60 Minutes (2/15/09)

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

Look at it this way: If the fat cats take over the Net, it will start to look like prime time TV — full of vacuous “reality” programs featuring no-talent buffoons fattening the wallets of brain-dead producers.

Noooooooo! It’s too horrible to contemplate. Act now, before it’s too late!

Save the Internet: Take Action:

Your Pain, Their Gain

Peter J. Schwartz 05.05.08, 12:00 AM ET

Crumbling home prices and $100 oil helped Wall Street’s Highest Earners pull in $19 billion last year

Problems paying the mortgage, filling the gas tank and feeding the family have eroded living standards for millions of Americans during the past several months. Not so for people who manage big piles of money–many of them made a fortune betting correctly on the housing debacle and rising commodity prices last year.

Our second annual look at the pay of folks who run hedge and private equity funds shows that the top 20 took home a collective $18.7 billion last year, 43% more than in 2006. To even make the list you needed minimum earnings of $350 million, which is $90 million higher than the year before. No chief executive of a traditional Wall Street investment bank even came close.

Our top-ranked earner, hedge fund manager John Paulson ($3.3 billion), reaped much of his bounty from shorting the ABX Index, which tracks the strength of the subprime mortgage market. Paulson earned an estimated $2.3 billion from his share of fees charged to investors and $1 billion from the appreciation of his own capital invested in Paulson & Co. funds.

Fund manager Philip Falcone, who ranked third with $1.7 billion, posted triple-digit returns by shorting subprime credit, resulting in $11 billion of growth for his two Harbinger Capital funds, excluding assets raised from new investors. John Burbank, who runs San Francisco hedge fund Passport Capital, made $370 million last year, also in large part by shorting home mortgage companies and mortgage-related debt ( see story).

Some members of our list, like Texans T. Boone Pickens ($1.2 billion) and John Arnold ($700 million), made their fortunes the old-fashioned way: betting on energy. Pickens’ $2.7 billion BP Capital Equity Fund grew by 24% after fees, while his $590 million Commodity fund grew 40% thanks to large positions in Suncor Energy (nyse: SU – news – people ), ExxonMobil (nyse: XOM – news – people ) and Occidental Petroleum (nyse: OXY – news – people ). For hedge fund billionaires Pickens and second-ranked George Soros ($2.4 billion), whose own investments compose a significant portion of their funds, there’s more to be made from asset appreciation than from fees. Soros made $2 billion from the growth of personal investments within his $17 billion Quantum Endowment Fund, which returned 32% for the year.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0505/038.html

Walmart Successfully Sues Brain-Damaged

Worker For $469,216 [Walmart]

March 25, 2008

Consumerist / Ben Popken

A Walmart worker who was hit by a truck and left brain-dead-damaged has lost her final round of appeals and must repay the retailer $469,216. This is because she both had Walmart pay for her medical …

Wal Mart News » BuzzTracker News Headlines

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (Thomas Jefferson)

“Psychiatric hospital beds are not profitable. In Virginia it costs $500 — an average of $500 a night to operate a psychiatric hospital bed. It costs $89 to have someone in jail. So it’s much simpler just to shuffle the mentally ill, close down the hospitals and move them into jails and prisons. That’s what we’ve done.

There are 300,000 people in this country with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression who are in our jails and prisons; 500,000 are on probation every year; 700,000 go through the court system. The largest public mental facility in the United States today is not a hospital, it’s the L.A. County Jail. That’s our system today.” (Pete Earley)

New Generation of Homeless Veterans

The Associated Press

Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident car crash, broken collarbone. And then a move east, close to his wife’s new job but away from his best friends.

And then self-destruction: He would gun his motorcycle to 100 mph and try to stand on the seat. He would wait for his wife to leave in the morning, draw the blinds and open up whatever bottle of booze was closest.

He would pull out his gun, a .45-caliber, semiautomatic pistol. He would lovingly clean it, or just look at it and put it away. Sometimes place it in his mouth.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” his wife, Anna, told him one day. “You can’t be here anymore.”

Banaz Mahmod
May perpetual light shine upon her.

Woman raped before honor killing: court | U.S. | Reuters