Down with Student Debt

From This...

To this...

Says Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing

Reclamations, a journal published by University of California students, has published a special, timely pamphlet called "Generation of Debt," on the trap of student debt in America. Young people in America are bombarded with the message that they won't find meaningful employment without a degree (and sometimes a graduate degree).


Meanwhile, universities have increased their fees to astronomical levels, far ahead of inflation, and lenders (including the universities themselves) offer easy credit to students as a means of paying these sums (for all the money they're charging, universities are also slashing wages for their staff, mostly by sticking grad students and desperate "adjuncts" into positions that used to pay professorial wages; naturally, the austerity doesn't extend to the CEO-class administrators, who draw CEO-grade pay).


The loans are backed by the government, and constitute a special form of debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and that can be doubled, tripled, or increased tenfold through usury penalties for missed payments (the lenders themselves have a deplorable habit of applying these penalties even when payments are made, through "bureaucratic error" that is nearly impossible to correct).


These debts are turned into securities, and represent the backbone of yet another subprime bubble in America, one that is due to explode soon, as more and more Americans find themselves drowning in student debt and faced with the prospect of having their wages garnished all the way through to social security.

"Generation of Debt" consists of five essays on the trap of student debt, analyzing the causes of the problem, marking out the beneficiaries of this bubble, and suggesting ways to break free of it.

Reclamations LINK HERE

4 Billionaire 'Vultures' Trying to Pick Our Next President

In light of the nature of this Article it is completly reposted here and no commentary is needed, Greg Palast needs no introduction and no help from our staff at ALGG at making a point.

Stealing oil from Indian reservations, cheating dying workers out of compensation for asbestos-exposure claims, voter-roll purging -- just some of the work of these kingmakers.

By Greg Palast,
Posted on October 5, 2011
Alternet.org

Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch brothers, Charles and David.


Singer has called together the billionaire boys' club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents -- democracy and counting ballots and all that - has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d'état.


Welcome to the nightmare. Singer, Langone and the Kochs last month decided to elect Chris Christie for us. The New Jersey governor's pseudocampaign went belly up before it began. But that's beside the point. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended campaign finance limits and allowed secretive contributions through "corporations," this new combine of the ultrawealthy should not be viewed as just a political threat to the Democrats, but as a threat to democracy.


Let me give you a rundown from my sulphur-scented files on these men who would be king-makers.

Billionaire 1: Ken Langone


Langone likes to be known as the founder of Home Depot, just your local tool guy in a blue apron with a little bag of screws.


But he was also the man, with his right-wing partners, behind Database Technologies. It was in my first investigation of Langone in 2000 that I discovered that DBT had created a list of several thousand "felons" - most of them black, all of them innocent, all of them purged from Florida's voter rolls by DBT's client, Katherine Harris. And Langone's company knew exactly what was going on.


What qualifies Langone to pick our president? In his own words: "I'm nuts; I'm rich."


Billionaires 2 and 3: David and Charles Koch


You think you've read all about the billionaire brothers. Well, there's more:


In 1996, an FBI agent, Richard Elroy, told my team that oil had been pilfered from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. He and other G-men filmed the filch-theft, say witnesses, personally ordered by Charles Koch. A few barrels here, a few barrels there.

It all added up: to about a billion and a half dollars in looted petroleum, says one expert, a third of the Koch fortune at the time. David and Charles shared in the booty via their private company, Koch Industries.


Billionaire 4: Paul Singer


Now we get to the carrion king, Paul Singer, known as Singer The Vulture. I didn't give him the moniker. The name Vulture was tagged on him and his speculator colleagues by the prime minister of Britain and the World Bank. Recently, former United Nations envoy Winston Tubman suggested I ask Singer or his business associates, "Do you know you're causing babies to die?"


What does this guy do -- put poison in kiddies' milk? Worse: he takes away the milk.


Singer's modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations' debts, then waits at bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. At BBC TV's Newsnight, we learned that Singer demanded $400 million dollars from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn't get his 4,000 percent profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don't mean that figuratively -- I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.


For BBC, I tried to ask Vulture Singer the diplomat's question about the baby-killing, but I couldn't get past George Gershwin. (In the New York office tower housing the billionaires' roost, a Gershwin lookalike in top hat and tails plays show tunes on a grand piano for Singer's grand entrance.)


And it's not just poor African carcasses that tempt Singer. Indeed, during my investigation for my new book, Vultures' Picnic, I discovered that Singer's first big vulture attack was on American asbestos victims.


Background: The executives of three companies -- vermiculate mine operator WR Grace, wallboard manufacturer USG and building materials company Owens Corning -- knew that asbestos exposure in their respective operations was killing their workers. When caught and sued, the companies filed for bankruptcy, agreeing to pay almost all of their earnings to the people who were dying and injured by their asbestos.


But Singer had a better idea. These companies, as you can imagine, were worth next to nothing, and Singer bought Owens Corning for a song.

If he could cut the amount paid to the victims, Singer could boost Corning's value big time. So, a public relations campaign began, attacking the dying workers, saying they were all faking it.


One attacker was a guy named George W. Bush.


In January 2005, President Dubya held a televised meeting to promote an "expert" who pronounced that over half a million workers suing Singer's industry were liars. If workers couldn't breathe, he said to the grinning president, it wasn't the fault of asbestos.


The "expert" was not a doctor, but, notably, his "research" was partly funded by ... Paul Singer. And so was Bush. Since the death of Enron's Ken Lay, Singer and his vulture flock at Singer's hedge fund, Elliott International, had become the top contributors to the Republican National Committee. It's hard to measure his largess exactly because some of that help comes in through the side door. For example, Singer put money behind the Swift Boat smear on Bush's opponent, John Kerry.


The legal, political and public relations attacks on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the asbestos companies, boosting their net worth. Singer then flipped Corning, selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit.


It's legal. It's brilliant. It's sick. It's Singer.

One of my favorite Singer scores was his successful scheme to legally loot the Treasury of Peru. The nation's US lawyer told me, aghast, how Singer let Peru's rogue President, Alberto Fujimori, flee his nation to avoid murder charges. Singer had seized Fujimori's getaway plane. The Vulture named his price: one of Fujimori's last acts as president before he fled was to order his dirt-poor nation to pay Singer $58 million.


Why the Billionaires Need to Buy the White House


A Koch Industries executive (not knowing he was being taped) said he had asked Charles Koch, who already had a billion from an inheritance, why Koch was pocketing a few bucks a week from poor American Indians. Koch told him, "I want my fair share, and that's all of it."


And "all of it," of course, includes the White House.


Putting Bush in the White House was worth his weight in gold to these gents - more, in fact. And now, the Kochs, Singer and Langone have teamed up to pick a candidate they pray can take back their real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.


The Gimme for Langone

Langone's firm DBT's "felon" scrub list included only innocent people, so you certainly wouldn't find the name "Langone" on it. In 2004, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged Langone with conspiracy, accusing the billionaire with subverting a stock exchange regulator's investigation into monkey business by Langone's investment bank.


A technicality ended the civil action on the conspiracy charge.


But now, Obama's new banking and securities reforms, albeit weak, give regulators new enforcement powers and provide an extra independent eye on stock market shenanigans. For Langone, picking the president means closing the regulatory eye.


The Gimme for The Kochs


FBI man Elroy told our investigators that the Justice Department was going to let the FBI cuff Charles Koch on criminal charges for the theft of the Osage Indian oil. But then, fumes Elroy, Koch's well-funded buddies, then-senators Bob Dole and Don Nickles, stepped in - and Koch walked. No charges.

Dennis DeConcini, then an Arizona senator, wanted to know why criminal or civil charges were never brought against the Kochs. That was not a wise question to ask. The senator told me that the Kochs threatened his political destruction if the Congressional committee he chaired continued with its investigations of the theft of Native oil. He continued, but his political career did not.


During the Clinton administration, Koch Industries was charged with criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. Under President Bush, the charges, but not the water, were cleaned up.


In other words, crime pays -- if you get to pick the sheriff.


The Gimme for Paul Singer


Paul Singer had placed a big bet on the asbestos industry, then, set out to fix the casino, helping install Bush in the White House. That is, he had a president willing to beat up on asbestos workers and push for so-called "tort reform" that undermined these victims' claims. What the victims lost, Singer gained.


But there's trouble on the horizon for Singer. In 2007, Britain outlawed Singer and all other Vulture speculators in Third World debt from collecting their pound of flesh in the United Kingdom. Other European nations are following suit.

Several US Congressmen are pushing a UK-style prohibition on Singer's activities. (Even Chevron Corporation is complaining about the Vulture attacks. When Chevron calls bankers unscrupulous, they've got to be really unscrupulous.) Without a veto pen over Congress, Singer stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.


Singer plays defense, but is best at offense: to collect on some of his claims against Argentina, his lobbyists have pushed a bill in Congress to put an economic chokehold on trade with the South American nation. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blocked this crazy attack on our ally. As a result, Singer is not a happy gaucho. There will be blood. Obama will have to pay.


The Gimme for Them All


There's one thing that every billionaire wants: another billion. And that's threatened by Obama's plan to tax the "carried interest" tax deferment.


Guys like Singer and Langone don't pay taxes like you and I do. While we pay taxes on income, the profits from vulture speculation and arbitrage are often recorded as "carried interest," effectively not taxed. It's a billion-dollar benefit for the billionaires, and every Republican candidate has sworn to keep this loophole open and make sure you and I pay Singers' taxes for him.

Unfortunately for Singer, the Kochs and Langone, the GOP candidates currently kissing the billionaires' behinds don't seem electable.


So the Billionaire Boys Club prodded Gov. Christie, a bully-boy from Jersey, to muscle his way into the Oval Office. Christie didn't fly, no surprise. But whether they pick the GOP candidate or retreat to their old tactics of smear-from-the-rear, the fragile thing called democracy stands little chance against the tsunamic powers of the quartet's combined checkbooks.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
View Palast's reports for BBC TV and Democracy Now! at gregpalast.com.

© 2011 TruthOut.org All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152625/

Corporate Psychopaths, like we didnt already know

...the researchers "pitted a group of stockbrokers against a group of actual psychopaths in various computer simulations and intelligence tests and found that the money men were significantly more reckless, competitive, and manipulative." Even more striking, the researchers note that achieving overall success was less important to the stock speculators than the sadistic drive "to damage their opponents."

...the award winning-documentary "The Corporation" used World Health Organization metrics to show that if companies really are "people," as our Supreme Court insists, then many of them are mentally ill.

Obviously, these results reflect the not-so-surprising fact that the extreme nature of the modern political process and of today's casino economy inherently self-select for certain kinds of traits. And no doubt, wholly changing that dynamic may be impossible or undesirable — or both.

However, the findings are a reminder of why now — more than ever — we must refuse to succumb to political apathy and laissez-faire demagoguery. Indeed, it's time to redouble our commitment to strengthening checks on political and corporate power because that power is often being wielded by the most unstable among us.

SOURCE LINK

The Corporation (2-Disc Special Edition)

Federal Government cracks down on the Cure for Cancer

First we get this wonderful News...

Scientific trials have for decades documented the anti-cancer properties of cannabis and its constituents. Yet it took until this week for the website of the National Institute of Cancer, a component of the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health, to finally acknowledged the herb’s therapeutic utility for patients living with disease or suffering from the adverse side-effects of cancer treatment.


In a newly added section to the website, entitled ‘Cannabis and Cannabinoids,’ the Institute states:

Cannabinoids may cause antitumor effects by various mechanisms, including induction of cell death, inhibition of cell growth, and inhibition of tumor angiogenesis and metastasis. Cannabinoids appear to kill tumor cells but do not affect their nontransformed counterparts and may even protect them from cell death.”


…The potential benefits of medicinal cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.”

It’s a stunning acknowledgment, given that the NIH is a branch of the very same government that presently maintains that the cannabis plant and all of its naturally-derived components have ‘no accepted medical use.’ Yet it also begs the question: Where has the National Institute of Cancer been all these years?

After all, the anti-tumor activity of cannabinoids were initially documented in 1975! That’s right; it’s taken 36 years for the Institute to get with the program.

SOURCE LINK

Then we get this horrible News...

Federal prosecutors have launched a crackdown on some pot dispensaries in California, warning the stores that they must shut down in 45 days or face criminal charges and confiscation of their property even if they are operating legally under the state's 15-year-old medical marijuana law.


In an escalation of the ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and the nation's burgeoning medical marijuana industry, at least 16 pot shops or their landlords received letters this week stating they are violating federal drug laws, even though medical marijuana is legal in California. The state's four U.S. attorneys were scheduled Friday to announce a broader coordinated crackdown.


Their offices refused Thursday to confirm the closure orders. The Associated Press obtained copies of the letters that a prosecutor sent to at least 12 San Diego dispensaries. They state that federal law "takes precedence over state law and applies regardless of the particular uses for which a dispensary is selling and distributing marijuana."


The move comes a little more than two months after the Obama administration toughened its stand on medical marijuana. For two years before that, federal officials had indicated they would not move aggressively against dispensaries in compliance with laws in the 16 states where pot is legal for people with doctors' recommendations.

SOURCE LINK

SIGN PETITION HERE

Dirty M*therF*ckers!

The Occupy Wall Street movement spread to Chicago this week, where protesters have gathered outside the Chicago Board of Trade, the world’s oldest options and futures trading center. Like the protesters in New York and other cities around the country, the group gathered to protest our nation’s growing income inequality, as the top 1 percent of Americans continue to see their incomes rise rapidly and their tax rates fall. The Chicago traders, confronted by the protesters’ “We are the 99 percent” message, crafted their own not-so-subtle reply, hanging signs in eighth-floor windows that said, “We are the 1%“:

SOURCE LINK

The Good Old Days...

This is what the Republicans are talking about when they want to roll back regulations, wages, unions, etc etc. They call it "The Good Old Days"

FROM WIKIPEDIA

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914.


The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. The massacre resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 25 people; sources vary but all sources include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent.


Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, lasting from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company (CF&I), the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), and the Victor-American Fuel Company (VAF).

'Off-Shore' Tax Havens? THINK AGAIN! Try Wall Street

The report, called the Financial Secrecy Index, assesses 73 jurisdictions that, allow for billions of foreign dollars to be kept in offshore accounts and untaxed. About $250 billion in tax revenue is lost by governments worldwide due to offshore accounts each year, according the Tax Justice Network.


The U.S. is the fifth best tax haven according to the report and government officials may be making some headway in breaking down Switzerland's secrecy laws. In September, the U.S. government obtained the account information of American clients at 10 major Swiss banks.

READ MORE/SEE SLIDE SHOW HERE

What the Frack?

Back in 2005, Congress exempted hydraulic fracturing from federal regulation via specific language tucked into the Energy Policy Act, a measure that then-Vice President Dick Cheney personally pushed through the legislative process.

See there is no regulation of this industry, Its a loophole situation that absolves companies from obeying any rules whatsoever set out by the EPA. They are completely exempt from having to do anything safely at all!

A recent study by researchers at Duke University found that the groundwater in the areas near active fracking wells contained, on average, methane concentrations 17 times higher than wells located where fracking was not taking place. Moreover, some of these wells had methane concentrations well above the “immedate action” hazard level as defined by the U.S. Department of the Interior.


And that’s not counting the environmental damage done by leaks, explosions or other incidents that result in massive spills of toxic fracking fluids, like the one that occurred in Pennsylvania last month at a well owned and operated by Chesapeake Energy.


The evidence is clear, despite what the natural gas industry and its apologists would have us believe: if you can set your tapwater on fire, there’s a problem. Fracking has enormous environmental consequences and it should have been heavily regulated — if not banned outright — from the outset.

SOURCE HERE

In 2005, the Bush/ Cheney Energy Bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act. It exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing. Essentially, the provision took the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) off the job. It is now commonly referred to as the Halliburton Loophole.

TO FIND OUT MORE AND TAKE ACTION CLICK HERE

The attack on Women, Unions, Pell Grants, Green Energy, and Public Radio. Again.

So this is the current Big Plan from the Right aka Cheap Labor Regressives...

The bill stipulates that no more federal money could be spent on the government’s main family planning program, Title X of the Public Health Service Act, established more than 40 years ago. The program provides services to more than five million people a year at more than 4,500 clinics.


On education, the House bill would maintain the maximum Pell grant at $5,550 but restrict eligibility, barring grants to students who attend college less than half time.


Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents 1,600 colleges and universities, estimated that the bill would eliminate Pell grants for a million students, or roughly 10 percent of those now eligible, while reducing the cost of the program by $3.5 billion, also 10 percent.


Since many states have increased tuition at public colleges, Mr. Hartle said, the bill would mean that “low- and middle-income families will face higher college costs with less student aid.”


With the bill, House Republicans try again, for the third time this year, to cut off federal money for NPR, the public radio network.

The House bill would also block numerous rules intended to protect workers. For example, the National Labor Relations Board could not use any money to enforce a new requirement that employers notify workers of their rights to form and join unions.


The House bill would also eliminate money for a Labor Department program that trains workers for “green jobs” in energy-efficient industries. It would virtually shut down a Labor Department office that helps communities hurt by the downturn in the auto industry.

Read More Here

Koch Brothers' Business Dealings with Iran

Controversial Republican billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch -- who have spent untold millions bankrolling right-wing candidates and causes -- are now the subject of a new Bloomberg investigation that shows Koch Industries profited from business with Iran.


This is all despite American trade sanctions against Iran and the country’s known links to financing terrorists. House Republican Leadership’s response: Silence.


This is unacceptable. We can’t let this stand.


Sign our petition right now calling for Speaker Boehner and House Republicans to immediately demand an investigation of Koch Industries’ business dealings with Iran.

http://www.dccc.org/pages/kochbrothers

110 Million Gallon Oil Spill hit the United States!

Not surprisingly, this “self-regulation” works about as well as fox oversight of the poultry industry. For instance, in Michigan a 35-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River “once teeming with swimmers and boaters, remains closed nearly 14 months after an Enbridge Energy pipeline hemorrhaged 843,000 gallons of oil that will cost more than $500 million to clean up.”

And, “this summer, an Exxon Mobil pipeline carrying oil across Montana burst suddenly, soiling the swollen Yellowstone River with an estimated 42,000 gallons of crude just weeks after a company inspection and federal review had found nothing seriously wrong.”

SOURCE LINK

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