Unscrupulous lenders have always preyed on military families, who are apt to be some combination of young, preoccupied, and broke. Payday lenders dot the neighborhoods around military bases. Real banks are cashing in, too. Fort Hood National Bank regularly allows account-holders to overdraft their accounts by several hundred dollars, charging a $35 fee per overdraft. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that 3 out of 10 of the banks that collected the most overdraft fees had branches on military bases.

[Photo credit: bradipo, Creative Commons]

Janet Reitman, an investigative journalist well-known for her expose of Scientology and her profile of the Boston bombing suspect, tackles the stealth war on abortion. Reitman explains how right wing groups have stopped trying to criminalize abortion outright and refocused their energies on regulating abortion out of existence.  This is the first time in years that Rolling Stone has devoted so much space to a reprouctive rights story. Kudos to the publication and the reporter for putting out this important piece of journalism.

On the 50th Anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that researchers went off track decades ago when they decided that fixing poverty was a matter of diagnosing and remediating the supposedly dysfunctional culture and flawed characters of poor people. These researchers assumed that the poor stayed poor because they choose immediate gratification over long-term planning, or addiction over sobriety, or promiscuity over lawful marriage, and therefore needed moral uplift in the form of “chastity training” and other behavior modification programs. Not surprisingly, the only people who improved their economic status were the consultants who charged taxpayers big bucks for ineffective and degrading programs. 

Ehrenreich thinks it’s a lot simpler than that: The working poor don’t rise out poverty because wages are low and being poor is insidiously but ruinously expensive. As Ehrenreich discovered while researching her book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, if you don’t have first and last month’s rent to put down on a new apartment, you can find yourself stuck in an overpriced residential motel that costs far more per month than you would have paid in rent if only you’d had the cash to put down the deposit. Ehrenreich found poverty “surcharges” on everything from convenience store groceries to high-interest payday loans. Between the hidden high costs of making do on minimum wage and stagnant wages, it’s no wonder that so many poor people find themselves unable to get ahead.

[Photo credit: kersy83, Creative Commons.]

The Best of the Week’s News

• An asthma epidemic in American cities is robbing children of their health and peace of mind, Dateline NBC investigates why so many kids are struggling to breathe.

• Texas abortion law drives more women to self-induce miscarriages with over-the-counter drugs.

• How Reddit became a gun market and authorized its logo on assault riffles.

• Jack Abramoff explains how lobbyists continue to ply legislators with free travel.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]