Friday Reads

Good Morning!

It’s still raining here and we’re under a flash flood warning and have been since yesterday afternoon.  It’s May!  Enough of the April Showers already!  My magnolia tree out front is blooming up a storm on its own.  The huge white blossoms are picture perfect!

Well, you knew it was coming!  It was just a matter of time before Debtors Prisons came back given the way Banana Republican States are trying to shove us back several centuries.  Why do people feel like the poor should be punished?

The jailing of people unable to pay fines and court costs is no longer a relic of the 19th century American judicial system. Debtors’ prisons are alive and well in one-third of the states in this country.

In 2011, Think Progress’ Marie Diamond wrote: “Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor’s prisons.”

In 2010, the ACLU did a study titled In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons, which revealed the use of debtors prison practices in five states, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia and Washington.

In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson said: “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope – some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”

Nearly 50 years after Johnson’s address, which launched the “War on Poverty,” “poverty in America has not dissipated,” the ACLU’s report states that “the number of people living in poverty in Ohio grew by 57.7% from 1999 to 2011, with the largest increase coming from suburban counties.”

This year’s ACLU report – which takes its name from a phrase in Johnson’s speech – points out that many poor “Ohioans … convicted of a criminal or traffic offense and sentenced to pay a fine an affluent defendant may simply pay … and go on with his or her life [find the fine] unaffordable [launching] the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.”

According to the report, Ohio courts in Huron, Cuyahoga, and Erie counties “are among the worst offenders. In the second half of 2012, over 20% of all bookings in the Huron County Jail were related to failure to pay fines. In Cuyahoga County, the Parma Municipal Court jailed at least 45 people for failure to pay fines and costs between July 15 and August 31, 2012. During the same period in Erie County, the Sandusky Municipal Court jailed at least 75 people for similar charges.”

Meanwhile, suicide rates are on the rise in the US.

More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.

Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.

The most pronounced increases were seen among men in their 50s, a group in which suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000. For women, the largest increase was seen in those ages 60 to 64, among whom rates increased by nearly 60 percent, to 7.0 per 100,000.

It is likely the stress of joblessness, lack of access to health care, loss of assets like the values of homes and retirement funds is correlated with this.   Bank abuses, however, are “in your face” and out of control according to Jeffrey Sachs.  Sachs is a Columbia University Economics professor.

When I really started to count in fact and keep track of the number of lawsuits, and the number of settlements, and it’s amazing actually how many there are, of course. Libor, Abacus, other financial fraud scandals, money laundering, insider trading. The list is actually extraordinary. The frequency of new cases, new settlements, new SEC charges, is stunning. And the lack of any apparent remorse from leaders of the industry.

[There hasn’t been one] major figure in the industry acknowledging this rot, and also calling upon the industry to clean itself up. And I find that amazing because I would’ve expected at least one or two voices that would’ve have played that role and that hasn’t happened yet.

Why the lack of prosecution?

The legal defenses are very powerful, the lobbying is very powerful, the government in general is completely squeezed even if it would like to regulate. But we also have a revolving door of senior regulatory officials, congressional staff, congressmen and senators. Everyone’s in on this. So the question is how is this going to be cleaned up, what will it really take to get this under control? We just haven’t seen glimmers of that yet.

What will it take to change the system?

I think that the public is utterly disgusted, of course, and that is a major start.

There’s going to be a massive backlash. But some thought, and I thought at the beginning, that Obama was going to bring in control, that’s essentially what he promised, but he actually essentially brought in Wall Street to do the clean up. Perhaps the next government, or perhaps the next crash, it’s hard to say. But what one does feel is that the extent of abuse, the stench of it, is reaching such a high level that we’re not in an equilibrium, political or social, right now.

This is explosive stuff (scandals like Abacus and insider trading). It’s unbelievable. So far it hasn’t stopped the practice, but it can’t get more in your face than this actually.

I think in the end the question will be for our politics in general, whether a political movement not based on mega-donations can win political control. I believe that it can actually.

Some movement like the populist movement or the progressive era of the past is going to rise and say ‘we don’t need contributions, we’re not taking them, and if you the American people want a way out of this that doesn’t involve politicians bought for big money, we’re the ones.”

But short of that I don’t see a way out. Our politicians are not heroes, to say the least, and they seem to have no taste for this.

Will Dodd-Frank be effective?

It’s clearly being eaten alive and at critical points — of too big to fail and the control of derivatives — I doubt that it’s going to have any real effect as it is right now. The lobbying is just simply so overwhelming that I doubt that it’s going to have much sticking power.

There’ a great book reviewed about some of the women who really helped win World War II.  It’s called “The Girls of Atomic City” written by Denise Kiernan.   Here’s an excerpt from a review at td.

In the fall of 1942, residents of a rural swath of east Tennessee began receiving official notifications that their homes and farms were no longer theirs and that they would have to move. The new owner was the U.S. government, which swept up some 59,000 acres of land and in a matter of months built an instant city of 75,000 people so secret it wasn’t even listed on maps.

Its purpose? To process uranium for the world’s first atomic bomb.

The fascinating story of the Manhattan Project has been told often, and often told well—Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” placing high on that lengthy list. But given the project’s significant and lasting impact, there’s plenty more mining to be done, and Denise Kiernan has found a rich vein in “The Girls of Atomic City.” Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets.

The secret Tennessee city eventually became modern Oak Ridge, built to support what was known as the Clinton Engineer Works. The sprawling complex was off-limits to anyone without proper ID. It was so vertically segregated in its operations that only a handful of people at the top knew what was really going on, and so swaddled in internal secrecy that to speculate on the purpose of your job invited immediate dismissal and eviction.

To see long excerpts from “The Girls of Atomic City” at Google Books, click here.

As Kiernan demonstrates, because of the shortage of manpower during the war years, much of the work at Oak Ridge was done by women. They were drawn from cities in the Northeast, farms in the South, and small towns in the Midwest, were paid good money for the time and the place, and were crammed into dormitories and trailers; and for the small contingent of African-Americans, there were four-person, 256-square-foot “hutments,” each one “a square plywood box of a structure that had a potbellied stove sitting right smack-dab in the middle.” Houses, impermanent as they were, were reserved for families.

Women may have migrated to Oak Ridge in droves, but they were still hemmed in by the social and racial narrows of the time. Few achieved levels of authority at work; housing policies forbade gender or racial mixing; a household wasn’t a household unless it was led by a man, which meant women with children who arrived ahead of their husbands struggled to find shelter.

Kiernan has amassed a deep reservoir of intimate details of what life was like for women living in the secret city, gleaned from seven years of interviews and research.

Here’s some fun from Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. This is part of the Rubber Duck Project conceived by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.

The artist has used this installment in other cities. The artist explains its purpose.

The piece, called Rubber Duck, is by Dutch conceptual artist Florentijn Hofman, internationally renowned for his large-scale sculptures, which often originate from recognisable, everyday objects. He said: “The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: It can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them.”

So, that’s my bit for this morning.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?