Is It in My Head?

OceanaGold is dead set on making El Salvador pay for rejecting a disastrous gold mine. The proposed mine would contaminate the last remaining clean water sources in the entire country. Now, the mining giant is taking the tiny country to a World Bank tribunal and suing it for a whopping $301 million.

BLITZER: Let me just ask you, I want to get your quick reaction to what we heard from speaker of the House, John Boehner. He was very blunt. He said if the president goes ahead and, through executive action, unilaterally, without going through Congress, tries to change the status of illegal immigrants here in the United States, that will be very dangerous, he’ll poison the well. And it’s as simple as that. He says the president better not even think about doing that. Your reaction?

SANDERS: Well, my reaction is the people of this country overwhelmingly want to see the minimum wage raised. Is the Republican Party going to do what the American people want? The American people do not want more tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations. Is the Republican Party going to poison the well by going forward, at a time of massive wealth and income equality, giving more tax breaks to people who don’t need the tax breaks? Boehner is talking about a political attack on the president.

BLITZER: Will you support the president if he goes around Congress and takes that executive action to change the status of illegal immigrants?

SANDERS: Look, what I support is Congress and the president doing everything they can to address the serious problems facing the American people. Immigration is one of those issues. In the Senate, we passed a bipartisan bill. The House did nothing. Let’s do something together. That’s the preferable route. Most importantly, let’s not turn our backs on the middle class of this country and ignore the enormous economic problems they are facing. Let’s not simply work for the rich and big campaign contributors who control the United States Congress. If we can do that and respond to the needs and the pain of the American people, you know what, I think you’ll suddenly find that Congress is regarded more favorably than is currently the case.

1. poverty is a complex problem — that we don’t know what works to reduce it, and that we need more data and more research
2. private or not-for-profit agencies are inherently more effective than public ones, and that state and local approaches do better than national ones
3. poor people need counseling and guidance; they are broken and in need of fixing

Sign the Petition: Allow Post Offices to Offer Basic Banking Services

www.credomobilize.com

My name is Brianna Tong, and I’m a student at the University of Chicago. I’m a leader in our on-campus organization, Southside Solidarity Network, and in the IIRON Student Network, because I want to win economic and racial justice for all people, and that young people will be at the forefront of a movement to make that happen.

Predatory check cashing and payday lending companies have been exploiting working class Americans for decades, by charging outrageous fees and triple digit interest rates. But now we have a chance to give the millions of Americans without access to affordable basic financial services a fair, publicly owned alternative to payday lenders and big banks.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has an exciting new proposal that would allow post offices around the country to offer basic financial services like check cashing and bill paying.

According to study released in January by the United States Postal Service’s Inspector General, 68 million Americans – nearly 1 in 4 households -- are underserved by banks and forced to rely on exploitative and wildly expensive payday lenders. Many of these people spend as much as $2,400 each year on inflated interest rates and unnecessary fees.

Across the globe, countries like Japan, Germany and Kenya have had great success with postal banking. And for more than 50 years, post offices in the United States were also allowed to offer banking services. Despite the program’s widespread success, both at providing banking services and generating billions of dollars in revenue for the United States Postal Service, Congress ended the program in 1967.

Given the lack of access to affordable banking services currently experiences by tens of millions of Americans, Congress needs take immediate action to enact Senator Warren’s proposal to bring a public option for financial services back to the United States.

While there’s been a lot of buzz lately about Senator Warren’s postal banking proposal, it needs support in Congress to become law. By signing my petition you can help build that support and add real momentum to the fight for postal banking.

• http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116374/postal-service-banking-how-usps-can-save-itself-and-help-poor
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-warren/coming-to-a-post-office-n_b_4709485.html
• http://www.npr.org/2014/02/07/272652648/post-office-could-rack-up-billions-by-offering-money-services
• http://www.thenation.com/article/178361/why-we-need-bank-post-office#
• http://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2014/rarc-wp-14-007.pdf

Twin studies released at noon Tuesday estimate that the majority of families of front-line fast food workers use public assistance, at a taxpayer cost of nearly $7 billion a year, while seven publicly-traded fast food corporations made $7.4 billion in profit last year.

The first study finds that 52 percent of families of workers employed at least twenty-seven weeks a year and ten hours a week in rank-and-file fast food jobs are enrolled in Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the program which replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children under “welfare reform”).  That includes a majority of those workers who are employed at least forty hours week. The study, Fast Food, Poverty Wages, was sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Urban & Regional Planning, and funded by the labor group Fast Food Forward. The estimates were based on government data.

A second study, by the pro-union National Employment Law Project, extended the analysis to individual companies, estimating that McDonald’s workers received $1.2 billion in public assistance while the corporation netted $5.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2012 profits, and devoted $5.5 billion to dividends and stock buybacks.

“This is the public cost of low-wage jobs in America,” write the authors of the Berkeley – Urbana-Champaign study. “The cost is public because taxpayers bear it. Yet it remains hidden in national policy debates about poverty, employment and federal spending.”