Curious Behavior

Recent News

• Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home, spoke with NPR’s Terry Gross about the Vietnam War–era roots of today’s alt-right activism, and how recent “lone wolf” terrorists—like Dylan Roof—are in fact deeply enmeshed in the white power movement.
• Ana Raquel Minian, author of Undocumented Lives, explained to PRI’s The World how Mexican immigration to the U.S. has evolved, from the end of the bracero program in the 1960s through decades of community development by Mexicans in the United States to today’s political crisis around the issue [starts at 06:10].
• Matthew Bowman, author of Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, talked to Religion News Service about how Donald Trump panders to the religious right.
• The Huffington Post reported on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)’s introduction of S.2755, “A bill…to provide that the United States Postal Service may provide certain basic financial services,” which has been endorsed by Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks and longstanding proponent of postal banking as a means of discouraging exploitative payday lending.

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April 26: Is Postal Banking Coming?

United States Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand has just introduced major new legislation to create a Postal Bank, which would establish a retail bank in all of the U.S. Postal Service’s 30,000 locations. As detailed by the Senator’s announcement, the Postal Bank “would effectively end predatory payday lending industry practices overnight by giving low-income Americans, particularly communities of color and rural communities, access to basic banking services that they currently don’t have. The lack of access to traditional banking services makes it nearly impossible for low-income Americans to escape the cycle of poverty because they are often forced to spend large percentages of their income to cash their paychecks or pay back high-interest predatory payday loans.” Mehrsa …