the only metric that matters.
Trump’s takeover, as far as Stevens is concerned, was the logical end point of the GOP’s twisted trajectory — and his ascendancy gave lie to every ideological argument and every talking point uttered by party leaders.
This analysis may sound familiar to close observers of American politics. Yet, it is striking to see an actual practitioner of these black arts point a finger at himself.
In the book, Stevens is honest enough to acknowledge the subtle ways he played the game of racial politics. He’s honest enough to write about how he cut ads that shaded the truth and put victory above all other considerations.
Some will characterize Stevens’ book as self-serving and disingenuous. Surely, he must have realized what he was doing for the GOP — and to the country — at the time. But he insists he was in denial. “Had Trump not been the nominee and won the election,” Stevens told me in an interview, “I probably could have kept denying it to myself. Most of us go through life trying to avoid moral crisis but Trump made it impossible to ignore.”
He told me that what initially drew him to the GOP was the notion of “personal responsibility.” And he didn’t know where else to begin but by taking responsibility for his own actions.
Trump’s takeover, as far as Stevens is concerned, was the logical end point of the GOP’s twisted trajectory — and his ascendancy gave lie to every ideological argument and every talking point uttered by party leaders.
This analysis may sound familiar to close observers of American politics. Yet, it is striking to see an actual practitioner of these black arts point a finger at himself.
In the book, Stevens is honest enough to acknowledge the subtle ways he played the game of racial politics. He’s honest enough to write about how he cut ads that shaded the truth and put victory above all other considerations.
Some will characterize Stevens’ book as self-serving and disingenuous. Surely, he must have realized what he was doing for the GOP — and to the country — at the time. But he insists he was in denial. “Had Trump not been the nominee and won the election,” Stevens told me in an interview, “I probably could have kept denying it to myself. Most of us go through life trying to avoid moral crisis but Trump made it impossible to ignore.”
He told me that what initially drew him to the GOP was the notion of “personal responsibility.” And he didn’t know where else to begin but by taking responsibility for his own actions.
MARKEY MAIL: Medicare for All Champion Ady Barkan Endorses Ed
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