Keword Berry

William M. Welch, USA Today:

As many as one in five members of the armed services are being preyed on by loan centers set up near military bases that can charge cash-strapped military families interest of 400% or more, a new Pentagon report has found.

Steep lending charges have long plagued servicemembers, but the problem has become a more urgent concern to the military as it has struggled to fill its ranks during the Iraq war. That’s because debt troubles can keep troops from going overseas.

“We’re seeing a growing trend of folks who are not eligible to deploy because of financial problems,” says Capt. Mark Patton, commander of Naval Base Point Loma in California. Patton says debt problems can cost some service members their security clearances.

The report says “payday loan” stores (so named because their loans are often due on a borrower’s next payday) have sprung up by the thousands around military bases and elsewhere in the past decade.

Lenders typically charge $15 to $25 per $100 loan for two weeks, and most loans are extended for several weeks. The report says the average loan is $350 and has an annual interest rate of 390% to 780%. The average borrower, it says, pays back $834 for a $339 loan.

The report cites estimates 13% to 19% of servicemembers — at least 175,000 people — took out high-interest, short-term loans last year. It said nine out of 10 loans go to borrowers who take out five or more over a year.

Charles Crain, Time:

For weeks the U.S. and Iraqi militaries have been striking piecemeal at an enemy they are not even allowed to name: Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. And after fierce clashes Monday, it appears that Iraq’s government and military is willing to go only so far in their efforts to rein in the powerful Shi’ite militia.

On Monday Sadr’s Shi’ite militia ambushed Iraqi Army soldiers in the southern city of Diwaniya and killed about 25 of them in the ensuing battle. According to a U.S. military official at least eight civilians also died. Reports on the number of militiamen killed varied wildly, with early reports claiming as few as five and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki claiming 50.

Maliki’s credibility may also be a casualty of the battle, or at least its aftermath. The fight, in essence, put him and his government’s claims to have a viable path to a national reconciliation plan to the test: either they are prepared to fight costly battles to defeat committed Shi’ite militiamen, or they are willing to cede control of neighborhoods and cities to the militias. In Diwaniya, it now seems, the government has chosen the path of least resistance, gaining a measure of calm in the city on Sadr’s terms.

On Tuesday Sadr’s representatives repeated their constant refrain that the violence was not carried out by legitimate members of the Mahdi Army and was not ordered from on high. The question now is whether the Maliki government can survive by continuing to echo that fiction, or if an escalating confrontation is inevitable.

Mark Trumbull, Christian Science Monitor:

As Americans head away for Labor Day weekend, two extremes of the labor force are crying out for help.

Millions, often among the economy’s most successful professionals, say they feel overworked while millions more, particularly among low-skilled workers, are starved for a paycheck or more work hours.

Experts say the two ends of the labor market are in fact the Janus faces of the same economic force. A higher level of economic efficiency is playing differently at the furthest points of the labor spectrum. With the help of improved technology, employers have grown adept at coaxing the most from their workers by monitoring productivity, basing pay on performance, and keeping the BlackBerry crowd connected to the workplace around the clock. The forces of globalization and technology, however, have made it harder for many workers with less education to find good jobs.

“We are in a watershed time in our economy, where technology has transformed how we work, [and] globalization is changing the rules of the game for low-skilled, semiskilled workers,” says John Challenger, an expert on workplace trends with the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas in Chicago.

“Pay for performance now dominates how people are paid,” says Mr. Challenger, the labor expert. There’s more weeding out of people who don’t work as hard, he says, as companies focus on measuring ability “every which way.”

Both the “overworkers” and the “underworkers” are part of an economy that has seen productivity rise much faster than worker compensation.

“What jumps out at you is the gaping hole between productivity growth and earnings,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. People are “working harder and smarter but not really seeing remuneration that they ought to be seeing.”

John Donnelly, Boston Globe:

The United States, now at nearly 300 million people, is the only industrialized country that has experienced strong population growth in the last decade, creating concerns that the boom and Americans’ huge appetites for food, water, and land will sharply erode the nation’s natural resources in coming years, according to a report released yesterday.

The Northeast remains by far the most densely populated region of the nation, but it also had the slowest population growth in the country during the 1990s, including a 2 percent population reduction in urban areas, said the Center for Environment and Population, a Connecticut-based nonprofit research organization that produced the report.

In contrast, the South and the West were booming, creating new pressure on fragile environments and water sources.

For the first time, the report compared national and regional population trends with environmental indicators, highlighting stresses that growing populations are placing on nature, according to the report and outside analysts.

While some researchers focus on alarming fertility rates in poor countries, which grew by 16.3 percent from 1995 to 2005, the US population grew by 10.6 percent in that period, or 29 million people, the report noted. Europe during that time grew by 504,000 people, or less than 1 percent.

The US population boom was attributed to high birth rates, immigration, and increased longevity.

Americans consume like no other nation — using three times the amount of water per capita than the world average and nearly 25 percent of the world’s energy, despite having 5 percent of the global population; and producing five times more daily waste than the average in poor countries.

One of the most alarming findings was that baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964, about 26 percent of the US population — were not downsizing as their children became adults and moved out. Instead, many have moved into bigger houses or bought vacation properties, and the tally of homes with space greater than 3,000 square feet went up 11 percent from 1988 to 2003.

Farah Stockman, Boston Globe:

Scores of detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been accused of belonging to terrorist networks posing as humanitarian organizations, according to transcripts of military hearings. Many of these detainees worked for groups with established terrorist links, but others were employees of legally recognized Muslim charities that are considered mainstream in the Middle East, are not on the State Department’s terrorist list, and employ relief workers around the globe.

Some defense lawyers say these cases show that the US military is stretching the evidence to justify the continued detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Others say the United States is maintaining a double standard, allowing the groups to operate in the United States while at the same time accusing them of terrorism during status-review hearings for detainees. Since so few of the detainees have been given trials, the hearings, before three-officer panels, are the only opportunity for most of the detainees to answer the evidence against them.

“Either a particular group is dangerous, and should be outlawed in the United States, or it is innocuous, and no one should be held at Guantanamo because of an association with it,” said Mark Denbeaux , a professor at Seton Hall Law School who published a series of reports of Guantanamo detainees accused of belonging to groups other than the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Defense Department spokesmen say the summaries of evidence against the detainees, placed on the Defense Department website, do not include classified information, meaning the evidence against some detainees may be more extensive.