The Harry Potter Alliance and the Hunger Games

Apparently the release of the second Hunger Games movie has become an occasion for hyper-marketing of cosmetics and fast-food sandwiches. This is, to say the least, ironic, considering the anti-capitalist and anti-militarist themes of the Hunger Games trilogy. The Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans devoted to working for social justice, has come up with a campaign to resist the hyper-marketing.

This very cool tumblr tells more.

Tar Sands Week of Action

Women's ENews correspondent Melinda Tuhus posted an excellent feature story about women working to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. A short excerpt:

WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)--Melina Laboucan Massimo is a Lubicon Cree from northern Alberta, Canada, who wants people to understand the magnitude of tar sands mining devastation to her community.

One single site of tar sands extraction near where she lives is the size of Washington, D.C., she said. "So think of your city being completely scraped out, and that's what's happening to our homeland."

She and other women gathered at a restaurant here on the evening of the largest environmental demonstration in U.S. history, on Feb. 17, to tell their stories of opposing TransCanada Corporation's Keystone XL pipeline project, which would bring hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of tar sands from northern Alberta across the entire U.S. mid-section to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining and export.

Massimo discussed ancient forests that have been chopped down to create a moonscape.

"The boreal forest is an ancient forest," Massimo told the gathering. "It's pristine; it's beautiful. A lot of our medicines are there; a lot of wildlife. It's such a beautiful area they call it the Lungs of the Earth. There are already 2,600 oil and gas wells taking up 70 percent of our territory."

This week is Stop Tar Sands Week of Action. More than 50 organizations and 30 planned actions are involved -- including one yesterday in Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma tax system is regressive

The OK Policy Blog has the details.

The regressivity of the system is obvious since the percentage paid in taxes drops with each increase in income. Those who are in the lowest 20 percent of income earners–making $12,000 or less each year–pay 12 percent (one-eighth) of their income in taxes. The percentage of income paid in taxes falls slightly for each income group above the middle. Those in the top 1 percent–making $250,000 or more each year–pay 8 percent (one-twelfth) of their income.

As much as we argue about taxes, most of us don’t think poor people should pay more in taxes than rich, but that’s how we’ve set up the system in Oklahoma.

The rest of the post includes proposals for remedying this situation.

Increase OK grocery tax credit

Oklahoma is one of 16 states that taxes groceries. The state has offers a tax credit to low-income households and individuals to help offset the sales tax they pay on groceries, but the amount of the credit has not been raised since 1990. The eligibility level has not been adjusted for inflation since 1998.

According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, Oklahoma has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the nation. They're supporting action in the state house and senate to expand the grocery tax credit. According to OPI's fact sheet:

HB 2204 (Rep. Trebilcock) and SB 567 (Sen. Rice) would help hard-pressed Oklahoma families by increasing Oklahoma’s Sales Tax Relief credit, an existing tax credit intended to offset the sales tax on groceries for low- and moderate-income households. The bills as introduced would:

• Increase the amount of the Sales Tax Relief credit from $40 to $60 per household member for those who are currently eligible for the credit (up to $50,000 for tax filers claiming a dependent child, senior, or person with disability status, or $20,000 for others);
• Expand eligibility for a partial credit to $60,000 or $30,000, depending on household status. Those with income between current eligibility and expanded eligibility levels would receive a $30 credit;
• Index eligibility levels annually to inflation beginning in 2011.

You can find email addresses and phone numbers here to encourage committee chairs in the House and Senate to hear these bills. For more information on the grocery tax credit, you can read the Oklahoma Policy Institute's policy brief.

Whether or not bailout passes, women likely to lose

Not surprisingly, Women's eNews reports that Economists Fear Bailout Could Tighten Squeeze on Women.

If the bill does not pass, and the economy worsens, women will suffer most because they have less wealth than men and are more vulnerable in economic downturns, she said.

If Congress does clear the bill, its high cost will put a fiscal squeeze on government programs that aid low-income people, most of whom are women, she said.

The $700 billion plan would cost roughly $150 billion more than the war in Iraq has cost US taxpayers so far.

Listen to the women

Three women with useful things to say about the current US financial crisis:

1. Naomi Klein
2. Nomi Prins
3. Mimi Abramovitz

Read them.

Message to Wall Street: the problem is poverty

NPR reports that the US stock market rallied strongly late Thursday amid rumors that the federal government might create an agency similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation that helped the country get through the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

But is a continuing series of bailouts of greedy and stupid Wall Street firms the best way to get out of our current economic situation? Sally Kohn, writing on Common Dreams, points out that Exploiting Poverty Caused the Financial Crisis.

The sub-prime crisis is the result of good people getting bad loans. Loans that triple or quadruple in interest rates, riddled with small print, are unbearable by most homeowners. But they are particularly unsustainable for low-income families working two or three jobs to make ends meet. Still, lenders scammed hardworking families with the promise of owning homes they really couldn't afford. And then greedy Wall Street managers, looking for a new way to squeeze a buck from an already bursting-at-the-seams economy, bundled up these bad loans into worse securities, sold them off, and tried to gain a profit as our national economy lost its shirt.
We could have averted the current financial crisis by creating affordable housing and good jobs, strengthening public education and providing health care and child care for all families, to help hardworking Americans thrive in the middle class instead of being pushed into poverty. We could have averted this crisis if we really cared about all families owning their own homes and created nationwide programs including affordable loans. (Even subsidized loans in the first place would have cost taxpayers less than what we're now spending bailing out Wall Street.) We could have averted this crisis if we put the needs of the majority of American families ahead of the needs of a small minority of greedy investors.
Now, 8,000 American families a day face foreclosure. But instead of prioritizing poor and even middle class families who are increasingly struggling, our government is spending billions and billions to bail out the Wall Street firms that created this crisis. Instead, we should be spending our taxpayer money to help the families who were taken advantage of in the "anything goes" unregulated financial system that years of misguided never-really-did-trickle-down economic policy created. These families need the government to help re-adjust their mortgages and cover bridge payments to avoid foreclosure.

There is also the troubling possibility that the US government's own finances could be dragged down by the bailouts. Here's how the NPR story finishes:

Economist Sun Won Sohn of California State University at Fullerton told NPR that the U.S. can raise the money it needs to pay for the bailouts, but the bigger issue is one of perception. The U.S. financial system seems overextended, and that is causing foreign investors to pull their money out of the country.
"The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have always been the rock of Gibraltar," he said. "Now we're seeing that people are beginning to wonder, is it really as strong as we thought it was?"

Carbon-Free Energy, Cutting Poverty in Half: Mr. Gore, Meet Mr. Edwards - Column | GreenBiz.com

This is worth reading:

Carbon-Free Energy, Cutting Poverty in Half: Mr. Gore, Meet Mr. Edwards

I wouldn't have expected an article this interesting to be posted on a site called GreenBiz.com.

That's why I originally found it at truthout.