Community-based movements to halt the flood of foreclosures have been building across the country. They turned out in Cleveland once again in October, when a coalition of grassroots housing groups rallied outside the Cuyahoga County courthouse, calling for a foreclosure freeze and constructing a mock graveyard of Styrofoam headstones bearing the names of local communities decimated by the housing crisis. (They did not, unfortunately, stop the more than 1,000 foreclosure filings in the county the following month.) In Boston the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America began protesting in front of Countrywide Financial offices in October 2007. Within weeks, Countrywide had agreed to work with the group to renegotiate loans. In Philadelphia ACORN and other community organizations helped to pressure the city council to order the county sheriff to halt foreclosure auctions this past March. Philadelphia has since implemented a program mandating “conciliation conferences” between defaulting homeowners and lenders. ACORN organizers say the program has a 78 percent success rate at keeping people in their homes. One activist group in Miami has taken a more direct approach to the crisis, housing homeless families in abandoned bank-owned homes without waiting for government permission.

It’s unlikely, though, that any of these activists will be able to relax soon. 

The Nation

 

When I was a lad, I ran off to San Francisco, like hippies from all over, to be free and unconventional and rid of the whole corporate America trip.

I ended up working at the Bank of America, thanks to a pink collar stoner chick who fudged my typing test.

While working at their headquarters, I learned about the proud heritage of the bank, which had rebuilt San Francisco in the early 20th century, in the wake of its great earthquake. 

Today, of course, bankers are universally regarded as monuments to heroic greed, spectacular corruption and epic incompetence–one short step above child molesters on the social scale. Adrift in their bubbles, intoxicated by their own emissions, only they remain unaware of this downward turn in public perception.

When a reporter for the AP politely asked them what they were doing with billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ bailout ransom, they sniffily replied to this effect: “Listen, you tawdry little man–we don’t give a fig about you and your shabby readers. We have parties to attend. Kindly pay up and shut up. Then find your way out.”

Men have short memories. It wasn’t so long ago in the long view of history that, faced with a similar situation, the rabble roused themselves in the streets of Paris and handed the nobility their heads. Good times.

Today, gun shops can’t keep up with demand.

Being a peaceful sort and averse to noise, I got to thinking that maybe it doesn’t have to come to bloodshed and armed insurrection.

Is it conceivable that bankers today are capable, if only in theory, of once again doing the right thing? Could they ever, even in an imagined world, earn their fat paychecks and lead us out of the mess that is largely their own creation? 

Trying to wrap my head around that wild notion, I am once again transported back to a more innocent era.

All across the nation

Such a strange vibration …

“Let the winds of doctrine blow me.” (Milton)

Russian treason bill could hit Kremlin critics

By DAVID NOWAK, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW – A new law drafted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Cabinet would allow authorities to label any government critic a traitor — a move that leading rights activists condemned Wednesday as a chilling reminder of the times under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

The draft extends the definition of treason from breaching Russia’s external security to damaging the nation’s constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That would essentially let authorities interpret any act against the interests of the state as treason — a crime prosecutable by up to 20 years in prison.

Prominent rights activists said passage of the bill would catapult Russia’s justice system back to the times of Stalin’s purges.

“It returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s,” the activists said in a statement, urging lawmakers to oppose what they described as the “legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler.”

Letter to a friend:

As you have rightly intuited, the inflammatory politics is merely symptomatic of a larger crisis — the end of the time we know and the beginning of another — as presaged by war, famine, fire, flood and reality TV.

This just in:

NATIONAL (NBC ) – Does the financial crisis have you feeling stressed out? Well, you’re not alone.

A newly released survey by the American Psychological Association shows the declining economy is causing stress levels to skyrocket.

The annual report takes a look at the stress level of Americans, and this year, stress is on the rise.

As things get worse on Wall Street, it seems Americans are hitting the wall. They’re stressed out and letting it show.

Dr. Katherine Nordal, the Executive Director for Professional Practice, says they have “irritability, depression, sleeplessness, problems concentrating…”

A new survey by the American Psychological Association finds eight out of ten Americans say the economy is now a significant source of stress.

Almost half say their stress has increased in the past year and they are now increasingly worried about their ability to provide even their families basic needs.

Dr. Nordal says, “What we’re seeing is more and more people coming in because they are more stressed about financial situations, having homes foreclosed on.”

According to the survey, women are being hit the hardest, feeling more stress than men about money, the economy, job stability, housing costs and health problems.

Since I’m the canary in the coal mine when it comes to stress, I can tell you with an uncertain amount of authority that exercise, rest, vitamins, meditation, prayer, soothing music and talking things over with trusted friends are all terrific for smoothing you out. Humor, where appropriate, can also work wonders.

That said, the sheer numbers of wobbling blobs of bobbling blubber among us — I speak, of course, of our fellow Americans — tell us that not everyone “gets” this. We therefore have a lot on our plate. Not as much as them, but you see my point.

The foregoing does not cover all those who resort to drugs and alcohol, of course, who can be counted upon to spiral out into all sorts of lunacy, not all of them comical.

You can, again, mightily empower yourself, being such a good ear and wise counsel, by helping others at this time of crisis, always bearing in mind the final temptation.

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

My love to you and the gang!

Our transcendent splendor,

Brian J. Flanagan

List of Journalists Arrested at the RNC

Posted on September 10.2008 by Josh Stearns

It’s a wonderful life.

Criminal fat-cats game the system and leave taxpayers holding the bag.

As for me, I believe we were born to serve the rich.

Being a Midwestern boy at heart, I prefer to serve them with barbecue sauce.

Mm-mm, good!

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

NY Times

Growing Gulf Between Rich and Rest of US

by Holly Sklar

Guess which country the CIA World Factbook describes when it says, “Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households.”

If you guessed the United States, you’re right.

The United States has rising levels of poverty and inequality not found in other rich democracies. It also has less mobility out of poverty.

Since 2000, America’s billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people.

Poverty and inequality take a daily toll seldom seen on television. “The infant mortality rate in the United States compares with that in Malaysia — a country with a quarter the income.” says the 2005 Human Development Report. “Infant death rates are higher for [black] children in Washington, D.C., than for children in Kerala, India.”

Income and wealth in America are increasingly concentrated at the very top — the realm of the Forbes 400.

You could have banked $1 million a day every day for the last two years and still have far to go to make the new Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.

It took a minimum of $900 million to get on the Forbes 400 this year. That’s up $150 million from 2004.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct05/Sklar1005.htm

________________________________________________

http://www.demos.org/inequality/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7180618

http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,sid%253D15288%2526cid%253D113382,00.html

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/p60191.html

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:9ed2DSIN_kMJ:www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf+income+inequality+US&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=19&gl=us&client=firefox-a

http://nearing.newsvine.com/_news/2008/05/12/1484568-the-l-curve-income-distribution-of-the-us

Villains in the Mortgage Mess? Start at Wall Street. Keep Going. – washingtonpost.com
Once again, too many people had access to other people’s money with too little oversight. Once again, the White House, Congress and federal bank regulators failed to police the financial services industry because they mistook deregulation for a system without any reasonable rules. And now as then, our saga is chock-a-block with people and institutions deserving special mention in the Subprime Hall of Slime.

But make no mistake: Today’s crisis dwarfs the S&L fiasco. The eventual cost to taxpayers of this scandal is likely to make yesteryear’s culprits look like pikers.

The short version of how we got here: Lenders, fat with money made cheap by the federal government, aggressively coaxed millions of borrowers to take out unaffordable mortgages. They lent this money without assessing whether borrowers could repay it. They assumed, in fact, that most wouldn’t be able to and would have to refinance into new, equally unaffordable loans. This process would produce an endless cycle of fees for the lenders — but only if home prices rose, fairy-tale-like, forever.

On what planet would that be an acceptable business plan?

I saw a documentary by Bill Moyers on PBS a few years back. It was about the American chemical industry and its depredations — about how it dumped chemicals on the poor, introduced thousands of foreign substances into our environment and gutted the EPA.

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder which chemical(s) might be responsible for the current epidemic of autism.

Now this:

Congress Examines Role Of Industry in Regulation

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page A01

Despite more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that have raised health concerns about a chemical compound that is central to the multibillion-dollar plastics industry, the Food and Drug Administration has deemed it safe largely because of two studies, both funded by an industry trade group.

[...]

“Tobacco figured this out, and essentially it’s the same model,” said David Michaels, who was a federal regulator in the Clinton administration. “If you fight the science, you’re able to postpone regulation and victim compensation, as well. As in this case, eventually the science becomes overwhelming. But if you can get five or 10 years of avoiding pollution control or production of chemicals, you’ve greatly increased your product.”

Studies on Chemical In Plastics Questioned – washingtonpost.com

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