Browsing PBH By Articles

Why Working The Working Poor Vote Republican

The Article: Working class voters: why America’s poor are willing to vote Republican by Gary Younge in The Guardian.

The Text: Tracey Owings is fighting hard to keep the home that has been in his family for 34 years. In 2000 his mother refinanced. In 2006 she died. In 2009 he lost his job and had no paid work for nine months. He fell behind with the mortgage. The bank moved to foreclose on the house. Gradually the work came back. Less than before. Much less. But just enough. The house is not in negative equity and now he can make the payments. But he can’t get the bank to take his money. Attempts to modify the loan and take advantage of a settlement, brokered by the White House, between mortgage companies and the justice department have come to nought. “I don’t qualify,” he says with exasperation detailing both his efforts to meet each bureaucratic challenge and his frustration at each bureaucratic obstacle.

He stands in the waiting room of Gulfcoast Legal Services offices in Sarasota with an armful of documents and a belly full of bile. “They have failed me,” he says. “Obama came in offering hope and change but he’s failed. I just want to save my mother’s house.”

Owings is voting for Mitt Romney. Does he think Romney will improve his lot? “I’m willing to try anything at this point,” he says.

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Student Loans = New Subprime Mortgages?

The Article: Are student loans the new subprime mortgages? by Marian Wang in Salon.

The Text: More than a decade after Aurora Almendral first set foot on her dream college campus, she and her mother still shoulder the cost of that choice.

Almendral had been accepted to New York University in 1998, but even after adding up scholarships, grants, and the max she could take out in federal student loans, the private university — among nation’s costliest — still seemed out of reach. One program filled the gap: Aurora’s mother, Gemma Nemenzo, was eligible for a different federal loan meant to help parents finance their children’s college costs. Despite her mother’s modest income at the time — about $25,000 a year as a freelance writer, she estimates — the government quickly approved her for the loan. There was a simple credit check, but no check of income or whether Nemenzo, a single mom, could afford to repay the loans.

Nemenzo took out $17,000 in federal parent loans for the first two years her daughter attended NYU. But the burden soon became too much. With financial strains mounting, Almendral — who had promised to repay the loans herself —withdrew after her sophomore year. She later finished her degree at the far less expensive Hunter College, part of the public City University of New York, and went on to earn a Fulbright scholarship.

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Obama, Science’s Best Hope

The Article: Obama is still the best hope for science in the US by Andy Feinberg in The New Scientist.

The Text: I grew up in Pennsylvania during the breathtaking years of the space race. I graduated from high school in the summer Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. All the boys and girls, farmers and teachers, Democrats and Republicans felt that a career in science and discovery was the best that anyone could pursue.

That is why I became a scientist and a doctor and dedicated my career to uncovering what causes disease, eventually helping pioneer the field of epigenetics. I have made many discoveries, but only because I worked hard, had great teachers and students, and lived in a society that supported and believed in what I was doing. The US is full of people like me – that’s why we have the greatest scientific enterprise in the world.

Science matters for everything and everyone. Scientific research and innovation have made and continue to make huge improvements in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the energy we use, the medicines that prolong and improve the quality of our lives and, especially, in how we communicate.

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Why Progressives Should Care About The Courts And Vote Obama

The Article: Three Reasons Progressives Should Care About the Courts (and Vote for Obama) by Bill Blum in Truth Dig.

The Text: Like Hamlet on the battlements, the progressive left is haunted by a question: to vote for Barack Obama with all his faults or, by boycotting the elections or casting ballots for a third party, risk the inauguration of Mitt Romney? To some on the left, disaffected by Obama’s statist posture on national security, his kowtowing to Wall Street and timidity on climate change, there is no appreciable difference between the two major candidates. So why not stay true to genuine progressive values and turn away from Obama, even in the swing states?

Of all the reasons for rejecting such thinking and the risks posed by a Romney victory, perhaps the clearest is that Romney’s election will enable the Republican Party to reshape the Supreme Court—and the entire federal judiciary along with it—for a generation. And, as the courts shift ever more decisively to the right, the fight for social justice and basic human decency also will be set back a generation.

Those doubting the risks involved in a wholesale GOP makeover of the courts should, at a minimum, reflect on three basic principles.

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The Case For Voter Rebellion

The Article: We Vote, They Rule: The Case for Voter Rebellion by Scott Tucker in Truth Dig.

The Text: Democratic and Republican politicians keep each other in business. That matters much more than the usual dead end debates about whether there is a dime’s or even a dollar’s worth of difference between the two ruling parties of this corporate regime. Of course there are differences, and the divergent points in public policy are very much what we would expect from a party that hopes for a better regulated form of capitalism on the “left,” and a party that hopes for a more dictatorial rule of the rich on the right. Only in the bizarrely reduced worldview of “our two-party system” would the borders of one country define the borders of political thought and practice.

Beyond our borders, millions of people freely and regularly vote for socialists and communists of various kinds and parties, and those citizens are not trembling under jackboots or facing summary execution in the soundproof basements of police states. If we insist on principle that the regime in Sweden is a political twin separated at birth from the regime in North Korea, then we will not be above calling President Obama a socialist and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont a Bolshevik. Those rhetorical steamrolling tricks can be left to the far right, however, if we identify in any way with the democratic left. Let us generously define this democratic left to include left-leaning members of the Democratic Party, as well as the growing number of people who are opposed to this bipartisan corporate regime. We need a public conversation about the present conditions and future prospects of the democratic left in the United States. This is why the question of a change in our whole economic and political system cannot be ruled out of order. That kind of censorship is not a promising premise for any political conversation.

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