Blacks Expelled More Than Whites From School

Black D.C. Students Suspended, Expelled Much More Than Their White Peers

To anyone who believe we live in a "post-racial" society, I present this:

In Washington area, African American students suspended and expelled two to five times as often as whites

Across the Washington area, black students are suspended and expelled two to five times as often as white students, creating disparities in discipline that experts say reflect a growing national problem.

An analysis by The Washington Post shows the phenomenon both in the suburbs and in the city, from the far reaches of Southern Maryland to the subdivisions of Fairfax, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties.

Last year, for example, one in seven black students in St. Mary’s County were suspended from school, compared with one in 20 white students. In Alexandria, black students were nearly six times as likely to be suspended as their white peers.

As that article's lede suggests, the problem isn't relegated to the D.C. area. Indeed, similar concerns around the country recently prompted the Education and Justice Departments to launch an effort to examine the "school-to-prison pipeline."

As for the question of "why," the Post notes that "A disproportionate number of black students live below the poverty line or with a single parent, factors that affect disciplinary patterns. But experts say those factors do not fully explain racial differences in suspensions. Other contributing factors could include unintended bias, unequal access to highly effective teachers and differences in school leadership styles."

Read more about the Post's investigation here.

By Lauren Kelley | Sourced from AlterNet

Chag Sameach from The President and First Lady

President Obama says happy Hanukkah to Jews around the world

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have a message for Jews around the world: chag sameach.
That’s Hebrew for wishing someone a festive holiday, akin to a "happy holidays" greeting. The Obamas issued the following statement today in honor of Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, which begins tonight at sundown:

Michelle and I send our warmest wishes to all those celebrating Hanukkah around the world.
This Hanukkah season we remember the powerful story of a band of believers who rose up and freed their people, only to discover that the oil left in their desecrated temple –- which should have been enough for only one night –- ended up lasting for eight.
It’s a timeless story of right over might and faith over doubt –- one that has given hope to Jewish people everywhere for over 2,000 years. And tonight, as families and friends come together to light the menorah, it is a story that reminds us to count our blessings, to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors, and to believe that through faith and determination, we can work together to build a brighter, better world for generations to come.
From our family to the Jewish Community around the world, chag sameach.

Chag sameach and happy Hanukkah to all!

How Can the World's Richest Country Let Children Go Hungry?

How Can the World's Richest Country Let Children Go Hungry? 6 Tricks Corporate Elites Use to Hoard All the Wealth

America is filthy rich, but the money is hidden away by the 1 percent while poverty rises all around.

December 21, 2011  |  

 

Photo Credit: Jun Acullador

 

 

“Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans, nearly 1 in 2, have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income."

“Study: 1 in 5 American children lives in poverty."

“In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United
States.”
What’s going on here? Aren't we the richest country on earth?
Day in and day out we are told that if the government doesn’t tighten its belt, we’re all headed for debtor’s prison. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are under attack. State budgets are in disarray. Teachers and firemen are getting canned. Public services are slashed. This is the new America and we'd better get used to it, the pundits proclaim. You would think we were a poor country.  
But we’re not. We’re filthy rich, but the money is hidden away by the 1 percent while poverty rises all around. Here’s why.
1. Productivity continues to rise but the 99 percent doesn’t share in the benefits.
The key to the material wealth of any nation is productivity – how much we produce per worker hour. Productivity is a crude measure of our overall level of knowledge, technique, organization, skill and cooperative work practices that produce the sum total of our goods and services. Lo and behold, there’s nothing at all wrong with productivity in America. It continues to rise and rise just like it did during our post-WWII boom years. What’s changed is that the average American wage has stalled since the mid-1970s -- which is precisely the time that we started to deregulate Wall Street and cut taxes on the rich.
During the 1950s and '60s boom years, almost all Americans shared in the fruits of productivity leading to rising real wages (after inflation). But now the productivity lines and wage lines have pulled apart. The gap between the two lines represents trillions of dollars that once went to the average American but are now going almost entirely to the super-rich.
2. Large corporations pay next to nothing in state and local taxes.
As a result of the Wall Street-created crash, state and local governments are struggling to make up for lost revenues and rising costs to care for the jobless and the destitute. In a fair society we would be asking Wall Street to pay for the damage it created. Instead, Wall Street has used its enormous lobbying muscle to make sure politicians are asking states to cut back public services of all kinds.
Meanwhile, large corporations use every trick in the book to avoid paying state and local taxes. A recent joint report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice reveals that 265 large corporations avoided $42.7 billion in taxes from 2008 to 2010. That’s enough money to hire more than one million teachers! Instead, we are firing teachers in the name of fiscal austerity. 
3. Money that should go toward the common good pours into the pockets of the 1 percent.
In 1970 the federal marginal tax rate on millionaires was 70 percent. That means for the next dollar the super-rich earned, 70 cents went to the federal government to pay for building what was then the most productive infrastructure in the world. Now the official top rate has fallen to 35 percent. But it’s much worse than that. Most of the super-rich take full advantage of the senseless 15 percent capital gains rate which pours hundreds of billions into the pockets of the super-rich. As a result, the real overall tax rate for the super-rich has plummeted to less than what the average secretary pays. 
4. The biggest corporations are sitting on a mountain of cash.
While politicians lament the debt crisis, America’s largest corporations are refusing to invest more than $1 trillion in cash because of the lack of consumer demand (resulting from high levels of unemployment caused by the Wall Street crash). That money is doing little for our economy. It’s not putting our people to work. It’s not helping to close state and local budget gaps. It’s not helping to improve our depleted infrastructure.
5. Hedge funds have over $1.917 trillion in misused investment capital.
Wall Street investment firms are loaded with investment capital looking for ways to make outsized profits while paying as little in taxes as possible. This is the money that floods Wall Street casinos and that led directly to the housing bubble and crash. The money is still there just itching to ride up and down the next bubble. Approximately 80 percent of all stock market transactions come from the manipulations of these funds. And much of the money jumps in and out of the markets in nanoseconds using high-speed automatic trading techniques that extract hidden taxes from the rest of us. Most of this speculative capital serves no broader economic or social purpose except to enrich the super-rich.
4. Many of the 1 percent cheat on their taxes.
When you have enormous sums of money, you can hire high-powered accountants and lawyers to help you avoid taxes. But these maneuvers aren’t just taking advantage of tax loopholes. It’s about cheating. Many of the super-rich hide their money in offshore tax havens. They place it in secret bank accounts without declaring it. They just pretend it doesn’t exist. How much money are we talking about? The tax revenues lost in the U.S. are estimated to be $337 billion a year according to a November report by the Tax Justice Network. This is more than enough to put America back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.   
So there hides our nation’s wealth. We are as productive as ever, but 99 percent aren’t getting their fair share. Instead the 1 percent are channeling our collective wealth away from our daily needs through investment hoarding, tax loopholes and outright tax cheating. Rather than using it to create badly needed jobs, they pocket it. And then our financial elites have the nerve to ask the rest of us to tighten our belts because the public trough is running low due to a financial crash they created! It’s an outrageous fabrication designed to shift the debate away from the obvious: Wall Street and its minions took down our economy, got bailed out and now refuse to pay anything to repair it. Instead they want us to pay for the damage they created.
This is the material basis for Occupy Wall Street and we should salute the occupiers for changing the national dialogue back to where it belongs. But we will have to go much further if we hope to create employment, alleviate rising poverty and bring a modicum of justice to our society. We will have to do nothing short of democratizing Wall Street from top to bottom so that our financial elites can no longer manipulate the economy and politics to serve their ends. 
We are still the richest nation on earth, but our wealth has been captured and hidden from view. We can’t expect Occupy Wall Street to rectify this ungodly mess on its own. It’s time for the rest of us to join the fight to recapture our nation’s wealth while resurrecting our society’s fundamental decency.  
No one should ever be poor in a country so rich. 

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

Christopher Hitchens, atheist to the very end

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the U.S.-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, said the magazine Vanity Fair, which announced the death. In recent days Hitchens had stopped treatment and entered hospice care at the Houston hospital. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, Hitch 22, and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.
He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.
He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”
Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his dishevelled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.
In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,” he said.
Hitchens, a British Trotskyite who had lost faith in the Socialist movement, spent much of his life wandering the globe and reporting on the world’s trouble spots for The Nation magazine, the British newsmagazine The New Statesman and other publications.
His work took him to Northern Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain and Argentina in the 1970s, generally to shine a light on the evil practices of entrenched dictators or the imperial machinations of the great powers.
After moving to the United States in 1981, he added American politics to his beat, writing a bimonthly Minority Report for The Nation. He wrote a monthly review-essay for The Atlantic and, as a carte-blanche columnist at Vanity Fair, filed essays on topics as various as getting a Brazilian bikini wax and the experience of being waterboarded, a volunteer assignment that he called “very much more frightening though less painful than the bikini wax.” He was also a columnist for the online magazine Slate.
His support for the Iraq War sprang from a growing conviction that radical elements in the Islamic world posed a mortal danger to Western principles of political liberty and freedom of conscience. The first stirrings of that view came in 1989 with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death wish against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his supposedly blasphemous words in The Satanic Verses. To Hitchens, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, confirmed the threat.
In a political shift that shocked many of his friends and readers, he cut his ties to The Nation and became an outspoken advocate of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a ferocious critic of what he called “Islamofascism.” Although he denied coining the word, he popularized it.
He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.' Do I see myself doing this? No, I do not!”
Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Navy and later earned a modest living as a bookkeeper.
Though it strained the family budget, Christopher was sent to private schools in Tavistock and Cambridge, at the insistence of his mother. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,” he overheard his mother saying to his father, clinching a spirited argument.
He was politically attuned even as a 7-year-old. “I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well,” he told the magazine The Progressive in 1997. “And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.”
Even before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens had been drawn into left-wing politics, primarily out of opposition to the Vietnam War. After heckling a Maoist speaker at a political meeting, he was invited to join the International Socialists, a Trotskyite party. Thus began a dual career as political agitator and upper-crust sybarite. He arranged a packed schedule of anti-war demonstrations by day and Champagne-flooded parties with Oxford’s elite at night. Spare time was devoted to the study of philosophy, politics and economics.
After graduating from Oxford in 1970, he spent a year travelling across the United States. He then tried his luck as a journalist in London, where he contributed reviews, columns and editorials to The New Statesman, The Daily Express and The Evening Standard.
“I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was Christopher Hitchens, he wrote in Hitch-22, “and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously features editor of Socialist Worker and book review editor of the theoretical monthly International Socialism.”
He became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely to be uttered by one of their number. Hitchens’ was “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”
After collaborating on a 1976 biography of James Callaghan, the Labour leader, he published his first book, Cyprus, in 1984 to commemorate Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus a decade earlier. A longer version was published in 1989 as Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.
His interest in the region led to another book, Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (1987), in which he argued that Britain should return the Elgin marbles to Greece.
In 1981 he married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by their two children, Alexander and Sophia; his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia; and his brother, Peter.
Hitchens’ reporting on Greece came through unusual circumstances. He was summoned to Athens in 1973 because his mother, after leaving his father, had committed suicide there with her new partner. After his father’s death in 1987, he learned that his mother was Jewish, a fact she had concealed from her husband and her children.
After moving to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen, Hitchens became a fixture on television, in print and at the lectern. Many of his essays for The Nation and other magazines were collected in Prepared for the Worst (1988).
He also threw himself into the defence of his friend Rushdie. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defence of free expression.”
To help rally public support, Hitchens arranged for Rushdie to be received at the White House by president Bill Clinton, one of Hitchens’ least favourite politicians and the subject of his book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (1999).
He regarded the response of left-wing intellectuals to Rushdie’s predicament as feeble, and he soon began to question many of his cherished political assumptions. He had already broken with the International Socialists when, in 1982, he astonished some of his brethren by supporting Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.
The drift was reflected in books devoted to heroes like George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters,” 2002), Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography, 2006) and Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, 2005).
His love for argument found other outlets. In 2001 he excoriated Kissinger, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, as a war criminal in the book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He helped write a 2002 documentary film by the same title based on the book.
Hitchens became a campaigner against religious belief, most notably in his tedious writings against Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995), and God Is Not Great. He regarded Mother Teresa as a proselytizer for a retrograde version of Roman Catholicism rather than as a saintly charity worker.
“I don’t quite see Christopher as a ‘man of action,”’ the writer Ian Buruma told The New Yorker in 2006, “but he’s always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.”
One stand distressed many of his friends. In 1999, Sidney Blumenthal, an aide to Clinton and a friend of Hitchens’, testified before a grand jury that he was not the source of damaging comments made to reporters about Monica Lewinsky, whose liaisons with the president was under investigation by the House of Representatives.
Contacted by House investigators, Hitchens supplied information in an affidavit that, in effect, accused Blumenthal of perjury and put him in danger of being indicted.
At a lunch in 1998, Hitchens wrote, Blumenthal had characterized Lewinsky as “a stalker” and said the president was the victim of a predatory and unstable woman. Overnight, Hitchens — now called “Hitch the Snitch” by Blumenthal partisans — became persona non grata in living rooms all over Washington.
In a review of Hitch-22 in The New York Review of Books, Buruma criticized Hitchens for making politics personal.
To Hitchens, he wrote, “politics is essentially a matter of character.”
“Politicians do bad things,” Buruma continued, “because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” Hitchens’ latest collection of writings, Arguably: Essays, published this year, has been a best-seller and ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.
Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God.
“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Times in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”
Readers of Hitch-22 already knew his feelings about the end. “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”
New York Times News Service

Simon Schama on How His Friend Christopher Hitchens Said Goodbye

Dec 19, 2011 12:00 AM EST

Christopher Hitchens confronted death with the same furious bravura that he deployed against purveyors of unreasoned pieties. Plus, more on Hitchens: his greatest writings, best zingers, and photos through the years.

 

The year America was born—1776—was also the year when the great Scottish philosopher David Hume died. More than once during the ordeal of my friend Christopher Hitchens—as he said, less a “battle” with esophageal cancer than an act of “resistance” to the malignancy to which he succumbed on Dec. 15—I have thought of the letter that Adam Smith wrote about his friend Hume and the heroic strength and uncompromising grip on the truth that he showed throughout the illness that killed him. In the letter, Smith recounted how, after a visit with the philosopher, a well-intentioned doctor said he would pass on the news to a mutual friend that Hume—an unrepentant atheist and unflinching rationalist—seemed to be in remarkably good spirits. To which Hume replied, “As I believe you would not choose to tell anything but the truth, tell him that I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could desire, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”

There were times during Hitch’s illness when cheerfulness must have been entirely beyond reach. But if the radiation burnt him and left him raw, it never turned his wit to ash or melted away the sharpness of his analytical temper. Astoundingly, he went on writing, never self-pityingly, constantly clarifying, brushing away the rubbish of ignorant cant and false consolations with a swish of his bristling broom of reason. It was typical that his last essay for Vanity Fair was less a chronicle of his pain than an attack on Nietzsche’s assertion that “whatever does not kill you makes you stronger.” There was much in what he had endured lately, he insisted, that proved Nietzsche’s aphorism demonstrably false.

Photos: Hitchens Through the Years

Kathy de Witt, Lebrecht Music & Arts / Corbis

There was no falling-off—no retreat or attenuation. His writing ended only when he did. In that sense, if he could not in the end defeat the sickness, he certainly routed its power to crush mind and spirit. His composure was that of unconfused self-reflection. The well-meaning strangers who ventured that when faced with the end he might reconsider his atheism he treated as a lower species of insurance salesmen, pitiable in their delusions, insulting in their presumption. Facing things head on packed his writing with tough integrity. It will be said that Hitch lived for the word. It could as easily be said that English in all its muscular, jubilantly performative splendor lives on for such as him to make hay, make enemies, and make waves with.

And it’s because Hitch’s polemics—and his many thoughtful, often very funny essays—liked to kick against the pricks that he will leave an immense, possibly unfillable space where his prose rocked and rolled in face of the demure, the hypocritical, and the ignorantly self-important. The vacancy will be especially felt on the American side of the ocean, where, as one of Hitch’s heroes (George Orwell) put it, “in our time political speech and writing is largely the defense of the indefensible” contaminated by “flyblown metaphors.” Anyone, Hitchens thought, who spoke with stale laziness of “kicking the can down the road” should themselves receive the end of the boot.

Hitch might not have had quite the same impact on the world of political writing and argument had he stayed in England. The son of a naval officer, he went through the usual motions of the upper-middle class—boarding school; an indifferent degree in history at Oxford; notoriety as a hard drinker and womanizer; a brass-knuckle pugilist of the left. He might have stayed a patrician socialist with a boozy bite to his irony in a notoriously acidulous literary Britain that has seen many of that type come and go. But he felt, as he recently said in a shatteringly honest and moving interview with BBC anchor Jeremy Paxman, the “planetary pull of America” had become irresistible. Submitting to its magnetic force was one of the best things he ever did, both for himself and for the fate of strong, honest, public writing in his adopted country.

Hitchens was never going to be a conventional journalist. But he didn’t just want to raise hell; he wanted to smell its stink firsthand. Hence the journeys into the swamps of despotism and atrocity that produced some of his most trenchant writing. But the instinct for mischief-making—all the more unforgettable because it was set in the features of a debauched cherub—was, in the end, turned to great and serious good. And the reason for this was that Hitch was an even more insatiable reader than he was a prolific and prodigious writer. To talk to him was to get tutorials with attitude—especially on the genealogy of Anglophone radicalism, all the way from parliamentary democrats like the 17th-century Levellers to their fading posterity in the present day. If he was spiky, it was sharpness with pedigree—that of the straight-talking, strenuously reasoning, mordant ironists of the English tradition: Jonathan Swift, Tom Paine, William Hazlitt, and Orwell. But he was also an almost romantic admirer of their American counterparts: Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken. He wanted that America, of the unsparing but wickedly droll unmasker of the sanctimonious, to live on and be rescued from the suffocation of money and spin.

Photos: Hitchens's Greatest Feuds

It was Twain’s bravura in the face of the pompous and the banal that Hitch sought to perpetuate into the age of the conservative radio ranter, the formless drivel of the ego-indulgent blog, the timorous decorum of liberal high-mindedness. To those who would lay off what he called “Islamofascism” in the name of cultural sensitivity he had only the contemptuous curl of his smoking lip. Hitch cared furiously for the bloody-minded decency of the free word, and he embodied it to a degree most of us fellow toilers in the trade can only admire even as we mourn his loss. He was, in short, one of the English language’s great debaters. And at a time when what masquerades as political debate is in fact the feeble utterance of unreasoned pieties—and when so much is at stake in what might be truly debated, not only in the United States but around the world—we need his like more desperately than ever. Just for a moment perhaps you would want, after all, to be able to believe in the immortality of the unbelievers, their admission into a Valhalla of the righteously naughty. For then, at least, we might be sure that Hitch would be greeted by Paine stretching out one hand to pull him in, with the other proffering a double scotch.

Accountability! SEC Charges Former Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with Fraud Related to Subprime Mortgages

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just announced securities fraud charges against six former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The SEC alleges that  Fannie and Freddie intentionally  misled  investors into believing that the company was less involved with riskier, or subprime, mortgages than was actually true.

According to Court House News:

Charged in separate complaints were Fannie Mae's for CEO Daniel Mudd, its former Chief Risk Officer Enrico Dallavecchia, and former Executive Vice President of Single Family Mortgages Thomas Lund.

Charged in the Freddie Mac complaint were former Chairman of the Board and CEO Richard Syron, former Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer Patricia Cook and former Executive Vice President for Single Family Guarantee business Donald Bisenius. 

The SEC seeks financial penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and injunctions against all six. 

According to court documents, "This  action  arises  out  of  a  series  of  materially  false  and  misleading  public  disclosures  by  the  Federal  National Mortgage  Association  ("Fannie  Mae"  or the  "Company")." Between December of 2006 and August of 2008, the case alleges, those charged "made or substantially assisted others in making materially false and  misleading statements regarding Fannie Ma e ' s  exposure to subprime and Alt-A loans."  

It cites the following example: 

For example,  in  a  February  2007  public  filing,  Fannie Mae  described  subprime  loans  as  loans  "made  to  borrowers  with  weaker  credit  histories"  and  reported  that  0.2%,  or  approximately  $4.8  billion,  of  its  Single  Family  credit  book  of  business  as  of  December  31, 2006,  consisted  of   subprime  mortgage  loans  or  structured  Fannie  Mae  Mortgage  Backed  Securities ("MBS") backed by subprime mortgage loans. 

According to the SEC statement,

"In the complaint against the former Freddie Mac executives, the SEC alleged that they and Freddie Mac led investors to believe that the firm used a broad definition of subprime loans and was disclosing all of its Single-Family subprime loan exposure. Syron and Cook reinforced the misleading perception when they each publicly proclaimed that the Single Family business had 'basically no subprime exposure.' Unbeknown to investors, as of December 31, 2006, Freddie Mac's Single Family business was exposed to approximately $141 billion of loans internally referred to as 'subprime' or 'subprime like,' accounting for 10 percent of the portfolio, and grew to approximately $244 billion, or 14 percent of the portfolio, as of June 30, 2008." 

Finally, we are holding the greedy thieves who wrecked the economy accountable for the disasters they created. I wonder what Occupy Wall St. might have to do with that?

By Kristen Gwynne | Sourced from AlterNet

Time For Rational Thought

What do GW Bush, Ayatollah Khameni  the Nazis and Christians  have in common?

They all believe God wants them to kill the other religion's followers.

Bush said God told him to kill Arabs in Iraq, that it was Gog and Magog.

The Ayatollah says God wants him to kill Jews, it's in the Koran.

To the Nazis, Hitler was God, and his followers, mostly devout Christians, did the actual pushing of the Jews into the ovens.

Whenever people believe in an ideology that is completely groundless, when they have faith in an ideology based on fantasy, that has no factual basis, they need someone or some thing to tell them what to do.

Since there is no God, the person telling them what God wants them to do is going to be a man, like Jimmy Swaggert or Ted Haggart or Reverend Jim Jones or Ayatollah Khomeini or Hitler, and that man has an incredible power to manipulate, since people fervently believe in him.

Muslims and Christians have been murdering each other for centuries,

because they think that's what God wants them to do.

Muslims murder other Muslims for the same reason, Sunni Muslims think God wants them to murder Shiite Muslims and Shiites think God wants them to murder Sunnis.

Their one degree of unity is their shared belief that God wants both of them to murder Jews.

Christians have historically had this view as well, as evinced by the crusades and Nazism.

Currently, Christians love Jews, apparently someone told them that Jesus was a Jew.

But that could change, some charismatic preacher could tell Christians that Jews did indeed kill Jesus, and since there is no God to tell them anything different, the Christians could happily resume their Jew killing proclivity.

Another problem with these two religions, that is, Christianity and Islam, is that they both predict the world will end in a big ball of fire, that God predicted it, and that nuclear war is not necessarily a bad thing.

Christians say things like”I will be raptured and taken up to the glory of God.”

Muslims say, “It is in our book. We have to kill the Jews for the prophet to return.”

This is insanity.

Sane people need to speak up.

When enough people believe in a God whose plan includes destroying our planet, when both sides have nuclear weapons and actually could destroy the planet, betting that your God is the right one is a fool's bet.

There are millions of rational thinkers in the U.S. And Europe and elsewhere, they need to speak up, otherwise the predictions of those who believe in fantastical deities may make their beliefs in total destruction a self fulfilling prophecy.

Why Republicans will lose big time in 2012

Current statistics show 2.6 million Americans are now living in poverty, the highest in 70 years and began in 2008. Middle income salaries have remained stagnant for the past 12 years. The only jobs bill component Republicans have agreed on was giving employers who hire vets a tax cut.

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN has told Republicans to gt off social issues and concentrate on the economy and jobs. While I disagree with many of Daniels policies, I have to give him credit for keeping the state operating in the black.

We now know that the Iraq was had no basis in fact. There were no WMDS. The chemicals Saddam used on his own people were degraded. Our grandson was in the first convoys entering Iraq. Their orders were to keep rolling, not to stop.

We all heard the warnings of mushroom clouds. When the inspectors weren’t finding any evidence, they were kicked out before their job was finished. Curiosity got the best of me and I went to the IAEA website and found a wealth of information. They had uncovered stores of yellow cake, listed how much, country of origin and how it was disposed of. It was all degraded—useless. No evidence of a nuclear bomb!

What’s been the cost of the 10-year-old Iraq War? Were over 4,000 Americans cilled worth it? The Bush administration kept the financial cost off the books through using supplementals.

Republicans are now insisting that every proposal of the Obama administration be paid for, yet ever single Republican congressional leader rubber stamped every single Bush proposal—two unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts and an unfunded prescription drug plan. That’s what I call gross hypocrisy!

Since the Obama administration took office, 1.2 million jobs have been added. When they took office, over 200,000 jobs were being lost monthly. Although jobs aren’t coming fast enough, that’s 1.2 million more now paying taxes.

While Republicans keep searching for an alternative to Romney, they have one in their midst. A former governor, experienced in diplomacy, particularly in China. John Huntsman has served under Bush I, Bush II and Obama. He put country service above party politics. But, of course, he’s a Morman.

Look at the rest of the field. Never mind Herman Cain’s sexual harassment charges, his woeful ignorance of foreign affairs is bone chilling! He didn’t know China has had nuclear weapon over 40years, couldn’t answer questions about Libya but claims he’d rely on advisors. Who’s the decision maker?

Michelle Bachman obviously flunked history. Her latest from the debate was that China should be a role model for the US to follow in that they have no social programs. But then they also have no freedom. Is that the role model for the US? What about human rights? What about their pollution of the environment?

Ron Paul is this years Ross Perot. He of the comment that the uninsured should be left to die in the street.

Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer, a man who told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer. He couldn’t wait to marry an intern whom he later divorced to marry yet another intern.. A deadbeat dad who refused to pay child support for his children but he could run up a half million dollars of debt supplying his third wife with jewels. Small wonder his children have turned their backs on him. Then there’s also the small matter of the house finding him guilty of ethics violations and fined him $300,000. He’s also a lobbyist and the ultimate Washington insider.

There’s Mitt Romney. His most asinine comment came during the last debate that if Obama was re-elected, Iran would have the nuclear bomb but if he was elected, they wouldn’t! He also has to explain his numerous flip flops. As governor, he excelled in arbitrage and shipping US jobs overseas.

It was astounding the number of Republican candidates who are ready to go to war against Iran! That, too, is bone-chilling! They haven’t learned that wars are easier to start but harder to end. Americans are sick of war—the financial drain and the lives lost. Hartmas was the only one brave enough to say we need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan NOW. That’s an opinion shared by the majority of the American public, both Republicans and Democraats. But since when do we the people have a voice? We’re only the ones who provide the bullet sponges..

Sadly, both Lindsey Graham and DeMint sat in the font row grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cats. Thrilled by the red meat being tossed around..

Rick Santorum showed the most sensible logic regarding foreign aid. While Perry and others would eliminate it, Pakistan, Israel and India have nuclear weapons. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep them as allies? Foreign aid consumes one percent of the budget.

The Republican party is FUBAR!

As for our family, we’ll stick with President Obama. Why not look up the long list of things he’s achieved? Bet you won’t. That would mean facing reality!

Thanks to Political Jack for this great article.

 

http://www.politicaljack.com/forums/showthread.php?7091-Why-Republicans-will-lose-big-time-in-2012

American Patriots

Although the militarized terror squads of major cities have beaten, maced and shot them with rubber bullets, the Occupy Movement continues to grow exponentially.

Peaceful Americans, exercising their First Amendment rights, are being brutally attacked by jack booted thugs.

It reminds us of the civil rights movement, when the far right opposed black people's cries of suffering and their demands for equality.

They were beaten and maced and brutalized, like the criminal class is now doing to the occupy movement.

Like the civil rights movement, however, the violence only exposes the evil of the 1%.

Here's a dispatch from the true patriots in our country: (MFB)

Following last week's raid on Justin Herman Plaza, San Francisco police evicted Occupy SF from their last camp, in front of the Federal Reserve, at 4am this morning. 55 people were arrested. Occupy Pittsburgh is also facing an eviction deadline today, continuing an escalating trend of harassment and eviction of nonviolent protesters across the country and the world.

To the 1%'s pundits who claim Occupy is over: We are still here. Even as the agents of the 1% evict our communities and eviscerate our rights, we are evolving. What we have set in motion cannot be stopped with tear gas, bulldozers, rubber bullets, or metal barricades.

Occupations across the country have found creative ways to persist, resist, and rebuild. We aren't giving up our public spaces. Last we checked, tents still stand in DC, Chicago, Boise, Oklahoma City, Buffalo, Miami, Chapel Hill, Cleveland, Providence, Baltimore, Orlando, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Pensacola, Lexington, Newark, Gainesville, Peoria, Eugene, Rochester, Orlando, Tacoma, Reno, Charlotte, Raleigh, New Haven, Houston, Austin, Tampa, Louisville, and elsewhere. In Anchorage, they even have igloos. On their two month anniversary, Occupy Minnesota will gather at The People’s Plaza to reclaim their space and continue the fight for equality and justice.

Occupiers in cities like Atlanta, Oakland, Fort Worth, Jackson, and Phoenix have cleverly responded to evictions by staying in the parks during the day and moving to the sidewalk at night. In Los Angeles, Toronto, San Diego, Portland, Tulsa, San Jose, Dayton, Tucson, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Sacramento, Hartford, Charlottesville, Denver, Dallas, Norfolk, Richmond, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New York, evicted Occupations continue to hold General Assemblies and maintain busy calendars with daily meetings, events, workshops, teach-ins, marches, direct actions, and demonstrations at their local city hall, bank branch, corporate office, and courts.

We are also disrupting business-as-usual from Wall Street to K Street. We have brought the festivity of Broadway into the streets. We mic check corrupt politicians and 1%ers everywhere they go. We have moved homeless families into empty foreclosed homes. We have spread our message by occupying the highway. In DC, Oakland, Santa Cruz, London, and Seattle we have liberated buildings from the banks and greedy corporations and begun to turn them into vibrant community centers.

While maintaining our nonpartisan focus on economic inequality and connecting a diversity of issues that impact the 99%, Occupations have begun to refine and hone our messaging around the big banks, foreclosures, evictions, and housing. Foreclosure auctions have been disrupted in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bremerton, Reno, and New Orleans. Occupiers foreclosed on bank offices in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Buffalo and elsewhere. Today, a few weeks after Occupiers took over the Washington State Capital, Occupy Providence is marching on their State house to "ask this house for homes!" After the recent Day of Action to Occupy Our Homes, many cities continue to support families, especially in communities of color, as they fight back against unfair evictions. In Atlanta, Cleveland, Oakland, Chicago, Rochester, New York, and Oakland, Occupiers are helping homeless families find shelter and resist eviction.

In solidarity with all oppressed communities, we are actively supporting the many social movements that comprise the global revolution. We have marched on U.S.-companies that supply teargas to the Egyptian government to support our comrades in Tahir Square; with immigrants rights activists against deportation, detention and wage-theft in Birmingham and New York; with seniors to advocate for social services; with students against tuition-hikes, with workers and unions for jobs, better working conditions, and fair wages; and with farmers fighting for food justice. Occupations in solidarity with OWS have arisen in Manila, Auckland, London, Amsterdam, South Africa and beyond. We've marched to draw attention to the connections between the corrupt banking system and issues like the prison industrial complex and climate change.

This is merely a sketch of the ongoing work of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It would be nearly impossible to compile a comprehensive list of the brave actions that are happening all across the United States and the world. And we're just getting started. Tomorrow, December 12th, in response to the coordinated effort to crush Occupy Wall Street, Occupiers in every major West Coast port city – San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver – are joining Occupy Oakland in a coordinated effort of our own: West Coast Port Shutdown. Solidarity actions are being organized around the world, including in Japan, Houston, Albuquerque, Denver, Greensboro, Austin, Honolulu, Salt Lake City, and New York.

Then they came for me

The 'War on Terror” is kind of crazy, isn't it?

I mean, how can you declare war on a noun?

Homeland security, the multi-billion dollar government jobs program hasn't caught a single terrorist.

You have a much better chance of being murdered by your wife than a terrorist, so why hasn't the government declared war on your wife?

The answer is rather simple, and if one observes the war on the first amendment being waged by local police departments across the country, it's obvious.

Its about control of the population.

The first amendment guarantees Americans the right to peacefully assembly to redress their grievances.

It doesn't say, you may assemble unless you are violating a zoning ordinance.

It doesn't say you can assemble to protest, but not in a park, and you can't use a tent, or protest more than 24 hours.

The occupy protests were peaceful, yet the government's response was cruel and brutal.

Its all about control.

The drug war has been successful in one respect; it is an excellent method to control the poor.

The fourth amendment protection against search and seizure was tossed out with the trash to prosecute the drug war, which has been a de facto war against the poor.

It has been effective in that, currently, 25% percent of all blacks are labeled as criminals for using drugs not approved by the government.

Rush Limbaugh is a notorious drug addict.

Why hasn't the government declared a war on lying, drug addicted talk show morons?

Because they have lawyers.

Not public defenders, real lawyers.

There  is an old saying, its a truism, a cliché, but I will repeat it one more time, just for those of the middle class who believe that the destruction of our country's freedom and the criminalization of our poor, and the militarization of our police departments has no effect on them.

“They came for the Communists first.

I'm not a Communist so I didn't help.

Then they came for the poor, and I'm not one of them so I didn't help.

Then they came for the “freethinkers”,  I'm definitely not one of them, so I didn't help.

Then they came for me...and there was no one left to help.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, Bozo the Clown!

By Michael Blackburn, Sr.

What can you say about a group of candidates when Michele Bachmann seems like the least insane of the bunch?

Herman Cain, the Pizza Guy, to the regret of most pundits and humorists, is gone.

A couple of weeks ago he was overheard saying, “They are all just lyin' bitches.”

In his “goodbye” speech, his last hurrah, he said, “All of these unproven, untrue allegations, these false charges, are lies.”

That of course, was a lie, and he's not only done as a presidential candidate, he probably is done with his erstwhile vocation of giving inspirational speeches to women's groups.

Rick Perry, this guy is so dumb even stupid people think he's an idiot.

Ron Paul has a certain appeal, to crazy people, but his idea of no government at all (except to protect the rich) has no appeal to voters.

John Hunt has shown his real intellectual deficit by even attempting to run in this field of whackos and assorted nuts.

Michele Bachmann was doing pretty well, particularly with her anti-gay slurs, until everyone realized her husband is gay!

Mitt Romney, like Newt, is a flip flopper, but the Republicans don't think he is a “real Christian”, and they are only interested in a candidate who is a “real Christian” like serial adulterer Gingrich, the family values guy.

Gingrich, as you may recall, was forced from his position as Speaker of the house, BY HIS OWN PARTY.

He is the front runner now.

His platform?

Overturn child labor laws, “because they are stupid” and put 9 year olds to work cleaning the urinals of their more fortunate classmates, because, as he says, “poor kids in the ghetto (read black kids) don't know about the work ethic.

Let them do janitorial work in the schools.

The only thing they know about money is getting it illegally.”

I guess he doesn't know that most poor people, even most poor black people, DO work, they just don't make a decent wage.

Gingrich is the front runner in the Republicon flock.

Good choice.

Frankly, his candidacy, if he makes the cut, (and how could he miss, unless Bozo the clown enters the Republicon race?) should be hilarious.

Why Do Republicons Hate Democracy?

The Republicons are the Big “Gummint” party.

They want a huge, massive, government bureaucracy to watch every pregnancy, to make sure that a woman can't decide her own health issues.

They want the government to dictate to her.

They have the “Patriot Act” and  “Homeland Security” multi-billion dollar government bureaucracies

to “protect” us from Arabs and Afghans, and Americans who for whatever reason Big Brother doesn't like.

They have thousands of employees.

Government employees, paid for by taxpayers.

Your chances, as an American, in this country, of being killed by a terrorist, are almost zero.

You are much more likely to be killed by a friend, or even your wife.

They support and promote the so-called “Drug War”, another billion dollar super-bureaucracy which has been a colossal failure, in terms of curtailing drug use, but has churned out billions of dollars for DEA,  ATF and other fascist, boot -heeled groups of official thugs.

Also government employees.

None of the “Homeland Security government employees or the “Drug War" employees have lost their jobs.

You won't hear the Republicons criticizing these government jobs.

The Republicons LOVE Big business, it is their thing.

When they rail against big “gummint” what they means is they don't want ANY government regulation of business.

They want government to bail them out when their profits are threatened, they want really big “gummint” then, but if you, a common citizen, lose your job, through no fault of your own, they don't want you to receive unemployment compensation.           

They don't want government to feed poor children in school, they do want government to subsidize massive agribusiness..

These are really evil people who suck up your taxes to spend on their desires, while millions of Americans live on the street.

The Democrats are in the tank, to a large extent as well, but at least their heart is in the right place.

A Republicon president killed thousands of innocent Arab women and children to protect oil interests.

The same president killed thousands of Afghan women and children..

We are still in those countries, even with a Democratic president.

Bush was the first American president to authorize torture, but the president has said basically, “That's in the past, we are not going to look into that.”

All polls show that most Americans are liberal.

Americans believe in democracy, freedom of thought, and equality,

Most Americans believe in a woman's right to choose.

Most Americans believe all Americans are entitled to health care.

Most Americans believe in equal rights for gays.

Most Americans believe education should be free, like it is in other industrial countries.

In short, Americans are liberals, except for a minority of uniformed or misinformed people.

For the sake of our country, we need to vote.

At this point you have the choice of two corporately sponsored candidates, but at least the Democrat's heart is in the right place.

Vote.

Stop police brutality against peaceful protesters!

Since Saturday night, millions of Americans have watched blast after blast of pepper spray directed at seated, passively resisting protesters at the University of California, Davis. The chemical was fired into their faces and on their bodies at point-blank range.
Two campus police officers are captured on video spraying the poisonous chemical.
The attack on the protesters was completely unjustified even according to the questionable standards of law enforcement, which allow the chemical's use in cases of a clear threat to the life and safety of police carrying out legitimate duties.
Criminologists across the country have joined in expressions of outrage, noting that police pepper spray can be even more dangerous than a Taser.
A victim of pepper spray first feels sharp burning and pain and then coughs as breathing becomes more difficult. Soon the victim's lungs begin to bleed, as was the case with several of the victims at the University of California last weekend.
This is not an isolated incident.
Police in New York used pepper spray on the first day of the Occupy Wall Street protests. When New York's billionaire mayor eventually evicted protesters from Zuccotti Park, it was supposedly out of concern for public safety.
In Portland, Ore., protesters were hit with pepper spray last week. Photographers captured the horrific image of a young woman having the spray pumped directly into her mouth, nose and eyes.
The same dangerous chemicals were also sprayed on Occupy protesters in Seattle.
We believe that it is time for the federal government to move in and stop what has become a pattern of attacks on the fundamental rights not only of Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country, but on the rights of all Americans to engage in peaceful protest.
This has historical precedent. When workers occupied an auto plant in Flint, Mich., in the 1930s,  U.S. troops were sent in to protect the occupiers from the police who were attacking them.
During the upsurge of the civil rights movement in the 1960's, our government again sent troops in to protect the public against police who used tear gas, water canons and attack dogs against civil rights demonstrators in the South.
As more and more members of the 99 percent majority exercise their rights to public assembly and free speech, we should, in a democracy, expect nothing less.
We are clearly in an era now where protests are becoming a daily, business-as-usual event. This demands a reassessment of how police forces, nationally, need to change the way they behave when "protecting" the "public." Even the definition of the "public" itself has changed as, more and more, the public and the protesters become one and the same.
One of the big issues for Occupy Davis students is the ceaseless round of tuition hikes resulting from the state's cuts to education. Previous generations of working-class youth attended that institution for free. Today, the tuition stands at almost $14,000 a year and it is climbing.
On Monday, New York City students at CUNY protesting tuition increases were also victims of police brutality at the Baruch campus.
Students all across America, asking for nothing more than what was granted to generations who came before them, should not have to face the threat of police attacks on their peaceful protests.
There are demands to fire the police chief, the officers involved and the University's Chancellor at Davis. While we support all of those demands, they are only first steps.
It's time for our elected leaders to speak out and take action against police brutality. The Justice Department today needs to step in with strict guidelines that protect all the people. And it should investigate the police departments involved for violating protester's civil rights.
Photo: One of the many pepper spray memes that popped up and went viral, this one depicting spraying at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
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by: PW Editorial Board

November 23 2011

tags: Civil liberties, civil rights, OWS, students, history

The Rise of the Pro-Ignorance Right Wing Puts us All In Danger

By Stephen Pizzo

The nation's simpletons have leapt from the shadows, where they wisely hide, except for distinct and notable moments in human history; the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, late 19th-century Germany and the same country during the 1930s. During such times, when the conditions are just right, like they are now, dumb and dumber leap from the shadows and take center stage, claim their right to lead, and... well the results are history.

I only mention all this because it's true. Tea Party simpletons wrap themselves in prideful ignorance, and treat matters of life and death, like global warming, with dismissive derision. They scoff at the science that explains their very existence as a species. They say there are doubts about all that "science" stuff, but no doubt about the Spirit in the sky to whom they pledge mindless allegiance.

Instead of all that complicated, annoying and often inconvenient "book learnin' stuff, they offer "common sense solutions." Which would be fine, if their solutions were not so uncommonly and provably disastrous.

Here's the problem dealing with these simpletons; We can all argue about how things might turn out if we do this or that now, because this situation or that situation has not played itself out fully. It's much more difficult to argue with what actually happened when our ancestors did this or that back then. Those situations played out, for better or for worse.

Of course simpletons don't care much for all that. They are profoundly nearsighted. Besides, a knowledge of history requires a modicum of curiosity, and simpletons are also a profoundly un-curious lot. If mankind only produced simpletons we'd all still be sitting around in caves reinventing wheels and rediscovering fire.

Which is precisely what separates the enlightened from the simpleton. The simpleton seeks .... well.. simplicity. But hitching one's wagon to the simplest solutions at times of exploding complexity is like trying to navigate a maze with ones eyes closed. No, not a maze.. that's too benign a metaphor for these perilous times. It's more like navigating a mine field with eyes closed -- wearing logging boots while singing God Bless America.

Nevertheless, here they are, simpletons proudly and loudly marching through our 21st-century mine fields, clutching their 2000-year-old guidebook they claim was inspired by a "Prince of Peace," -- but who also cheer like a lynch mob at the mere mention of executions, and cheer at the idea of letting the uninsured die on hospital doorsteps.

Like the cycle that raises cicadas from the dark earth every 13-years, simpletons have risen -- again. History warns what follows. Yet no one seems to be able to figure out how to cram the simpleton genie back in the bottle. It's the Sorcerer's Apprentice come to life for GOP strategists who uncorked the simpleton bottle and now have no idea how to stop them. So, instead, they are running along beside them trying to keep up.

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer.