Alleged child rape by Penn State coach may go back to 1970s

If the allegations are true, it won't be a complete surprise as it's doubtful someone woke up one day in the late 1990's and started sexually abusing children. Much like the child rape scandal with the Catholic church, once the story gets out there, more and more people will emerge and report their own case of abuse. How many more alleged victims will emerge?

Authorities have not disclosed how many additional people have come forward with stories of abuse. The number of victims listed in the grand jury report is eight. Reports of larger numbers have to this point been unconfirmed or denied.

But if true, this report of potential abuse as far back as the '70s would lend credence to the prosecutors' view that Sandusky's charity was used to find and groom children for molestation.

And, if indeed there were victims back in the 1970's, that would cover the greater part of Sandusky's coaching career at Penn State, which began in 1969. Sandusky is credited with helping Penn State and head coach Joe Paterno become known for great defenses.

All of this now leads to at least one outlet asking, what is the value now of a Penn State education? It would be a hard decision for any parent to send their child to a school that accepted and hid such information. The school has nobody to blame but themselves for this very serious problem. Read the rest of this post...

Is the next financial crisis looming in the derivatives market, again?

It's probably the last thing that anyone wants to think about now that we're a few years into this crisis. When the problems keep getting pushed out and political leadership fails to lead by implementing serious reform, we shouldn't expect anything other than another crisis. Forbes:

Speaking in Tokyo, he pointed to derivatives, the financial hairball of futures, options, and swaps in which nearly all the world's major banks are tangled up.

Estimates on the amount of derivatives out there worldwide vary. An oft-heard estimate is $600 trillion. That squares with Mobius' guess of 10 times the world's annual GDP. "Are the derivatives regulated?" asks Mobius. "No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes."

In other words, something along the lines of securitized mortgages is lurking out there, ready to trigger another crisis as in 2007-08.

Read the rest of this post...

Right-wing "gotcha" activist James O'Keefe bedeviled by infighting, lawsuits, lack of funds

How sad.  Nice blockbuster of a story by Ken Vogel at Politico.  It seem that James O'Keefe, the guy who did the Acorn sting and the NPR sting (and selectively edited the videos to portray things not quite as they were) is apparently watching his empire fall apart around him.  Former colleagues are dissing him to Politico.  Lawsuits are being threatened all over the place (amongst themselves).  And funds aren't quite pouring in.  It's a heartwarming tale, read it. Read the rest of this post...

Texas College Republican Prez: Assassinating Obama 'tempting'

The sickness continues. Someone should expect a visit from the Secret Service very shortly.

At 2:29 p.m. ET, UT’s Lauren E. Pierce wrote: “Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama. We need him to go down in history as the WORST president we’ve EVER had! #2012.”

Pierce, the president of the College Republicans at UT Austin, told ABC News the comment was a “joke” and that the “whole [shooting incident] was stupid.” Giggling, she said that an attempted assassination would “only make the situation worse.”

“Insofar as she’s a representative [of the College Republicans], maybe it shouldn’t be said, but she’s made a positive statement in a way, ” said Cassie Wright, the group’s vice president.

Read the rest of this post...

Is 80 the new 65 for Americans? It may have to be.

This is pathetic. There's no reason why Americans should have to work until they're 80 years old, just so we can prop up the 1% who always seem to benefit. It would be nice if one party actually cared enough to make it their mission to bring back the middle class.

One of the striking results of the survey released Wednesday is that 25 percent of the respondents said they'll need to work until at least age 80 because they will not have enough money to retire comfortably.

Even those who plan on retiring expect they may continue working in some capacity and for various reasons:

- About 75 percent said they expect to work in their retirement years;
- About 39 percent said they will need to work to afford things they want or to maintain their lifestyle; and
- Another 35 percent say they'll work because they want to.

Read the rest of this post...

N17: Occupy Wall Street national day of action

Today is the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and there is a national day of action. In New York, the day is broken up into three separate movements at breakfast, lunch and dinner:

7:00am — Shut Down Wall Street
We will gather in Liberty Square at 7:00am, before the ring of the Trading Floor Bell, to prepare to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the frontlines of economic injustice.

3:00pm — Occupy the Subway
We will gather at 3:00pm at 16 central subway hubs and take our own stories to the trains, using the "People's Mic". Details here.

5:00pm — Take the Square, Festival of Lights on Brooklyn Bridge
At 5:00pm thousands will gather at Foley Square in solidarity with laborers demanding jobs to rebuild this country's infrastructure and economy. They will encircle City Hall and march across the Brooklyn Bridge, carrying thousands of handheld lights, as a festival of lights to celebrate two months of a new movement to reclaim our democracy.

OccupyWallSt.org is hosting both live text updates from New York and multiple live video streams. Already there have been over 100 arrests reported, as well as incidents of the police using LRAD sound weaponry against peaceful protesters. The NYPD also has blocked reporters from accessing or filming arrests. The scale of response from Bloomberg to protect Wall Street bankers is truly astonishing, even for a billionaire.

If you're not in New York, you can find events near you at November17.org.  (Note from John: "November 17" is also an infamous marxist terrorist organization in Greece that has now been disbanded.  They were right up there with the Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof (if you studied national security in the 80s and 90s, you know them).  Rather unfortunate name for a Web site and campaign dealing with a revolutionary uprising, but fortunately the other November 17 has nothing to do with today's events.) Read the rest of this post...

Secret Service checked if WH shooter Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez had ties to OWS, did they check Tea Party ties too?

It's interesting that news stories about Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, the man who allegedly fired shots at the White House, and apparently got one bullet lodged in a window of the President's personal residence, are noting that the Secret Service investigated whether the shooter had ties to the Occupy movement.  I wonder if they also investigated possible ties to the Tea Party or other right-wing groups?  After all, the man "hated" Obama.  And he's from Idaho (hello?). That's GOP territory.  On our side of the aisle, we're sometimes "disappointed" in the President, but "hate" is the domain of the other guys.  Speaking of the other guys, the fact that the Secret Service has found no connection to the Occupy movement hasn't stopped Fox from calling him "the Occupy shooter."  They really are such a diligent propaganda arm of the Republican party. Read the rest of this post...

Video: 84 y.o. activist Dorli Rainey on being pepper-sprayed by Seattle cops

Yesterday we told you about a 84-year-old woman who had been pepper-sprayed by Seattle police at Occupy Seattle. Click through to see the image; it's pretty bad. (It's also copyrighted, so we can't show it directly. If the reporter who shot it thinks it's photojournalistic gold, he's right.)

Here is Keith Olbermann's interview with the woman. She's Dorli Rainey, bright, clear, an activist and German survivor of the Nazi era. It's a fascinating interview. My few comments after.



Three notes:

First, she starts with the importance of education. Exactly right. Every generation needs to educate itself about what's going on, Howard Zinn fashion. The 60s activists started with teach-ins, for a reason. People aren't born knowing that the propaganda that surrounds them is BS. They have to be shown.

Think about the people on that bus she mentions. How many of them thought that cops were "rough" only when faced with "the wrong people"?

Second. she goes right to the coming Internet restrictions. She's referring to PIPA, the ProtectIP Act, making another appearance. (Senator Klobuchar, this is your doing.)

Elites (man do I want a more evocative term) always need to control the messaging in order to remain the elite. This means controlling the medium. Note her references to German WWII messaging. They were always winning the war with Eastasia — until the Eastasians showed up. (And Bloomberg was always a friend of freedom from noise, until he showed up with his ear-destroying battlefield bullhorns.)

Third, this is for you, the well-meaning Mr. Day. Only the criminals of the last generation failed you. The criminals of their generation failed them. Your children will lay the failures of you and your brothers at your own feet.

Why's that? Because a small, determined, organized gang of the very very rich, who own the services of the very very powerful (their retainers), can almost always defeat the unorganized many.

Dr. Spock (the baby doctor, not the other guy) joined the Movement in the 60s, as did may like him. Dorli Raines is part of Occupy, as are many like her.

It takes the right time (this is one of them) and a determined, organized cadre to capture those occasional wins. Perhaps instead of complaining about the loss of Penn State–innocence, just join the cross-generational fight. It's always a cross-generational fight. It's mostly a losing one (think Peasants' War, which Martin Luther opposed).

This is one of the few times in history when the fight can actually be won. Let's not throw it away.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Why hasn’t "Pope 1%" removed bishop who didn’t call cops on pedophile priest?

I thought the Vatican's enabling of pedophilia was all in the past. I thought these were charges dealing with things that happened twenty, thirty, forty years ago. I did not realize that there is a case currently playing out in Missouri and, big surprise, the Vatican is again refusing to do the right thing.

In a nutshell...

The local Catholic diocese in Kansas City, Missouri was allegedly aware, as far back as 2006, that something funny was going on with a local priest, Father Ratigan. You'd think that this late in the game, after so many child sex abuse scandals, the Catholic Church would freak out over an allegation of a priest having inappropriate contact with young girls.

Yeah, not so much.  The church denies that they knew of anything untoward back in 2006, but that's irrelevant when you find out what happened next.

Zoom ahead to May of 2010, and again there are allegations that Father Ratigan was involved in inappropriate touching with young children (such as putting candy in his pocket and letting children fish it out with their hands), and a report that a parent found a pair of girl's panties in a planter at the priest's home.

The Bishop, Robert Finn, was given a "brief verbal summary" of the letter, per the NYT, but didn't read it until a year later. Hmmm... you hear that there's a letter alleging some pretty weird behavior of one of your priests, involving small children, and the guy is allegedly already the subject of previous complaints, and you don't read it.

Then we come to December of 2010.  Hundreds of photographs of child pornography involving young girls are found on the priest's computer. (The priest was subsequently indicted on charges of taking the photos of local children himself, a charge far worse than looking at kiddie porn he downloaded off the Web (still, obviously, a serious charge in and of itself). The charges include "taking lewd pictures of the genitalia of five girls ages 2 to 12, sometimes while they slept."  That's how bad the photos were.) The next day, according to the Times, the priest tried to kill himself and left what amounted to a written confession.  This time, the bishop was informed for sure, no getting around it.

So you'd think that then the Catholic Church took matters into their own hands, called the cops, and kept the guy away from kids.

Not so much.

The Bishop didn't turn the photos over to the police until this past May, 2011.  In the meantime, the priest was sent to a convent (always a good choice for a guy who has issues with girls) and continued to have contact with children.  Here's one of example from the Kansas City Star of what the priest is alleged to have done after the Bishop knew he had a problem:

On Wednesday, Randles filed a fourth civil lawsuit against Ratigan, alleging that he used his cellphone to surreptitiously take pictures of a 10-year-old Northland girl on multiple occasions earlier this year.

Ratigan contacted the girl on Facebook weeks after Fitzgibbons treated him, according to the lawsuit filed in Clay County Circuit Court by the girl and her parents. The family — unaware of Ratigan’s troubling behavior and restrictions placed on him by Finn — invited Ratigan into their home numerous times, the suit says.

According to the lawsuit, Ratigan took pictures of the clothed girl with his cellphone from beneath the family’s dinner table on multiple occasions. The parents thought he was texting someone, the suit said. Because they did not know about the lewd photos on Ratigan’s laptop computer, they had no reason to suspect that he was taking inappropriate pictures, the lawsuit said.

“They thought it was weird that he would be texting at that angle, but it was not until someone told the parents that Ratigan had been accused of taking up-the-skirt photos that it finally hit them,” said Randles, the attorney representing the family. “It wasn’t texting.”

And guess what?  The Bishop is still on the job.  And to make matters even more interesting, he's a member of the uber-conservative wing of the church called "Opus Dei," and the accused priest is also a conservative.

The Bishop was recently indicted over this matter, and narrowly avoided a second indictment.  And he's still on the job.

The local paper has called on the Bishop to step down.  And he's still on the job.

Contrast this to what the Catholic Church is doing in Illinois.  Rather than obey local non-discrimination laws protecting gays (the church gets millions in state funding), the Catholic Church is shutting down their local adoption agencies, hurting needy kids.  You see, the Catholic Church is so moral that it just couldn't continue to provide adoption services if it were required to not discriminate against gays.  The church's only option was to hurt kids in order to defend its heightened sense of morality.  Sound familiar?

The moral of the story: If you're a college football coach, you lose your job if you don't immediately report child abuse to the cops; but if you're a Catholic bishop, you remain on the job ad infinitum.

After everything the Catholic Church has been through, it is still to this day coddling church leaders who through their own admission enabled known pedophiles.  And these people have the nerve to lecture President Obama about his morals? Read the rest of this post...

How is raising the Medicare age not a tax hike?

I'm sorry, but if the Republicans are going to call everything that costs the taxpayers more money a "tax hike" then they're proposing a historically large tax hike by trying to move the age at which people are eligible for Medicare.  A good number of us work for ourselves, or are unemployed, and thus have no choice but to buy our own health insurance directly from insurance companies.  By the age of 65, private insurance is exorbitant on the individual market.  But that doesn't matter to the Republicans.  They're happy to force you to pay $2000/month to Blue Cross for another two years, costing you $48,000 more than it would have cost you to go on Medicare.

I'd call a nearly $50,000 tax hike per person pretty darn historic.  But for the Republicans, tax hikes are bad if the money goes to the government, but they're good if the money goes to their rich buddies in corporate America.

That's why the GOP is happy to keep socking Americans for the prescription drug tax we pay pharmaceutical companies to compensate them for all the subsidized drugs they sell to Europe.  You see, pharmaceutical companies sell the same drugs in Europe for 1/5th to even 1/6th the price they charge Americans.  Then they just up the price five or six times when they sell the drug here in states, to make up for their losses in Europe.  So we make up the difference, and the Republicans refuse to fix it.  And they can fix it.  The government can simply negotiate with drug companies and get drug prices lower, at least for Medicare recipients, but they don't because the Republicans (and some Democrats) are in the pocket of Big Pharma.  (We also could allow the importation of cheap drugs from abroad, which would also help lower prices, but again, Republicans and some Democrats refuse.)  So Americans keep paying their prescription drug tax, oblivious to the fact that we are literally paying six times more than we need to for many of our prescription medicines.

The Republicans are only against taxes when the proceeds aren't going to their rich buddies, who then funnel it back to the GOP in contributions. Read the rest of this post...

Meek GOP tax increase proposal for Super Committee causing GOP identity crisis

What's particularly disturbing about this story is how even when they're falling apart they win.  The entire story is about how GOP infighting has begun now that some Republicans have signed off on increasing taxes as part of the Super Committee budget.  Forget that the "revenue enhancements" are only around $300bn, or 25% of the deal (they should be 50%).  But somehow a small offer is considered a grand thing.  In the end the Republicans will be forced to negotiate with themselves and they'll only offer us, say, 10% tax increases in the final deal and everyone will say how courageous the GOP was in making such a difficult decision to, essentially, steamroll the Democrats once again. Read the rest of this post...

Occupy London receives eviction notices

But remember, there has not been any coordination anywhere with the evictions taking place in the last few days. None at all. It's no wonder other parts of the world are so jealous (supposedly) of our democratic systems that do such a fine job of protecting the elite and stomping on anyone who dares challenge the system including 84 year old retired school teachers. Oh wait, that's the system they already have.

The City of London Corporation has attached eviction notices to tents outside St Paul's Cathedral, telling activists to move them from the public highways by 6pm on Thursday or face legal action.

It is the latest development in a month-long saga that has pitted the protest movement Occupy London against the corporation, the local authority for the Square Mile, and St Paul's. Both institutions own the land around the church but only the corporation is pressing ahead with court proceedings.

The notice is addressed to "each and every person taking part in and/or having erected tents or other structures at St Paul's Churchyard EC4".

The Occupy protesters both in the UK and US have been mostly peaceful, but one wonders how this will work out when the authorities are forcing them out. Wouldn't it have been nice if there had been so much action against the "repugnant" bankers who caused the economic problems? Read the rest of this post...

Austerity program crashing UK economy

The big lie of slashing in order to shrink the deficit is exposing itself at the same time youth unemployment is skyrocketing to a 17 year high. The tough talk and big promises of the benefits of austerity are falling flat. In case the Republicans in the US are watching, brutal cuts only kill the economy and reduce growth. The Guardian:

It is now expected that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will declare at the time of Osborne's autumn statement on 29 November that the downturn's impact is more permanent than thought and the government may not be able to meet its commitment to eliminate the structural deficit – the part of the deficit unaffected by growth – by 2014-15, as he predicted in the June 2010 budget.

The expected delay is symptomatic of the damage on the public finances being wrought by lower-than-expected growth and deepening unemployment.

The admission over deficit reduction does not mean the chancellor will break his mandate, as that gave him the leeway to eliminate the current structural deficit either by 2014-15, or a year later.

Read the rest of this post...