November 12, 2009roman
There are more than 150 cash strapped communities throughout the US that are making their own money. I mean that literally, they are printing their own currency to be used locally. The bad news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. The good news is you can’t use it at Wal-Mart. And surprisingly, this is not illegal. It’s all in an effort to keep money circulating exclusively in the local economy when the federal currency is too busy being locked up in a bank vault. From Washington DC, WAMU’s Rebecca Sheir has the story.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 8:46 — 6.1MB)
Do you have a piece you think should be considered for the EconomyBeat Podcast? Put it on
PRX, and add the tag ‘ebpodcast’.
November 11, 2009Jon Brooks
Another moving student piece from Curie Youth Radio, a Chicago high school radio workshop:
In My Plate Full, Yours Empty, a student thanks his mother for sacrificing her own meals while her children ate.
November 11, 2009Jon Brooks
Things are tough out here in Recessionland, but let’s take a moment to check in with how things are going in the Armed Forces, through their own words. Assorted posts from American soldiers, found while looking through the Top 100 Favorite Milblogs on Milblogging.com:
From Afghan Quest
Just returned from another wretched trip to Pogadishu, once again challenging my moral endurance. One of the more blatant signs of disconnection from reality; several Soldiers complaining vociferously about Pizza Hut running out of beef while nearby a Soldier who was passing through Bagram to go on leave had come from a FOB where running out of water for days at a time was relatively common, and needed supplies were unable to be delivered due to a lack of airlift capacity. The ridiculousness of the concerns…is highlighted in the presence of those who pass through their midst on their way to and from the real war.
The Soldiers who pass through are subjected to visions of three-story condos, while they (live in) “transient tents.” These hovels house nearly 200 men who share four shower stalls, two urinals and three toilets. Overflow capacity is provided by several porta-johns nearby. I haven’t been to the east side of Bagram in two years, but I hear that conditions over there are even more horrific. How that can be escapes me, but there must be another level of depravity on that side of the runway…
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November 11, 2009Jon Brooks
Curie Youth Radio is a workshop at Curie High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side in which students write, record, and produce their own radio pieces. Many of these can be heard on
PRX and some have been aired on
Chicago Public Radio and NPR’s
All Things Considered.
A sampling:
You can also listen or subscribe to Curie Youth Radio as a podcast.
November 10, 2009Jon Brooks
From the Torontoist, via Boing Boing: “Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing elimination of copyeditor jobs.”
A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher’s memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit from editorial aid.
Click on the image to see the full memo.
November 10, 2009Jon Brooks
…listen to it! The entire Affordable Health Care for America Act, aka the House health care reform bill, read aloud by different volunteers. From HearTheBill.org.
November 10, 2009Jon Brooks
On Saturday the House passed H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act–1990 pages long and not a photograph, cartoon panel, or dirty limerick among them. We did count, however, 182 mentions of the word “subsection” in the first 300 pages alone, a pretty good ratio.
As you may have noticed, the length of the bill has been generating a lot of snide comments and critical remarks (see above paragraph), mostly by those who oppose it.
Computational Legal Studies, however, a blog that “attempt(s) to disseminate legal or law related studies that employ a computational or complex systems component,” points out some interesting facts about the bill’s length, cut and pasted here:
Number of words in H.R. 3962 impacting substantive law:
234,812 words (w/ generous calculation)
Number of total words in H.R. 3962: 363,086 words (w/ titles, tables of contents …)
Number of text blocks: 7,961
Average number of words per text block: 24.18
Average words per section: 267.03
Is this a Large or Small Number? Comparison to Harry Potter
Number of substantive words in H.R. 3962: 234,812 words
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – 257,000 words
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – 190,000 words
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – 198,000 words
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November 10, 2009Jon Brooks
I’m way into Smigley. This one, called The Stimulus Package, is about as concise an indictment of late-2000s America as you’ll find, and the lead character’s obliviousness in the face of such a decline is almost chilling.
More Smigley below ↓ or here.
November 9, 2009Jon Brooks
Smigly is–unknowingly–having a bad day at the big bank.
More Smigley below ↓ or here.
November 9, 2009Jon Brooks
The Democrats moved the health care ball a little further down the field this weekend, when the House passed its comprehensive reform bill by a slim margin. In order to gain the necessary votes, however, Speaker and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi had to allow the inclusion of a restrictive abortion amendment.
From CBS News:
The provision would prevent women who receive subsidies to purchase insurance that covers abortion — inside or outside of the proposed national health insurance exchange. It would also explicitly ban abortion coverage from the government-run plan, or “public option.” While it does not explicitly prohibit private plans on the exchange from offering abortion coverage, insurers would have little incentive to offer abortion coverage, since most customers on the exchange would pay with subsidies.
Online reaction has come fast and furious today. Just a sampling of user opinion, from the abortion section of the health care feedback forum on the New York Times web site:
I am against the war and our current prison system, but my taxes go to it regardless. We spend trillions of dollars on weapons and operations that will actually or have the potential to kill real live people and lots of them…But we can’t fork over a couple hundred or a thousand dollars for a woman to have a legal medical procedure? It doesn’t make sense to me.
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All women have a choice on whether or not to take a risk on getting pregnant, therefore that is all the choice they need on whether to get an abortion…Being poor is not an excuse for being ignorant.
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I hope someone in the IRS is taking a good hard look at the Catholic Church and other religious groups that claim tax exemptions and see if this kind of lobbying and other politically partisan activities is consistent with (them)…This is offensive to pro-choice voters and I will not be voting anytime soon for any candidate who caved in to this kind of religious bigotry.
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