[Photo credit: NYT]

The Steven J. Baum law firm, the New York foreclosure mill whose employees threw that appalling homeless-themed Halloween party, is shutting down just a month after pictures of the party were published by the New York Times.

"The firm has been under fire from federal agencies and the public, including members of the local “Occupy” movement, for its alleged business practices," reports BusinessFirst.

The firm's apparent history of cruel indifference towards homeowners seeking to work out repayment or obtain a modification to save their homes, had previously earned the firm nothing more than the proverbial "hand slap" in the way of a fine not large enough to make the firm blink as they sign the check for "operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe,” according to one New York State Supreme Court judge.

Last week, Steven J. Baum himself sent Joe Nocera, the Times columnist who first published the pictures, an email claiming that Nocera's column destroyed his firm: "There is blood on your hands for this one, Joe… I will never, ever forgive you for this."

Nocera's column certainly couldn't have helped bring the downfall of Baum's foreclosure mill firm without the questionable actions of Baum himself. The filing of "robo-signed" documents, and use of practices that one Long Island judge likened to something out of the "Twilight Zone." Baum paid a $2 million fine in October to settle a Federal case accusing the firm of filing misleading papers to rush through foreclosures. These things combined with the reputation those photographs revealing the soul-less beings that comprised Baum's foreclosure mill earned them brought on the firm's karmic end.

Herman Cain, who has made job creation a signature issue, was on the board of Whirlpool when the company engaged in a pattern of layoffs, outsourcing and the cutting of retiree benefits, all while accepting government subsidies and paying little to no taxes. Cain has made it clear that he doesn't understand jobs and the economy and has surrounded himself with people who don't know more than he does, but the Whirlpool example goes beyond a lack of understanding into an assault on American workers.

http://www.outsaurus.com/2011/11/04/outsourced-whirlpool/

Between 2008 and 2010, Whirlpool paid no federal taxes, despite sales of over $18 billion. In 2010, the company reported an effective tax rate of -10.9 percent. And the company continued to lay workers off and outsource their jobs after receiving $19 million in stimulus funds.

Cain joined the Whirlpool board of directors in 1992 and received payment for his work there as late as 2010. His compensation from Whirlpool ranged from $166,000 to $190,000 a year.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday suggested using drastic cuts to health care for the poorest Americans to fund the Department of Defense.

Speaking to employees of BAE Systems, one of the nation's largest defense contractors, the candidate said that President Barack Obama and members of the "super committee" should agree to scale back the Medicaid program in order to prevent $600 billion in cuts to defense spending over ten years.

"A doomsday scenario for our military is not the right course, given where the world is headed," Romney remarked. "I would call on the president -- and do call on the president -- to immediately introduce legislation which says we will not have a $600 billion cut to America's military. We should not cut any funding from our base Department of Defense budget. That should not occur."

"And I would apply the $600 billion [in cuts] that were anticipated being imposed upon the military, I would take those and apply them to other parts of the federal budget," he continued. "And there are a number of candidates for that. One of them, of course, would be to take something like Medicaid, which is our health care program for the poor, and return that program to the states."

Since President Barack Obama took office, the defense budget has actually grown from $513 billion to $530 billion, according to The Associated Press. Additional spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased from $153 billion to $159 billion.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates (PDF) that the total base defense budget will increase to $665 billion by 2028 if there are no cuts. Because the triggered cuts are spread over a 10-year period, overall defense spending would still grow each year, albeit at a slower rate.

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Via Raw Story -- Ron Paul gets ‘mic-checked’ by New Hampshire protesters:

Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R) received a “mic check” from protesters affiliated with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement at town hall event in Keene, New Hampshire on Monday.

“We are the 99 percent,” they shouted. “We will be heard. There are criminals on Wall Street who walk free. There are protesters in jail. There is something wrong with this system. We are the 99 percent. We will be heard.”

“Do you feel better?” Paul responded, chuckling.

“If you listen very carefully, I’m very much involved with the 99 [percent],” the presidential candidate continued. “I’ve been condemning that 1 percent because they’ve been ripping us off. So, we need to sort that out. But the people on Wall Street got the bailouts and you guys got stuck with the bills and I think that’s where the problem is.”

The “mic check” is a reference to the system of communication used by the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters in New York City’s Zuccotti Park.

While I agree with Ron Paul on some matters of war and military intervention, I disagree with him on about 99 percent of his insane economic views and I don't think he's any better than the rest of the Republican candidates running for president when you look at what he wants to do to our social safety nets, public education and programs that help the poor. That said, at least Paul managed to be polite to the group instead of calling them a bunch of fascists like Karl Rove did or telling them to get a job and take a bath like Gingrich.

h/t Dave for the video

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New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly got the first place honors in Keith Olbermann's list of Worst Persons for Monday night for their little fiasco this weekend with another over-hyped terrorism threat to distract from the Occupy Wall Street protesters that were showing up outside of Bloomberg's home.

Marcy Wheeler has more on that here -- The Bloomie and Kelly Show … with Fake Video Props!.

Runners up were deadbeat dad Rep. Joe Walsh -- VIDEO: Rep. Joe Walsh Calls Veterans Protesting Wall Street Un-American.

And child labor advocate and current GOP frontrunner, Newt Gingrich -- Newt Gingrich: "Child Labor Laws Are Stupid" -- UPDATED with Video!.

This morning on Fox News, radio bloviator Tony Katz said this:

There's no such thing as income inequality. A stockbroker makes more than a schoolteacher and a schoolteacher exists off the excesses of the stockbroker and the capitalist and people who pay into the system to allow the educator to exist.

I am trying to imagine a world where stockbrokers and capitalists exist without teachers. I can't. A capitalist system exists because ideas become some kind of product or service and those products and/or services are capitalized in order to make a wider market. At the heart of any enterprise, there is education, whether it be an education of the idea-maker or those who actually execute the idea.

But for Tony Katz, education exists only because the capitalist and others have "excess," which he implies is taken from them to fund a system which teachers and professors then benefit from without any work. What kind of logic is that? One immediate retort that formed in my mind while listening to this clip was that Katz would not be sitting there spewing that nonsense if he actually had a decent education. And if he did have a decent education, then he, too, is the beneficiary of hard-working professors and teachers who were not leeches on the capitalist system, but the builders of it through the education process.

Here's something else for Tony Katz to chew over. California used to have the finest public university system in the country. Our state universities did not charge tuition. Because they didn't, admission was open to anyone who qualified. Then Ronald Reagan was elected. One of the first things he did was change the system to a tuition-based system. My mother went to UCLA in the late 1950s. She could not have attended that university if tuition were required. She went on to work and work hard throughout her career in times where women were not especially welcome in the workplace, much less the management end of the workplace. Yes, Mr. Katz. She was college-educated and she worked a whole lot harder than you are when you just spew nonsense out over the airwaves.

College tuition for those students protesting at UC Davis was $13,000+ this year for California residents. By comparison, in 1995 it was $4,100. When I was attending college in the Cal State system, tuition was $144.00 and the state paid it because I was in the top 10 percent of my class. In 2007 when my son entered the Cal State system, tuition was $2,772. In 2010-2011, it's $4,335. As the parent of a Cal State student and a soon-to-be (we hope) UC student, I can guarantee you those kids are getting nothing handed to them. Nothing, except perhaps a very large bill for accrued tuition.

Yes, they have every reason to protest such things as income inequality and unfair exploitation of their current and future opportunities.

In his must-read New York Magazine essay entitled "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?", David Frum takes on Fox News with a vengeance. Here's a small taste of the bitters he served them:

Continue reading »

I wrote a piece with my impression of the Occupations I've visited so far.

From The Atlantic:

During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.

This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.

Thus far I've visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, four on the West coast and four on the East: Toronto, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland.

The only GA that had anywhere near gender parity was the largest one there's been yet -- the GA on the day of the general strike at U.C. Berkeley. The largest GAs will only turn out 500 people max; Zuccotti Park is a tiny granite slab in lower Manhattan and can't fit many more than that. But the Mario Savio Steps at Sproul Hall at Berkeley held more than 4,000 students and activists -- and half of them appeared to be female. (Go Bears!)

This is not an expose of the Occupy movement's outlook toward women or to suggest attitudes within it are radically different from those found elsewhere. I was also screamed at and called "bitch" at Occupy LA, but frankly I'm called worse in my fan mail on a daily basis. Yet as this movement has been in the media at a near constant rate for now two months, the story telling about it has not evolved. There's either the agenda "journalism" whose practitioners show up to paint the protesters as violent or stupid or its equally useless counterpart, a virtual livestream of reporting on every detail, no matter how trivial. Everything else is crime reporting: How many arrests? Who's pepper sprayed? Who's died? No wonder we still hear the question: "What do they want?"

This movement is complex -- how the members define themselves, how important the tents are (or are not) and what they're doing is still being worked out in marathon meetings and through endless committee votes. This process of identity-formation is made only more complicated by police raids, and by the tear gas and pepper spray that gave greeted protest in some cities. Occupiers all viscerally sense the problem: extreme economic inequality. They all cite a lack of fairness -- a lack of opportunity. They also agree that the status quo is failing.

The whole piece is here.

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A woman who was pepper sprayed during during a raid on Occupy Seattle last week is blaming police after she miscarried Sunday.

Jennifer Fox, 19, told The Stranger that she had been with the Occupy protests since they started in Westlake Park. She said she was homeless and three months pregnant, but felt the need to join activists during their march last Tuesday.

"I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in," Fox recalled. "I was screaming, 'I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.'"

She claimed that police hit her in the stomach twice before pepper spraying her. One officer struck her with his foot and another pushed his bicycle into her. It wasn't clear if either of those incidents were intentional.

"Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut," Fox said.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Joshua Trujillo snapped a picture of Fox in apparent agony as another activist carried her to an ambulance.

Seattle fire department spokesman Kyle Moore told The Washington Post that a 19-year-old pregnant woman was among those that were examined by paramedics.

While doctors at Harborview Medical Center didn't see any problems at the time, things took a turn for the worst Sunday.

"Everything was going okay until yesterday, when I started getting sick, cramps started, and I felt like I was going to pass out," she explained.

When Fox arrived at the hospital, doctors told her that the baby had no heartbeat.

"They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too," she said.

"I was worried about it [when I joined the protests], but I didn't know it would be this bad. I didn't know that a cop would murder a baby that's not born yet... I am trying to get lawyers."

The Scoville heat chart indicates that U.S. grade pepper spray is ten times more painful than the blistering hot habanero pepper, according to Scientific American. While law enforcement officials regulary claim that the spray is safe, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University found that it could "produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death."

In the midst of everything going on, this story has fallen by the wayside, but it's an important one, especially if you think Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination for 2012. At the end of Romney's term as governor, Romney's staffers destroyed emails, sold publicly-owned hard drives to staffers, and made sure no digital tracks were left behind. This action flies in the face of public records laws in Massachusetts, which require that electronic records be preserved for state archives. (Bush administration, anyone?)

Via ThinkProgress:

Asked why he purchased his hard drive for $65 just two weeks before leaving office, Romney’s chief legal counsel, Mark Nielsen, couldn’t explain, saying only that he followed the law:

“I’m confident that we complied with the letter and the spirit of the law,’’ he added. When asked why he would want to purchase his hard drive, he said, “Employees were given that option and it was my understanding that it was a longstanding practice in the governor’s office.’’When asked about replacing the remaining computers and wiping the server clean, he said, “All I can tell you is we fully complied with the law and complied with longstanding executive branch practice. Nothing unusual was done.’’

The problem with that statement is that no one can find any precedent for selling hard drives at the end of a term. The Romney campaign notes that they turned over 700 cubic feet of information to the archives, but those are paper records and trying to find anything in them is akin to searching for the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack.

Which brings us to the interview at the top, where Romney has yet another reason for keeping his hard drives.

Via ThinkProgress:

Romney and his campaign have so far denied this, with the candidate saying this weekend in New Hampshire that his staff took the highly unusual step of purchasing their work hard drives because they might contain “confidential and private” information. Meanwhile, he’s made calls for greater White House transparency a part of his campaign message.But in a fairly stunning admission today during an interview with the editorial board of the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire, Romney suggested that his administration deleted emails because they didn’t want “opposition research teams” to have access to them:

ROMNEY: Well, I think in government we should follow the law. And there has never been an administration that has provided to the opposition research team, or to the public, electronic communications. So ours would have been the first.

That's a new one. An elected official who used equipment paid for by the public he served choosing to withhold information from that same public in order to thwart opposition research?

Just a little bit of what one could expect from a President Romney, who clearly takes his cues from the Karl Rove School of (Non)Transparency.

In an article at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi contrasts the story of a woman who committed food stamp fraud and recieved a harsh penalty with the fraudsters of Wall Street, who, at worst, got slaps on the wrist for their crimes. Taibbi explains:

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.

Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.

He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court."

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of government generosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi’s debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs.

Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave back every penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now going to do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!

Taibbi is right to be outraged. This is another in a long line of false crises pushed by Republicans that, instead of targeting real problems, target populations that can't speak up for themselves as well or who already suffer from low public approval. For decades, conservatives have targeted the recipients of government assistance programs, trying to pain anyone in one of these programs as part of the "unworthy poor" who are "stealing" from the rest of us. These campaigns heavily target the most vulnerable of the 99 percent and few people are willing to defend the targets.

Think Progress recently pointed out the weakness of the conservative argument against the food stamp program:

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, SNAP errors are currently at an all-time low, with errors accounting for less than three percent of the program’s cost:

"To ensure that benefits are provided only to eligible households and in the proper amounts, SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program and, in recent years, has achieved its lowest error rates on record. In fiscal year 2009, even as caseloads were rising, states set new record lows for error rates. The net loss due to errors equaled only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009. There is no evidence that program errors are driving up SNAP spending."

During the recession, SNAP has been critical for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies.

It's clear that food stamp fraud is not a real issue. If anything, the biggest problem in the program comes not from program recipients, but stores that accept food stamps, who are committing significant fraud:

A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores across the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.

Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer money annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stores and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.

Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to SRA International to step up the technology used to combat fraud.

...

Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated.

So the real significant fraud in food stamps comes from retailers -- who are being caught in significant numbers already. On top of that, the president is ramping up enforcement, which is already good. So, again, this isn't a problem that is costing the government or the taxpayers much money in the big picture. The combined fraud rates from individuals and retailers is like 3.5 percent of a $65 billion program, accounting for less than $3 billion annually. The entire realm of fraud for the entire program is less than numerous individual cases of fraud on Wall Street. And that's not even to go into the subsidies, tax relief and bailout money the Wall Street fraudsters got.

Conservatives complain about a few anecdotes of millionaires getting food stamps because of loopholes as if the anecdotes were proof of broader problems. They complain of Barack Obama pushing more to get people enrolled in the program than to prevent fraud, as if making sure that people eat during bad economic times is somehow a crime. And they complain about the lack of inspectors able to pursue fraud cases, despite it being their push for downsizing government that led to that shortage.

Taibbi adds another thought:

Here’s another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

As part of the fraud hysteria promoted by Republicans, people are given penalties way out of proportion with the crimes they are committing. In particular, poorer people are given these penalties. What the proponents of these types of laws -- denial of food stamps because of drug use -- are literally saying is that the punishment for drug use should be starvation.