Rhode Islands Scary State Treasurer – Forbes
Just what kind of fees are we paying in Rhode Island under the current treasurer’s “alternative” investments?
High Deductible Health Plans Causing Less Use of Hospital and More Bad Debt from Patients
This article explains how 31 people are being laid off from a hospital in Keene, New Hampshire, due to a number of factors including less reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid and problems stemming from high deductible health plans:
Hospital officials said in December recent trends toward high-deductible health insurance plans have apparently led to increases in outstanding bad debt, which includes unpaid patient bills, and also to reductions in the public’s use of some medical services. The number of patients, which at the hospital averages more than 30 filled beds at any one time, is down, and demand for outpatient services is also off.
How Government Preys on the Poor
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new blog called Economichardship.org, which talks about how the Great Recession is impacting regular folk. This article has some information on how government and law enforcement are getting into the business of making money off the poor.
At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.
And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country — from California and Texas to Pennsylvania — counties and municipalities have been toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school hours. In New York City, it’s now a crime to put your feet up on a subway seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime of having a “messy yard.” Some cities — most recently, Houston and Philadelphia — have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in public places.
Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage — a practice so common that the industry even has a term for it: “sewer service.” In a sequence that National Public Radio reports is “increasingly common,” a person is stopped for some minor traffic offense — having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake light — at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting offender is whisked off to jail.
Read on:
38 Studios Writes Rubber Check to RI
It just keeps getting better. From the Boston Globe:
Curt Schilling firm to make $1.1m payment, may miss payroll..
38 Studios and the ‘Job Creator’ Logic
The news is not good for the $75 million dollar gamble that Governor Carcieri talked the state of RI into taking. It looks like 38 Studios is already looking for a bailout. From Bob Plain at the RIFUTURE blog:
Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! – The Daily Beast
If only more people could cut through the right-wing “protect the rich” talking points like Stephen King, we might actually have a strong middle class again.
Maybe the Government Needs to Regulate CEO Pay
After adjusting for inflation, we pay CEOs today four times what they made in the 1970′s. Pay-for-performance is the idea behind exorbitant CEO pay, but the fact is that CEO’s make big money whether their companies perform or not. CEO pay is a problem that is affecting us all as we struggle to afford housing, health care and education in the middle class, while the 1% continues to hoard resources. We need to reach some social consensus on what to do about this problem. Otherwise, the stratification will continue. From Time: Are We Paying Our CEOs Enough: A New Survey From the Wall Street Journal and Hay Group Suggests Maybe Not | Business | TIME.com.
Providence and the Non-profits
Once again, Providence politicians are looking to the city’s private colleges for money to help shore up the city’s poor finances. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay says these non-profit institutions shouldn’t be seen as cash cows for the city.
There has been more rhetoric than reality in the latest dispute between Brown University and Mayor Angel Taveras and his city council allies.
David Korten Frames the Issues for Occupy Wall Street
This is an excellent video from an erudite scholar of our economy. David Korten is the author of When Corporations Rule the World and is here to tell us that we don’t need Wall Street in its current form. It is just messing up the economy with corruption and financial warrior tactics to protect and further enrich the elite. We need local banks and local economies. The notion is radical — what will we all do with our 401K’s if there is no Wall Street? Go back to having a savings account and earning 3% interest a year. Actually that doesn’t sound half bad. The problem is banks are paying less than 1% interest right now.
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