We’ve talked until we are blue in the face about the awful consequence of predatory lending, how they are aimed directly at the working poor, or anyone with any income at all. They target those on disability or folks on Social Security—any trickle of money—if its there, they plan to get it. Predatory lenders influence…Continue reading Breaking Bad – Fair Loans For Low Income People
About 25 men and women from all over Indianapolis showed up at the police roll call on Tuesday in a crime hot spot at 30th and Post Road. They weren’t picketing or calling to defund the police. IMPD East is one of six districts of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, and those officers serve in…Continue reading No One Moved
Society has a way of creating its own difficulties. Like the push to defund police has led to a situation where no one wants to be on a police force, the idea that strong women don’t need a husband or father in the home has led to—surprise!—reduction in fathers. Free love of the ’60’s and…Continue reading Where Are the Fathers?
What is it to have a second chance? UNITE INDY’s SecondChanceIndy.com web site gives men and women access to a new future—one that is a gateway to a financially secure life, that opens doors to having successful relationships, raising successful children, and becoming self-sufficient and independent. But second chances are only for those who are…Continue reading You Can Only Do What You Can Do
Year after year, exorbitant interest fees and onerous, unrealistic balloon payments are draining money from the meager earnings of Indiana’s most financially vulnerable citizens. Even small financial emergencies regularly take working people and military families down the path to bankruptcy because they must turn to payday predatory lenders, whose schemes trap borrowers in a never-ending…Continue reading Indiana Employers Needed No Risk, Big Payoff
Over the last five decades, allegations of abuse combined with the reality of funding shortages caused the closings of mental hospitals here and across the country. Central State Hospital, formerly the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane, was closed in the 90s, in favor of a “modern” approach, away from institutional methods of treatment. It…Continue reading Expanding Psychiatric Care
A man accused of fatally shooting a police officer made a song about killing a cop, then he did it. Early on a Sunday morning he shot 24 year old Elwood Officer Noah Shahnavaz (pictured) in the face. According to the shooter’s rap sheet, (which included the term SVF for ‘serious violent felon’) he had…Continue reading The Damage of ‘Defund’ Rhetoric
Is work out of style? My parents were middle-class people. As kids, we didn’t have to work to eat, but we DID have to work. Because my dad owned a manufacturing plant (and since you can legally hire your own children at age 14) my sister and I went to work all summer long at…Continue reading The Era of Aggressive Entitlement
Last Friday at 9:30 in the morning, an Uber driver was shot. As the weekend began, four people were shot in a park in Beech Grove. One is dead. Then on Sunday, in the food court at Greenwood Park Mall around dinner time a 20-year old with 3 guns and more than 100 rounds began…Continue reading Would Have Been a Bloodbath
Back in November of ’21 folks on Indy’s east side weren’t getting very much sleep. Pop pop pop, every night. Gunshots cracked the silence, pushing Indianapolis homicides to a record 246 by the end of the year. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett responded, using $150 million in federal American Rescue Plan money to hire more officers,…Continue reading Who’s Next??
