In the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation, America and its allies have been huddling on Libya’s future after Moammar Gadhafi leaves power. (March 29)
Continue reading …No Wonder They Hate Her: Elizabeth Warren’s Agency Advising State AGs on Mortgage Broker Penalties
March 29, 2011 No CommentI can’t even bring myself to hope that mortgage companies will ever face significant consequences for the economic havoc they’ve wreaked. There have been rumors that the Obama administration has been leaning on the state AGs to get them to lighten up on their penalities; I hope they’re just rumors , but I suspect not: NEW YORK — The nation’s five largest mortgage firms have saved more than $20 billion since the housing crisis began in 2007 by taking shortcuts in processing troubled borrowers’ home loans , according to a confidential presentation prepared for state attorneys general by the nascent consumer bureau inside the Treasury Department. That estimate suggests large banks have reaped tremendous benefits from under-serving distressed homeowners, a complaint frequent enough among borrowers that federal regulators have begun to acknowledge the industry’s fundamental shortcomings. The dollar figure also provides a basis for regulators’ internal discussions regarding how best to penalize Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial in a settlement of wide-ranging allegations of wrongful and occasionally illegal foreclosures. People involved in the talks say some regulators want to levy a $5 billion penalty on the five firms, while others seek as much as $30 billion, with most of the money going toward reducing troubled homeowners’ mortgage payments and lowering loan balances for underwater borrowers, those who owe more on their home than it’s worth. Even the highest of those figures, however, pales in comparison to the likely cost of reducing mortgage principal for the three million homeowners some federal agencies hope to reach. Lowering loan balances for that many underwater borrowers who owe less than $1.15 for every dollar their home is worth would cost as much as $135 billion, according to the internal presentation, dated Feb. 14, obtained by The Huffington Post. But perhaps most important to some lawmakers in Washington, the mere existence of the report suggests a much deeper link between the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, led by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, and the 50 state attorneys general who are leading the nationwide probe into the five firms’ improper foreclosure practices, a development sure to anger Republicans in Congress and a banking industry intent on diminishing the fledgling CFPB’s legitimacy by questioning its authority to act before it’s officially launched in July. Earlier this month, Warren told the House Financial Services Committee, under intense questioning, that her agency has provided limited assistance to the various state and federal agencies involved in the industry probes. At one point, she was asked whether she made any recommendations regarding proposed penalties. She replied that her agency has only provided “advice.”
Continue reading …No Wonder They Hate Her: Elizabeth Warren’s Agency Advising State AGs on Mortgage Broker Penalties
March 29, 2011 No CommentI can’t even bring myself to hope that mortgage companies will ever face significant consequences for the economic havoc they’ve wreaked. There have been rumors that the Obama administration has been leaning on the state AGs to get them to lighten up on their penalities; I hope they’re just rumors , but I suspect not: NEW YORK — The nation’s five largest mortgage firms have saved more than $20 billion since the housing crisis began in 2007 by taking shortcuts in processing troubled borrowers’ home loans , according to a confidential presentation prepared for state attorneys general by the nascent consumer bureau inside the Treasury Department. That estimate suggests large banks have reaped tremendous benefits from under-serving distressed homeowners, a complaint frequent enough among borrowers that federal regulators have begun to acknowledge the industry’s fundamental shortcomings. The dollar figure also provides a basis for regulators’ internal discussions regarding how best to penalize Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial in a settlement of wide-ranging allegations of wrongful and occasionally illegal foreclosures. People involved in the talks say some regulators want to levy a $5 billion penalty on the five firms, while others seek as much as $30 billion, with most of the money going toward reducing troubled homeowners’ mortgage payments and lowering loan balances for underwater borrowers, those who owe more on their home than it’s worth. Even the highest of those figures, however, pales in comparison to the likely cost of reducing mortgage principal for the three million homeowners some federal agencies hope to reach. Lowering loan balances for that many underwater borrowers who owe less than $1.15 for every dollar their home is worth would cost as much as $135 billion, according to the internal presentation, dated Feb. 14, obtained by The Huffington Post. But perhaps most important to some lawmakers in Washington, the mere existence of the report suggests a much deeper link between the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, led by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, and the 50 state attorneys general who are leading the nationwide probe into the five firms’ improper foreclosure practices, a development sure to anger Republicans in Congress and a banking industry intent on diminishing the fledgling CFPB’s legitimacy by questioning its authority to act before it’s officially launched in July. Earlier this month, Warren told the House Financial Services Committee, under intense questioning, that her agency has provided limited assistance to the various state and federal agencies involved in the industry probes. At one point, she was asked whether she made any recommendations regarding proposed penalties. She replied that her agency has only provided “advice.”
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Obama’s arguments for US action in Libya draws scorn from Sarah Palin and comparisons with Bush’s foreign policy Did the world witness the birth of an “Obama doctrine” in the president’s speech on Libya? Or is it just a thinly disguised version of George Bush’s doctrine? “It is stunning how similar in tone this speech is to George W Bush’s Iraq speeches,” was the response of former Republican congressman and TV anchor Joe Scarborough. Later, Scarborough accused Obama’s supporters on the left of hypocrisy: How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? Erick Erickson, the influential Republican blogger, derided Obama’s justifications for military action. “Here comes the ‘I am George Bush, but I don’t want you to think I am George Bush’ line,” Erickson tweeted mid-speech . But otherwise Erickson was unimpressed : Obama’s doctrine or lack thereof is the foreign policy equivalent of being a little bit pregnant. Wants Gaddafi gone, but no regime change. Steven Metz, a professor at the US Army War College, heard echoes of Bush’s defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Obama’s arguments for international participation. “Rumsfeld believed that if the United States minimised its role in the stabilisation and reconstruction of Iraq, other nations would step up,” Metz wrote in the New Republic, explaining: Initially Bush was only addressing the September 11 attacks. The big ideas and the doctrines came later. Only time will tell whether an Obama Doctrine will emerge following this pattern. Defining the Obama doctrine proved more difficult. Aaron David Miller, a Middle East peace negotiator in the Clinton administration, told the New York Times : The Obama doctrine is the ‘hedge your bets and make sure you have a way out’ doctrine. He learned from Afghanistan and Iraq. On the more immediate question of whether the speech would win support for Obama’s action, the president found himself with some unusual supporters. One was the neoconservative cheerleader William Kristol, editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard , one of a small group of commentators Obama spoke to before his speech: The president was unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing, and didn’t shrink from defending the use of force or from appealing to American values and interests. Furthermore, the president seems to understand we have to win in Libya. I think we will. On the fringes of the Republican party Obama’s speech got qualified support from his 2008 opponent, Senator John McCain. But McCain is regarded with deep suspicion by many Republicans, and the party’s congressional leaders instead aimed criticism at Obama’s actions, saying he hadn’t explained the extent and costs of the US’s role and failed to gain approval from Congress. Sarah Palin represented a more mainstream Republican opposition, accusing Obama of a “dodgy” strategy. It was, Palin told Fox News , “full of chaos and questions”: [Obama] did not make the case for this intervention. US interests have got to be met if we are going to intervene. And US interests can’t just mean validating some kind of post-American theory of intervention wherein we wait for the Arab League and the United Nations to tell us ‘thumbs up America, you can go now, you can act’, and then we get in the back of the bus and we wait for Nato, we wait for the French to lead us. That’s not inspirational. At the National Review, unofficial house organ of the Republican right, the discomfort of America’s neocons was on display. While they liked military intervention against Gaddafi, they couldn’t rush to support a political opponent. “On paper, I agree with a lot of what Obama is saying,” said National Review commentator Jim Geraghty . “But he’s stringing together a lot of pretty-sounding phrases without really getting at the questions most skeptical Americans have: why intervene here and not in other places?” Marc Lynch, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, had an answer : “The fact that Cote d’Ivoire is awful is a terrible reason to oppose intervening to save Libyans from slaughter in Benghazi.” Update : The New York Times’s Michael Shear has a fascinating side-by-side comparison of the language used by Obama and Bush. Barack Obama Libya George Bush Sarah Palin US foreign policy Obama administration Republicans United States Richard Adams guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The GOP often argues that “we’re making it harder and harder for good, honest corporate citizens to create jobs here” thanks to a stiff corporate tax rate, Jon Stewart noted last night . “Can you blame a company like GE for not wanting to do business in America when it has…
Continue reading …Chris Brown will appear as planned on Dancing with the Stars tonight, but host Tom Bergeron says producers shouldn’t expect him to interview the singer unless they want to see someone bust a window. Bergeron says he can’t promise to avoid mentioning Brown’s well-publicized temper tantrum following his Good Morning…
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enlarge America has had a lot of “So it’s come to this…” moments over the past decade and the headline from this Fortune article gives us year another one: Unpaid jobs: The new normal? Yes, America, we’ve reached a point where our major business publications are asking whether it will soon become “normal” to work for absolutely no compensation whatsoever. The article itself is a tragically hilarious exposé of corporate greedheads who feel all tingly when they think about growing rich off of free labor. Just look at this: “People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they’re going to outperform, they’re going to try to please, they’re going to be creative,” says Kelly Fallis, chief executive of Remote Stylist, a Toronto and New York-based startup that provides Web-based interior design services. “From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it’s huge. Especially if you’re a small business.” In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She’s convinced it’s the wave of the future in human resources. “Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm,” she says. OK, so pick your jaw up off the floor and take a look at that first sentence again: “People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary…” Well, yes. People who work for no money can’t afford to buy food and are generally hungrier. “…so they’re going to outperform, they’re going to try to please, they’re going to be creative…” “…this one guy, who redesigned my entire website for a bag of Doritos last week, I got him to literally lick my boot. He actually licked it! I thought that only happened in the movies!” Like others who have used unpaid labor, Remote Stylist’s Kelly Fallis recommends beginning with a very specific job description and conducting a thorough hiring process to screen out people who aren’t going to give their all for nothing. Candidates who respond to Fallis’ postings on Craigslist and Facebook must fill out a detailed email questionnaire and undergo two rounds of phone interviews and three in-person interviews. I can only imagine what these grueling tests consist of. My quess: Fallis has her two Doberman Pinschers take a ginormous dump on a silver plate. She then instructs job candidates to eat it. Those who swallow their pride (and a whole lot else!) will get the job. Those who refuse? BUH-BYE! Those who join Remote Stylist, whether they are students or out-of-work 20- or 30-somethings, must agree to a four-month run and sign a hiring contract. She asks interns to commit 30 hours a week; she has been burned in the past by people who were trying to juggle a paid job with their commitment to Remote Stylist. When you commit to Remote Stylist, you commit to living on the roof of a Taco Bell and to feeding only on pigeons and rats who get caught in the nearby heating ducts. Everything else must be sacrificed. John Lovejoy, managing director of multimedia fundraising company Nomadic Nation, received 300 responses for an editor position and 700 cameraman applications after only one week of advertising a project to drive from Germany to Cambodia in plastic cars. Not only were the positions unpaid, but successful candidates had to pay their own expenses. One editor and two cameramen ended up quitting before the end of the trek due to rough conditions and 16-hour workdays. In retrospect, Lovejoy says, “I would screen a little bit better and make sure they understood that this wasn’t a vacation.” Very true. Lots of people get paid while they’re on vacations, after all. This, then, is the Grand Future our corporate masters have in mind for the American worker: A bunch of poor suckers so desperate for any kind of work that they’ll agree to be modern-day serfs. And luckily for them, the GOP has decided to adopt their strategy by telling Americans that we should be willing to take massive pay cuts so that our corporate masters will deign to hire us again. Something tells me this won’t go over well in Real America once they figure out what’s really up.
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enlarge America has had a lot of “So it’s come to this…” moments over the past decade and the headline from this Fortune article gives us year another one: Unpaid jobs: The new normal? Yes, America, we’ve reached a point where our major business publications are asking whether it will soon become “normal” to work for absolutely no compensation whatsoever. The article itself is a tragically hilarious exposé of corporate greedheads who feel all tingly when they think about growing rich off of free labor. Just look at this: “People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary, so they’re going to outperform, they’re going to try to please, they’re going to be creative,” says Kelly Fallis, chief executive of Remote Stylist, a Toronto and New York-based startup that provides Web-based interior design services. “From a cost savings perspective, to get something off the ground, it’s huge. Especially if you’re a small business.” In the last three years, Fallis has used about 50 unpaid interns for duties in marketing, editorial, advertising, sales, account management and public relations. She’s convinced it’s the wave of the future in human resources. “Ten years from now, this is going to be the norm,” she says. OK, so pick your jaw up off the floor and take a look at that first sentence again: “People who work for free are far hungrier than anybody who has a salary…” Well, yes. People who work for no money can’t afford to buy food and are generally hungrier. “…so they’re going to outperform, they’re going to try to please, they’re going to be creative…” “…this one guy, who redesigned my entire website for a bag of Doritos last week, I got him to literally lick my boot. He actually licked it! I thought that only happened in the movies!” Like others who have used unpaid labor, Remote Stylist’s Kelly Fallis recommends beginning with a very specific job description and conducting a thorough hiring process to screen out people who aren’t going to give their all for nothing. Candidates who respond to Fallis’ postings on Craigslist and Facebook must fill out a detailed email questionnaire and undergo two rounds of phone interviews and three in-person interviews. I can only imagine what these grueling tests consist of. My quess: Fallis has her two Doberman Pinschers take a ginormous dump on a silver plate. She then instructs job candidates to eat it. Those who swallow their pride (and a whole lot else!) will get the job. Those who refuse? BUH-BYE! Those who join Remote Stylist, whether they are students or out-of-work 20- or 30-somethings, must agree to a four-month run and sign a hiring contract. She asks interns to commit 30 hours a week; she has been burned in the past by people who were trying to juggle a paid job with their commitment to Remote Stylist. When you commit to Remote Stylist, you commit to living on the roof of a Taco Bell and to feeding only on pigeons and rats who get caught in the nearby heating ducts. Everything else must be sacrificed. John Lovejoy, managing director of multimedia fundraising company Nomadic Nation, received 300 responses for an editor position and 700 cameraman applications after only one week of advertising a project to drive from Germany to Cambodia in plastic cars. Not only were the positions unpaid, but successful candidates had to pay their own expenses. One editor and two cameramen ended up quitting before the end of the trek due to rough conditions and 16-hour workdays. In retrospect, Lovejoy says, “I would screen a little bit better and make sure they understood that this wasn’t a vacation.” Very true. Lots of people get paid while they’re on vacations, after all. This, then, is the Grand Future our corporate masters have in mind for the American worker: A bunch of poor suckers so desperate for any kind of work that they’ll agree to be modern-day serfs. And luckily for them, the GOP has decided to adopt their strategy by telling Americans that we should be willing to take massive pay cuts so that our corporate masters will deign to hire us again. Something tells me this won’t go over well in Real America once they figure out what’s really up.
Continue reading …Stacked Deck: Soros Adds More Lefty Supporters to Event Aiming to Remake Economy
March 29, 2011 No CommentLeft-wing funder extraordinaire George Soros isn’t content with just promoting his long list of liberal causes. He wants to remake the global economy. This plan, first revealed by the Media Research Center last week , continues to get more obvious. Soros has spent $50 million getting the group INET ( Institute for New Economic Thinking ) to throw a remake of the famous Bretton Woods conference held near the end of World War II. This conference begins April 8 and Soros’s goal is to “establish new international rules” and “reform the currency system.” It’s all according to a plan laid out in a Nov. 4, 2009, Soros op-ed calling for “ a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order .” Of course it’s gotten little press, despite having eight separate journalists on the list of 90 speakers. That list includes six from The Financial Times, which hasn’t mentioned INET since November. Though the Soros-funded INET keeps adding new speakers, more than two-thirds of those are still connected directly to George Soros. Some of the newer additions are also blatantly liberal, in case there was any doubt about the nature of the event. A few of the new additions include: Brad DeLong , professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley. DeLong is both a prominent liberal economist and a perennial defender of Soros. DeLong even went so far as to connect criticism of Soros with anti-Semitism, calling one graphic from “The O’Reilly Factor,” the “Protocols of the Elders of George Soros.” According to DeLong’s own blog, INET funds the Berkeley economics department for $1.25 million . “The University of California, Berkeley's Department of Economics is the recipient of a $1.25 million grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) to develop a Berkeley Economic History Laboratory. The new lab will train economists to be more historically literate so they can better contribute to policy debates … The award is the largest of 30 first round grants announced recently by the institute.” Wendy Carlin, professor of Economics, University College London, is yet another speaker connected directly to INET, which is sponsoring the conference with Soros funding. Carlin is a member of the advisory board . Barry C. Lynn , the director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative, and a senior fellow at the Soros-funded New America Foundation, a liberal think tank. Wolfgang Munchau , co-founder and
Continue reading …My, they really are hypocrites of the highest degree , aren’t they? After all the water they carried for the insurance industry for Medicare Part B, and during the health care debate, they’re going to try to pin AARP with making money on insurance ? What happened to their much-loved free market? Guess it only works when the businesses support the Republicans! I’m not always a fan of AARP (they do provide affordable insurance to people who otherwise couldn’t get it). They did a lot of work to push the Affordable Care Act, and they stand up for consumers on a wide variety of issues. Bottom line? Even if I didn’t like them at all, the fact that the Republicans have targeted them would make me want to defend them. After all, sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend! Newly empowered House Republicans are getting ready to renew their attacks against AARP over its support for the healthcare reform law, The Hill has learned. The Ways and Means health and oversight subcommittees are hauling in the seniors lobby’s executives before the panel for an April 1 hearing on how the group stands to benefit from the law, among other topics. Republicans say AARP supported the law’s $200 billion in cuts to the Medicare Advantage program because it stands to gain financially as seniors replace their MA plans with Medicare supplemental insurance — or Medigap — policies endorsed by the association. The hearing will cover not only Medigap but “AARP’s organizational structure, management, and financial growth over the last decade.” An embarrassing hearing would not only hit AARP back for its support of the law, but fits in with the GOP’s mantra that the law was written behind closed doors to favor Democratic allies. And policy-wise, it could empower Republicans to tackle Medigap policies, which many conservatives want to reform because they believe they contribute to over-utilization of the medical system by reducing out-of-pocket contributions. Imagine the nerve of old people actually going to the doctor’s, taking care of their health and extending their lifespan. Shame on them! Two Ways and Means Republicans — Reps. Wally Herger (Calif.), the No. 2 Republican on the panel, and Dave Reichert (Wash.) — led the charge against the seniors group during the healthcare reform debate, along with then-Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (Fla.). “AARP unfortunately has become a mouthpiece for this president at the expense of what is best for America’s seniors,” Brown-Waite wrote in a letter to the association at the time. The AARP’s support for healthcare reform “just doesn’t make sense” until “you dig a little deeper and see that [a lot] of their revenues come from these royalties,” Reichert told The Hill during the healthcare reform debate. “And if Medicare Advantage does go away, they may gain millions of dollars in additional royalties.” Just breathtaking, the hypocrisy.
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