This video rivals the one of candid interviews of Obama supporters last year. Same deal: didn’t have a clue what she stood for.
Hat tip: Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
A second article gives the timeline for Leavitt, which shows just how easy it is for a police officer to continue to get jobs no matter how many times they get caught breaking the law.
November 2000-June 2001:
Leavitt is employed at South Central Regional Jail.
June 25, 2001:
Leavitt is arrested for driving under the influence.
December 2001-December 2004:
Leavitt is in the U.S. Army. While there, he is disciplined for drinking on duty.
March 2005:
Leavitt is employed as a Cedar Grove Police officer.
January 2006:
Leavitt’s certificate of completion of West Virginia State Police Basic Training is signed.
April 2006:
Leavitt is charged with battery by Charleston police for a bar fight.
June 2006:
Leavitt leaves the Cedar Grove department and is hired by the Madison Police Department.
July 13, 2006:
Leavitt goes to Elsie Keffer’s house in Madison at 7:45 a.m. and harasses her, her boyfriend and her daughter, according to Madison Police records subpoenaed in the Reynolds’ civil suit.
August 2006:
Leavitt resigns the Madison Police Department.
October 2006:
Leavitt is hired by the Smithers Police Department.
Nov. 6, 2006:
Leavitt is hired by the Mount Hope Police Department.
Nov. 24, 2006:
Leavitt leaves the Mount Hope department.
Nov. 29, 2006:
Leavitt is hired by the Gauley Bridge Police Department.
In his employee file, provided to the Gazette by Reynolds’ attorney Mike Clifford, there is a paper where Gauley Bridge Chief L.S. Whipkey and Mayor Damon Runyon kept notes from interviews with Leavitt’s references.
Madison Chief C. Burgess said, “he would love to have him back” and that he “gets along well with other people.” Smithers and Cedar Grove police chiefs also recommended Leavitt to Whipkey.
December 2006:
Hutchinson is hired by Smithers.
January 2007:
Leavitt is terminated by Gauley Bridge for sleeping on duty.
January 2007:
Leavitt is hired by Montgomery.
September 2007:
Hutchinson and Leavitt allegedly assault Roderick and Lakisha White after responding to an incident at their home, according to a lawsuit filed in Kanawha County Circuit Court.
“[Leavitt] threatened to ‘blow my fat black ass away,’” Lakisha White told the Gazette. “He said, ‘Bitch, I own you. I own the streets of Montgomery.’”
December 2007:
Hutchinson receives certificate of completion of West Virginia State Police Basic Training.
February 2008:
Leavitt leaves the Smithers Police Department. (During Leavitt’s tenure at Smithers, he worked for other departments concurrently, a common practice among small-town officers.)
March 2008:
Leavitt, recently hired by Cedar Grove, along with another Cedar Grove officer and a Kanawha County sheriff’s deputy, allegedly sexually assaults Patricia O’Scha on a hill across from Riverside High School, according to a suit filed by O’Scha in Kanawha County Circuit Court.
The three allegedly told her that if she would have sex with them, she wouldn’t have to go to jail. O’Scha said that while she was alone with Leavitt at the Montgomery police station, he implied she should have sex with him or give him oral sex, according to the complaint. Just when he stopped working for Cedar Grove is unclear.
March 2008:
Hutchinson resigns from Smithers and is hired in Montgomery.
August 2008:
Leavitt allegedly handcuffs Gregory Lee Payne and drives him to a wide spot in the road just before Interstate 64 near Cabin Creek. There he chokes and hits Payne, then leaves him by the side of the road, according to a lawsuit filed in Kanawha County Circuit Court.
Aug. 23, 2008:
Leavitt allegedly assaults 17-year-old Sherkiri Terrell. She alleges that after he pushed her head against a wall, he slammed her cell phone to the ground. As the two struggled, she says she put the phone down her pants. She alleges that when it began to ring, he put his hands down her pants to get the phone, according to Terrell.
Aug. 27, 2008:
Joey Carr knocks over a soda machine in Montgomery. Leavitt stops him, takes him to the police station and assaults him. When Leavitt pepper sprays him at close range, Carr says he tries to run away.
“He grabs me and throws me down, kicks me in the stomach and Maces me again,” Carr told the Gazette previously. “When he handcuffs me, he throws me against the car and told me to ‘Quit screaming like a little bitch.’”
Sept. 26, 2008:
Leavitt and Hutchinson assault Twan and Lauren Reynolds. Leavitt hits Twan over the head with a blackjack, kicks him in the back and sprays his eyes with pepper spray at close range.
He also uses a racial epithet and licks Lauren Reynolds on the neck during an interrogation, saying, “Little whore, you like it like that.” Their 4-year-old daughter witnesses much of the assault.
Sept. 27, 2008:
Montgomery officials suspend Leavitt and fire Hutchinson for the incident.
Sept. 29, 2008:
Montgomery police start an internal investigation into the Reynolds beating.
Oct. 1, 2008:
Hutchinson is employed as a Glasgow police officer.
Oct. 21, 2008:
Hutchinson’s last day as a Glasgow police officer.
April 2009:
Leavitt is terminated by Montgomery Police.
April 2009:
Hutchinson is employed by Chesapeake Police, where he is still an officer.
June 10, 2009:
Leavitt is indicted on federal civil rights violations for beating Twan Reynolds and falsely charging his wife, Lauren Reynolds, with a DUI.
July 6, 2009:
Leavitt pleads guilty to two misdemeanor civil rights violations in federal court. During the sentencing Oct. 22, Chief U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin said Leavitt remains defiant.
“He has stated that he only pleaded guilty because he feared that due to, quote, ‘idiots,’ unquote, on the jury, it was the, quote, ’smarter thing to plead guilty,’ unquote,” Goodwin said. “He stated he wants the Court to know, quote, ‘I stand by my actions that day.’”
This guy should have been in prison a long time ago.
The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left … is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
Because of these revelations, the now scandal-ridden Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has suddenly reversed their long-standing stonewalling and refusal to comply with requests via the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act and now will release their “full data.” Meanwhile, we now find that the New Zealand government’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has similarly been “cooking the books.”
But perhaps of even greater importance is whether these revelations will finally bring to light the need for a serious re-assessment of the actual operations of academia and scientific enterprise. For far too long, “science” has been shrouded in a cloak of unquestionable authority as the final arbiter of all knowledge. Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science receiving a whopping $7 billion annually from the U.S. government alone (more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research). The conclusions from such endeavors have been viewed by many as utterly sacrosanct, around which public policy and the law itself should allegedly be based.
In the process, this dogmatic commitment to “science” and a government-science complex as the source of all higher truth has produced a narrow-minded worship of scientific materialism, the reductionist fallacy of “scientism.” Almost daily for example, media reports claim that “in the name of science” yet another enduring human characteristic has now been “explained” away—from free will to love, from moral conscience to reason, from education to the arts, from commerce to law—in purely deterministic terms, with government power the requisite means to address social problems by redesigning and controlling mankind.
Domestic violence
Sex
Child sex
Stealing money
DUI and Drugs
Tazering
Plain test is all the violent action they do and anything else.
November 22
November 23
New Orleans LA police officer suspended after arrest for failing to pay up to $21k in child support
California police officer gets 13 years for robbing banks
Former Pennsylvania cop gets 30 years for robbery from drug dealer
November 24
Palm Beach County FL sheriff’s commander arrested for DUI after driving car off-road and crashing
November 25
St. Johns County FL deputy arrested for stealing drugs from evidence room for his own use
Birmingham AL police officer charged with murder for off-duty DUI accident that killed other driver
Columbia MO police officer suspended after arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated
November 26
November 27
November 28
Plain test is all the violent action they do and anything else. 25
DUI and Drugs 12
Stealing money 9
Tazering 3
Domestic violence 3
Child sex 1
Sex 0
Let’s see how this week compares to last week.
Plain test is all the violent action they do and anything else. 21
Stealing money 16
DUI and Drugs 11
Child sex 7
Tazering 7
Sex 5
Domestic violence 5
You can tell that I didn’t get enough stories. Sexual stories gets a 0? Come on, now.
How big is the subsidy? It’s impossible to predict with any certainty, but we can rationally speculate. The Obama administration’s claims that “health care reform” will reduce patient costs are laughable on their face. When you force everyone to buy something — or, to put it a different way, when you forcibly increase demand versus supply for that thing — the price of that thing goes up, not down.
Per the US Census Bureau (Excel statistics file), there were about 78 million families in the US in 2008. Per the Association of Health Insurance Plans (PDF), the average family paid $5,799 per year for health insurance as of 2007.
If those numbers remain roughly accurate, the “individual mandate” provision of “health care reform” constitutes a guaranteed transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the insurers of about $450 billion per year.
In fact, I suspect that that estimate is way, way low. The numbers are old. The estimate doesn’t account for non-family insurance purchases (individual policies cost more per person than family policies). And the prices are almost certain to rise dramatically once purchase is required rather than merely recommended. I’ll be very surprised if the final total take of this robbery scheme comes to less than a trillion dollars a year.
What most people are missing is that this corporate welfare package is the whole point of the legislation. Any “health care reform” bill that makes it to President Obama’s desk for his signature will consist of two things and two things only:
1) The insurance industry subsidy; and
2) a bunch of hyperbole designed to disguise the centrality of the insurance industry subsidy.
What about the “public option?” Its chances of turning up in the final Senate bill, or of making into the final bill during the House/Senate reconciliation process, fall into the tiny range separating “slim” and “none.” And if it does turn up against all odds, it will be neutered so as to serve the single purpose of providing its insurance industry beneficiaries with a dumping ground for patients they can’t profitably insure even with a mandate and a monopoly.
The “health care reform” movement in Congress is a con, a fraud, a snow job. And how could it have been anything else? This is what government does. It seizes power — any power it can seize, under any pretext it can invent for doing so — and it uses that power to reward its friends and backers.
In the area of “social welfare,” or “the safety net,” the approach of government resembles nothing so much as the modus operandi of a boa constrictor on the hunt.
Boas are patient and loving predators. They don’t beat, bite or poison their victims. They just … embrace them. Give’em a big, squeezy hug. Each time the victim breathes out, the squeeze gets a little tighter, making it harder to inhale the next breath. The victim eventually dies … not from trauma, but from slow asphyxiation.
Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are waiting for you to exhale so they can squeeze you and so their friends, patrons and benefactors in the insurance industry can eat you. They’re the boa’s muscle. The insurance industry is the boa’s mouth.
If we allow ourselves to be ruled by governments, those governments are, sooner or later, going to involve themselves in health care. And when government involves itself in health care, it does so at the expense of the productive masses and for the benefit of the privileged elites.
Substitute any phrase you like for “health care” and the statement will remain true.
Thomas L. Knapp — Center for a Stateless Society
• Critics argue decision may prompt Middle East arms race
• Move worth billions of dollars to US companies
Barack Obama today gave the go-ahead for a controversial transfer of technology to the United Arab Emirates that would make it the first Arab nuclear state.
The UAE is regarded by the US as a moderate Arab state and the transfer is to allow it to build a nuclear power plant to produce energy, not a bomb. But it is easier for a country with civilian nuclear power technology to make the change to military purposes.
Critics of the decision argue that could lead to an arms race in the Middle East, encouraging other countries seeking nuclear technology. They say does not make sense at a time when the US is engaged in trying to persuade Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme that Washington sees as intended to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.
The Bush administration last year agreed in principle to the transfer to the UAE but there was some doubt over whether Obama would endorse it. The move is worth billions of dollars to US energy companies.
“I have determined that the performance of the agreement will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to, the common defence and security,” Obama said.
The US argues that the transfer of technology for civilian purposes, with all the safeguards and monitoring required by international law, helps avoid an arms race and is a relatively safe option.
At present, Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon. Iran could have nuclear weapons capability within the next few years.
Ewen MacAskill — Guardian Washington DC
admin
admin here: I have a hard time putting all this together. Let’s start with Iraq’s nuclear power first. It was started in the 1950’s under the U.S. Atoms for Peace program. During the 1970’s then Vice President and head of the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) Saddam Hussein ordered the establishment of a nuclear weapons program. It went downhill from there.
Iran nuclear power next. It was started in the 1950’s under the U.S. Atoms for Peace program. The Shah may have had nuclear weapons ambitions. However, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq war limited the nuclear program’s expansion. Of course the U.S. didn’t agree with anything that Iran was doing.
We’re at odds with Iran, but we are endorsing Iraq’s building new nuclear power plants. And we got this United Arab Emirates deal going on. Have we forgotten history? What are we going to do in the future, say 30-40 years from now, or perhaps sooner, when the government of United Arab Emirates is overthrown by some Muslim fanatics? That goes for Iraq. too.
And Iran’s been capable of producing nuclear weapons, if you listen to propaganda machines, by 1986, if you listened to the West German propaganda machines, or 2000, if you believe our propaganda machines.
Does anybody see this United Arab Emirates going nuclear as a problem waiting to be unfolded?
It also made me do this anti-war design.
I feel much better now, thanks for not asking. :O)
What are we getting in return for the bailout? So far, predatory credit card rates, exorbitant bank fees and obscene Wall Street bonuses. But we’re being robbed in other, sneakier ways, too. It seems that taxpayers in the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the county are getting plundered by the same institutions they bailed out. One example is AIG’s underhanded fleecing of residents of rural Kentucky.
Middlesboro and Clinton are two tiny, impoverished towns in southern Kentucky with a combined population of 12,000. In 2008, Middlesboro’s per capita income was $13,189 a year, only a few hundred dollars more than the average worker earned in third-world Mexico. That is if they were lucky to even get a job. Real unemployment hovers somewhere around 30%, and the state is so broke that half the people eligible for unemployment benefits can’t receive them. Life may be tough and most people live in poverty, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be made a little poorer. That’s the lesson locals learned after bailed-out insurance villain AIG took over their water utility and instantly raised rates to squeeze an extra $1 million in profits out of its new customers, forcing some to consider choosing between running water and food.
The towns are so rural, their residents have yet to be touched by the Internet revolution. Forget comment sections or forum threads. In Clinton, you have to track down actual hand-written notes that residents filed with city hall to read their complaints about the rate increase. Luckily, city officials were nice enough to scan some of them.
Here’s one, dated August 8, 2009:
My husband and I are on a fixed income and with everything going up in price this would be very a very large burden on us as well as most of the citizens of Clinton. Our town is mostly of people like us and this would be such a hardship for us. A 50.8% raise is outrageous on anything. Please do not let this happen. It would mean the difference in bringing buying food and medicine or paying a high water bill to make someone else’s life easier.
Here is how the AIG takeover went down: In 2005, flush with cash from its shady dealings in the mortgage derivatives market, AIG announced that it was in the process of acquiring Utilities Inc., a holding company that controlled scores of small water utilities across 17 different states. With just 300,000 customers, the company wasn’t huge, but it boasted of being the largest privately held water utility in the country.
“We have long considered water infrastructure as an attractive investment opportunity and an excellent complement to [our] existing energy infrastructure portfolio. Utilities Inc. is a leader in this industry and we are pleased that [we have] the opportunity to acquire this business,” AIG Chairman and CEO Win J. Neuger gloated in a press release.
AIG had reason to be pleased with its purchase. Water utilities are one hell of a profitable business, with international corporations easily making a 20 to 30% profit margin, according to a 2007 report by Food and Water Watch. In the US, federal regulations limit profits to 10%, a pesky rule that companies easily subvert by shuffling their income around and “investing” it in side businesses. These kinds of returns would be the envy of the pharmaceutical and oil industries. How do water companies do it? According to Food and Water Watch, they charge 50% more for services than public utilities and pocket the difference, thereby unleashing the potential of the free market.
People who have been ripped off by bailed-out banks’ schemes to trick late fees out of their customers will recognize what Utilities Inc. did to the people of Middlesboro and Clinton. In the summer of 2008, as AIG was teetering and desperate for funds, it “upgraded” its billing system, and suddenly a slew of late fee charges hit the struggling locals.
Residents had been getting their water bills like clockwork for as long as anyone could remember, but confusion and disorder set in as soon as Utilities rolled out its new and improved billing system. Monthly statements started coming late or didn’t come in for months at a time. People were double-billed and double-penalized for bills that never arrived. One month, a bill would include sewer fees, the next month it wouldn’t—and you’d be charged if didn’t catch the omission. It’s obvious the new invoice system was designed for pure harassment, creating chaos and reaping the rewards of the late fees it generated.
Internally, Utilities referred to their revamp of the billing system as “Project Phoenix.” It sounded eerily similar to the CIA’s “Phoenix Program,” which was designed to terrorize, kill and torture uppity Vietnamese villagers into submission during the Vietnam War. One month after Project Phoenix started wreaking havoc on locals, AIG collapsed and took the first of over $150 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. That meant Project Phoenix could still go on terrorizing locals—which it did.
Here is how a local newspaper described the new billing program in Clinton in March, 2008:
It wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that the new bills began to arrive and from Day One, they were messed up. Few customers here in Clinton [called] the water company because they got multiple bills. One business thought it got a break when its bill went down somewhat, only to discover that the bill hadn’t included sewer costs. This went on for several months. Finally, the [sewer bill] showed up – due in full – on one bill. Requests to spread out the payment fell on deaf ears. . . . Some of us were so confused by the bills, we paid them every time they came in. . . . Fears of bad credit reports and shut offs kept most customers paying whenever a bill arrived.
To make it harder for Clinton residents to file complaints, AIG closed the utility’s local office as soon as it took over the company. Pleas made by phone were rejected.
Local citizens are angry, upset and fearful. Many senior citizens on fixed incomes are already stretched past the breaking point. Others living below the poverty line without hope of getting a job are worried about how to pay another rising utility bill.
Customers we’ve talked to “want to do something,” but say they cannot afford to file to intervene in the case. The trip to Frankfort is daunting and expensive. Some dare not leave the jobs or businesses they have for the time it would take to travel and attend a hearing in Frankfort.
In November 2008, right as AIG was recieving the second installment of its bailout and the economy was in a free-fall, AIG’s water utility notified Middlesbro and Clinton residents that it would be raising rates by 51%. It would mean more than $750,000 in additional revenue a year, just from 8,000 customers. The money wouldn’t be used to fund infrastructure improvements—none had been made and none were planned. No, according to a company spokesman, the utility was trying to recoup money it had invested in its “improved” billing system, in effect forcing the victims of the billing system to pay for their own fleecing.
It seems Utilities was quite honest about explaining that a good chunk of the $750,000 would be transferred straight into the pockets of its investors, according to the West Kentucky Journal of Politics and Issues.
[Another] reason came from [the] company’s financial expert, Pauline M. Ahern, who opined that a rate increase will allow [the utility] to “earn a range of common equity cost ratio of 11.60% to 12.10%.” In the present market, that is an attractive return on investment.
One million dollars may not seem like much these days, but it sure meant a lot to the poverty-stricken residents of Middlesbro and Clinton. There were quite a few bleak handwritten statements filed with Clinton’s city hall during a public hearing on the water rates increase. It makes sense to quote them to get a feel for the level of despair that exists in rural communities like this all over the United States.
Here’s one from August 8, 2009:
I get $675.00 a month, if they raise the water, or utilities, I can’t pay them. I would have to go without water, etc. or gas. I’m disabled and I can’t walk. Raising the utilities hurt a lot of people here in Clinton. Not just me but everyone. As it is I can’t pay the water bills because its high. But I pay what I can.
And here is another from August 12, 2009:
I feel that a rate increase of 50.8% will add a heavy burden on our small rural community. Our citizin [sic] that lives in our city are on Social Security, have full time jobs that pay barely minimum wage or are working as many as 3 part time jobs to make their monthly budget.
And another from May, 2009:
“I always have a high bills [sic] to pay. I pay what I can. I am on disable. [sic] I try not to use too much water. But yet I have a high water bill. If the bill goes up, I will be lucky to pay them $10.00 instead of $80.00.
In the end, Kentucky’s regulatory commission reduced the water rate increase from 50.1% to 30%. How long before they try raise the rate again? Or until the energy company decides to follow suit? It’s hard to say. But one thing is for certain: AIG’s takeover shows again that the American people were screwed by the bailed-out billionaires, who, instead of showing gratitude or willingness to reciprocate, have been preying upon the most vulnerable Americans like they are 15th century barons soaking the peasants.
And as our cities and states start leasing out and selling public infrastructure to pay off their municipal debts, we can expect banks to gain more control of public wealth. Middlesbro and Clinton are a glimpse into the future of post-privatized America.
That’s exactly what he did when Bronx residents asked him to commit to the following: that businesses at a city-owned mall development promise to pay the prospective work force a minimum of $10 an hour, plus benefits. Too much, crowed the vigilant mayor, ever fearful that business might be scared away by such an extravagant demand– a poverty wage.
Ten dollars an hour gets you very little in the Bronx, or anywhere in the country, as many can attest. Millions of Americans having been reduced to the status of working poor, or worse, competing for poverty wages in city after city. With the number of government jobs — a traditional source of better pay, especially for minorities — shrinking and the federal government banking on, well, banks to underpin a no-strings-attached market-driven recovery, a recovery that combines big pay-offs and low-wages, exploitation at the workplace is the order of the day. The Raid on the Treasury goes on, unabated, and poverty is growing by leaps and bounds. Adding jobs via tax credits, the liberal position, appears to be just another salvo in the longest Treasury raid in US history.
Baby boomers need to confront the reality that receiving 100 per cent of their social security is becoming more and more remote. Or, as the president might say, “Save more.” Except the country can’t “save more” because business needs those consumers and their wages now. There’s a bind.
Still, you would think the mayor of America’s largest metropolis might have some notion of what it takes to get by, or is that simply irrelevant to gaining elective office in America today?
Did the press simply forget to ask: Are you concerned, sir, that during your first two terms the city’s poverty rate hovered unchanged at 20 percent? Despite the fact that 2006 was the biggest year for profits in modern Wall Street history? With 2009 close behind? And homelessness sky high? And where will those “good jobs” you promise be found? That would be the same press that anointed Bloomberg mayor many months before Election Day in one of the worst excuses for election coverage since Dewey defeated Truman.
The mayor barely eked out a majority, despite a compliant press, self-financed TV ads saturating the airwaves (including commercials with Bloomberg on camera touting “good job” promises) and a lackluster campaign by his Democratic challenger. Not to mention nice words about Bloomberg from President Obama and Al Gore.
As for the benefits, like health care, these outlandish Bronxites dared ask their mayor to support last week, the mayor should know that a $10-an-hour wage earner qualifies for Medicaid now and under all versions of all health plans before Congress. But Medicaid is already strained to the max. How can a system with insufficient Medicaid resources today expect to add millions more Medicaid recipients tomorrow?
These Bronxites are the same people who live in areas where health clinics and doctors are few today, and few they will remain, as the health insurers, pharmaceutical companies and high-end clinic systems re-tool their gouging, sated with “innovation costs”, “return on research” and “platinum premiums”, leaving little-to-no health care access for the working poor — the impending newly-insured — near the bottom rung of the most stratified, expensive and inequitable health care system in the industrial world… the latest in the American elite’s obsession with everything pyramid.
Mayor Mike and President Obama appear to be removed from the realities of the pervasive, deep poverty to which they, and the US Congress, are consigning a galloping number of American families. Today, 35 percent of African American children are poor by official count. In Bloomberg’s New York, upwards of 1.4 million residents now receive food assistance. And there is really no relief in sight.
How to shake poverty? Well, what about new technology and all its promise? What about expanded broadband, beaming ubiquitous wifi, connecting us all? Surely that’s a way around living poor? The connection between the Web and anti-poverty is hard to establish, as students attending community colleges — not just in the Bronx – can testify. They are reportedly lining up by the hundreds, waiting hours, just to go on-line at campus libraries. Could it be that as the $10-per-hour jobs go, so goes the laptop? The unemployment rate for people under 25 is off the charts. Again, no relief in sight.
One way to stay clear of poverty is to seek a career in real estate. A quarter of U.S. homes are underwater, that is, worth less than their mortgages, a sure sign that the upper estimate of impending foreclosures, 5 to 6 million in 2010, might well be achieved. In one of the most grossly irresponsible and disingenuous acts in US corporate history, the rescued banks have largely failed to apply the taxpayer money and credits we gave them to offset unfairly burdensome mortgages. Injecting that aid would keep people in their homes, neighborhoods together, poverty at bay. But it turns out that the lessons of moral hazard are for poor people to learn, not Wall Streeters.
Worse, there’s money to be made in the unraveling of neighborhoods— in the fields of law enforcement, asset seizure, the auction trade and more. Maybe the evicted, the theory goes, will get opportunity as the money made in the process of their evictions and aftermath filters back through the community. Shades of a NAFTA relocation re-employment strategy, the equivalent of an economic boomerang — a disgraced theory put forward by Bill Clinton and Bob Rubin in the Great Scam of 1993.
Whatever it takes. These times call for creative solutions— “pick yourself up” is the way Obama put it in his run up to the presidency. Along those lines, why not get Medieval? In far off Ghana there’s a gold rush under way, right now, with five times the gold uncovered this year compared to last. With gold prices over $1,100 per ounce (some estimate it’ll top $2,500), anyone can join in one of the oldest of anti-poverty efforts known to man.
Gold mining would be a hard sell back at that Bronx community where moms, dads and teenagers came to ask their mayor – one of the richest individuals in the world — for a pledge of $10 an hour. Most know nothing about the part gold plays in the mayor’s mighty fortune.
Mayor Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LLP, makes billions in profits providing information for the trading of commodities and precious metals, including gold. The small black box his company rents out, by the many thousands and at a cost of up to $20,000 per month, is located on the desk of every commodities trader worth his weight in gold. That box holds the magic key: to data, multitudes of it, reported by Bloomberg LLP minions every micro second. It gives meaning to the words: Buy low, sell high. Speculate. Bet on demise. Go for the gold.
Let’s face it: Planning for poverty is not what Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg and the others do best. Or is it?
This is a life-size rendition using cardboard boxes.
I like this one. Having a showoff getting his clock cleaned, makes me want to watch again and again.
My clitoris owns a house!
WTF?
All the people on this film are dead, long dead.
I’m hungry!