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POPSCountry First? Really? "Will the disgraceful and desperate attacks hurt Obama? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing is clear: they will hurt our country."
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POPSOver 70 Percent Of CEOs Fear An Obama Presidency Will Be A Disaster “Overall, many CEOs are concerned about the future of the U.S. economy and its ability to compete in the global market, but they look to John McCain and hope that this self-described political maverick may yet shake up established thinking and not give into to the tired policies of the past,” concluded Kopko
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POPSPlanting Seeds of Disaster
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” ACORN’s Inside Strategy Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy. Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” ,Saul Alinsky.
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POPSFannie/Freddie Trouble Seen 9 Yrs Ago
In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates -- anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans. ''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.'' Demographic information on these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black
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POPSIn Search of Wisdom: What is the Root Cause of Inequality? When there is nothing quantifiable to possess, we would neither know what the share of each individual is nor think of equality; if there was no notion of equality, we would not care that some have more than the others. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is always something to be possessed and our mind is naturally keen on the subject of equality
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POPSGOP Strategists See Big Nov. Losses "If you turn the clock back two or two and half weeks, you could make a plausible argument that if a couple of things go our way we will lose three to four Senate races," an unnamed strategist told WaPo . "Now we will lose six to eight." Polling in most Senate races over the past 14 days has shown a five-point decline for the Republican candidate, the strategist said. The piece continues: The picture in the House is similar. The generic ballot test -- a traditional measure of broad voter attitudes -- has also moved decisively in Democrats' direction in recent days. The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal and Associated Press polls showed voters favoring a generic Democratic candidate for Congress over a generic Republican by 13 points, while a recent Time magazine poll gave Democrats a 46 percent to 36 percent edge. It's looking more and more like 2006 all over again.
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POPSWireless at Fiber Speeds Richard Ridgway, a senior researcher at Battelle, says that the technique could be used to send huge files across college campuses, to quickly set up emergency networks in a disaster, and even to stream uncompressed high-definition video from a computer or set-top box to a display.
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POPSThe Spies who love Obama
The world is a very complicated place and there are not always easy solutions to a lot of the problems out there," says John Brennan, a top Obama intelligence advisor and former senior CIA official who co-founded the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the National Counterterrorism Center, a post-9/11 effort to integrate the US government's terror threat intelligence. "If you look at the world in black and white, you miss a lot of the subtleties out there. 'Either with us or against'—the world is not divided into good and evil a lot of time. Despite America's military might, a lot of these problems do not lend themselves to kinetic solutions"—i.e. the use of force. And world dynamics are likely to get more complicated and nuanced, not less, by 2025. "It's time to update our national security strategy to stay one step ahead of the terrorists," Obama said at Indiana's Purdue University. "It's time to look ahead—at the dangers of today and tomorrow rather than those of yesterday.
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POPSWhy CIA Veterans are Scared of McCain McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials "who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency," the former senior intelligence officer said. "They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear."
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POPSMartial Law Would Be Declared If Bailout Not Passed In House
As former California congressman Dan Hamburg said earlier this year, the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act gives the executive the power to invoke martial law in case of “major public emergencies,” not limited to “a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack,” but also “any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order.” Obviously, a financial crash and ensuing social chaos of the sort now being implemented by the ruling elite would be characterized as a dire emergency and a near perfect excuse to impose martial law, a long standing goal of the elite. As the Army Times reported last month, a battle-hardened “homeland” brigade is now “going domestic” after spending time in Iraq. It appears this illegal deployment (under Posse Comitatus) is designed to respond to “public disorder” as the economy is deliberately and cynically dismantled at the behest of our rulers.
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POPS'Historic' 'bailout' passes Congress This has got Nothing whatsoever to do with People (Who?) This is to bail ou the banking industry and corporate holdings. - give them the cash, and when the Economy hits rock bottom the idea is to buy out things of value, real assets for pennies. There is an Australian Movie 'The Castle' that puts into context "They're Dreamin' " Are we going to sell what we own Like they've sold the U.S. to Europe.? That's up to You
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POPSclimate change and poverty A tool for understanding the impacts of climate change on low-income and minority communities. How do you preach the importance of preventive measures to increasingly drastic change in weather patterns, that results in action, when you are working with people who are dealing with constant crisis not clearly linked with the environment?
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POPSNaomi Klein The homepage of Naomi Klein, author No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. The Shock Doctrine is a must read.
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POPSFannie Mae/Freddie Mac Warnings - 2004 Very clear who wanted to do what and who was blind. How people like B. Frank can look in the mirror is difficult to see when you listen to what he said then and yesterday.
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POPS After Bailout, Economy Will Still Be Lousy You'll simply be spared some sort of wipe out. Meanwhile, the economy is likely to continue its down drift, with all the hallmarks of a recession. If strained consumers expecting some kind of immediate relief grow cynical when it doesn't arrive, it could even deepen a downturn as consumer confidence quakes once again. So, do the economy a favor, and curtail your expectations. Here's what the bailout will and won't do, in the areas that matter most to consumers: Housing. Homeowners at risk of foreclosure won't enjoy much of a bailout at all. The plan calls for the government to "encourage" banks to help out borrowers who are in arrears by writing off some of the loan amount or negotiating more agreeable terms. But voluntary programs to help stressed homeowners have been marginally effective at best. The ultimate financial fix would be a fast-forward button that rushed us to the end of the housing bust, which underlies the entire meltdown. But that's beyond the government
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POPSThe 55 trillion dollar question Will credit default swaps be the next disaster? When you put $10 on black 22, you're pretty sure the casino will pay off if you win. The CDS market offers no such assurance. One reason the market grew so quickly was that hedge funds poured in, sensing easy money. And not just big, well-established hedge funds but a lot of upstarts. So in some cases, giant financial institutions were counting on collecting money from institutions only slightly more solvent than your average minimart. The danger, of course, is that if a hedge fund suddenly has to pay off on a lot of CDS, it will simply go out of business.
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POPSAnyone Remember the Cost of The Wars? Estimates of the true long-term costs of the President's war of choice, including payments of health care and veterans benefits into the distant future, soar into the budgetary stratosphere. They range from the Congressional Budget Office's $1-2 trillion to an estimate by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes of up to $4-5 trillion. So we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq. As Chalmers Johnson, author most recently of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, has pointed out for years, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and America's wars are in the process of bankrupting us.
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POPSSubstantive Presidential Debates Are Hard to Find
Overall, 32% of the questions asked in debates were non-substantive; Only 9% of the questions concerned the economy. The debates hosted by PBS and Univision were the most substantive, with 100% and 82% substantive questions respectively. Fox and ABC hosted the least substantive debates; fewer than half the questions were substantive. The front-running candidates in both parties were more likely to be asked questions focused on trivia, while the candidates trailing badly in the polls were more likely to be asked substantive questions. For example, 73 percent of the questions posed to Dennis Kucinich were substantive, while only 51 percent of the questions given to Barack Obama were substantive, and only 59 percent of the questions for John McCain were substantive. Of those who moderated more than one debate, Salinas and Ramos of Univision asked the most substantive questions (88% and 73%, respectively). Chris Wallace of Fox (33%) asked the fewest substantive questions.
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