Sunday, August 29, 2010
Gateway Arch showing rust and decay
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_75095ba4-2d7d-5811-b4f9-a7ce769ddb0d.html
Gateway Arch showing rust and decay
NICHOLAS J.C. PISTOR
npistor@post-dispatch.com
314-340-8265
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, August 22, 2010
As civic leaders reveled in last week's unveiling of grand plans to remake the Gateway Arch grounds, there was an ominous element not discussed.
Almost 45 years into its reign atop the St. Louis skyline, the 630-foot monument is suffering from growing rust and decay. And nobody knows how extensive.
Corrosion, some of it feared aggressive, and severe discoloration of the stainless steel skin have long been present, according to engineering reports reviewed by the Post-Dispatch.
The documents and interviews with metallurgists indicate that the remedy could be as minor as an "expensive" surface cleaning or as elaborate as a full-blown restoration. One report, completed in 2006, called for a deeper study, for which the National Park Service says it only recently obtained funding.
"This is not yet a health and safety issue," said Frank Mares, the deputy superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which oversees the Gateway Arch. "(The report) says learn more about what's going on. It's something that requires further study."
The problems are increasingly evident, with streaks and spots marking the upper reaches of the Arch exterior.
None of the documents reviewed addressed concerns about safety in relation to corrosion, or made estimates of what remedies might cost. One speculated it could take a "long time" before corrosion would "induce any integrity concern."
Officials said the structural issues were separate from — and would not compete for funding with — plans revealed Tuesday to rebuild the Arch site in time for its 50th anniversary celebration in 2015.
"It's apples and oranges," Mares said, suggesting he is confident there will be money to do what is necessary.
The 2006 report identified corroding bolt heads and staircases, a leaky interior sometimes shrouded with its own fog, rusting of interior carbon steel and a mysterious staining of the glimmering surface.
"The exterior skin has definitely degenerated since first constructed," it said. "However it is not possible to accurately determine the rate of visual distress."
The deeper examination will analyze and test corrosion samples, to recommend steps for long-term preservation.
No repairs or changes have been made since the 2006 report, Mares said, with the follow-up study delayed for lack of funds. He said the first report cost about $150,000, and the second is expected to cost about $437,000.
A Post-Dispatch reporter was allowed to review the corrosion report for about 40 minutes earlier this month. But officials refused to make it available for a second look the next day, citing national security concerns and saying it should not have been provided the first time.
A formal Freedom of Information Act request for the material is pending, but did produce some other documents.
The first phase of the corrosion study was conducted by two architectural and engineering firms, Bahr Vermeer Haecker, of Nebraska, and Wiss, Janney, Elstner, of Illinois. Both declined to comment for this story.
Their report pinpointed several potential corrosion problems, with the culprit perhaps being water leakage. The report raised the question of whether the carbon steel interior skeleton is rusting through failed welds and onto the stainless steel outer surface.
"As the structure is subject to dynamic stress cycles, there is a possibility that welds have failed locally, generating points of water leakage into the interstitial space," the report says. "Corrosion products of carbon steel may then have stained the stainless steel surface."
Topped out in 1965, the Arch is made up of triangular sections — a carbon steel interior and stainless steel exterior — stacked and welded one atop the next. Concrete reinforces the lower half of each leg.
"It is possible that corrosion at welds or at contaminated areas is taking place aggressively," one report said.
The investigation noted a repainted area inside the south leg. "Failure of the original paint layer in this area may have been due to rusting of the steel," the report said.
It suggested taking core samples of the metal for testing, but warned that, "Removal of stainless steel from the Arch will be controversial and will require planning and much discussion."
Water intrusion has long been an issue. "Condensation in the legs has been there since day one," Mares said.
In fact, a recently filed "cultural landscape report" said: "A cursory inspection of the Gateway Arch legs and foundation construction joints in 1984 revealed defects, and possible water intrusion between the outer and inner skins. Marks on the exterior stainless steel skin are visible at about 350 feet above the ground."
Arch officials say they have set up a makeshift system of tubes and containers to try to collect water.
A year after the corrosion report was written, a steel cable for the tram system snapped inside the Arch, causing a two-hour power outage and a nighttime evacuation of visitors. Nobody was hurt. An investigation by Maida Engineering, based in Pennsylvania, blamed the quality of maintenance performed by the Park Service and outside contractors. The tram system had not been specifically mentioned in the corrosion report.
R. Craig Jerner, an expert metallurgist based in Dallas who grew up in St. Louis, said the presence of water in the structure was an obvious problem. He said that he had visited the Arch within the past five or 10 years, and that "I seem to remember seeing water streaks on steel members. My thought at the time was, 'That's a problem in the making.'"
Added Jerner, who spoke with the warning that he had not seen the reports, "The problems described are indeed serious, and it may well be expensive to fix many of the problems, if those problems do exist."
Reacting to a report passage noting "corrosion at bolt heads/fasteners in wall," Jerner said in an e-mail: "More importantly, it is possible that rust could have formed under bolt/fastener heads? If the bolt/fastener is not removed and thoroughly cleaned (or even better replaced) the repainting will merely cover the rusty bolt 'underside.' The corrosion will continue and soon the bolted connection may not be a connection at all."
The report recommended that the Arch skin be cleaned within the next 10 years.
"The initial cleaning will be expensive due primarily to access requirements, but a reusable means of access should be designed as part of the cleaning procedure," according to a 2010 Historic Structure Report.
Again, cost estimates were not mentioned.
The Arch hasn't had a full scale cleaning since the "creeper" derricks that carried materials up each leg were removed shortly after construction was completed in 1965, Park Service officials said.
Some of the construction equipment may have left "grease spots" on the Arch surface that have collected dirt over time, the documents state.
Tom Bradley, the Arch superintendent, said there were no immediate plans to clean the surface. "You don't want to do more damage through the cleaning," Bradley said.
Lower reaches have been cleaned to remove graffiti, which one report said "is changing the finished surface of the panels near the base of the leg."
Some of the nation's most significant monuments have undergone restorations within the last 30 years.
The Washington Monument was surrounded with scaffolding in 1999 when it underwent a $9.4 million renovation. Corrosion problems at the Statue of Liberty led to a $65 million, privately financed rehab.
Tracy Campbell, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, is working on a book about the Arch, which he said, "represents wealth and power in the middle 20th century, right after World War II.
"Like all buildings, it's aging," Campbell said. "What makes the Arch so striking is its sculpture and appearance. As it ages and deteriorates, the question becomes, 'How much do you want to spend to preserve it in its original state?'"
Gateway Arch showing rust and decay
NICHOLAS J.C. PISTOR
npistor@post-dispatch.com
314-340-8265
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday, August 22, 2010
As civic leaders reveled in last week's unveiling of grand plans to remake the Gateway Arch grounds, there was an ominous element not discussed.
Almost 45 years into its reign atop the St. Louis skyline, the 630-foot monument is suffering from growing rust and decay. And nobody knows how extensive.
Corrosion, some of it feared aggressive, and severe discoloration of the stainless steel skin have long been present, according to engineering reports reviewed by the Post-Dispatch.
The documents and interviews with metallurgists indicate that the remedy could be as minor as an "expensive" surface cleaning or as elaborate as a full-blown restoration. One report, completed in 2006, called for a deeper study, for which the National Park Service says it only recently obtained funding.
"This is not yet a health and safety issue," said Frank Mares, the deputy superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which oversees the Gateway Arch. "(The report) says learn more about what's going on. It's something that requires further study."
The problems are increasingly evident, with streaks and spots marking the upper reaches of the Arch exterior.
None of the documents reviewed addressed concerns about safety in relation to corrosion, or made estimates of what remedies might cost. One speculated it could take a "long time" before corrosion would "induce any integrity concern."
Officials said the structural issues were separate from — and would not compete for funding with — plans revealed Tuesday to rebuild the Arch site in time for its 50th anniversary celebration in 2015.
"It's apples and oranges," Mares said, suggesting he is confident there will be money to do what is necessary.
The 2006 report identified corroding bolt heads and staircases, a leaky interior sometimes shrouded with its own fog, rusting of interior carbon steel and a mysterious staining of the glimmering surface.
"The exterior skin has definitely degenerated since first constructed," it said. "However it is not possible to accurately determine the rate of visual distress."
The deeper examination will analyze and test corrosion samples, to recommend steps for long-term preservation.
No repairs or changes have been made since the 2006 report, Mares said, with the follow-up study delayed for lack of funds. He said the first report cost about $150,000, and the second is expected to cost about $437,000.
A Post-Dispatch reporter was allowed to review the corrosion report for about 40 minutes earlier this month. But officials refused to make it available for a second look the next day, citing national security concerns and saying it should not have been provided the first time.
A formal Freedom of Information Act request for the material is pending, but did produce some other documents.
The first phase of the corrosion study was conducted by two architectural and engineering firms, Bahr Vermeer Haecker, of Nebraska, and Wiss, Janney, Elstner, of Illinois. Both declined to comment for this story.
Their report pinpointed several potential corrosion problems, with the culprit perhaps being water leakage. The report raised the question of whether the carbon steel interior skeleton is rusting through failed welds and onto the stainless steel outer surface.
"As the structure is subject to dynamic stress cycles, there is a possibility that welds have failed locally, generating points of water leakage into the interstitial space," the report says. "Corrosion products of carbon steel may then have stained the stainless steel surface."
Topped out in 1965, the Arch is made up of triangular sections — a carbon steel interior and stainless steel exterior — stacked and welded one atop the next. Concrete reinforces the lower half of each leg.
"It is possible that corrosion at welds or at contaminated areas is taking place aggressively," one report said.
The investigation noted a repainted area inside the south leg. "Failure of the original paint layer in this area may have been due to rusting of the steel," the report said.
It suggested taking core samples of the metal for testing, but warned that, "Removal of stainless steel from the Arch will be controversial and will require planning and much discussion."
Water intrusion has long been an issue. "Condensation in the legs has been there since day one," Mares said.
In fact, a recently filed "cultural landscape report" said: "A cursory inspection of the Gateway Arch legs and foundation construction joints in 1984 revealed defects, and possible water intrusion between the outer and inner skins. Marks on the exterior stainless steel skin are visible at about 350 feet above the ground."
Arch officials say they have set up a makeshift system of tubes and containers to try to collect water.
A year after the corrosion report was written, a steel cable for the tram system snapped inside the Arch, causing a two-hour power outage and a nighttime evacuation of visitors. Nobody was hurt. An investigation by Maida Engineering, based in Pennsylvania, blamed the quality of maintenance performed by the Park Service and outside contractors. The tram system had not been specifically mentioned in the corrosion report.
R. Craig Jerner, an expert metallurgist based in Dallas who grew up in St. Louis, said the presence of water in the structure was an obvious problem. He said that he had visited the Arch within the past five or 10 years, and that "I seem to remember seeing water streaks on steel members. My thought at the time was, 'That's a problem in the making.'"
Added Jerner, who spoke with the warning that he had not seen the reports, "The problems described are indeed serious, and it may well be expensive to fix many of the problems, if those problems do exist."
Reacting to a report passage noting "corrosion at bolt heads/fasteners in wall," Jerner said in an e-mail: "More importantly, it is possible that rust could have formed under bolt/fastener heads? If the bolt/fastener is not removed and thoroughly cleaned (or even better replaced) the repainting will merely cover the rusty bolt 'underside.' The corrosion will continue and soon the bolted connection may not be a connection at all."
The report recommended that the Arch skin be cleaned within the next 10 years.
"The initial cleaning will be expensive due primarily to access requirements, but a reusable means of access should be designed as part of the cleaning procedure," according to a 2010 Historic Structure Report.
Again, cost estimates were not mentioned.
The Arch hasn't had a full scale cleaning since the "creeper" derricks that carried materials up each leg were removed shortly after construction was completed in 1965, Park Service officials said.
Some of the construction equipment may have left "grease spots" on the Arch surface that have collected dirt over time, the documents state.
Tom Bradley, the Arch superintendent, said there were no immediate plans to clean the surface. "You don't want to do more damage through the cleaning," Bradley said.
Lower reaches have been cleaned to remove graffiti, which one report said "is changing the finished surface of the panels near the base of the leg."
Some of the nation's most significant monuments have undergone restorations within the last 30 years.
The Washington Monument was surrounded with scaffolding in 1999 when it underwent a $9.4 million renovation. Corrosion problems at the Statue of Liberty led to a $65 million, privately financed rehab.
Tracy Campbell, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, is working on a book about the Arch, which he said, "represents wealth and power in the middle 20th century, right after World War II.
"Like all buildings, it's aging," Campbell said. "What makes the Arch so striking is its sculpture and appearance. As it ages and deteriorates, the question becomes, 'How much do you want to spend to preserve it in its original state?'"
Philly requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/philly-requiring-bloggers-to-pay-300-for-a-business-license-101264664.html
Philly requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license
Mark Hemingway
08/22/10
It looks like cash hungry local governments are getting awfully rapacious these days:
Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.
It would be one thing if Bess’ website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn’t outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can’t very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.
When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city’s now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, “I was told to hire an accountant.”
She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.
Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.
To say that these kinds of draconian measures are detrimental to the public discourse would be an understatement.
Philly requiring bloggers to pay $300 for a business license
Mark Hemingway
08/22/10
It looks like cash hungry local governments are getting awfully rapacious these days:
Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.
It would be one thing if Bess’ website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn’t outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can’t very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.
When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city’s now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, “I was told to hire an accountant.”
She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.
Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.
To say that these kinds of draconian measures are detrimental to the public discourse would be an understatement.
Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100818/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_castro_bildenberg
Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club
WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 18, 2010
HAVANA – Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.
Estulin's work, "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a "fantastic story."
Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."
The Bilderberg group's website says its members have "nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern" once a year, but the group does nothing else.
It said the meetings were meant to encourage people to work together on major policy issues.
The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives.
The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to "control the masses" by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.
"The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself," the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.
"In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population," the excerpt said.
Castro — who had an inside seat to the Cold War — has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.
Estulin's own website suggests that the 9/11 attacks were likely caused by small nuclear devices, and that the CIA and drug traffickers were behind the 1988 downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was blamed on Libya.
The Bilderberg conspiracy theory has been popular on both extremes of the ideological spectrum, even if they disagree on just what the group wants to do. Leftists accuse the group of promoting capitalist domination, while some right-wing websites argue that the Bilderberg club has imposed Barack Obama on the United States to advance socialism.
Some of Estulin's work builds on reports by Big Jim Tucker, a researcher on the Bilderberg Group who publishes on right-wing websites.
"It's great Hollywood material ... 15 people sitting in a room sitting in a room determining the fate of mankind," said Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank in New York.
"As someone who doesn't come out of the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy, I have a hard time believing it," London added.
A call to a Virginia number for the American Friends of Bilderberg rang unanswered Wednesday and the group's website lists no contact numbers.
Castro, who underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and stepped down as president in February 2008, has suddenly begun popping up everywhere recently, addressing Cuba's parliament on the threat of a nuclear war, meeting with island ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry, writing a book and even attending the dolphin show at the Havana aquarium.
Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club
WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 18, 2010
HAVANA – Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.
Estulin's work, "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a "fantastic story."
Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."
The Bilderberg group's website says its members have "nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern" once a year, but the group does nothing else.
It said the meetings were meant to encourage people to work together on major policy issues.
The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives.
The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to "control the masses" by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.
"The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself," the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.
"In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population," the excerpt said.
Castro — who had an inside seat to the Cold War — has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.
Estulin's own website suggests that the 9/11 attacks were likely caused by small nuclear devices, and that the CIA and drug traffickers were behind the 1988 downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was blamed on Libya.
The Bilderberg conspiracy theory has been popular on both extremes of the ideological spectrum, even if they disagree on just what the group wants to do. Leftists accuse the group of promoting capitalist domination, while some right-wing websites argue that the Bilderberg club has imposed Barack Obama on the United States to advance socialism.
Some of Estulin's work builds on reports by Big Jim Tucker, a researcher on the Bilderberg Group who publishes on right-wing websites.
"It's great Hollywood material ... 15 people sitting in a room sitting in a room determining the fate of mankind," said Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank in New York.
"As someone who doesn't come out of the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy, I have a hard time believing it," London added.
A call to a Virginia number for the American Friends of Bilderberg rang unanswered Wednesday and the group's website lists no contact numbers.
Castro, who underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and stepped down as president in February 2008, has suddenly begun popping up everywhere recently, addressing Cuba's parliament on the threat of a nuclear war, meeting with island ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry, writing a book and even attending the dolphin show at the Havana aquarium.
David McGowan on Rod Blagojevich
So after waging a no-holds-barred campaign to garner convictions against the Blagojevich brothers - first through the media and then in a federal courtroom - the government managed to get a conviction on just one of twenty-eight counts -- which just goes to show you that when you are being persecuted by criminals, it's probably not because you are guilty.
For more work from our man Dave:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
For more work from our man Dave:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
Clemens Shouldn't Have to Take the Fall
In struggle and sports
Dave Z
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/08/21/2010-08-21_opinion_roger_clemens_is_no_saint_but_baseball_owners_executives_need_to_be_held.html
Clemens Shouldn't Have to Take the Fall
by Dave Zirin
Roger Clemens is about as popular in baseball circles as jock itch. The man is such a pariah, he makes Barry Bonds look like Justin Bieber. Yet we should hold the cheers over the recent news that Clemens has been indicted on perjury charges for lying in front of Congress on questions related his much-denied steroid use.
However, the real question here is: Why Clemens was dragged in front of Congress in the first place? We can ask the same of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and all the players who have been put under the congressional hot lights. To put it bluntly, why have players, and not team owners, been given the third degree? Not one owner has ever been called to account for the steroid era in Major League Baseball. Not one person who has called an owner's box home has had to answer questions about steroid use.
This would be akin to investigating the oil rig workers after the Deepwater Horizon spill, but leaving BP bigwigs untouched. Yes, individual players may have made terrible personal decisions that sullied the game. But there's a systemic problem here, too. And the absence of corporate accountability around this issue is simply breathtaking.
In February 2005, Major League Commissioner Bud Selig — a former team owner himself — made the following statement about steroids: "I [had]never heard about it." That strains credulity to the breaking point. As sports writer D.K. Wilson has noted, "General managers know if a star player reported to spring training at 185 lbs. one season and 215 the next, and whether that newly added 30 pounds was fat or muscle, or a combination of both. As does the team owner — or at least one who's not asleep in the executive suite."
The issue of performance enhancing drugs had been discussed at Major League Baseball's winter ownership meetings as far back as 1988. Assuming he was awake at these meetings, Selig — then owner of the Milwaukee Brewers — would have heard the words of former Cleveland Indians trainer Brent Starr.
"Here's the thing that really bothers me," Starr said in 2007. "They sit there, meaning the commissioners office, Bud Selig and that group...They sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened were going to do something about it.' I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it. That was in 1988.'"
The roots of the current crisis lie not in the individual moral failings of players like Clemens, but from systemic greed at the highest levels of the sport. The juicing of the game began in earnest in 1994, when a players' strike mutated into an owners lockout that led to the cancellation of the World Series. The popularity of what was once "America's pastime" sank to a shameful low.
Then, the muscles started coming in — and the bucks along with them. The protracted pitching battles of old were replaced by games that were essentially home run derbies. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were, briefly, the heroes of the day. And so, helped by steroids, baseball came back into fashion as a new, juiced-up sport of A-Rod clones. Steroids were simply a quiet part of the marketing plan.
Therefore, despite your personal views on Roger Clemens, it must be acknowledged that the steroid era has been, to paraphrase a famous quote about the criminal justice system, like a magical fishing night that captures the minnows while the whales go free. Even when the minnows are as unpleasant as Clemens, this fundamental truth must be acknowledged.
Zirin is author of the new book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love." He is also, tragically, a Mets fan.
Dave Z
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/08/21/2010-08-21_opinion_roger_clemens_is_no_saint_but_baseball_owners_executives_need_to_be_held.html
Clemens Shouldn't Have to Take the Fall
by Dave Zirin
Roger Clemens is about as popular in baseball circles as jock itch. The man is such a pariah, he makes Barry Bonds look like Justin Bieber. Yet we should hold the cheers over the recent news that Clemens has been indicted on perjury charges for lying in front of Congress on questions related his much-denied steroid use.
However, the real question here is: Why Clemens was dragged in front of Congress in the first place? We can ask the same of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and all the players who have been put under the congressional hot lights. To put it bluntly, why have players, and not team owners, been given the third degree? Not one owner has ever been called to account for the steroid era in Major League Baseball. Not one person who has called an owner's box home has had to answer questions about steroid use.
This would be akin to investigating the oil rig workers after the Deepwater Horizon spill, but leaving BP bigwigs untouched. Yes, individual players may have made terrible personal decisions that sullied the game. But there's a systemic problem here, too. And the absence of corporate accountability around this issue is simply breathtaking.
In February 2005, Major League Commissioner Bud Selig — a former team owner himself — made the following statement about steroids: "I [had]never heard about it." That strains credulity to the breaking point. As sports writer D.K. Wilson has noted, "General managers know if a star player reported to spring training at 185 lbs. one season and 215 the next, and whether that newly added 30 pounds was fat or muscle, or a combination of both. As does the team owner — or at least one who's not asleep in the executive suite."
The issue of performance enhancing drugs had been discussed at Major League Baseball's winter ownership meetings as far back as 1988. Assuming he was awake at these meetings, Selig — then owner of the Milwaukee Brewers — would have heard the words of former Cleveland Indians trainer Brent Starr.
"Here's the thing that really bothers me," Starr said in 2007. "They sit there, meaning the commissioners office, Bud Selig and that group...They sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened were going to do something about it.' I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it. That was in 1988.'"
The roots of the current crisis lie not in the individual moral failings of players like Clemens, but from systemic greed at the highest levels of the sport. The juicing of the game began in earnest in 1994, when a players' strike mutated into an owners lockout that led to the cancellation of the World Series. The popularity of what was once "America's pastime" sank to a shameful low.
Then, the muscles started coming in — and the bucks along with them. The protracted pitching battles of old were replaced by games that were essentially home run derbies. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were, briefly, the heroes of the day. And so, helped by steroids, baseball came back into fashion as a new, juiced-up sport of A-Rod clones. Steroids were simply a quiet part of the marketing plan.
Therefore, despite your personal views on Roger Clemens, it must be acknowledged that the steroid era has been, to paraphrase a famous quote about the criminal justice system, like a magical fishing night that captures the minnows while the whales go free. Even when the minnows are as unpleasant as Clemens, this fundamental truth must be acknowledged.
Zirin is author of the new book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love." He is also, tragically, a Mets fan.
15 Things You Shouldn't Be Paying For
http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/110384/things-you-shouldnt-be-paying-for
15 Things You Shouldn't Be Paying For
by Phil Taylor
Thursday, August 19, 2010
So much money and energy is wasted on things we could get for free. If you're into new, shiny things and collecting stuff, this is not for you. But if you want less clutter in your life and want to keep more of your money, then check out these 15 things you shouldn't be paying for.
Basic Computer Software -- Thinking of purchasing a new computer? Think twice before you fork over the funds for a bunch of extra software. There are some great alternatives to the name brand software programs. The most notable is OpenOffice, the open-source alternative to those other guys. It's completely free and files can be exported in compatible formats.
Your Credit Report -- You don't have to pay for your credit report. You could sign up for one of the free credit monitoring services online to get a quick look at your credit report. You just have to remember to cancel the service before the end of the free trial. Or you could do one better and visit http://www.annualcreditreport.com/, the only truly free place to see all three of your credit reports for free once a year.
Cell Phone -- The service plan may be expensive, but the phone itself doesn't have to cost a thing. Most major carriers will give you a free phone, even a free smart phone, with a two-year contract.
Books -- There's a cool place in your town that's renting out books for free: the library. Remember that place? Stop by and put your favorite book on reserve. And if you don't feel like getting out, visit www.paperbackswap.com and find your books there (small shipping fees apply).
Water -- Besides the monthly utility bill, there's no reason to shell out $1 for every bottle of water you drink. Bottled water is so last decade anyway. We're over it, and into tap, filters, and reusable water bottles. It's cheaper for you and better for the environment.
Credit Card -- With as many credit cards as there are available on the market today, it's easy to avoid a credit card with an annual fee. Unless you're dead set on a particular perk that a fee card brings, skip the annual fee card and pocket that money yourself.
Debt Reduction Help -- Speaking of credit cards, if you're in over your head with credit card help, there are many free sources you can turn to for help with your debt. No one is going to be able to magically wipe away your debts, but there is help out there that will set you up on a debt reduction plan you can handle. Start with a visit to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
Basic Tax Preparation -- If your tax situation isn't that complicated, then you should probably be preparing your own tax return using one of the many free online services. It's now common for e-filing to be free as well with many services. You won't even need a stamp.
The News -- Leave it to a blogger to try and kill off traditional print. I'm not anti-newspaper. I just don't find them practical anymore. Skip the daily .50 cents and get your news online. And for you dedicated coupon clippers, you can get most of your Sunday coupons online now too.
Budgeting Tools -- There are many budgeting tools (both online and desktop) that offer up the service for free. Don't ask me how they do this, but who cares. If you're looking to reign in some of your spending, the good news is you can do it for free.
Pets -- This is a controversial one, I know. But there are likely many pets down at your local animal shelter that could use just as much love as the pure-bred types. There may be a small fee due to the shelter for shots and basic care, but you'll have your pet home without paying a mini-fortune.
Shipping -- If you like to buy online, you probably use coupons to get a percentage off of your purchase. Take your skills to the next level and look for coupons or promotion codes that offer free shipping. If in doubt, visit a site like www.freeshipping.org.
Checking Account -- Isn't it nice when a bank takes your money, lends it out to earn money, and then has the audacity to charge you for the service? What a joke. Checking should be free. If yours isn't free then move to one of the many banks that offers a checking account for free. And the same can be said for ATM fees, teller fees, and checks.
DVD Rentals -- Did you know that you can rent DVDs from RedBox locations for $1 a night? And better yet, if you use one of the coupon codes from www.insideredbox.com you can avoid the $1 charge. Free DVD rentals! Most libraries now have free DVD rental as well.
Exercise -- Skip the expensive gym memberships. Visit your local park for a walk or run. Do basic push-up and sit-up programs in your living room. Rent a workout DVD from the library. There are many free workout programs you can download online as well.
15 Things You Shouldn't Be Paying For
by Phil Taylor
Thursday, August 19, 2010
So much money and energy is wasted on things we could get for free. If you're into new, shiny things and collecting stuff, this is not for you. But if you want less clutter in your life and want to keep more of your money, then check out these 15 things you shouldn't be paying for.
Basic Computer Software -- Thinking of purchasing a new computer? Think twice before you fork over the funds for a bunch of extra software. There are some great alternatives to the name brand software programs. The most notable is OpenOffice, the open-source alternative to those other guys. It's completely free and files can be exported in compatible formats.
Your Credit Report -- You don't have to pay for your credit report. You could sign up for one of the free credit monitoring services online to get a quick look at your credit report. You just have to remember to cancel the service before the end of the free trial. Or you could do one better and visit http://www.annualcreditreport.com/, the only truly free place to see all three of your credit reports for free once a year.
Cell Phone -- The service plan may be expensive, but the phone itself doesn't have to cost a thing. Most major carriers will give you a free phone, even a free smart phone, with a two-year contract.
Books -- There's a cool place in your town that's renting out books for free: the library. Remember that place? Stop by and put your favorite book on reserve. And if you don't feel like getting out, visit www.paperbackswap.com and find your books there (small shipping fees apply).
Water -- Besides the monthly utility bill, there's no reason to shell out $1 for every bottle of water you drink. Bottled water is so last decade anyway. We're over it, and into tap, filters, and reusable water bottles. It's cheaper for you and better for the environment.
Credit Card -- With as many credit cards as there are available on the market today, it's easy to avoid a credit card with an annual fee. Unless you're dead set on a particular perk that a fee card brings, skip the annual fee card and pocket that money yourself.
Debt Reduction Help -- Speaking of credit cards, if you're in over your head with credit card help, there are many free sources you can turn to for help with your debt. No one is going to be able to magically wipe away your debts, but there is help out there that will set you up on a debt reduction plan you can handle. Start with a visit to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
Basic Tax Preparation -- If your tax situation isn't that complicated, then you should probably be preparing your own tax return using one of the many free online services. It's now common for e-filing to be free as well with many services. You won't even need a stamp.
The News -- Leave it to a blogger to try and kill off traditional print. I'm not anti-newspaper. I just don't find them practical anymore. Skip the daily .50 cents and get your news online. And for you dedicated coupon clippers, you can get most of your Sunday coupons online now too.
Budgeting Tools -- There are many budgeting tools (both online and desktop) that offer up the service for free. Don't ask me how they do this, but who cares. If you're looking to reign in some of your spending, the good news is you can do it for free.
Pets -- This is a controversial one, I know. But there are likely many pets down at your local animal shelter that could use just as much love as the pure-bred types. There may be a small fee due to the shelter for shots and basic care, but you'll have your pet home without paying a mini-fortune.
Shipping -- If you like to buy online, you probably use coupons to get a percentage off of your purchase. Take your skills to the next level and look for coupons or promotion codes that offer free shipping. If in doubt, visit a site like www.freeshipping.org.
Checking Account -- Isn't it nice when a bank takes your money, lends it out to earn money, and then has the audacity to charge you for the service? What a joke. Checking should be free. If yours isn't free then move to one of the many banks that offers a checking account for free. And the same can be said for ATM fees, teller fees, and checks.
DVD Rentals -- Did you know that you can rent DVDs from RedBox locations for $1 a night? And better yet, if you use one of the coupon codes from www.insideredbox.com you can avoid the $1 charge. Free DVD rentals! Most libraries now have free DVD rental as well.
Exercise -- Skip the expensive gym memberships. Visit your local park for a walk or run. Do basic push-up and sit-up programs in your living room. Rent a workout DVD from the library. There are many free workout programs you can download online as well.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Homeowners' Rebellion: Could 62 Million Homes Be Foreclosure-Proof?
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/18-8
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 by YES! Magazine
Homeowners' Rebellion: Could 62 Million Homes Be Foreclosure-Proof?
A committed movement to tear off the predatory mask called MERS could yet turn the tide for struggling homeowners.
by Ellen Brown
Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.
Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.MERS was convenient for the mortgage industry, but courts are now questioning the impact of all of this financial juggling when it comes to mortgage ownership. To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to establish the chain of title entitling it to relief. But MERS has acknowledged, and recent cases have held, that MERS is a mere "nominee"-an entity appointed by the true owner simply for the purpose of holding property in order to facilitate transactions. Recent court opinions stress that this defect is not just a procedural but is a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff's legal ability to foreclose.
That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear-while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.
California Precedent
The latest of these court decisions came down in California on May 20, 2010, in a bankruptcy case called In re Walker, Case no. 10-21656-E-11. The court held that MERS could not foreclose because it was a mere nominee; and that as a result, plaintiff Citibank could not collect on its claim. The judge opined:
Since no evidence of MERS' ownership of the underlying note has been offered, and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another. Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law.
In support, the judge cited In Re Vargas (California Bankruptcy Court); Landmark v. Kesler (Kansas Supreme Court); LaSalle Bank v. Lamy (a New York case); and In Re Foreclosure Cases (the "Boyko" decision from Ohio Federal Court). (For more on these earlier cases, see here, here and here.) The court concluded:
Since the claimant, Citibank, has not established that it is the owner of the promissory note secured by the trust deed, Citibank is unable to assert a claim for payment in this case.
The broad impact the case could have on California foreclosures is suggested by attorney Jeff Barnes, who writes:
This opinion . . . serves as a legal basis to challenge any foreclosure in California based on a MERS assignment; to seek to void any MERS assignment of the Deed of Trust or the note to a third party for purposes of foreclosure; and should be sufficient for a borrower to not only obtain a TRO [temporary restraining order] against a Trustee's Sale, but also a Preliminary Injunction barring any sale pending any litigation filed by the borrower challenging a foreclosure based on a MERS assignment.
While not binding on courts in other jurisdictions, the ruling could serve as persuasive precedent there as well, because the court cited non-bankruptcy cases related to the lack of authority of MERS, and because the opinion is consistent with prior rulings in Idaho and Nevada Bankruptcy courts on the same issue.
What Could This Mean for Homeowners?
Earlier cases focused on the inability of MERS to produce a promissory note or assignment establishing that it was entitled to relief, but most courts have considered this a mere procedural defect and continue to look the other way on MERS' technical lack of standing to sue. The more recent cases, however, are looking at something more serious. If MERS is not the title holder of properties held in its name, the chain of title has been broken, and no one may have standing to sue. In MERS v. Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance, MERS insisted that it had no actionable interest in title, and the court agreed.
An August 2010 article in Mother Jones titled "Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons" exposes a widespread practice of "foreclosure mills" in backdating assignments after foreclosures have been filed. Not only is this perjury, a prosecutable offense, but if MERS was never the title holder, there is nothing to assign. The defaulting homeowners could wind up with free and clear title.
In Jacksonville, Florida, legal aid attorney April Charney has been using the missing-note argument ever since she first identified that weakness in the lenders' case in 2004. Five years later, she says, some of the homeowners she's helped are still in their homes. According to a Huffington Post article titled "‘Produce the Note' Movement Helps Stall Foreclosures":
Because of the missing ownership documentation, Charney is now starting to file quiet title actions, hoping to get her homeowner clients full title to their homes (a quiet title action ‘quiets' all other claims). Charney says she's helped thousands of homeowners delay or prevent foreclosure, and trained thousands of lawyers across the country on how to protect homeowners and battle in court.
Criminal Charges?
Other suits go beyond merely challenging title to alleging criminal activity. On July 26, 2010, a class action was filed in Florida seeking relief against MERS and an associated legal firm for racketeering and mail fraud. It alleges that the defendants used "the artifice of MERS to sabotage the judicial process to the detriment of borrowers;" that "to perpetuate the scheme, MERS was and is used in a way so that the average consumer, or even legal professional, can never determine who or what was or is ultimately receiving the benefits of any mortgage payments;" that the scheme depended on "the MERS artifice and the ability to generate any necessary ‘assignment' which flowed from it;" and that "by engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically ‘mail or wire fraud,' the Defendants . . . participated in a criminal enterprise affecting interstate commerce."
Local governments deprived of filing fees may also be getting into the act, at least through representatives suing on their behalf. Qui tam actions allow for a private party or "whistle blower" to bring suit on behalf of the government for a past or present fraud on it. In State of California ex rel. Barrett R. Bates, filed May 10, 2010, the plaintiff qui tam sued on behalf of a long list of local governments in California against MERS and a number of lenders, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for "wrongfully bypass[ing] the counties' recording requirements; divest[ing] the borrowers of the right to know who owned the promissory note . . .; and record[ing] false documents to initiate and pursue non-judicial foreclosures, and to otherwise decrease or avoid payment of fees to the Counties and the Cities where the real estate is located." The complaint notes that "MERS claims to have ‘saved' at least $2.4 billion dollars in recording costs," meaning it has helped avoid billions of dollars in fees otherwise accruing to local governments. The plaintiff sues for treble damages for all recording fees not paid during the past ten years, and for civil penalties of between $5,000 and $10,000 for each unpaid or underpaid recording fee and each false document recorded during that period, potentially a hefty sum. Similar suits have been filed by the same plaintiff qui tam in Nevada and Tennessee.
By Their Own Sword: MERS' Role in the Financial Crisis
MERS is, according to its website, "an innovative process that simplifies the way mortgage ownership and servicing rights are originated, sold and tracked. Created by the real estate finance industry, MERS eliminates the need to prepare and record assignments when trading residential and commercial mortgage loans." Or as Karl Denninger puts it, "MERS' own website claims that it exists for the purpose of circumventing assignments and documenting ownership!"
MERS was developed in the early 1990s by a number of financial entities, including Bank of America, Countrywide, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, allegedly to allow consumers to pay less for mortgage loans. That did not actually happen, but what MERS did allow was the securitization and shuffling around of mortgages behind a veil of anonymity. The result was not only to cheat local governments out of their recording fees but to defeat the purpose of the recording laws, which was to guarantee purchasers clean title. Worse, MERS facilitated an explosion of predatory lending in which lenders could not be held to account because they could not be identified, either by the preyed-upon borrowers or by the investors seduced into buying bundles of worthless mortgages. As alleged in a Nevada class action called Lopez vs. Executive Trustee Services, et al.:
Before MERS, it would not have been possible for mortgages with no market value . . . to be sold at a profit or collateralized and sold as mortgage-backed securities. Before MERS, it would not have been possible for the Defendant banks and AIG to conceal from government regulators the extent of risk of financial losses those entities faced from the predatory origination of residential loans and the fraudulent re-sale and securitization of those otherwise non-marketable loans. Before MERS, the actual beneficiary of every Deed of Trust on every parcel in the United States and the State of Nevada could be readily ascertained by merely reviewing the public records at the local recorder's office where documents reflecting any ownership interest in real property are kept....
After MERS, . . . the servicing rights were transferred after the origination of the loan to an entity so large that communication with the servicer became difficult if not impossible .... The servicer was interested in only one thing - making a profit from the foreclosure of the borrower's residence - so that the entire predatory cycle of fraudulent origination, resale, and securitization of yet another predatory loan could occur again. This is the legacy of MERS, and the entire scheme was predicated upon the fraudulent designation of MERS as the ‘beneficiary' under millions of deeds of trust in Nevada and other states.
Axing the Bankers' Money Tree
If courts overwhelmed with foreclosures decide to take up the cause, the result could be millions of struggling homeowners with the banks off their backs, and millions of homes no longer on the books of some too-big-to-fail banks. Without those assets, the banks could again be looking at bankruptcy. As was pointed out in a San Francisco Chronicle article by attorney Sean Olender following the October 2007 Boyko [pdf] decision:
The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.
. . . The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail . . . .
Nationalization of these giant banks might be the next logical step-a step that some commentators said should have been taken in the first place. When the banking system of Sweden collapsed following a housing bubble in the 1990s, nationalization of the banks worked out very well for that country.
The Swedish banks were largely privatized again when they got back on their feet, but it might be a good idea to keep some banks as publicly-owned entities, on the model of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. For most of the 20th century it served as a "people's bank," making low interest loans to consumers and businesses through branches all over the country.
With the strengthened position of Wall Street following the 2008 bailout and the tepid 2010 banking reform bill, the U.S. is far from nationalizing its mega-banks now. But a committed homeowner movement to tear off the predatory mask called MERS could yet turn the tide. While courts are not likely to let 62 million homeowners off scot free, the defect in title created by MERS could give them significant new leverage at the bargaining table.
Ellen Brown wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Ellen developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how the Federal Reserve and "the money trust" have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com, ellenbrown.com, and public-banking.com.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 by YES! Magazine
Homeowners' Rebellion: Could 62 Million Homes Be Foreclosure-Proof?
A committed movement to tear off the predatory mask called MERS could yet turn the tide for struggling homeowners.
by Ellen Brown
Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.
Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.MERS was convenient for the mortgage industry, but courts are now questioning the impact of all of this financial juggling when it comes to mortgage ownership. To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to establish the chain of title entitling it to relief. But MERS has acknowledged, and recent cases have held, that MERS is a mere "nominee"-an entity appointed by the true owner simply for the purpose of holding property in order to facilitate transactions. Recent court opinions stress that this defect is not just a procedural but is a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff's legal ability to foreclose.
That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear-while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.
California Precedent
The latest of these court decisions came down in California on May 20, 2010, in a bankruptcy case called In re Walker, Case no. 10-21656-E-11. The court held that MERS could not foreclose because it was a mere nominee; and that as a result, plaintiff Citibank could not collect on its claim. The judge opined:
Since no evidence of MERS' ownership of the underlying note has been offered, and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another. Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law.
In support, the judge cited In Re Vargas (California Bankruptcy Court); Landmark v. Kesler (Kansas Supreme Court); LaSalle Bank v. Lamy (a New York case); and In Re Foreclosure Cases (the "Boyko" decision from Ohio Federal Court). (For more on these earlier cases, see here, here and here.) The court concluded:
Since the claimant, Citibank, has not established that it is the owner of the promissory note secured by the trust deed, Citibank is unable to assert a claim for payment in this case.
The broad impact the case could have on California foreclosures is suggested by attorney Jeff Barnes, who writes:
This opinion . . . serves as a legal basis to challenge any foreclosure in California based on a MERS assignment; to seek to void any MERS assignment of the Deed of Trust or the note to a third party for purposes of foreclosure; and should be sufficient for a borrower to not only obtain a TRO [temporary restraining order] against a Trustee's Sale, but also a Preliminary Injunction barring any sale pending any litigation filed by the borrower challenging a foreclosure based on a MERS assignment.
While not binding on courts in other jurisdictions, the ruling could serve as persuasive precedent there as well, because the court cited non-bankruptcy cases related to the lack of authority of MERS, and because the opinion is consistent with prior rulings in Idaho and Nevada Bankruptcy courts on the same issue.
What Could This Mean for Homeowners?
Earlier cases focused on the inability of MERS to produce a promissory note or assignment establishing that it was entitled to relief, but most courts have considered this a mere procedural defect and continue to look the other way on MERS' technical lack of standing to sue. The more recent cases, however, are looking at something more serious. If MERS is not the title holder of properties held in its name, the chain of title has been broken, and no one may have standing to sue. In MERS v. Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance, MERS insisted that it had no actionable interest in title, and the court agreed.
An August 2010 article in Mother Jones titled "Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons" exposes a widespread practice of "foreclosure mills" in backdating assignments after foreclosures have been filed. Not only is this perjury, a prosecutable offense, but if MERS was never the title holder, there is nothing to assign. The defaulting homeowners could wind up with free and clear title.
In Jacksonville, Florida, legal aid attorney April Charney has been using the missing-note argument ever since she first identified that weakness in the lenders' case in 2004. Five years later, she says, some of the homeowners she's helped are still in their homes. According to a Huffington Post article titled "‘Produce the Note' Movement Helps Stall Foreclosures":
Because of the missing ownership documentation, Charney is now starting to file quiet title actions, hoping to get her homeowner clients full title to their homes (a quiet title action ‘quiets' all other claims). Charney says she's helped thousands of homeowners delay or prevent foreclosure, and trained thousands of lawyers across the country on how to protect homeowners and battle in court.
Criminal Charges?
Other suits go beyond merely challenging title to alleging criminal activity. On July 26, 2010, a class action was filed in Florida seeking relief against MERS and an associated legal firm for racketeering and mail fraud. It alleges that the defendants used "the artifice of MERS to sabotage the judicial process to the detriment of borrowers;" that "to perpetuate the scheme, MERS was and is used in a way so that the average consumer, or even legal professional, can never determine who or what was or is ultimately receiving the benefits of any mortgage payments;" that the scheme depended on "the MERS artifice and the ability to generate any necessary ‘assignment' which flowed from it;" and that "by engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically ‘mail or wire fraud,' the Defendants . . . participated in a criminal enterprise affecting interstate commerce."
Local governments deprived of filing fees may also be getting into the act, at least through representatives suing on their behalf. Qui tam actions allow for a private party or "whistle blower" to bring suit on behalf of the government for a past or present fraud on it. In State of California ex rel. Barrett R. Bates, filed May 10, 2010, the plaintiff qui tam sued on behalf of a long list of local governments in California against MERS and a number of lenders, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, for "wrongfully bypass[ing] the counties' recording requirements; divest[ing] the borrowers of the right to know who owned the promissory note . . .; and record[ing] false documents to initiate and pursue non-judicial foreclosures, and to otherwise decrease or avoid payment of fees to the Counties and the Cities where the real estate is located." The complaint notes that "MERS claims to have ‘saved' at least $2.4 billion dollars in recording costs," meaning it has helped avoid billions of dollars in fees otherwise accruing to local governments. The plaintiff sues for treble damages for all recording fees not paid during the past ten years, and for civil penalties of between $5,000 and $10,000 for each unpaid or underpaid recording fee and each false document recorded during that period, potentially a hefty sum. Similar suits have been filed by the same plaintiff qui tam in Nevada and Tennessee.
By Their Own Sword: MERS' Role in the Financial Crisis
MERS is, according to its website, "an innovative process that simplifies the way mortgage ownership and servicing rights are originated, sold and tracked. Created by the real estate finance industry, MERS eliminates the need to prepare and record assignments when trading residential and commercial mortgage loans." Or as Karl Denninger puts it, "MERS' own website claims that it exists for the purpose of circumventing assignments and documenting ownership!"
MERS was developed in the early 1990s by a number of financial entities, including Bank of America, Countrywide, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, allegedly to allow consumers to pay less for mortgage loans. That did not actually happen, but what MERS did allow was the securitization and shuffling around of mortgages behind a veil of anonymity. The result was not only to cheat local governments out of their recording fees but to defeat the purpose of the recording laws, which was to guarantee purchasers clean title. Worse, MERS facilitated an explosion of predatory lending in which lenders could not be held to account because they could not be identified, either by the preyed-upon borrowers or by the investors seduced into buying bundles of worthless mortgages. As alleged in a Nevada class action called Lopez vs. Executive Trustee Services, et al.:
Before MERS, it would not have been possible for mortgages with no market value . . . to be sold at a profit or collateralized and sold as mortgage-backed securities. Before MERS, it would not have been possible for the Defendant banks and AIG to conceal from government regulators the extent of risk of financial losses those entities faced from the predatory origination of residential loans and the fraudulent re-sale and securitization of those otherwise non-marketable loans. Before MERS, the actual beneficiary of every Deed of Trust on every parcel in the United States and the State of Nevada could be readily ascertained by merely reviewing the public records at the local recorder's office where documents reflecting any ownership interest in real property are kept....
After MERS, . . . the servicing rights were transferred after the origination of the loan to an entity so large that communication with the servicer became difficult if not impossible .... The servicer was interested in only one thing - making a profit from the foreclosure of the borrower's residence - so that the entire predatory cycle of fraudulent origination, resale, and securitization of yet another predatory loan could occur again. This is the legacy of MERS, and the entire scheme was predicated upon the fraudulent designation of MERS as the ‘beneficiary' under millions of deeds of trust in Nevada and other states.
Axing the Bankers' Money Tree
If courts overwhelmed with foreclosures decide to take up the cause, the result could be millions of struggling homeowners with the banks off their backs, and millions of homes no longer on the books of some too-big-to-fail banks. Without those assets, the banks could again be looking at bankruptcy. As was pointed out in a San Francisco Chronicle article by attorney Sean Olender following the October 2007 Boyko [pdf] decision:
The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.
. . . The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail . . . .
Nationalization of these giant banks might be the next logical step-a step that some commentators said should have been taken in the first place. When the banking system of Sweden collapsed following a housing bubble in the 1990s, nationalization of the banks worked out very well for that country.
The Swedish banks were largely privatized again when they got back on their feet, but it might be a good idea to keep some banks as publicly-owned entities, on the model of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. For most of the 20th century it served as a "people's bank," making low interest loans to consumers and businesses through branches all over the country.
With the strengthened position of Wall Street following the 2008 bailout and the tepid 2010 banking reform bill, the U.S. is far from nationalizing its mega-banks now. But a committed homeowner movement to tear off the predatory mask called MERS could yet turn the tide. While courts are not likely to let 62 million homeowners off scot free, the defect in title created by MERS could give them significant new leverage at the bargaining table.
Ellen Brown wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Ellen developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how the Federal Reserve and "the money trust" have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com, ellenbrown.com, and public-banking.com.
The Duke & The Dude
Thanks to Kenn Thomas of SteamshovelPress.com for the following...
Iconic John Wayne Role Redone
by Jonathan Crow
August 18, 2010
Yahoo News
In 1969, John Wayne played Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" -- a grizzled, drunken U.S. Marshal hired by a 14-year-old girl to track down her father's killer. The role ended up winning the aging Western star his first and only Oscar, prompting him to make a rare sequel -- "Rooster Cogburn" -- opposite Katherine Hepburn in 1975. The image of Wayne's craggy, eye-patched visage from "True Grit" has become a cinematic icon.
So film mavens everywhere were taken aback when it was announced last year that Joel and Ethan Coen would been making their own version of "True Grit." But don't expect a straight remake; this movie is based more closely on the Charles Portis novel. And Jeff Bridges, fresh off his Oscar win, was tapped to play Cogburn; that's right, the Duke has been replaced by the Dude.
The movie will also star another Coens alum, Josh Brolin, along with Barry Pepper and Matt Damon.
"I've never even seen the original John Wayne movie"
Matt Damon, who plays Glen Campbell's old role of LaBeouf in this new version, told Entertainment Weekly. Unlike the old flick, this LaBeouf reportedly doesn't sing. "Our movie is totally different."
This week, the first photo of the Coen Brothers' effort was released, hinting at other differences. The most obvious being is that Mattie Ross, who is a fourteen year-old girl in the book, is actually being played by a fourteen year-old girl -- newcomer Haile Steinfeld. In the original, Kim Darby was 21.
But what fans of the original are all wondering is how the Dude's Cogburn going to stack up next to the Duke's. The photo shows Bridges, looking ornery and weathered, sporting a beard and that famous eye patch. Wayne, a staunch Republican during the height of the '60s, was resolutely clean-shaven.
A quick comparison reveals that Wayne and Bridges sport their patches on opposite eyes. The Duke covered his left eye as a nod to his longtime collaborator John Ford, who lost vision in that eye when he removed bandages too soon after a cataract operation. No word on why Bridges decided to cover the other side.
When he was making his "True Grit," John Wayne was 61 years old. He was too unhealthy to perform his own stunts and, thanks to having an entire lung removed years prior, could barely walk more than 30 feet before heavy breathing. You might be forgiven, when looking at side-by-side photos, for assuming that Bridges is five or ten years younger that Wayne when he shot his version. In fact, Jeff Bridges turns 61 in December.
"True Grit" opens December 25, 2010.
Kool Ads
http://www.bowflexhomegyms.com/
Enjoy all the benefits of gym-style vertical workout position for serious workouts. All in space-saving designs that will fit into any budget.
Enjoy all the benefits of gym-style vertical workout position for serious workouts. All in space-saving designs that will fit into any budget.
YouTube Hair Metal Video of the Month
Warrant, "Cherry Pie"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjyZKfdwlng&feature=av2n
"One wonders if the girl is even necessary..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjyZKfdwlng&feature=av2n
"One wonders if the girl is even necessary..."
The “Ground Zero mosque”: Obama cowers before right-wing hysteria
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a18.shtml
The “Ground Zero mosque”: Obama cowers before right-wing hysteria
18 August 2010
Bill Van Auken
With the US mid-term elections less than three months away, the issue that has become the focus of this campaign season is a telling indicator of the intensely reactionary character of official politics in America and of both big business parties.
Employing unbridled hypocrisy and cynicism, right-wing forces centered in the Republican Party, but aided and abetted by leading Democrats, have attempted to whip up mob hysteria against a proposed Islamic cultural center that has been approved by local authorities for construction in lower Manhattan.
The center, the Cordoba House, is to include a swimming pool, a gym, an arts center and a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While its supporters have stressed its inter-faith character, it has been almost universally dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque.”
Semi-fascist elements have denounced the proposed center—to be built two and a half blocks from where New York City’s World Trade Center once stood—as a desecration of the “sacred ground” where over 2,700 people were killed on 9/11. Former House Speaker and likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 Newt Gingrich has compared the backers of the project to Nazis protesting outside the Holocaust museum.
The reality is that, nearly nine years after the attacks, the former World Trade Center largely remains a hole in the ground, a sprawling construction site in which little has been built. No memorial has been erected to those who died, as real estate developers and government officials have haggled year after year over financial terms.
Within roughly the same walking distance from this “sacred ground,” one passes strip joints, porn shops, betting parlors and dance clubs, none of which appear to have wounded the sensibilities of these patriotic defenders of the sanctity of Ground Zero. The center itself is to take the place of a dilapidated warehouse, previously the site of a Burlington Coat Factory outlet.
The real aims of those attacking the Cordoba House are not the protection of the nonexistent sanctity of Ground Zero or the shielding of the sensibilities of 9/11 victims’ families. It is a vicious attempt to foment and exploit religious bigotry, xenophobia and outright racism to drive politics ever further to the right.
The far-reaching implications of this campaign entail an assault on the First Amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion and barring the government from establishing a state religion or lending preference to one religion over another. This includes the right of Muslims, or any other religious minority, to worship how and where they choose, without the interference of the government or other religious institutions. The “Ground Zero mosque” campaign is consciously directed at mobilizing elements of the religious right that reject this principle.
It is entirely in sync with a parallel attempt to foment mass hysteria over immigration, portraying immigrants as a criminal class responsible for the loss of jobs and social services. Increasingly, this campaign has embraced the demand for the repeal of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment—which guarantees citizenship to every person born in the US—in order to clear the way for the deportation of millions of children born in the US to undocumented immigrants. This amendment is the constitutional foundation of equal protection under the law.
In both cases, the assault on core constitutional principles and democratic rights has been coupled with venomous rhetoric that serves as an incitement to violence against immigrants, racial minorities and Muslims.
For months, the Obama White House refused to comment on the controversy, insisting in the face of an assault on core constitutional principles and a nationwide hate campaign that the dispute was little more than a local zoning matter.
Then, last Friday, Obama delivered a speech to a Ramadan dinner at the White House affirming that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center in Lower Manhattan … This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.”
Within the space of 24 hours—and in the wake of a firestorm of Republican right criticism—Obama demonstrated that his commitment was anything but unshakeable. “I was not commenting and will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” he told reporters. “I was commenting very specifically on the right of people that date back to our founding.”
In other words, Obama’s White House speech was nothing more than a formal recognition of the constitutional rights that he is sworn to defend, upholding them in principle, while refusing to lift a finger in their defense against those who would deny these rights in practice.
Obama’s cowardly retreat was followed by a similar statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada), who on Monday issued a gutless statement acknowledging that “The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” while insisting “the mosque should be built someplace else.” Needless to say, the senator did not propose any alternative site, much less offer to have the center built in Nevada.
There is little to distinguish Obama and Reid from Gingrich, Sarah Palin and others on the Republican right, who also formally acknowledge freedom of religion, while demanding that this freedom be denied to Muslims. Both parties are content to turn the Constitution into a dead letter, replacing it with statutes more suited to police-state repression at home and permanent military aggression abroad.
Why did Obama bother giving the speech if he was prepared to repudiate it so quickly? Clearly, it was not motivated by any concern for religious freedom or democratic rights.
The real motivation was suggested in a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, who aptly noted that with his speech and speedy backtracking, “Obama managed to collect all the political damage for taking an unpopular stand without gaining credit for political courage.”
The US president, Gerson continued, was compelled to make such a speech, because he “leads a coalition that includes Iraqi and Afghan Muslims who risk death each day fighting Islamic radicalism at our side. How could he possibly tell them that their place of worship inherently symbolizes the triumph of terror?”
Obama acted not out of commitment to constitutional principles, but rather, in all likelihood, at the prodding of the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment. They fear that the anti-Muslim campaign being whipped up by the Republican right could undermine US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to affirm Washington’s hegemony in the overwhelmingly Muslim Middle East and Central Asia, the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas.
Indeed, the principal figure involved in the Cordoba House project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, plays a direct role in these US efforts. The State Department announced last week that it is sending Rauf on a goodwill tour of the Middle East, the third such mission by the Muslim cleric, with whom the State Department acknowledged having “a long-term relationship.” The Imam has also provided training for the FBI and police agencies in dealing with Muslim populations.
The “Ground Zero mosque” controversy has ensnared the Obama administration in an unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand US imperialism needs to recruit Muslim allies and puppets to further its two ongoing wars, as well as to support aggression against Iran. On the other hand, it has whipped up anti-Muslim sentiment within the general population and among US troops in order to generate religious-based support for these wars.
In the final analysis, the fascistic agitation against the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, together with the cowering response of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, demonstrate that militarism and imperialist war abroad coupled with ever-widening social inequality at home are incompatible with democratic rights. The escalating attacks on rights that go back to the founding of the American republic constitute a stark warning. The defense of these rights requires a counteroffensive by the working class against the reactionary social and political forces being mobilized to subvert them and against the profit system that gives rise to these attacks.
The “Ground Zero mosque”: Obama cowers before right-wing hysteria
18 August 2010
Bill Van Auken
With the US mid-term elections less than three months away, the issue that has become the focus of this campaign season is a telling indicator of the intensely reactionary character of official politics in America and of both big business parties.
Employing unbridled hypocrisy and cynicism, right-wing forces centered in the Republican Party, but aided and abetted by leading Democrats, have attempted to whip up mob hysteria against a proposed Islamic cultural center that has been approved by local authorities for construction in lower Manhattan.
The center, the Cordoba House, is to include a swimming pool, a gym, an arts center and a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While its supporters have stressed its inter-faith character, it has been almost universally dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque.”
Semi-fascist elements have denounced the proposed center—to be built two and a half blocks from where New York City’s World Trade Center once stood—as a desecration of the “sacred ground” where over 2,700 people were killed on 9/11. Former House Speaker and likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 Newt Gingrich has compared the backers of the project to Nazis protesting outside the Holocaust museum.
The reality is that, nearly nine years after the attacks, the former World Trade Center largely remains a hole in the ground, a sprawling construction site in which little has been built. No memorial has been erected to those who died, as real estate developers and government officials have haggled year after year over financial terms.
Within roughly the same walking distance from this “sacred ground,” one passes strip joints, porn shops, betting parlors and dance clubs, none of which appear to have wounded the sensibilities of these patriotic defenders of the sanctity of Ground Zero. The center itself is to take the place of a dilapidated warehouse, previously the site of a Burlington Coat Factory outlet.
The real aims of those attacking the Cordoba House are not the protection of the nonexistent sanctity of Ground Zero or the shielding of the sensibilities of 9/11 victims’ families. It is a vicious attempt to foment and exploit religious bigotry, xenophobia and outright racism to drive politics ever further to the right.
The far-reaching implications of this campaign entail an assault on the First Amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion and barring the government from establishing a state religion or lending preference to one religion over another. This includes the right of Muslims, or any other religious minority, to worship how and where they choose, without the interference of the government or other religious institutions. The “Ground Zero mosque” campaign is consciously directed at mobilizing elements of the religious right that reject this principle.
It is entirely in sync with a parallel attempt to foment mass hysteria over immigration, portraying immigrants as a criminal class responsible for the loss of jobs and social services. Increasingly, this campaign has embraced the demand for the repeal of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment—which guarantees citizenship to every person born in the US—in order to clear the way for the deportation of millions of children born in the US to undocumented immigrants. This amendment is the constitutional foundation of equal protection under the law.
In both cases, the assault on core constitutional principles and democratic rights has been coupled with venomous rhetoric that serves as an incitement to violence against immigrants, racial minorities and Muslims.
For months, the Obama White House refused to comment on the controversy, insisting in the face of an assault on core constitutional principles and a nationwide hate campaign that the dispute was little more than a local zoning matter.
Then, last Friday, Obama delivered a speech to a Ramadan dinner at the White House affirming that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center in Lower Manhattan … This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.”
Within the space of 24 hours—and in the wake of a firestorm of Republican right criticism—Obama demonstrated that his commitment was anything but unshakeable. “I was not commenting and will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” he told reporters. “I was commenting very specifically on the right of people that date back to our founding.”
In other words, Obama’s White House speech was nothing more than a formal recognition of the constitutional rights that he is sworn to defend, upholding them in principle, while refusing to lift a finger in their defense against those who would deny these rights in practice.
Obama’s cowardly retreat was followed by a similar statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada), who on Monday issued a gutless statement acknowledging that “The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” while insisting “the mosque should be built someplace else.” Needless to say, the senator did not propose any alternative site, much less offer to have the center built in Nevada.
There is little to distinguish Obama and Reid from Gingrich, Sarah Palin and others on the Republican right, who also formally acknowledge freedom of religion, while demanding that this freedom be denied to Muslims. Both parties are content to turn the Constitution into a dead letter, replacing it with statutes more suited to police-state repression at home and permanent military aggression abroad.
Why did Obama bother giving the speech if he was prepared to repudiate it so quickly? Clearly, it was not motivated by any concern for religious freedom or democratic rights.
The real motivation was suggested in a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, who aptly noted that with his speech and speedy backtracking, “Obama managed to collect all the political damage for taking an unpopular stand without gaining credit for political courage.”
The US president, Gerson continued, was compelled to make such a speech, because he “leads a coalition that includes Iraqi and Afghan Muslims who risk death each day fighting Islamic radicalism at our side. How could he possibly tell them that their place of worship inherently symbolizes the triumph of terror?”
Obama acted not out of commitment to constitutional principles, but rather, in all likelihood, at the prodding of the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment. They fear that the anti-Muslim campaign being whipped up by the Republican right could undermine US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to affirm Washington’s hegemony in the overwhelmingly Muslim Middle East and Central Asia, the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas.
Indeed, the principal figure involved in the Cordoba House project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, plays a direct role in these US efforts. The State Department announced last week that it is sending Rauf on a goodwill tour of the Middle East, the third such mission by the Muslim cleric, with whom the State Department acknowledged having “a long-term relationship.” The Imam has also provided training for the FBI and police agencies in dealing with Muslim populations.
The “Ground Zero mosque” controversy has ensnared the Obama administration in an unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand US imperialism needs to recruit Muslim allies and puppets to further its two ongoing wars, as well as to support aggression against Iran. On the other hand, it has whipped up anti-Muslim sentiment within the general population and among US troops in order to generate religious-based support for these wars.
In the final analysis, the fascistic agitation against the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, together with the cowering response of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, demonstrate that militarism and imperialist war abroad coupled with ever-widening social inequality at home are incompatible with democratic rights. The escalating attacks on rights that go back to the founding of the American republic constitute a stark warning. The defense of these rights requires a counteroffensive by the working class against the reactionary social and political forces being mobilized to subvert them and against the profit system that gives rise to these attacks.
Elvis bin Laden
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/2010/07/26/Commentary-Elvis-bin-Laden/UPI-65401280146819/
Elvis bin Laden
July 26, 2010
ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON -- The "Veterans Today" Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn't involved and died in 2001.
This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden's reported demise seriously.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn't been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since "late 2001." And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.
Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept "alive" to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.
Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden.
By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.
The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden's voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan's tribal areas.
The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she believes "elements" of the Pakistani government know bin Laden's whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the "bowels" of the bureaucracy, not the "top levels of government." She was clearly referring to some members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden's no. 2, the Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan's politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United States.
There are "retired" ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the "Pakistani people," on al-Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after 9/11, in which he said:
-- "I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.
-- "Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
-- "All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel."
Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.
"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin towers," he said then, "but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind."
While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11 generation that doesn't read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their "naive" elders.
Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.
Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent "Top 10 Stories of the Week": "The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated"; "Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?"; "Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups."
Duff's "Corporate Profile" says, "We are a full service Network of 63 Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans' Community," which claims "over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month" and recently grew 39 percent in one month.
On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.
Elvis bin Laden
July 26, 2010
ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON -- The "Veterans Today" Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn't involved and died in 2001.
This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key intelligence officials are taking bin Laden's reported demise seriously.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence agency hadn't been able to positively confirm any specific information on the uber-terrorist since "late 2001." And all those audio and video tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera global television network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.
Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept "alive" to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.
Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos, have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin Laden.
By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.
The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden's voice were made by overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of Pakistan's tribal areas.
The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley. We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50 fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she believes "elements" of the Pakistani government know bin Laden's whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the "bowels" of the bureaucracy, not the "top levels of government." She was clearly referring to some members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden's no. 2, the Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan's politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United States.
There are "retired" ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the "Pakistani people," on al-Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after 9/11, in which he said:
-- "I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.
-- "Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
-- "All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel."
Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.
"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin towers," he said then, "but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind."
While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11 generation that doesn't read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives youngsters a leg up on their "naive" elders.
Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.
Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent "Top 10 Stories of the Week": "The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated"; "Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli Operation?"; "Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups."
Duff's "Corporate Profile" says, "We are a full service Network of 63 Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans' Community," which claims "over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month" and recently grew 39 percent in one month.
On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information, misinformation and disinformation.
Orwell in charge?
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0820/george-orwell/
Orwell in charge? Kucinich compares Iraq ‘exit’ to Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’
Ron Brynaert
Friday, August 20th, 2010
"Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today challenged the notion that removing ‘combat brigades’ but leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq constitutes an end to combat operations, let alone an end to the war," a press release sent to RAW STORY on Thursday stated.
The press release continues:
“Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said ' Mission Accomplished ' . In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq , but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities.
“Just seven days ago, General Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander of Iraq ’s military, said that Iraq ’s security forces will not be trained and ready to take over security for another 10 years. One story is being told to the military on the ground in Iraq and another story is being told to their families back home.
“You can’t be in and out at the same time.
“This is not the end of the war; this is simply a new stage in the campaign to lull the American people into accepting an open-ended presence in Iraq . This is not an honest accounting to the American people and it diminishes the role of the troops who will put their lives on the line. This is not fair to the troops, their families or the American people.
“The Administration and the Pentagon would be wise to level with the American people about our long-term commitment to Iraq .
“The cost of the wars has been estimated to be around $1 million per soldier per year. Each year the troop levels stay at 50,000 means another $50 billion is wasted. I object to spending billions of dollars to maintain a charade in Iraq while our own economy is failing and over 15 million Americans are out of work. I object to keeping any level troops in Iraq to maintain a war based on lies. It is time that Congress sees through the manipulation and finally acts to truly end the war by stopping its funding,” said Kucinich.
Kucinich's statement doesn't mention President Obama's name once, but the president also didn't don a military jumpsuit and fly a plane onto a carrier with a gigantic "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Many of the top liberal blogs who have criticized Obama the past year went silent on the Iraq "exit" coverage (perhaps some are on August vacation).
Aside from Kucinich, RAW STORY was only able to find a scathing editorial on the World Socialist Web Site:
The White House and the Pentagon, assisted by a servile media, have hyped Thursday’s exit of a single Stryker brigade from Iraq as the end of the “combat mission” in that country, echoing the ill-fated claim made by George W. Bush seven years ago.
Obama is more skillful in packaging false propaganda than Bush, and no doubt has learned something from the glaring mistakes of his predecessor. Bush landed on the deck of the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 to proclaim—under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”—that “major combat operations” in Iraq were over. A captive audience of naval enlisted personnel was assembled on deck as cheering extras.
Obama wisely did not fly to Kuwait to deliver a similar address from atop an armored vehicle. He merely issued a statement from the White House, while leaving the heavy lifting to the television networks and their “embedded” reporters, who accompanied the brigade across the border into Kuwait and repeated the propaganda line fashioned by the administration and the military brass.
Three years after former President George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on an aircraft carrier, MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann proceeded to mock the early propagandistic call by announcing each successive night on his Countdown show that it has been "one thousand and blank" days since the the war in Iraq "ended," RAW STORY noted yesterday.
Chances are, three years from now, even if US troops are still caught up in a quagmire in Iraq, Olbermann won't be doing a similar signoff schtick to mock the coverage that ran on NBC and MSNBC Wednesday evening.
At The New York Times Media Decoder blog,, Brian Stelter reported, "The combat mission in Iraq doesn’t officially end until Aug. 31 but viewers and readers could be forgiven for thinking it ended tonight."
In a broadcast that Brian Williams said constituted an “official Pentagon announcement,” NBC showed live pictures Wednesday night as members of the last combat brigade in Iraq drove toward the Kuwait border, symbolizing an end to fighting in the country.
“We are with the last combat troops” in Iraq, the NBC correspondent Richard Engel said at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, the same time that the military lifted an embargo that had been placed on the reporters traveling with the 440 troops, a part of the 4/2 Stryker Brigade.
The Associated Press, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and other news media outlets also reported Wednesday evening that the last combat troops were crossing into Kuwait. Only NBC broadcast it live, in asymmetrical image to the invasion that captured the nation’s attention on television seven years ago.
Coverage by most media outlets on the "last combat brigade" leaving Iraq paint an almost rosy picture with their headlines, which suggest that not only will the close to 60,000 troops left behind not be fighting anyone, but that there is no chance of any future surge.
"As the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void," the New York Times reports.
However, the Associated Press and many liberal blogs instead chose to criticize Fox News for not covering the "exit" with the same gusto.
Perhaps another network could have covered the extensive coverage MSNBC was provided by the Pentagon instead.
Orwell in charge? Kucinich compares Iraq ‘exit’ to Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’
Ron Brynaert
Friday, August 20th, 2010
"Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today challenged the notion that removing ‘combat brigades’ but leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq constitutes an end to combat operations, let alone an end to the war," a press release sent to RAW STORY on Thursday stated.
The press release continues:
“Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said ' Mission Accomplished ' . In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq , but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities.
“Just seven days ago, General Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander of Iraq ’s military, said that Iraq ’s security forces will not be trained and ready to take over security for another 10 years. One story is being told to the military on the ground in Iraq and another story is being told to their families back home.
“You can’t be in and out at the same time.
“This is not the end of the war; this is simply a new stage in the campaign to lull the American people into accepting an open-ended presence in Iraq . This is not an honest accounting to the American people and it diminishes the role of the troops who will put their lives on the line. This is not fair to the troops, their families or the American people.
“The Administration and the Pentagon would be wise to level with the American people about our long-term commitment to Iraq .
“The cost of the wars has been estimated to be around $1 million per soldier per year. Each year the troop levels stay at 50,000 means another $50 billion is wasted. I object to spending billions of dollars to maintain a charade in Iraq while our own economy is failing and over 15 million Americans are out of work. I object to keeping any level troops in Iraq to maintain a war based on lies. It is time that Congress sees through the manipulation and finally acts to truly end the war by stopping its funding,” said Kucinich.
Kucinich's statement doesn't mention President Obama's name once, but the president also didn't don a military jumpsuit and fly a plane onto a carrier with a gigantic "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Many of the top liberal blogs who have criticized Obama the past year went silent on the Iraq "exit" coverage (perhaps some are on August vacation).
Aside from Kucinich, RAW STORY was only able to find a scathing editorial on the World Socialist Web Site:
The White House and the Pentagon, assisted by a servile media, have hyped Thursday’s exit of a single Stryker brigade from Iraq as the end of the “combat mission” in that country, echoing the ill-fated claim made by George W. Bush seven years ago.
Obama is more skillful in packaging false propaganda than Bush, and no doubt has learned something from the glaring mistakes of his predecessor. Bush landed on the deck of the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 to proclaim—under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”—that “major combat operations” in Iraq were over. A captive audience of naval enlisted personnel was assembled on deck as cheering extras.
Obama wisely did not fly to Kuwait to deliver a similar address from atop an armored vehicle. He merely issued a statement from the White House, while leaving the heavy lifting to the television networks and their “embedded” reporters, who accompanied the brigade across the border into Kuwait and repeated the propaganda line fashioned by the administration and the military brass.
Three years after former President George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on an aircraft carrier, MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann proceeded to mock the early propagandistic call by announcing each successive night on his Countdown show that it has been "one thousand and blank" days since the the war in Iraq "ended," RAW STORY noted yesterday.
Chances are, three years from now, even if US troops are still caught up in a quagmire in Iraq, Olbermann won't be doing a similar signoff schtick to mock the coverage that ran on NBC and MSNBC Wednesday evening.
At The New York Times Media Decoder blog,, Brian Stelter reported, "The combat mission in Iraq doesn’t officially end until Aug. 31 but viewers and readers could be forgiven for thinking it ended tonight."
In a broadcast that Brian Williams said constituted an “official Pentagon announcement,” NBC showed live pictures Wednesday night as members of the last combat brigade in Iraq drove toward the Kuwait border, symbolizing an end to fighting in the country.
“We are with the last combat troops” in Iraq, the NBC correspondent Richard Engel said at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, the same time that the military lifted an embargo that had been placed on the reporters traveling with the 440 troops, a part of the 4/2 Stryker Brigade.
The Associated Press, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and other news media outlets also reported Wednesday evening that the last combat troops were crossing into Kuwait. Only NBC broadcast it live, in asymmetrical image to the invasion that captured the nation’s attention on television seven years ago.
Coverage by most media outlets on the "last combat brigade" leaving Iraq paint an almost rosy picture with their headlines, which suggest that not only will the close to 60,000 troops left behind not be fighting anyone, but that there is no chance of any future surge.
"As the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void," the New York Times reports.
However, the Associated Press and many liberal blogs instead chose to criticize Fox News for not covering the "exit" with the same gusto.
Perhaps another network could have covered the extensive coverage MSNBC was provided by the Pentagon instead.
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