AM: Weekly Radio and TV Address: The G-20 Summit
PM: Remarks on health care at the Black Caucus Dinner
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Geography Refresher: Iran, The Middle of the Middle East
by Ron Powell
Secret nuclear facilities have been revealed in Qom, Iran. Failure to fully report the existence of these facilities, which as President Obama said," are inconsistent with a peaceful program", to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and permit the required inspection, will bring sanctions and other dire consequences.
With a line drawn in the sand, and an October 1st deadline for a meeting with the UN Security Council ( United States, Russia, China, France, England) and Germany (P5+1) regarding compliance, Iran will be at the top of the news for the next week and beyond...A refresher in geography seemed to be in order.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Sarah Palin Keynote Speaker On Foreign Policy In Hong Kong?
by Ron Powell
Who is CLSA-Hong Kong? What could they possibly want/get from Sarah Palin?
Or Was she "punked" with a six figure payoff?
The CLSA (Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia-Hong Kong) Investors Forum in Asia features former Republican nominee for Vice-President, Sarah Palin discussing China as well as other foreign policy subjects. This is Sarah Palin's first keynote speech outside the boundaries of North America.
Jonathan Slone, the CEO of CLSA, said that Sarah Palin was asked to speak on U.S. foreign policy, healthcare, governance, and China. The keynote speech by Palin to investors in China was closed to the media. She did acknowledge that her speech would be "different" with the media in the room.
The CLSA decided that their clients were more important than the possible media circus they would get with "media types trying to prove how stupid Sarah Palin is".
No doubt there will most likely be a youtube video of Sarah Palin's foreign policy speech about China and other issues that will be posted not long after the speech is finished. Sarah Palin was due to speak at the forum today.
CLSA
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Business Type: Private Founded: Hong Kong (1986) Headquarters: Hong Kong, China
Key people: Jonathan Slone, Chairman and CEO Industry: Diversified financials
Products: Financial services Employees: 1,350 (2009) Website: www.clsa.com
CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets is one of the region's largest and most highly rated independent equity brokers and financial-services groups, focused on providing broking, investment banking and asset management to corporate and institutional clients around the world.[1][2]
Founded in 1986, CLSA has its headquarters in Hong Kong and offices or representatives in 15 cities across the Asia-Pacific region, as well as New York, London, San Francisco and Dubai. CLSA is majority owned (65%) by Crédit Agricole, France's largest retail-banking group, with the remainder held by staff.
Unlike most of its competitors, CLSA is a research-driven agency broker.[3] It's known for its annual investor forums (particularly the calibre of its keynote speakers and the star acts at its parties), as well as its unique reports, the hallmarks of which are colourful and sometimes irreverent "cartoon" covers[4], outrageous pranks at gatherings, and analysis that goes beyond the numbers and 'tells the story' (a legacy of the journalism background of its founders). It has produced a number of seminal reports, including Billion Boomers and Mr & Mrs Asia
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The Values Voter Summit: A Sampling
Ordinarily, I would consider this some kind of stand-up comedy routine....But, these people are serious and this is no joke:
This is the stand-up comedy routine performed by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) at the Values Voter Summit that only a certain kind of indvidual would find humorous....
Then there's this; the Right Wing understanding of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state:
And this: An anti-abortionist V V speaker wants us to "hear angels singing as we ponder the glory of conception".
I am sure that there are a few women at OS who could tell this young lady a thing or two about "hearing angels" and about the many and various other things she might wish to hear. They know she might want to "ponder the glory" of getting a good f**k. ;-) Which, if she works at it really hard, and has a bit of luck, might well occur prior to conception.
Contraception and birth control being what they are today,
she doesn't need to be overly concerned with the prospect or consequences of conception, unless she is so inclined.
NOW FOR RACHEL MADDOW'S PREQUEL TO ALL OF THIS:
Never undersetimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Does The 1st Amendment to the Constitution Give Us The Right To Lie?
By Ron Powell
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. --- George Orwell
Quite some time ago, I read Sissela Bok's seminal work: Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life (1978). The book is still in print , nearly thirty years after its initial publication. I have used it in my classes when dealing with the questions and issues of morality and ethics in professional and personal life. Its continuing broad readership pays tribute to the book's lucidity and good sense. Bok's work has no equal as a serious treatment of a central, but neglected, dimension of moral life.
Note: Sissela Bok is the daughter of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal both Nobel Prize recipients, and the wife of Derek Bok, formerly President of Harvard University (1971-1991).
What exactly is a lie?
A lie is a statement, believed by the liar to be false, made to another with the intention that the person be deceived by the statement. This is the definition used by Sissela Bok and it has antecedents as far back as St. Augustine. I often like to throw in curve balls like; What if the liar knows the statement to be true but wishes the person to whom the statement is made to believe it to be false?
What's the difference between lying about the day or time you'll be able to deliver yourself to a particular location for a dinner date and lying about the day and time you'll be able to deliver goods or services to that same location?
One situation seems to involve a purely or primarily interpersonal or social arrangement and the other involves a contractual or commercial agreement. One situation may not become the basis for a legal sanction being levied against the liar, the other provides the foundation for taking legal action against the liar. One case involves a'harm' done to anindividual the other involves a 'harm' done to society at large.
A good person does not lie.
It is this intuition which brings lying so naturally within the domain of those things and behaviors which we believe to be categorically immoral or wrong. Yet many lies do little if any harm, and some lies do real good. How are we to account for this stringent judgment on lying, particularly in face of the possible trivial, if not positively beneficial, consequences of lying?
What the lie accomplishes is deception:
There are many ways, of course, to deceive without actually lying.
Consider this scene: The Doctor enters your hospital room looking cheerful. "Have you seen the test results?" you ask. "No," the doctor says, "they'll be available tomorrow. Relax and get a good night's rest." In fact, the doctor isn't lying - the final results won't be available until tomorrow - but he is deceiving you by his manner. He already has preliminary indications of what the test results will show, and your prognosis is not good. Was he justified in assuming a deceiving manner?
What if we altered this scenario so that the doctor actually lied? Would that make his deception worse?
What makes lying wrong? What makes deception wrong, when it is wrong?
You want to lie to someone? Well, what if you were the one being lied to? Or the one being lied about? Would taking up that perspective change your view of the lie?
Take the example of the human resources consultant (an example Sissela Bok discusses in her book) who was proud of her method for getting reliable recommendations about job candidates. She floats lies about the candidates she's investigating to see how a recommender responds. "I hear Smith doesn't get along well with her colleagues," the headhunter offers. "I hear Jones sometimes takes credit for other people's work." By gauging recommenders' reactions to these manufactured rumors, she elicits a richer report on a candidate's character and experience, so she is convinced.
The headhunter is so proud of her method in part because she is obtuse. She never imagines herself on the receiving end of her method. She never imagines herself as somebody being lied about by a seeker of information regarding her. Were she vividly to imagine that scenario, she might come very quickly to appreciate the great potential for harm in what she was doing. She might reflect:
Suppose my boss is just about to make a choice to promote me rather than a colleague - a close call - when he gets a phone query from a headhunter dropping unflattering rumors about me. Even though my boss denies the rumors, perhaps hearing them leaves a residue of doubt in his mind, and he reverses his decision, promoting my colleague instead of me!
No one wants to be harmed by a lie. We've no reason to suppose otherwise about the consultant. Thus, we've every reason to believe she would object to being on the receiving end of her method.
I highly recommend Sissela Bok's book as it is still the foremost treatise and analysis on the social and moral dynamics of lies and lynig.
Our focus here is; do we have a right to lie under the constitution? What are the questions and issues posed by what seems to be taking place in the contemporary media and political arena?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Are lies and liars protected under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution?
Yes and No:
Yes: Political and religious speech are categorically protected, hence falsehoods, half-truths and down right lies that are promulgated within the context of such speech are also protected...So too, are the people who are responsile for the false, misleading or deceptive utterances couched in politics or religion. This appears to be so whether the speaker intends the lie or not.
Yes: Commercial and journalistic speech are protected for the most part. However, unlike political and religious speech and speakers which enjoy absolute protection, there are areas in which commercial speech and journalistic speech are measured or evaluated in terms of veracity and or intent regarding the queation of damage or harm to either an individual or society. In these areas commercial and journalistic speech which is deemed intentionally deceptive and the cause of damage or harm is not protected and may result in the perpetrator being hit with a civil or criminal penalty of some kind.
(In the law the concept of intent is critical because without showing the requisite intent, the harm or damage caused by the liar's lie may not result in the liar being subject to civil or criminal liabilty and penalties.)
No: Interpersonal speech that results in harm or damage to another, particularly where the damage or harm caused is intended or reasonably forseeable, because it is fraudulent, libelous or uttered as part of or in the furtherance of a criminal activity, a criminal conspiracy or a criminal enterprise.
No: Speech that is intended to cause or incite violence, or riots.
No: Speech that is seditious or intended to cause rebellion against the government.
No: Speech that is intended to impede or interfere with the legitimate exercise of govermental power or authority. (Lying to the police, or falsifying a tax return, etc.)
In the instances where the speech is not protected the speaker is subject to civil or criminal liabilty and penalties when held responsible or accountable for the non-protected speech.
Where does this leave us?
The right to political or religious freedom of speech gives the speaker a constitutionally protected right to lie as long as the speech stays within the parameters of protectd speech.
The journalist who lies without the overt intention to cause damage or harm is, for the most part, also constitutionally protected.
As the ones being lied to, our best protection against the barage of lies we are subjected to on a daily basis, is to seek and learn the facts, and arrive at our own truths....It is not only our right but our responsibilty and civic duty as citizens.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Recession’s Racial Divide
By BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEDRICK MUHAMMAD
New York Times Op-Ed Contributors
Published: September 12, 2009
Note: This piece is absolutely essential reading if we are to fully comprehend and appreciate the meaning and impact of the current economic crisis on black people as individuals, black families, and the black community as a whole-RP
What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.
Despite the sense of white grievance, though, blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment. And they weren’t doing so well to begin with. At the start of the recession, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling to a lower economic level, according to a study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University and Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research organization.
In fact, you could say that for African-Americans the recession is over. It occurred from 2000 to 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During those seven years, one-third of black children lived in poverty, and black unemployment — even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.
That was the black recession. What’s happening now is more like a depression. Nauvata and James, a middle-aged African American couple living in Prince Georges County, Md., who asked that their last name not be published, had never recovered from the first recession of the ’00s when the second one came along. In 2003 Nauvata was laid off from a $25-an-hour administrative job at Aetna, and in 2007 she wound up in $10.50-an-hour job at a car rental company. James has had a steady union job as a building equipment operator, but the two couldn’t earn enough to save themselves from predatory lending schemes.
They were paying off a $524 dining set bought on credit from the furniture store Levitz when it went out of business, and their debt swelled inexplicably as it was sold from one creditor to another. The couple ultimately spent a total of $3,800 to both pay it off and hire a lawyer to clear their credit rating. But to do this they had to refinance their home — not once, but with a series of mortgage lenders. Now they face foreclosure.
Nauvata, who is 47, has since seen her blood pressure soar, and James, 56, has developed heart palpitations. “There is no middle class anymore,” he told us, “just a top and a bottom.” Plenty of formerly middle- or working-class whites have followed similar paths to ruin: the layoff or reduced hours, the credit traps and ever-rising debts, the lost home. But one thing distinguishes hard-pressed African-Americans as a group: Thanks to a legacy of a discrimination in both hiring and lending, they’re less likely than whites to be cushioned against the blows by wealthy relatives or well-stocked savings accounts. In 2008, on the cusp of the recession, the typical African-American family had only a dime for every dollar of wealth possessed by the typical white family. Only 18 percent of blacks and Latinos had retirement accounts, compared with 43.4 percent of whites.
Racial asymmetry was stamped on this recession from the beginning. Wall Street’s reckless infatuation with subprime mortgages led to the global financial crash of 2007, which depleted home values and 401(k)’s across the racial spectrum. People of all races got sucked into subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase loans as low-income whites — even when they qualified for prime mortgages, even when they offered down payments.
According to a 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy, a research and advocacy group, from 1998 to 2006 (before the subprime crisis), blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans. The researchers called this family net-worth catastrophe the “greatest loss of wealth in recent history for people of color.” And the worst was yet to come.
In a new documentary film about the subprime crisis, “American Casino,” solid black citizens — a high school social studies teacher, a psychotherapist, a minister — relate how they lost their homes when their monthly mortgage payments exploded. Watching the parts of the film set in Baltimore is a little like watching the TV series “The Wire,” except that the bad guys don’t live in the projects; they hover over computer screens on Wall Street.
It’s not easy to get people to talk about their subprime experiences. There’s the humiliation of having been “played” by distant, mysterious forces. “I don’t feel very good about myself,” says the teacher in “American Casino.” “I kind of feel like a failure.” Even people who know better tend to blame themselves — like Melonie Griffith, a 40-year-old African-American who works with the Boston group City Life/La Vida Urbana helping other people avoid foreclosure and eviction. She criticizes herself for having been “naïve” enough to trust the mortgage lender who, in 2004, told her not to worry about the high monthly payments she was signing on for because the mortgage would be refinanced in “a couple of months.” The lender then disappeared, leaving Ms. Griffith in foreclosure, with “nowhere for my kids and me to go.” Only when she went public with her story did she find that she wasn’t the only one. “There is a consistent pattern here,” she told us.
Mortgage lenders like Countrywide and Wells Fargo sought out minority homebuyers for the heartbreakingly simple reason that, for decades, blacks had been denied mortgages on racial grounds, and were thus a ready-made market for the gonzo mortgage products of the mid-’00s. Banks replaced the old racist practice of redlining with “reverse redlining” — intensive marketing aimed at black neighborhoods in the name of extending home ownership to the historically excluded. Countrywide, which prided itself on being a dream factory for previously disadvantaged homebuyers, rolled out commercials showing canny black women talking their husbands into signing mortgages.
At Wells Fargo, Elizabeth Jacobson, a former loan officer at the company, recently revealed — in an affidavit in a lawsuit by the City of Baltimore — that salesmen were encouraged to try to persuade black preachers to hold “wealth-building seminars” in their churches. For every loan that resulted from these seminars, whether to buy a new home or refinance one, Wells Fargo promised to donate $350 to the customer’s favorite charity, usually the church. (Wells Fargo denied any effort to market subprime loans specifically to blacks.) Another former loan officer, Tony Paschal, reported that at the same time cynicism was rampant within Wells Fargo, with some employees referring to subprimes as “ghetto loans” and to minority customers as “mud people.”
If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites — a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the “prosperity gospel.” Since “God wants to prosper you,” all you have to do to get something is “name it and claim it.” A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, “I want my stuff — right now!”
Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God’s urgings — conveyed by his wife — to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.” If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-’00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.
But you didn’t need a dodgy mortgage to be wiped out by the subprime crisis and ensuing recession. Black unemployment is now at 15.1 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. By 2010, according to Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, 40 percent of African-Americans nationwide will have endured patches of unemployment or underemployment.
One result is that blacks are being hit by a second wave of foreclosures caused by unemployment. Willett Thomas, a neat, wiry 47-year-old in Washington who describes herself as a “fiscal conservative,” told us that until a year ago she thought she’d “figured out a way to live my dream.” Not only did she have a job and a house, but she had a rental property in Gainesville, Fla., leaving her with the flexibility to pursue a part-time writing career. Then she became ill, lost her job and fell behind on the fixed-rate mortgage on her home. The tenants in Florida had financial problems of their own and stopped paying rent. Now, although she manages to have an interview a week and regularly upgrades her résumé, Ms. Thomas cannot find a new job. The house she lives in is in foreclosure.
Mulugeta Yimer of Alexandria, Va., still has his taxi-driving job, but it no longer pays enough to live on. A thin, tall man with worry written all over his face, Mr. Yimer came to this country in 1981 as a refugee from Ethiopia, firmly believing in the American dream. In 2003, when Wells Fargo offered him an adjustable-rate mortgage, he calculated that he’d be able to deal with the higher interest rate when it kicked in. But the recession delivered a near-mortal blow to the taxi industry, even in the still relatively affluent Washington suburbs. He’s now putting in 19-hour days, with occasional naps in his taxi, while his wife works 32 hours a week at a convenience store, but they still don’t earn enough to cover expenses: $400 a month for health insurance, $800 for child care and $1,700 for the mortgage. What will Mr. Yimer do if he ends up losing his house? “We’ll go to a shelter, I guess,” he said, throwing open his hands, “if we can find one.”
So despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs, this recession is on track to leave blacks even more economically disadvantaged than they were. Does a black president who is inclined toward bipartisanship dare address this destruction of the black middle class? Probably not. But if Americans of all races don’t get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of the forthcoming “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Dedrick Muhammad is a senior organizer and research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.
New York Times Op-Ed Contributors
Published: September 12, 2009
Note: This piece is absolutely essential reading if we are to fully comprehend and appreciate the meaning and impact of the current economic crisis on black people as individuals, black families, and the black community as a whole-RP
What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.
Despite the sense of white grievance, though, blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment. And they weren’t doing so well to begin with. At the start of the recession, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling to a lower economic level, according to a study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University and Demos, a nonpartisan public policy research organization.
In fact, you could say that for African-Americans the recession is over. It occurred from 2000 to 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During those seven years, one-third of black children lived in poverty, and black unemployment — even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.
That was the black recession. What’s happening now is more like a depression. Nauvata and James, a middle-aged African American couple living in Prince Georges County, Md., who asked that their last name not be published, had never recovered from the first recession of the ’00s when the second one came along. In 2003 Nauvata was laid off from a $25-an-hour administrative job at Aetna, and in 2007 she wound up in $10.50-an-hour job at a car rental company. James has had a steady union job as a building equipment operator, but the two couldn’t earn enough to save themselves from predatory lending schemes.
They were paying off a $524 dining set bought on credit from the furniture store Levitz when it went out of business, and their debt swelled inexplicably as it was sold from one creditor to another. The couple ultimately spent a total of $3,800 to both pay it off and hire a lawyer to clear their credit rating. But to do this they had to refinance their home — not once, but with a series of mortgage lenders. Now they face foreclosure.
Nauvata, who is 47, has since seen her blood pressure soar, and James, 56, has developed heart palpitations. “There is no middle class anymore,” he told us, “just a top and a bottom.” Plenty of formerly middle- or working-class whites have followed similar paths to ruin: the layoff or reduced hours, the credit traps and ever-rising debts, the lost home. But one thing distinguishes hard-pressed African-Americans as a group: Thanks to a legacy of a discrimination in both hiring and lending, they’re less likely than whites to be cushioned against the blows by wealthy relatives or well-stocked savings accounts. In 2008, on the cusp of the recession, the typical African-American family had only a dime for every dollar of wealth possessed by the typical white family. Only 18 percent of blacks and Latinos had retirement accounts, compared with 43.4 percent of whites.
Racial asymmetry was stamped on this recession from the beginning. Wall Street’s reckless infatuation with subprime mortgages led to the global financial crash of 2007, which depleted home values and 401(k)’s across the racial spectrum. People of all races got sucked into subprime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were almost twice as likely to end up with subprime home-purchase loans as low-income whites — even when they qualified for prime mortgages, even when they offered down payments.
According to a 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy, a research and advocacy group, from 1998 to 2006 (before the subprime crisis), blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans. The researchers called this family net-worth catastrophe the “greatest loss of wealth in recent history for people of color.” And the worst was yet to come.
In a new documentary film about the subprime crisis, “American Casino,” solid black citizens — a high school social studies teacher, a psychotherapist, a minister — relate how they lost their homes when their monthly mortgage payments exploded. Watching the parts of the film set in Baltimore is a little like watching the TV series “The Wire,” except that the bad guys don’t live in the projects; they hover over computer screens on Wall Street.
It’s not easy to get people to talk about their subprime experiences. There’s the humiliation of having been “played” by distant, mysterious forces. “I don’t feel very good about myself,” says the teacher in “American Casino.” “I kind of feel like a failure.” Even people who know better tend to blame themselves — like Melonie Griffith, a 40-year-old African-American who works with the Boston group City Life/La Vida Urbana helping other people avoid foreclosure and eviction. She criticizes herself for having been “naïve” enough to trust the mortgage lender who, in 2004, told her not to worry about the high monthly payments she was signing on for because the mortgage would be refinanced in “a couple of months.” The lender then disappeared, leaving Ms. Griffith in foreclosure, with “nowhere for my kids and me to go.” Only when she went public with her story did she find that she wasn’t the only one. “There is a consistent pattern here,” she told us.
Mortgage lenders like Countrywide and Wells Fargo sought out minority homebuyers for the heartbreakingly simple reason that, for decades, blacks had been denied mortgages on racial grounds, and were thus a ready-made market for the gonzo mortgage products of the mid-’00s. Banks replaced the old racist practice of redlining with “reverse redlining” — intensive marketing aimed at black neighborhoods in the name of extending home ownership to the historically excluded. Countrywide, which prided itself on being a dream factory for previously disadvantaged homebuyers, rolled out commercials showing canny black women talking their husbands into signing mortgages.
At Wells Fargo, Elizabeth Jacobson, a former loan officer at the company, recently revealed — in an affidavit in a lawsuit by the City of Baltimore — that salesmen were encouraged to try to persuade black preachers to hold “wealth-building seminars” in their churches. For every loan that resulted from these seminars, whether to buy a new home or refinance one, Wells Fargo promised to donate $350 to the customer’s favorite charity, usually the church. (Wells Fargo denied any effort to market subprime loans specifically to blacks.) Another former loan officer, Tony Paschal, reported that at the same time cynicism was rampant within Wells Fargo, with some employees referring to subprimes as “ghetto loans” and to minority customers as “mud people.”
If any cultural factor predisposed blacks to fall for risky loans, it was one widely shared with whites — a penchant for “positive thinking” and unwarranted optimism, which takes the theological form of the “prosperity gospel.” Since “God wants to prosper you,” all you have to do to get something is “name it and claim it.” A 2000 DVD from the black evangelist Creflo Dollar featured African-American parishioners shouting, “I want my stuff — right now!”
Joel Osteen, the white megachurch pastor who draws 40,000 worshippers each Sunday, about two-thirds of them black and Latino, likes to relate how he himself succumbed to God’s urgings — conveyed by his wife — to upgrade to a larger house. According to Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, pastors like Mr. Osteen reassured people about subprime mortgages by getting them to believe that “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and bless me with my first house.” If African-Americans made any collective mistake in the mid-’00s, it was to embrace white culture too enthusiastically, and substitute the individual wish-fulfillment promoted by Norman Vincent Peale for the collective-action message of Martin Luther King.
But you didn’t need a dodgy mortgage to be wiped out by the subprime crisis and ensuing recession. Black unemployment is now at 15.1 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. By 2010, according to Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, 40 percent of African-Americans nationwide will have endured patches of unemployment or underemployment.
One result is that blacks are being hit by a second wave of foreclosures caused by unemployment. Willett Thomas, a neat, wiry 47-year-old in Washington who describes herself as a “fiscal conservative,” told us that until a year ago she thought she’d “figured out a way to live my dream.” Not only did she have a job and a house, but she had a rental property in Gainesville, Fla., leaving her with the flexibility to pursue a part-time writing career. Then she became ill, lost her job and fell behind on the fixed-rate mortgage on her home. The tenants in Florida had financial problems of their own and stopped paying rent. Now, although she manages to have an interview a week and regularly upgrades her résumé, Ms. Thomas cannot find a new job. The house she lives in is in foreclosure.
Mulugeta Yimer of Alexandria, Va., still has his taxi-driving job, but it no longer pays enough to live on. A thin, tall man with worry written all over his face, Mr. Yimer came to this country in 1981 as a refugee from Ethiopia, firmly believing in the American dream. In 2003, when Wells Fargo offered him an adjustable-rate mortgage, he calculated that he’d be able to deal with the higher interest rate when it kicked in. But the recession delivered a near-mortal blow to the taxi industry, even in the still relatively affluent Washington suburbs. He’s now putting in 19-hour days, with occasional naps in his taxi, while his wife works 32 hours a week at a convenience store, but they still don’t earn enough to cover expenses: $400 a month for health insurance, $800 for child care and $1,700 for the mortgage. What will Mr. Yimer do if he ends up losing his house? “We’ll go to a shelter, I guess,” he said, throwing open his hands, “if we can find one.”
So despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs, this recession is on track to leave blacks even more economically disadvantaged than they were. Does a black president who is inclined toward bipartisanship dare address this destruction of the black middle class? Probably not. But if Americans of all races don’t get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of the forthcoming “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Dedrick Muhammad is a senior organizer and research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Are The Republicans Trying To Get President Obama Killed?
by Ron powell
Should we take comments like the "lie" shouted out by Representative Joe Wilson, as a mere moment of passion, or a part of a larger plan in which the GOP tries to delegitimize Obama's Presidency? Are the Republicans feeding red meat to the GOP base, fomenting secession and the bearing of arms at public meetings? If that is the goal, aren't Republicans also placing Obama's life at risk?
I purposely did not include material involving Dobbs, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Malken, since they are not Republican elected officials.....However, when you add this stuff to the posture of the likes of Rove, Cheney, Gingrich and Buchannan, what you have, in my view, is clear evidence that these folks are indeed out to "get" President Obama...
I purposely did not include material involving Dobbs, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, and Malken, since they are not Republican elected officials.....However, when you add this stuff to the posture of the likes of Rove, Cheney, Gingrich and Buchannan, what you have, in my view, is clear evidence that these folks are indeed out to "get" President Obama...
Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
Most however, are kept under wraps because the Secret Service fears that revealing details of them would only increase the number of copycat attempts. Although most threats are not credible, each one has to be investigated meticulously.According to the book, intelligence officials received information that people associated with the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab might try to disrupt Mr Obama's inauguration in January, when the Secret Service co-ordinated at least 40,000 agents and officers from some 94 police, military and security agencies.
More than a dozen counter-sniper teams were stationed along the inauguration parade route and the criminal records of employees and hotel guests in nearby buildings were scrutinised.
Despite all this, there were glaring loopholes in the security. Kessler describes how more than 100 VIPs and major campaign donors were screened by metal detectors but then walked along a public pavement before boarding "secure" buses and were not checked again.
It could have been relatively simple for an assassin to have mingled with them in order to get close enough to shoot the new president.
After Mr Obama was elected president, his two children Malia, 11, codenamed Radiance, and Sasha, eight, codenamed Rosebud, began receiving Secret Service protection. Mr Obama's wife Michelle is codenamed Renaissance. The Secret Service also started to protect Vice-President Joe Biden's children, grandchildren, and mother.
Instead of bringing in more agents - instantly identifiable because of their bulky suits, worn over bullet-proof jackets, and earpieces - the Secret Service directed agents to work longer hours to cover the extra load and to miss firearms training, physical fitness sessions and tests.
"We have half the number of agents we need, but requests for more agents have fallen on deaf ears at headquarters," a Secret Service agent told Kessler. "Headquarters' mentality has always been, 'You can complete the mission with what you have. You're a U.S.S.S. agent'."
Mr Biden's constant travel, including back to his home state of Delaware-the burden has meant that all agents on his team have ceased training. According to Kessler, however, they fill in forms stating they have "taken and passed all tests, when they have not, creating a dishonest culture".
The Secret Service has increasingly cut corners after it was absorbed by the new Homeland Security Department under Mr Bush. Kessler said that when Mr Biden threw the first pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the 2009 season, the Secret Service did not screen any of the more than 40,000 fans, stunning his agents and the local Secret Service field office.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Barack Obama Became President Last Night
By Ron Powell
I have posted and commented on the number of Republicans in congress who are racists, hate mongers, liars, birthers, deathers, tenthers, obstructionists, immoral and amoral crooks and thieves.
When you look at the videos and see the faces of those who refuse to acknowledge the veracity, validity, and legitimacy of what the President was saying, you are looking into the faces of the racist hate mongers who would sooner see the President dead than to work with him or any black man of consequence on anything meaningful, universally beneficial or constructive.....
These are the people who now know that they cannot bring him down, or box him in, or shut him up...These are the people who will resort to violence to protect their interests, and the interests they represent. The interests that have long been in control of the government and that have been out of control as relates to their complete and utter disregard for the needs and concerns of ordinary cititzens.
These are the faces of those who are there to represent and protect the interests and concerns of the rich, the white, and the very powerful. They are the people who wish to maintain the status quo....
President Obama has manifest a level of courage the far exceeds anything that they could have possibly anticipated or imagined within the context and framework of the images and stereotypes that they have worked long and hard to develop and maintain. These are the people who will stop at nothing to keep the 1st black president from succeeding to the point of instilling sufficient trust and confidence in American voters to win a second term.
I have often said in my posts and comments here and elsewhere that the surest way for the President to secure a second term is to BE president in his first term. He began to step away from campaign mode and into presidential mode last night.
It is the moment I have been waiting to see and hear for the past eight months. It is the moment that very nearly equals the night that we got the news that Senator Barack Obama had indeed won the election and would become the 44th President of the United States. It is the moment that the racists and hate mongers have dreaded since the day he was inaugurated.
This is what they fear most and why they didn't stand. It is because they realize now, more than ever, that the country not only elected an African-American to the office of President. The country has an African-American who has the courage, confidence, conscience and competence to stand up, speak out and BE President of the United States of America.
I couldn't be more happy or more proud.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Closet Birther Outed At Teaparty!
At a Teaparty held outside of Cincinatti during Labor Day weekend Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) is caught on tape telling Birther: ‘I Agree With You’:
In July, following her 15 minutes of YouTube fame, Schmidt’s office issued a statement to Ohio’s Loveland Magazine to clarify her views:
"The President is indeed a Citizen of this country. I voted as a Member of the House to certify the vote of the Electoral College electing him as our President. I may not agree with his politics but there is no doubt he is our President and has my full respect as such."
Schmidt’s exchange with the birther this weekend directly contradicts her July statement. The footage appears to indicate that Schmidt is a closet birther who questions the citizenship of the President.
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