Browsing PBH By Articles

At Guantanamo, US Government Spends 900 Grand A Prisoner

The Article: Guantanamo camp burns through $900,000 a year per inmate in Reuters.

The Text: It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually.

The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.

By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.

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The Fruits Of The Rich’s Speedy Recovery

The Article: The Rich Have Gained $5.6 Trillion in the ‘Recovery,’ While the Rest of Us Have Lost $669 Billion by Les Leopold in AlterNet.

The Text: Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us — the bottom 93% (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.

Do the math and you’ll discover that the top 7% gained a whopping $5.6 trillion in net worth (assets minus liabilities) while the rest of lost $669 billion. Their wealth went up by 28% while ours went down by 4 percent.

It’s as if the entire economic recovery is going into the pockets of the rich. And that’s no accident. Here’s why.

1. The bailouts went to Wall Street, not to Main Street.

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The 11 Most Heartless GOP Amendments To The Immigration Bill

The Article: The 11 Most Heartless Republican Amendments To The Immigration Bill by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee in ThinkProgress.

The Text: On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin marking up the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that will allow America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants to earn a path to citizenship over 13 years.

Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has promised an open amendment process, leading senators from both parties to offer more than 300 changes to the underlying legislation. Republicans introduced almost two-thirds of the changes, including a series of draconian provisions preventing the undocumented population from ever earning citizenship and or receiving any government assistance. Here are 11 of the most heartless GOP amendments:

1. Undocumented immigrants can never become citizens. “No person who is or has previously been willfully present in the United States will [sic] not in lawful status…shall be eligible for United States citizenship.” Offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

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How Your Tax Dollars Fund Bad, Low-Wage Jobs and Help Fuel Inequality

The Article: How Your Tax Dollars Fund Bad, Low-Wage Jobs and Help Fuel Inequality by Anna Simonton in AlterNet.

The Text: The vacuous, cheerful expression of the Walmart smiley face has long been associated with the paradoxically dark reality of low-wage work. With the recent fast-food worker walkouts in New York, the golden arches may go down, too, in the annals of class-war symbology. But a report released Wednesday by the public policy organization Demos, reveals that there is one employer responsible for creating more low-wage jobs than Walmart and McDonald’s combined: Us.

According to “Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality,” taxpayers subsidize nearly 2 million low-wage jobs through federal contracts, Medicare and Medicaid spending, Small Business Administration loans, federal infrastructure funds, and other areas of government spending.

Low-wage workers in these sectors include apparel manufacturers, construction laborers, retail workers, security guards, janitors, and home health aides, to name a few. The vast majority of these workers are paid less than $12 per hour, and depending on the sector, wages are often much lower than that. The struggle to live and raise families on low wages is made even more difficult by the lack of benefits and job security that are typically part and parcel of these jobs.

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It’s Our Way Or We Break Medicare

The Article: Boehner And McConnell: Our Way Or We Break Medicare by Brian Beutler in Talking Points Memo.

The Text: Your big Obamacare story of the day is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won’t recommend commissioners to the Independent Payment Advisory Board — a panel designed to contain Medicare spending — as the law asks them to.

This isn’t a huge surprise given how, er, eager Republicans have been to smooth Obamacare implementation in general. But it’s more revealing, and just as ironic, as their other efforts to break or hinder the law before it takes full effect.

It’s not just that Boehner and McConnell hate Obamacare and it’s not just that they’re hypocrites about spending. What they’re saying with their actions is that if they can’t convert Medicare from a single-payer into a private insurance system, they’d rather the whole thing collapse under its own weight. President Obama’s and Paul Ryan’s Medicare plans both envision budget caps for Medicare — the difference is that Ryan wants to let private insurers enforce it while Obama leaves the task to providers, with IPAB as a backstop. The parties are actually in about the same place fiscally with respect to Medicare, but unless reaching a more sustainable trajectory means privatizing the program, Republicans will try to keep it unsustainable.

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