What Wall Street Reform Means Where We Live

Here are a few highlights courtesy of Whitehouse.gov:

• There's now a single agency responsible for looking out for consumers: the Bureau for Consumer Financial Protections. Instead of seven agencies dealing with these issues part-time, one agency will be in charge of establishing clear rules of the road for banks, mortgage companies, payday lenders and credit card lenders.
• Mortgage brokers won't make a higher commission by selling people mortgages that they can't afford. This was a major factor in the recent housing crisis. Now brokers and banks have to take into consideration a borrower's ability to repay before giving a home loan.
• You’ll be able to get a free credit score if you’re denied a loan, an apartment, or a job because of your credit, so you won’t be turned down without knowing why. Right now, you get one free credit report a year, but you can’t see your credit score for free, even if a lender or employer rejects your application because you have bad credit.
• No more bailing out banks with our tax dollars, no more "too big to fail." If a company's in trouble because of risky gambles, it will have to liquidate -- and do so before it can take down the rest of the financial system.

Stay tuned for more...

Not Ever

Rape Crisis Scotland takes on the victim-blaming ethos that excuses sexual assault.

See also the comment in the British medical journal The Lancet titled: Key to prevent HIV in women: reduce gender-based violence.

Monologue | One More Call

Here's another free script from the Sketches: Mainly on Sex collection for my youth worker and drama friends. 

The piece is titled One More Call and it's a somber monologue from a school administrator about what happens when kids don't look out for each other.

I hope One More Call strikes a chord with you. If so, tell your youth worker and drama-geek friends where to find it, with my compliments. 

The text is below. If you like it, download the free script for One More Call, with discussion questions. 

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

Mr. Potter

 This is not why I got into education, OK? If I have to call in one more child sex abuse case...

Which is a joke. I’ll make that call before the month is out.

Did you know that 70% of teenage pregnancies are fathered by men over 20? 70%. It’s ridiculous.

Some guy comes along with a car and a part time job and he’s not all pimply and awkward so, what — he makes a girl feel like a woman? And of course he wants her to act like a woman, right? No way! He wants her to act like a girl. He wants her to do whatever he says. He wants oral sex and vaginal sex and whatever kind of sex he can get and he’ll be tender or demanding or whatever it takes to get what he wants. Oh, and he wants to keep it a secret from her parents. Real mature.

Speaking of oral sex, if I have to tell one more parent I just pulled her seventh grade girl off some boy behind the gym...

HealthCare.Gov is Up + Running

This week, HealthCare.gov went live.

Here's a fourish-minute video describing how to move around the site, which includes details on what's changing (and when) and current state-by-state availability of health coverage keyed to specific individual, business and family circumstances.