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NEWS DISSECTOR: WHITE HOUSE TO VETO FORECLOSURE VICTIMS: SORRY, IT WAS YOUR FAULT!
NEWS DISSECTOR June 24, 2008
WHITE HOUSE TO VETO FORECLOSURE VICTIMS: SORRY, IT WAS YOUR FAULT!
"We are what we make of what we are made of." JP Sartre
"We are toast without action on warming," NASA Scientist
TAKE THAT OBAMA
AP:WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering setting up a diplomatic outpost in Iran in what would mark a dramatic official U.S. return to the country nearly 30 years after the American embassy was overrun and the two nations severed relations.
WILL THERE BE ACTION ON FORECLOSURES?
HOME EQUITY BEING SLASHED
CONGRESS BENDS OVER ON WAR AGAIN
As readers know, I have been obsessed with financial crisis because it will affect everyone including what the next president can or can't do, and what will happen to our country. The war contributes to it, of course, how can activists Obama loving Democrats stand by and do so little about MILLIONS of families losing their homes. If we lived during the days of slavery, I am sure some of us would be moved by the spirit of John Brown to break up slave auctions.
How about breaking up those housing auctions taking place in every city where homes are sold-off to vulture investors looking for bargains. You have seen the pictures. These are homes that were foreclosed upon in large part because of subprime loans. This practice may be acceptable legally, but is it acceptably morally? Do property rights trump human rights? Does anyone care about their neighbors?
Here's the latest: Foreclosure aid bill facing veto threat
WASHINGTON:"The Senate signaled overwhelming support for a foreclosure rescue bill despite a presidential veto threat and concerns that it could benefit the very lenders responsible for the expanding national crisis.
Republican opponents of the bill sought to return the bill to the Banking Committee to clarify whether Countrywide Financial Services, or any other lender, was gaining a benefit from the bill in a not-too-subtle partisan attack on the Democratic architect of the bill.
"There have been very serious concerns raised about actions taken by Countrywide and we need to know what they stand to gain from this bill," Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said in a statement. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., called for a motion to send the bill back to committee, but it was rejected 70 to 11. Two earlier votes on amendments that would have gutted the legislation were rejected by veto-proof margins.
Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., have come under intense scrutiny since a magazine reported last week that they received special treatment from Countrywide on personal loans.
Dodd and Conrad were among a handful of powerbrokers that Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo reportedly offered lower-rate loans as well as waiving fees and points when they refinanced mortgages.
Dodd said he received no special treatment that he knew of….a
DID BANKS WRITE LAWS?
And yet critics see the not so invisible hand of big banks in the writing of the laws:
"We call it the 'Bank of America bill on steroids.'" A House staffer told me that, demanding anonymity, but speaking on behalf of aides to GOP members of the House Financial Services Committee.
He was talking about the bill whose Senate version has been brought to the floor this week by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CN, and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL. Dodd-Shelby would let mortgage lenders off the hook for bad loans, shifting the burden ultimately to taxpayers. Dodd has received approximately $70,000 in campaign
contributions from Bank of America in the last year-and-a-half.Some journalists and Republican lawmakers are asking if Countrywide bought a bailout bill with its VIP loans to Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
of America.
COMMENTS: THIS IS NOT A PARTISAN PROBLEM'
This goes way beyond "sensitivity". It hits at the heart of the entire regulatory mechanism. If the elected officials we put in charge of the henhouse turn out to be the foxes, then the burdensome and costly bureaucracies we build to regulate these industries are useless.
The Times is right in one respect: the Senate Ethics Committee isn't likely to take any significant action against Conrad or Dodd, the latter of whom has the more egregious fault in this case. Neither will Dodd's constituents in Connecticut. Conrad may be lucky that he won't stand for re-election for another four years, because he would almost certainly lose if he had to run this year in North Dakota after this scandal. And as long as no consequences
result from this kind of slimy double-dealing, it will continue to occur.
Lawmaker says had no Countrywide "sweetheart deal"
LENDERS SLASHING HOME EQUITY
ANOTHER HIT ON HOMEOWNERS
Lenders limit or freeze home equity credit. Some banks are starting to restrict or freeze access to emergency cash.
What's particularly exasperating is that lenders aren't even bothering to appraise properties on site or consider borrowers' credit history. They're taking action based solely on the steep decline in home values across the region, a slide that rivals any in the country.
"I don't think it's right," said Louis Moroff, 81, who lives west of Boca Raton. "It's damaging to the economy, and I really believe it's irresponsible."
Please see my commentary on these issues on Mediachannel.org and other sites.
Why Has The Leadership Of The Democratic Party Broken Its Promises On War?
CHUCK SLATKIN: TRUST CONGRESS NO MORE
Hearing Nancy Pelosi claim that she hoped this was the "last time" for this kind of funding was a maddening thing to hear. The Congress this past week voted another $162 billion dollars for the war in Iraq. This fully funds the war through June 2009. In 2006, the American people gave the Democrats the majority in Congress to end to the war. Now, with the lame duck Bush also the historically most unpopular President, the Democrats have mounted no resistance to giving George W. Bush all that he wanted. It was also the week that the Democrats voted to nullify the 4th Amendment by giving it all to George W. Bush in the expanded FISA legislation. In addition to giving amnesty to the major corporations who conspired with the Bush administration to violate our rights, it will now be legal for the Government to spy on any American, without a warrant, for one week.
The leadership of the Democratic Party has broken every promise it has made to us on ending the war in Iraq at the same time that it barters away our Constitutional protections. We are being led to believe that all we have to do now is elect Barack Obama to end the war. The only thing wrong with that is that there is still six more months to the Bush/Cheney criminal reign.
Now that Obama broke his pledge to participate in public financing, we should begin to wonder what other promises he will abandon for political expediency. It is getting hard to tell the progressives from the "blue dogs."
The past two years can accurately be characterized as the Bush/Cheney/Pelosi administration.
This was a different kind of "worst week in the war."
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS?
Empty Plate Club
From Fifp.org
What happened to the global food crisis? It was in the news and out again as quickly as a bad Hollywood movie. The media covered the alarming increase in food prices that have hit poor people so hard. Riots broke out in dozens of countries. Zimbabwe, Sudan, and North Korea are on the edge of severe hunger. Earlier this month, world leaders met in Rome to redirect global funds to meet the new problem.
There's nothing like a big meeting to signal to the news media that adult supervision has returned and everyone can safely focus on other matters.
But instead of addressing the underlying causes of the crisis, world leaders have largely engaged in a high-stakes game of finger-pointing. Everybody has identified a different culprit for the 83% spike in global food prices over the last three years. At the UN conference in Rome, Zimbabwe's not-for-long leader Robert Mugabe blamed colonialism. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued that Western countries had deliberately devalued the dollar and driven up oil prices. Brazil blasted the United States for subsidizing corn-based ethanol; the United States blasted Brazil for diverting agricultural land for sugar-cane-based ethanol.
True, the crisis has generated a small bump up in humanitarian aid. But no one is challenging business as usual in the world of agriculture. Neither the United States nor the European Union has backtracked on their biofuel policies, which has siphoned food into the gas tanks of the wealthy world. Nor has the United States in particular addressed with any greater urgency the environmental constraints that are making food production harder and harder each year: global warming, water shortages, a declining per-capita percentage of arable land.
The bottom line: there are ever more people to feed and a declining ability to feed them all. We face a set of paralyzing trade-offs. Yes, we could bring more land into cultivation, but that would knock down the remaining rainforests and eliminate our carbon sinks. Yes, we could attempt another Green Revolution by imposing industrial agriculture on small farmers, but that requires cheap oil (for fertilizer) and plentiful water (for irrigation) that we simply don't have. Yes, we could launch a dramatic anti-poverty campaign - think the UN Millennium Development Goals squared - that would eventually drive down population growth. But all those new entrants into the middle class would begin to consume a great deal more meat, and therefore grain, just as the no-longer-poor are doing in China and India.
UPI.com: NEWS OF OIL CRISIS IN IRAQ MISSING IN ACTION
Controlling Iraqi Oil
Congress and the major media avoid mentioning oil in connection with military activity in Iraq, all following the lead of the Bush administration. But it is no coincidence that news of negotiations over the "security" agreement comes with news that the occupied Iraqi government is getting ready to sign contracts with ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Total to assist in developing Iraq's vast oil fields, holding the world's third-largest reserves.
The Man Behind Al Hurra, Murdoch's Latest Schemes, Efforts to Stop the FCC
I wrote last night about 60 Minutes expose of the US backed Arab "news" station, Al Hurra, a one billion dollar propaganda deception run in part by James Glassman. Rick Perlstein writes about what he calls ", the mountebank in charge of our nation's "public diplomacy" to the Arab world" on Tom Paine.com
IWM: Murdoch Eyes Pay TV to Buoy His Business
News Corp. is counting on its pay-television businesses to offset any advertising downturn that could affect its other TV and print operations. Cable programming will be "a great profit driver," says chief Rupert Murdoch, and could help fund "later purchases."
Malone: Free Online TV Is Doomed to Fail
Efforts by television networks to make their programs available for free on the Internet are "absurd," says Liberty Media boss John Malone. NBC's online coverage of the Beijing Olympics will be a "flop." Expensive events won't "have adequate underwriting through advertising."
HOUSE MAY KILL FCC RULES
by David Hatch
The House Appropriations Committee is expected to approve provisions Wednesday that effectively block the FCC's controversial relaxation of its media ownership rules, forcing newspaper and broadcast opponents to fight another day. The language would bar the agency from using its funds to implement the rule change, which permits the consolidation of newspaper and broadcast properties in the nation's top 20 media markets and in smaller cities under limited circumstances. Both industries have launched a coordinated effort to convince committee members to remove the restriction, inserted by House Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., during his panel's markup last week. The newspaper and broadcast industries would be forced to seek a remedy on the House floor or during conference negotiations on the spending bill if the section survives Wednesday's full committee markup. The language is part of a larger effort by members in both chambers to rescind the rule change, approved by the FCC's three Republican members in December. In May, the Senate easily cleared a "resolution of disapproval" authored by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., that would nullify it, and Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., has introduced a House counterpart.
REMEMBERING CARLIN
The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972.
When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.
"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians," he explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today's half-a-loaf reformers. "Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"
HELP IS A FOUR LETTER WORD
Thanks to all of you who wrote to offer suggestions on how to raise money for Mediachannel which seems to be in one of our periodic crises. Watch for a letter from Zack Pickens, a young man who has joined us to help.
You may think we are just being alarmist. We are not. We have no funds. Oodles of media funding goes for conferences. None for work like ours. Please respond to Zach's appeal.
Donations must be made to the Global Center are tax deductible. Use Pay Pal or write The Global Center, 575 8th Ave #2200, NY NY 10018 USA
I probably won't be writing for a few days. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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