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Murder, Suicide and Financial Ruin: How the Class War Is Destroying Americans' Lives

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Mark Ames - Apr. 18 (News Report) - This past Thursday, a Modesto, California, man whose house was in foreclosure shot and killed the Sheriff’s deputy and the locksmith who came to evict him from his condominium unit. Modesto authorities responded by sending 100 police and SWAT snipers to counter-attack, and it ended Waco-style, with the fourplex structure burning to the ground with the shooter inside.

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Fact-Mauling in Mesa

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, Lori Robertson, Brooks Jackson - Feb. 23 (Fact Check) - The four remaining GOP presidential candidates met in Mesa, Ariz., for another debate, and mauled a few facts. Rick Santorum claimed earmarks were done in an “open” process during his time in Congress. Mitt Romney said dispensing morning-after pills to rape victims was “entirely voluntary” for Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts. … More >>

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Van Jones: Bank Settlement: $25B Down, $675B to Go

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Van Jones - Feb. 12 (News Analysis) - 'We must not forget the more than 14 million homeowners (one in five) whose homes are underwater, beneath a crushing total $700 billion in negative equity. We must not forget the more than 4 million families who have lost their homes.' Van Jones, Reader Supported News

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50-State, $25B Mortgage Settlement: Relief for Struggling Homeowners or Bailout for Big Banks?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation's five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation's economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement's most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, "Naked Capitalism." "The settlement, on the surface, does look like it's helping homeowners," Smith says. "But, in fact, the bigger part that most people don't recognize is the way it actually helps the banks with mortgages on their own books... The real problem is that this deal is just not going to give that much relief." [includes rush transcript]

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Taibbi: Mortgage Fraud Settlement is More Like a Bailout Than Justice

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Kristen Gwynne - Feb. 10 (News Analysis) - Tabbi says that as more of the banks' bad behavior is exposed, it will become obvious that they must shut down to pay for their crimes, because the reparations necessary would bleed them dry. This settlement, he says, is a "kewpie doll" for victims of banker greed, and won't "stem the tide or turn the tables for these people."

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Flipping Through DNC Playbook on Romney

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Scott Blackburn, Lalita Clozel - Dec. 01 (Fact Check) - The Democratic National Committee casts Mitt Romney as an untrustworthy flip-flopper in a lengthy Web video, but pads a long list of examples with some falsehoods and distortions. It's true that Romney has changed or modified his position on some major issues -- including abortion, a federal assault weapons ban and Reaganomics, as the DNC says. But the video strains the truth ... More >>

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9 Policies Conservatives Were For Long Before They Were Against Them

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joshua Holland - Sep. 22 (News Analysis) - Journalist Steve Benen noted that while "the record here may be inconvenient for the right ... it's also unambiguous: the mandate Republicans currently hate was their idea." It was championed by the Heritage Foundation ... Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush kept it going in the 1980s. For years, it was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg, and many other ... notable GOP officials.

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AFL-CIO's Trumka Calls for Labor Movement Separate from Parties: 'I've Had a Snootful of This S---!"

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - Jun. 14 (News Report) - “We can’t simply build the power of any political party or any candidate. For too long we’ve been left after the election holding a canceled check and asking someone to pay attention to us. No more! No more!” the federation president, a former United Mineworkers union chief, shouted above the cheers of the nurses.

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What They Don’t Tell You About Oil Industry Tax Breaks

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - May. 25 (News) - It really is a game—and the stakes are dangerously high So I was reading this New York Times explainer on yet another failure to take the oil industry off the sweet, sweet gravy train. And my mind went back a bit to what’s missing from the current discussion—the long, long history of tax [...] ...

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Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers

Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Shahien Nasiripour - May. 17 (News Report) - A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation's five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes...

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‘RomneyCare’ Facts and Falsehoods

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Lori Robertson - Mar. 26 (News) - It has been nearly five years since Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed the state's landmark health care law amid the political flourish of a fife and drum corps and 300 guests in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. The overhaul is largely seen as a blueprint ...

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Obama and Geithner's Insidious Plan to Hand the Entire Housing Industry Over to the Banks

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Robert Scheer - Feb. 18 (News Analysis) - A most dastardly deed occurred last Friday when the Obama administration issued a 29-page policy statement totally abandoning the federal government’s time-honored role in helping Americans achieve the goal of homeownership. Instead of punishing the banks that sabotaged the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders by “securitizing” our homesteads into poker chips to be gambled away in the Wall Street casino, Barack Obama now proposes to turn over the entire mortgage industry to those same banks.

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Federal Homeless Program Runs Out Of Money As Need Rises

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Laura Bassett - Feb. 03 (News Report) - Homelessness has significantly risen in the U.S. as a result of surging foreclosures and joblessness caused by the recession, but a new federal program designed to nudge people back from the brink of life without shelter is on the brink itself.

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The VA's Foreclosure Business: A New Wave Of Veteran Homelessness

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Torrey Shannon - Jan. 22 (News Report) - Due to a backlog in processing disability claims, military members and their families are forced to live on the streets because of foreclosures and are heading into bankruptcy courts.

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New HUD Rules Require Equal Housing

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Advocate - By Michelle Garcia - Jan. 21 (News Report) - The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed new regulations to stop discrimination against LGBT people who are seeking to buy a home or qualify for government-backed housing programs.

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The Year in Wall Street Investigations

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

ProPublica - By Karen Weise - Dec. 28 (News Analysis) - It's been over three years since credit markets started shaking with the early tremors of the subprime crisis, and two years since that spread into a marketwide collapse. Prosecutors, regulators, Congress and journalists have spent the year uncovering the financial shenanigans that brought the market to its knees. It's been marked by a few blockbuster settlements and more revealing investigations -- as well as by some noticeable inaction in the reckoning.

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'Robo-Signer' Foreclosure Scandal May Threaten Fundamental Financial Stability, Government Watchdog Warns

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Shahien Nasiripour - Nov. 16 (News Report) - The ongoing "turmoil" roiling megabanks and their faulty home foreclosure practices may represent deeper, more systemic problems regarding the origination, transfer and ownership of millions of mortgages, potentially putting Wall Street on the hook for billions of dollars in unexpected losses, threatening to undermine "the very financial stability that the Troubled Asset Relief Program was designed to protect," a government watchdog warns in a new report. Recent revelations regarding mortgage companies' use of "robo-signers" when processing foreclosure documents "may have concealed much deeper problems in the mortgage market," according to the Tuesday report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, an office formed to keep tabs on the bailout.

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United States Consumer Price Index

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wikipedia - Nov. 01 (Research) - The U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a time series measure of the price level of consumer goods and services. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which started the statistic in 1919, publishes the CPI on a monthly basis. The CPI is calculated by observing price changes among a wide array of products in urban areas and weighing these price changes by the share of income consumers spend purchasing them. The resulting statistic, measured as of the end of the month for which it is published, serves as one of the most popular measures of United States inflation; however, the CPI focuses on approximating a cost-of-living index not a general price index.

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Brazil Elects Dilma Rousseff, First Female President

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Michael Fox - Nov. 01 (News Report) - Brazil has reached a new milestone with the election of its first-ever female president. On Sunday, Dilma Rousseff defeated rival José Serra with 55 percent in a runoff vote. Rousseff was outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's chosen successor after serving the last five years as his chief of staff. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was involved in the armed struggle against Brazil's military dictatorship. She was imprisoned for nearly three years and tortured. Among her pledges, Rousseff vowed to eradicate chronic poverty in Brazil affecting 20 million people. We talk with Michael Fox, an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based outside Porto Alegre. "She's a fighter," Fox says.

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Stimulating Hypocrisy: Scores of Recovery Act Opponents Sought Money Out of Public View

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Center for Public Integrity - By John Solomon, Aaron Mehta - Oct. 17 (Special Report) - Rep. Pete Sessions, the firebrand conservative from Dallas, Texas, has relentlessly assailed the Democratic-passed stimulus law as a wasteful "trillion dollar spending spree" that was "more about stimulating the government and rewarding political allies than growing the economy and creating jobs." But that didn’t stop the Republican lawmaker from reaching his hand out behind the scenes to seek stimulus money for the suburb of Carrollton after the camera lights went dark and the GOP campaign against the 2009 stimulus law quieted down.

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Why Are Bailed-Out Banks Breaking Into Struggling Borrowers' Homes?

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Oct. 12 (News Analysis) - Last week Florida resident Nancy Jacobini revealed that an agent hired by her bank broke into her home after she fell behind on her mortgage payments. Thinking she was being burglarized, Jacobini called 911. We speak to Jacobini’s lawyer Matthew Weidner and Bruce Marks, the founder and CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a housing services organization that’s been calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures for years.

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ACLU Report Exposes Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

aclu-wa.org - Oct. 04 (News Report) - Poor people increasingly are being jailed for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford, according to a new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. “Debtors’ prisons” create new hardships for people seeking to re-enter society and waste resources in an often fruitless effort to extract payments from defendants who may be homeless, unemployed, or simply too poor to pay. The report looks at “debtors’ prisons” and their devastating impact on individuals in Washington – one of five states highlighted in the report.

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Welfare-To-Work Program's Demise 'Really Demoralizing'

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Sep. 28 (News) - Jaquayla Burton's job will end this week unless the Senate does an about-face and decides to preserve a welfare-to-work program that created more than 240,000...

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FactChecking ‘The Pledge’

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Sep. 25 (News) - The Republican “Pledge to America,” released Sept. 23, contains some dubious factual claims. It declares that “the only parts of the economy expanding are government and our national debt.” Not true. So far this year government employment has declined slightly, while private sector employment has increased by 763,000 jobs. It says that ...

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Thousands of Haitians Face Risk of Forcible Evictions from Temporary Camps

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS, Mark Schuller, - Aug. 17 (News Report) - It's been over seven months since Haiti's devastating earthquake left up to 300,000 dead and displaced over 1.5 million. Only a small fraction of the displaced have found new homes, and those who've found shelter in temporary camps now face a new round of displacement. According to Haitian community groups, thousands of Haitians are at risk of forcible eviction from some of the 1,300 camps established since the quake. The evictions come at a time when reports show a rising number of rapes and sexual abuse in the aftermath of the quake, especially in the camps for the internally displaced.

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