If the Florida House Republicans have their way, here is what the state’s workers would stand to lose: paid sick leave, a living wage, wage theft protections and equal opportunity benefits (for same sex couples, for example).

That’s because an assortment of bills—including one introduced by House Majority Leader Stephen Precourt that would nullify nearly all of these pro-worker policies—would pre-empt local ordinances and leave it up to the state to implement (or not) any of these measures. Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm writes that these bills were “ghost written by special-interest lobbyists.”

It would mean the end of the fourteen-year-old Miami-Dade County living wage ordinance. A new anti-wage theft law that passed just last month in Alachua County would be nixed. The paid sick leave initiative that 52,000 Orange County residents got onto the ballot for 2014—gone.

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But make no mistake: The competition to shut down “the last clinics” in states with only one clinic is ongoing; call it The Red State Derby. In Mississippi, Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, pro-life groups such as 40 Days for Life are working to bring about “the first abortion-free state where abortion is legal but it’s simply not available.”

Forty years after Roe v. Wade made abortion a constitutional right across the nation individual states are staging subtle and not-so-subtle insurrections, aiming to be the first  clinic-less state.

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Meanwhile, the stock market is hitting new heights and the banks are roaring back, selling the very same “risky amalgams of mortgages and loans” they sold during the boom, The New York Times reported on its front page in April, and minting more “arcane-sounding financial products” like the kind that doomed the economy only five years ago. And so, despite Dodd-Frank, we are still threatened by the same dangers. “It’s like a horror movie, and the beast hasn’t been killed yet,” Parsons says. “You can’t be too triumphant just because the first blows had the beast weakened.”

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 A former juvenile court judge in Pennsylvania was sentenced to 28 years in prison on Thursday for his part in an alleged “kids for cash” scam considered one of the worst judicial scandals in US history.

[...]

The federal indictment says the two judges accepted $2.8 million in kickbacks from the owner and builder of two privately-run juvenile detention facilities. In exchange, the judges agreed to close down the county’s own juvenile detention center, which would have competed with the new, privately-run facilities. In addition they guaranteed that juvenile offenders from their court would be directed to the privately-run facilities.

Mr. Conahan, pleaded guilty last year to a single count of racketeering and is awaiting sentencing.

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Child poverty is on the rise in Utah, a trend child advocates say drives down many other measures of child well-being.

According to the latest KIDS COUNT report, nearly 378,000 Utahns lived below the federal poverty level in 2011, with more than 140,000 of them children under age 18.

“Poverty affects everything else we look at. It’s a huge ‘uh-oh’ moment,” said Terry Haven, deputy director of Voices for Utah Children.

According to the report, 16.2 percent of the state’s children lived in poverty in 2011, up from 13 percent in 2010.

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Ohio’s Civil Liberties Union recently issued a report documenting the Scroogian return of debtors’ prisons after finding that municipal courts in that state are jailing poor people unable to pay court fines. Last summer, a suburban Cleveland court threw 45 people in jail because they couldn’t come up with the money for fines they were assessed, and the Sandusky Municipal Court imprisoned 75 down-and-outers for the same “crime.”

Besides the fact that jailing indigents for debts cost the courts way more than the fines they owe, it also violates the U.S. and Ohio constitutions.

But what the hey — on to Georgia, which has enhanced the debtor prison experience by privatizing it.

Say you roll through a stop sign. Uniquely, the Peach Tree State counts that as a criminal offense.

Now, say you can’t pony up the full fine. Suddenly, you’re in the clutches of a for-profit, private probation corporation. It charges probationers a $15 “start-up” fee, a $25 photo fee, and a myriad of other fees — on top of the fine they owe. Fail to pay, go to jail.

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“Where are the jobs?” Speaker John Boehner likes to ask. But do his fellow House Republicans really want to kick the unemployed off food stamps if they can’t find the jobs either?

That’s the question behind a simmering farm bill battle over reimposing work requirements on millions of able-bodied adults enrolled in the nutrition program. Most have no reported earnings, and without added job training or workfare slots, the change could spell real hardship in today’s economy.

Back during welfare reform, the “working poor” were the great Republican model for social advancement — helped along by the boom of the 1990s. But the same households are struggling to find work in today’s economy of low-wage, part-time jobs. As safety-net costs rise, there’s more conflict with the GOP’s budget-cutting agenda.

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Three Nordic countries – Finland, Iceland and Sweden – plus
Luxembourg and Slovenia – head the table with infant mortality rates
of fewer than 2.5 deaths per 1,000 births.
» 26 of the 35 countries have reduced infant mortality to 5 or fewer
per 1,000 births.
» The only countries with infant mortality rates higher than 6 per
1,000 births are Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and the United States.

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A new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, on the well-being of children in 35 developed nations, turned up some alarming statistics about child poverty. More than one in five American children fall below a relative poverty line, which UNICEF defines as living in a household that earns less than half of the national median. The United States ranks 34th of the 35 countries surveyed, above only Romania and below virtually all of Europe plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

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