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In an interview with New York Magazine, Barney Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, revealed that during the presidential transition from former President Bush to Obama, Obama rejected a Bush administration concessionto write down mortgages. According to Mr. Frank:
The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it. This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.
There were policy debates within Obama’s economic team about how to handle the mortgage crisis. The two choices were to either create a way to write down mortgage debt or to allow the write-down of mortgage debt through massive amounts of foreclosures over the next four to six years. Obama chose the latter, which caused roughly $7 trillion in middle class wealth to vanish and financial assets for the elites to re-inflate like never before.
New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg plans to enact a ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts.
The proposal would largely affect the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces would be a supersized no-no.
The measure would not apply to diet sodas, fruit juices, dairy-based drinks like milkshakes, or alcoholic beverages; it would not extend to beverages sold in grocery or convenience stores.
“Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ ” Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview.
“New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something,” he said. “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do.”
“The New York City health department’s unhealthy obsession with attacking soft drinks is again pushing them over the top,” said Stefan Friedman, spokesman for the New York City Beverage Association. “It’s time for serious health professionals to move on and seek solutions that are going to actually curb obesity. These zealous proposals just distract from the hard work that needs to be done on this front.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal requires the approval of the Board of Health, which shouldn’t be a problem since he approved all the members.
The ban on supersized soft drinks is one in a long line of aggressive regulations involving public health, from bans on smoking in restaurants and parks, to a prohibition against artificial trans fat in restaurant food to a requirement for health inspection grades to be posted in restaurant windows.
The mayor, who said he occasionally drank a diet soda “on a hot day,” contested the idea that the plan would limit consumers’ choices, saying the option to buy more soda would always be available.
“Your argument, I guess, could be that it’s a little less convenient to have to carry two 16-ounce drinks to your seat in the movie theater rather than one 32 ounce,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “I don’t think you can make the case that we’re taking things away.”
He also suggested that restaurants could simply charge more for smaller drinks if their sales were to drop.
Former secretary of labor and current professor, Robert Reich wrote a blog for the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “College Grads Face Gloomy Prospects“. Not exactly high on optimism Mr. Reich tells like it is:
Fewer than half of the graduates from last year’s class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking.
That’s been the pattern over the last three graduating classes: It’s been taking graduates more than a year to land the first job. And those who still haven’t found a job will be competing with you, making your job search even harder.
Contrast this with the class of 2008, whose members were lucky enough to get out of here and into the job market before the Great Recession really hit. Almost three-quarters of them found jobs within the year.
A little sliver of hope?
Overall, the unemployment rate among young people (21 to 24 years old) with four-year college degrees is now 6.4 percent. With just a high school diploma, the rate is double that.
Not so Fast:
Even when you get a job, it’s likely to pay peanuts. Last year’s young college graduates lucky enough to land jobs had an average hourly wage of only $16.81, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about $35,000 a year – lower than the yearly earnings of young college graduates in 2007, before the Great Recession. The typical wage of young college graduates dropped 4.6 percent between 2007 and 2011, adjusted for inflation.
Presumably, this means that when we come out of the gravitational pull of the recession, your wages will improve. But there’s a longer-term trend that should concern you. The decline in the earnings of college grads really began more than a decade ago. Young college grads with jobs are earning 5.4 percent less than they did in 2000, adjusted for inflation.
The bottom line?
If unemployment stays high for many years, if the wages of young college grads continue to fall, if the costs of college continue to rise and state and local spending per college student continues to drop, and if the college-debt burden therefore continues to explode – well, you do the math.
At some point in the not-too-distant future, these lines cross. College is no longer a good investment.
That’s a problem for you and for those who will follow you into these hallowed halls, but it’s also a problem for America as a whole.
You see, a college education isn’t just a private investment. It’s also a public good. This nation can’t be competitive globally, nor can we have a vibrant and responsible democracy, without a large number of well-educated people.
So it’s not just you who are burdened by these trends. If they continue, we’re all screwed.
Back in 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama said that his views on medical marijuana was that it was a state rights issue best left up to state and local governments to decide.
“I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he said to the delight of many who utilize medical marijuana and it’s advocates. He also promised an end to Bush era raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
But it didn’t take very for President Obama to go back on those words and unleash a multiagency crackdown on medical marijuana that goes far beyond anything perpetrated by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, promising to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, in addition to threatening state employees with prison time for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, the Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts.
“There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,” says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “He’s gone from first to worst.”
The estimated 730,000 patients nationwide, many of whom are seriously ill or dying, who rely on state-sanctioned marijuana recommended by their doctors are obviously being adversely affected by the crackdown. In addition, drug experts warn, the White House’s war on law-abiding providers of medical marijuana will only expand the black market for real criminals.
“The administration is going after legal dispensaries and state and local authorities in ways that are going to push this stuff back underground again,” says Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a former Republican senator who has urged the DEA to legalize medical marijuana, pulls no punches in describing the state of affairs produced by Obama’s efforts to circumvent state law: “Utter chaos.”
Some might describe the president’s high school years as utter chaos. Those very same years when him and his friends were known as the “Choom Gang” for their marijuana smoking prowess.
In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot as a high school kid. He would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”
Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled “Barack Obama: The Story” gives more detail on Obama’s pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama’s high school buddies.
According to Maraniss, teenage Obama was not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator.
“As a member of the Choom Gang,” Maraniss writes, “Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends.” One of which was “Total Absorption” or “TA”.
“TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” explains Maraniss. Here’s how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, “you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around.”
As one of Obama’s old high school buddies tells Maraniss: “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated.”
Another Obama innovation was called “Roof Hits.”
“When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.”
Maraniss also says Obama was known for his “Interceptions”: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”
So not only was the president a weed head but he was also a bogart.
A bogart and hypocrite who wrote about doing drugs enthusiastically in his youth, who promised to respect state laws on medical marijuana and who is ultimately hurting those who rely on it to combat a variety of aliments.
A president so hip and cool he can laugh and brag about the fun times he had in his youth, while locking people away for doing the very same although not for fun but for relief from pain.
A USA TODAY study finds that the typical American household would have had to have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit.
Under those accounting practices, the government ran up debt equal to $42,054 per household last year, which is almost four times the official number reported.
A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445.
Unlike standard accounting, Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits when figuring out the budget. Companies, state and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.
The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules instead of the official number of $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was left off of the government’s books.
According to USA TODAY’s calculation federal finances under these accounting rules since 2004 found no correlation between fluctuations in the deficit and which party ran Congress or the White House.
Key findings:
•Social Security had the biggest financial slide. The federal government would need $22.2 trillion, set aside and earning interest, to cover benefits promised to current workers and retirees beyond what taxes will cover. That’s $9.5 trillion more than was needed in 2004.
•Deficits from 2004 to 2011 would be six times the official total of $5.6 trillion reported.
•Federal debt and retiree commitments equal $561,254 per household. By contrast, an average household owes a combined $116,057 for mortgages, car loans and other debts.
“By law, the federal government can’t tell the truth,” says accountant Sheila Weinberg of the Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting.
Jim Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by cutting benefits or lifting taxes.
A Catholic priest who was removed from the ministry over sex abuse allegations has been hired by the TSA to be a supervisor at Philadelphia International Airport.
Until 2002, Thomas Harkins was a Catholic priest working at churches in South Jersey, when the Diocese of Camden had him removed from ministry because he sexually abused two young girls. Now, in a new lawsuit, a third woman is claiming to also be one of Harkins’ victims.
When asked about the suit by Philadelphia’s CBS I-Team, Harkins’ replied “I have nothing to say,”.
The new lawsuit, accuses Harkins of sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl 10 to 15 times in 1980 and 1981 while Harkins was a priest at Saint Anthony of Padua parish in Hammonton, NJ, with one assault even occurring in Harkins’ bedroom at the rectory.
The I-Team asked Harkins if the traveling public should be worried.
“No, they shouldn’t be,” he said.
“The public should not be worried with you in a position like this despite your past?” reporter Ben Simmoneau asked.
“I have nothing to say,” Harkins repeated.
He then used his TSA badge to walk into a restricted area where cameras are not allowed.
“They should know who they’re hiring,” said Karen Polesir, a Philadelphia spokeswoman with the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). She believes Harkins’ TSA job is inappropriate.
“As the public, we are screened to our underwear getting on a plane, and yet they hire a man like that.”
A TSA official said that Harkins’ title is “Transportation Security Manager, Baggage,” and he deals mostly with luggage, not passengers.
“Sure, that’s his title,” Polesir said. “That doesn’t mean that’s where he stays, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t fill other roles when necessary.”
The TSA says all its employees go through a criminal background check before they’re hired, but because these cases are so old, criminal charges were not filed. A spokesman says the Camden Diocese settled the first two lawsuits with Harkins’ accusers, it has not seen this suit just yet.
Two legal groups are calling for a federal investigation into Florida’s treatment of jobless workers following reforms to the State’s unemployment insurance program that made it the stingiest in the nation.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a law last year that reduced the length of time that individuals could claim benefits and made filing for unemployment more difficult. The law requires claims to be filed online, a test with math and reading questions must be passed and workers have to keep detailed records of their job search efforts.
The National Employment Law Project and Florida Legal Services have filed formal complaints.
“Florida’s revised procedures make it just about as difficult as possible for unemployed workers to access unemployment insurance now,” said Florida Legal Services attorney Valory Greenfield in a statement. “The effect is that the state is blocking workers from accessing help they are qualified for and twisting the knife in the state’s ailing economy. Nowhere in the country is it this hard to get help when you lose a job.”
The complaint states that the law reduced the share of unemployed Floridians receiving benefits to 15 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, lower than any other state in the country. 27 percent of unemployed Americans nationwide received state unemployment benefits last year.
43,680 Floridians were denied benefits from August to April because they didn’t finish a 45-question test. Over the first three months of this year the rate of benefit denials for procedural reasons climbed 200 percent when compared with the year before. Nationwide, more than 70 percent of new applicants received benefits.
“One of Governor Scott’s top priorities this year was to convert Florida’s unemployment system into a re-employment system designed to help families return to the workforce,” Gov. Rick Scott spokeswoman Jackie Schutz said in an email. “The Governor believes we owe it to those looking for work to make sure they have the skills employers are looking for, and to provide skills training where it is lacking.”
“Requiring jobless Floridians to take a skill assessment test is the right thing to do, not just for them, but also to ensure Florida’s tax dollars are spent on making sure our workforce is the most qualified in the nation,” Schutz added.
The complaint acknowledged that the U.S. Labor Department reviewed and approved each reform for compliance with federal unemployment regulations but said the cumulative effect of the changes violated the federal requirement that state governments “establish methods of administration reasonably calculated to insure payment of benefits when due.”
“States receive federal grants to administer their unemployment insurance programs, and one of the conditions for those grants is that they have procedures in place that facilitate the prompt payment of benefits to workers who meet basic eligibility criteria,” said National Employment Law Project senior attorney George Wentworth in a statement.
“Florida’s new procedures force workers who already satisfy the basic eligibility requirements to jump through additional hoops in the form of complex online transactions,” Wentworth continued. “Thousands of workers are being unfairly disqualified as a result. We are asking the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate and find that Florida’s procedures are in violation of federal law.”
One of Scott’s previous efforts to add new conditions to a safety-net program was halted last year when a federal judge issued an injunction against a new law requiring welfare applicants to pass drug tests.
Proposed legislation from New York’s legislature would require all New York-based websites to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”
No votes on the measures have been taken yet, but the bill cannot be seen as anything other than yet another attack on First Amendment rights in this country.
Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”
“This statute would essentially destroy the ability to speak anonymously online on sites in New York,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology. He added that the legislation provides a “heckler’s veto to anybody who disagrees with or doesn’t like what an anonymous poster said.”
Republican Sen. Thomas O’Mara who is also sponsoring the measure, said it would “help lend some accountability to the internet age.”
The Senate and Assembly measures cover messages on social networks, blogs, message boards or “any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”
The bills forces sites to have a contact number or e-mail address posted for “such removal requests, clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.”
Ironically the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the removal of anonymous content.
