When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested by Lizzie Presser for ProPublica. “Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail and Americans are watching their lives—and liberty—disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.”
Student Loan Horror Stories: Borrowed $79,000. Paid $190,000. Now Owes? $236,000 by Matt Taibbi for TK News. “At 59, Chris pleaded for a renegotiation. ‘My life expectancy is 15 more years. At this rate, you’re not going to get very much … ‘ Their response was, ‘So?'”
Public Defender Tales: Innocent, But Fined by Matt Taibbi for TK News. “The state of Iowa collects millions of dollars from people whose charges were dismissed. There’s also a Catch-22: financially, you’re better off guilty.”
Lawmakers Unify to Give Corporate Donors a License to Kill You by David Sirota and Julia Rock for The Daily Poster.
I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism by Kurt Andersen for The Atlantic. “How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everyone else.”
Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan” Sites in Favor of “Mainstream News” Is a Fraud by Glenn Greenwald. “The corporate news organizations masquerading as reliable and non-partisan are, in fact, as hyper-partisan as any sites on the Internet and spread as much misinformation.”
How Postal Workers Saved the Election by Jane Slaughter for Labor Notes.
A lawsuit in Georgia claims that nearly 200,000 voters were improperly purged by Eileen Sullivan for The New York Times. Most of the purged, unsurprisingly, were black.
Indian Farmers Lead Historic Strike Against Nardendra Modi, Neoliberalism and Inequality, an interview with Indian journalist P. Sainath for Democracy Now! (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)
Why the Arab Spring Failed, an interview of Anand Gopal for Jacobin.
Grey Wolves – The Fascists Nobody Wants to Talk About by Gary Brecher for Radio War Nerd.
Tags: Debtors Prisons, Medical Debt, Student debt
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