HOLDEN LEWIS, - ABC News/Bankrate.com
Stephan: This is the most amazing story, the latest development in the real estate crash that enriched some, and beggared many, grievously injuring the middle class. Now this. That it is happening cries out about what America has become. If you read this about some Third World authoritarian government, you would nod and say, 'Yeah, well, what can you expect?' This is about the United States of America. It should outrage you.
Read to the end and, if relevant to you, do what Lewis suggests.
Some of the foreclosure checks bounced.
A bunch of big banks agreed to a $3.6 billion legal settlement a few months ago to halt a review of improper foreclosures. Under the settlement, checks will be sent to more than 4 million homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure in 2009 and 2010.
The first wave of checks was sent Friday. And, according to the Federal Reserve, at least some of them bounced. The Fed phrased it this way: ‘Some early recipients of checks informed the Federal Reserve’s consumer helpline on Tuesday that they were told their checks could not be cashed.’
The Fed says the problem has been solved.
Screwing up for fun and profit
This is the latest episode in a long tragicomedy in which banks, regulators and consultants rival the Keystone Cops in ineptitude. Those banks, regulators and consultants have excelled at only one thing: protecting one another. Meanwhile, borrowers are abused repeatedly.
The biggest abuse came in the form of improper foreclosures, in which banks’ law firms fabricated and robosigned documents. Then the regulators ‘got tough,’ if by ‘got tough’ you mean, ‘Let the banks choose the consultants who would review paperwork to identify abuses, then let the consultants dawdle and delay.’
PHOTO: […]
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Stephan: This story is an indulgence, not a trend. Ronlyn, my children, and my friends all know my strange schedule. In my family I am known as the Bat. My work day is 11:30 a.m. to 3 a.m.. I do it seven days a week, with breaks for meals, gym, walks in the woods and, when I am home on the island, some of the marvelous creativity to be found here. Part of each day involves SR, as you know. So this story of guys who worked late at night made perfect sense to me.
I really believe in day people and night people,
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story
Stephan: This trend: government's denial and failure to deal appropriately with climate change remediation constitutes a national psychosis. A true madness. It is completely irrational in terms of the future; but supremely fine tuned for maximum short term profit at an obscene level for the few, but at great cost of the many.
Like so many others stories I have published recently, this account reminds me of Jared Diamond's book Collapse, and its story of the last tree on Easter Island being cut down, by a man representing a culture that worshipped trees. Or Babara Tuchman's March of Folly the history of how Europe and the United States were drawn into World War I, a war nobody wanted and none could change enough to stop.
We seem incapable of learning the lesson because we repeat it over and over, and we are doing it again with climate change.
Progress towards the use of cleaner fuel technology has stalled, with production of the world’s energy as ‘dirty
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JENNIFER NORRIS, - Asia Times (Hong Kong)
Stephan: These wars begun so confidently by Bush, Cheney and the other necons, is going to haunt us for generations. Because of the cultural ignorance of the neocons the main outcome of the Iraq-Afghanistan adventure, will be years of conflict in these regions, and the most intense anti-American hatred.
Tonight I saw the film, Emperor, and although it plays fast and loose with many facts, it strongly makes a point that is worth remembering. The fate of Japan, and the future of the world, was made better by a single act of cultural compassion --not prosecuting Emperor Hirohito, or his immediate family. However cynically motivated the act may have been on MacArthur's part his decision to be culturally sensitive made possible the relationship that has existed between the Japanese and the Americans for more than half a century. It could so easily have been otherwise.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if foreign policy like that existed today?
Americans who left the movie Zero Dark Thirty thinking that the dark stain of torture is behind us should be cautioned by the US exit strategy in Afghanistan.
As the 2014 deadline for ending the US combat mission in Afghanistan approaches, US forces have been working with the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP) to build their capacity to fight the Taliban and other insurgent elements on their own. Yet even as the ANA and ANP cost US taxpayers billions of dollars a year, there are still swaths of the country that the national army and police cannot control.
Faced with an impending withdrawal deadline and tightening budgets, US planners created another security entity, the Afghan Local Police (ALP), which they have pitched as an affordable short-term fix to fill this security vacuum. However, the name is a misnomer, since members do not have police powers and are essentially village militias armed with AK-47s. Highlighting its prominence as a key feature of the US exit strategy, General David Petraus described the ALP program in 2011 as ‘arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capacity to secure itself.’
Despite some success in achieving security […]
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Thursday, April 18th, 2013
Stephan: Please click through to see who voted for and against.
I ask every SR reader, whether they get SR from the website, the subscription edition, Facebook, or the Tweeter edition, to contact their Senators, either to congratulate them for voting affirmatively for a compassionate life-affirming approach to firearms, or to condemn them if they voted No on the bill and amendments today. If they voted against, please tell them that you will never vote for them for a public office again. Over 3,300 men, women, and boys and girls have been killed by firearms since the Sandy Hook massacre on14 December -- four months. For comparison 4,487 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the Iraq war since 2003 -- 10 years.
WASHINGTON — With shouts of ‘Shame on you!’ echoing in the chamber, the U.S. Senate failed to muster sufficient support Wednesday for a gun-buyer background check bill that’s supported by nearly 90 percent of Americans.
It also voted down other key measures and counterproposals, defeating a string of amendments in a series of procedural votes that likely doomed any major legislation to curb gun violence.
The background check measure — painstakingly crafted by the bipartisan duo of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) — was seen as the key to passing the first legislation in decades to address the sorts of mass slaughters that so recently horrified the country in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six educators were gunned down at an elementary school, and in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed in a theater.
The amendment failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster. That failure upset anew victims of the Sandy Hook shootings and other slaughters who watched from the Senate gallery.
‘Shame on you!’ shouted two women in the gallery after the vote. One was Patricia Maisch, who grabbed the third clip from the gunman who opened fired at then-Rep. […]
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