UN confirms previous reports of child torture in Syria

Just because it's not surprising doesn't mean it's any less disgusting.

Children were slaughtered, tortured, sexually attacked and used as human shields by pro-government Syrian forces, according to a damning United Nations report released late on Monday.

"Children were victims of killing and maiming, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and ill-treatment, including sexual violence, by the Syrian Armed Forces, the intelligence forces, and the Shabbiha militia," the U.N.'s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a release issued along with the report.

The shabiha are a pro-government militia that recruits largely from the Alawite community- the same Muslim sect as President Bashar Assad. Sunnis, who make up the majority of the rebels, are an estimated 74 percent of the population.

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How do privatized TSA agents solve the TSA problem?

I completely understand that Representative Mica likes to hand privatized deals over to campaign contributors or potential contributors but I have yet to hear how or why privatizing addresses the problems of the TSA. They will be following the same mission and rules as the TSA except that instead of some level of accountability via the government, there will now be an extra layer with a private company that is accountable to no one.

The privatized TSA will still be groping or using the porno-scanners that are expensive but easily beatable as we have seen recently as well as a few years ago. They will still be humiliating Americans and preventing babies from flying because of incorrect no-fly lists and declaring cream cheese dangerous.

Why isn't anyone asking Rep. Mica how the privatized TSA will be any different with these problems? The Hill:

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) has long pushed for private screeners at Orlando's Sanford International Airport. He said Monday he hoped the move at the airport in his home state would open "a new era of reform for TSA operations, not only at Orlando Sanford but across the nation.

“It’s critical that TSA get out of the business of running a huge bureaucracy and human resources operation and refocus its attention on security, analyzing intelligence, and setting the highest risk-based security standards," Mica, who is a vocal critic of TSA, said in a statement.

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BREAKING: Victory for Minneapolis mom over Citibank's foreclosure effort

John wrote the other day about Nick Espinosa's mom.  She was behind on her mortgage, finally was able to get the money together, but Citibank said "no" - they refused to accept her mortgage payment, and instead were going to sell her house tomorrow.  That is, until Nick and a lot of his friends stepped up and saved the day.

Nick Espinosa is an organizer with Occupy Homes MN, where he's helped people facing foreclosure and eviction fight off the bank and keep their homes for the last eight-plus months. Nick is also well-known in activist circles for being the creator of the Glitter Bomb as a tactic in support of LGBT rights. In short, he's a great activist who's putting his full being into helping others.

Unfortunately while Nick had been helping other families in his community, his mother, Colleen McKee Espinosa, received a foreclosure notice.

After briefly falling behind on her payments, Colleen had repeatedly asked Citibank to let her become current on her mortgage, but they wouldn't let her pay. Instead the bank moved to take the home, with a Sheriff's Sale set for Wednesday, June 13th.

Thanks to organizing by Nick and other Occupy Homes MN activists, OccupyOurHomes.org (which I help run), and countless supporters around the country, Citibank has come to the table and found a solution for Colleen and Nick, stopping the sale.

An official with CitiMortgage’s Executive Response Unit contacted the Espinosa family with news that Citibank had approved a loan modification that would keep the family in their home and reduce their payments by one-third on a 7.5 year payment plan. The dramatic news came less than 24 hours before the house was to be sold at auction on Wednesday, June 13.

“I’m so relieved that my family’s home of 16 years will not be on the auction block tomorrow,” said Colleen McKee Espinosa, a nurse and single mother who received widespread support after she pledged not to leave her home without a good faith negotiation. “We are grateful that Citibank has decided to accept my payments, and we look forward to signing the final paperwork.”
...
“I am deeply grateful to everyone from across the country who stood with our family as we fought our foreclosure,” said Nick Espinosa, Colleen’s son, and an organizer with Occupy Homes MN. “I’m inspired by the outpouring of community support, and it renews my commitment to stand with other families who are struggling to stay in their homes.”

This is a tremendous victory for Nick and Colleen and their community, as well as the entire Occupy Our Homes movement. But how did it happen and what should we take away from it?

Colleen's choice to fight back was critical to victory. She decided to share her story and talk to her neighbors, Occupiers, and community organizers about how she could put pressure on Citibank to make a deal. Banks aren't showing themselves willing to magically reduce homeowners' principal out of the goodness of their hearts (let alone for the financial benefit of their investors). But homeowners who are standing up and saying that they are not ashamed to be fighting back are finding that they are can get solutions from the banks.

The banks want homeowners to be ashamed about being in foreclosure. They want us to keep our mouths shut, except to open wide while we take the bitter medicine of losing our homes. But Colleen's story shows, as is so often the case, it's not the homeowners fault for being in foreclosure.

When the bank refuses to take your money, it's obvious that it's not your fault.

When the bank defrauds you and sells you something other than what you were told you were getting, it's not your fault.

When the business you work for goes under and you lose your job in an economy that Wall Street broke, it's not your fault for coming to foreclosure.

When your government job is eliminated as part of austerity pushed by financial elites to, again, try to repair the economy that they broke, it's not your fault when you get a foreclosure notice. Banks demand that homeowners feel shame for situations created entirely from bank behavior.

As McKee Espinosa says, "If anyone should be ashamed, it’s the banks for tearing apart our communities after we bailed them out with our tax dollars. When we stand together we can win, and I believe thousands more will.”

People like Colleen are showing us all that when homeowners fight back against the banks, they can win. While servicers aren't rushing to make deals to keep families in their homes and keep chasing profits through foreclosures, when communities organize to help a family stay in their home, the banks are coming to the negotiating table.

The banks have destroyed so much of our economy. Over 7 millions homes have been foreclosed on and at least that many more are likely to happen over the next three to four years. A new study by the Federal Reserve (pdf link) says that median net worth fell 38.8% between 2007-2010, largely driven by a losses in housing.

Policy makers, regulators, and politicians have failed to either pursue legal accountability for bank crimes relating to the housing crisis, or put in place programs to aid homeowners in crisis. In the absence of meaningful law enforcement and aid solutions, it is up to communities to rally together to fight off foreclosures, as Minneapolis rallied around Colleen and Nick.

Community pressure around brave homeowners like Colleen is producing solutions that are keeping families in their homes. It is forcing banks to behave with a shred of decency and humility. Indeed, it is the hope of the Occupy Our Homes movement that by forcing banks to change what their doing with foreclosures one case at a time, we can build up enough pressure to force banks to change their foreclosure mitigation policies nationally, so all homeowners can benefit.

This is going to be a long fight, but Colleen and Nick are proof that homeowners can beat big Wall Street banks, if they stand up and organize in their communities and wield their power for change. Find out more at OccupyOurHomes.org or OccupyHomesMN.org. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Impromptu subway dance party in Toronto

It's not entirely clear to me what these are. Whether they're flash mobs, or just a few individuals getting up and dancing (rather than the entire car). It's almost more interesting to watch it not as a flash mob - to see just a few people dancing, and watching the rest of the people in the subway car trying to figure out what's going on. More on these various flash mob type things here. Read the rest of this post...

Donate a kidney, kiss insurance goodbye

Not in all cases, but as the NYT notes, it's happened repeatedly.

Linda Bramblett, a 53-year-old self-employed swim instructor from Great Falls, Va., was denied health insurance in 2010 after telling her prospective insurer that she was planning to donate a kidney to her younger brother. She was in good health and had already been approved for surgery, and went ahead with the donation in December 2010, she said.

Susan Galbreath, a 42-year-old from New Boston, Mich., who is on dialysis, said a friend was going to donate a kidney to her but changed her mind after a conversation with an official from her insurance company, who said her future coverage would be determined on a “claim by claim” basis.

Best health care in the world. If you can get it. Read the rest of this post...

Manpower survey: US employers to add jobs in Q3

While potentially encouraging, most people are in the "I'll believe it when I see it" phase after years of employment problems and promises of political fixes. The stimulus did work though nothing else has helped employment. Maybe there really is a hiring spike coming in Q3 but like others, I'll believe it when I see it.

More from Bloomberg on the new survey:

Manpower Inc. (MAN)’s employment index for the period from July through September climbed to 11 percent, the highest reading in four years, from 10 percent in the second quarter, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based, staffing company reported. The measure was at 8 percent a year earlier.

For the first time since 2008, employers held positive outlooks on hiring in consecutive quarters in all four regions of the country and in all industries. The figures may ease concern that the job market is faltering after Labor Department data showed employment rose in May at the slowest pace in a year.

“We’ve been climbing out of this slowly,” Manpower Chief Executive Officer Jeff Joerres said in an interview. “It’s nothing fantastic, but it’s a hand-over-hand rappelling up the hill.”

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Median family net worth drops almost 40%, to level of early 1990s

This isn't good, and it isn't good for folks to know how many are suffering along with them. It's one thing to think your own self is sunken down; it's another to think the sinkage is national.

Chris in Paris noted this earlier via Bloomberg, but I want to add an exclamation point and some bits from the New York Times. As David Atkins says at Digby's digs, "Someone is going to take the blame for this."

The Times (h/t Natasha Chart; my emphasis and paragraphing abuses):

The recent economic crisis left the median American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve said Monday.

A hypothetical family richer than half the nation’s families and poorer than the other half had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, compared with $126,400 in 2007, the Fed said.

The crash of housing prices directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss.

Families’ income also continued to decline, a trend that predated the crisis but accelerated over the same period. Median family income fell to $45,800 in 2010 from $49,600 in 2007. All figures were adjusted for inflation.

If you do the math on the net worth numbers, you get a drop to 61%. That's a thud in anyone's ballpark.

The source of all this data is a big every-three-years Fed study:

The new data comes from the Fed’s much-anticipated release on Monday of its Survey of Consumer Finances, a report issued every three years that is one of the broadest and deepest sources of information about the financial health of American families. ... The Fed found that middle-class families had sustained the largest percentage losses in both wealth and income during the crisis, limiting their ability and willingness to spend.

The article has other interesting bits, including the fact that consumer spending is "surprisingly resilient." Also not good, in my view, since it implies a slowing of debt repayment — though Krugman would applaud the systemic benefits of continued demand in a demand-driven recession.

Who will be tagged as the perp? The Republicans, who want every inch of this suffering to deepen and continue, hope the president will be made to pay.

But couple this data with ... (do you think I'm going to mention Our Betters?) ... the results from Wisconsin.

My fear is that we're going to slice each other to ribbons over this, making the real problem (that no one but Money has money) very much worse.

Wisconsin — what were you thinking? (Sadly, I think I know.)

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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If JPMorgan is too big to manage, it is too big to fail

As Congress prepares for the latest complete waste of time but made for TV news clip event with Jamie Dimon, Bloomberg has a great read on the world of Jamie Dimon and how his own actions are at the center of the problem. What jumps out is the hard reality that the JPMorgan empire is simply too big to manage.

We can debate whether or not Dimon was giving a free pass to the CIO who took extensive gambles and lost, but the problem is the enormous size of JPMorgan. We let the pressure slip on demanding that the mega banks be broken up but now is an ideal time to restart that demand.

There are new concerns about US banks being under funded for Basel III and we really don't yet know how much expose the US banks (including the Spanish banks that now operate in the US) have with the Europe crisis. All of this points to another round of concern about the banking system and whether it will need another intervention.

We are four years into this banking crisis yet we've made too little progress. This needs to change. More on the JPMorgan problems via Bloomberg:

Dimon’s actions contrast with his reputation as a risk- averse manager who demands regular and exhaustive reviews of every corner of the bank. While Dimon has said he didn’t know how dangerous bets inside the CIO had become, the loss on those trades calls into question whether anyone can manage a financial empire as vast as JPMorgan, which became the biggest U.S. lender last year and now has more than $2.3 trillion in assets, larger than the economies of Brazil or the U.K.

“These institutions are too big to manage because even the bank that was considered to be the best-managed turns out to have had a significant glitch,” said Gary Stern, a former president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and co-author of the 2004 book “Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts.”

Shouldn't we also be questioning the sanity of anyone who promotes the "Jamie Dimon had a reputation for being risk averse" now that we see this? It makes about as much sense as "George Bush, the CEO president" who happened to drive every company he touched into the ground followed by the same for the US. Let's all admit that Jamie Dimon was great at PR spin to make people believe he was risk averse when in fact he really was just another Wall Street gambler. Read the rest of this post...

Blunt video song parody: "Citizens United is Democracy's Castration"

Oy! Another Blunt video, this time a song parody.

I'm going to send you over to The Political Carnival (dot net) to listen, but trust me, it's hilarious. There's a real art to writing lyrics that work. It's especially tough to get funny rhymes that aren't all half-rhymes. (A half-rhyme: home / clone.)

English is considered a rhyme-poor language, and that's certainly true relative to, say, Italian. But once you get to half-rhymes, the world opens up. Needless to say, Shakespeare had little (though some) use for half-rhymes.

That aside, the lyrics are a hoot, and the performances are better than that.

A taste of the writing (the music is "Supercalifragilistic" from Mary Poppins):

The highest court in all the land
    decides what’s wrong or right.
It’s composed of different folks,
    but mostly old and white.
Nine supposed wise and learned
    judges make the calls
Including one decision where
    the (bleep) has hit the wall.

Oy!

Thanks to the Supreme Court we have
    Citizens United.
How ironic is it that we
    ended up divided?
Corporations, superPACs could
    not be more delighted!
Any way to get five of those
    justices indicted?

By the way, there's a nice set of rhymes on — shrinkage (yes) / inkage / drinkage / brinkage. As regular readers know, the suffix –age is one of my favorites; I have been known to apply it in tweakage situations.

Enjoy: "Citizens United is Democracy's Castration" is brought to you by the Blunt Video Players.

Yours in good fun,

GP

To follow or send linkage (heh): @Gaius_Publius
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The Fox News-ification of American newspapers has begun

For all of its foibles, the American media of the past several decades has been arguably one of the best, collectively, in the world.

I've done a lot of traveling.  And most countries have newspapers that follow the Fox News model - i.e., in bed with one political party (or union, in some places) and the news follows accordingly.  And for all the excuses that Fox apologists make about the difference between Fox's "news" and "commentary," spare us.  Fox lives to support the GOP, period.

While biased media is the norm in much of Europe, it's not in America (it was, once upon a time, but not for a long while now).  Other than Fox, our media had its foibles, but it was pretty good.  But now, per the NYT, the robber barons are back and the Republicans are spreading the Fox plague across the land, starting in San Diego.

Republicans learned long ago that they win more easily when they lie.  And the biggest impediment to a GOP lie is a fair and balanced media.  And rather than play the refs, like folks on the left do, the GOP figured they'd simply make their own media to replace the real one.  Get rid of the fact checkers and you can get rid of the facts.

But even by GOP standards, it's pretty sleazy what's happening in San Diego.  The local paper, bought by a conservative activist, now investigates government entities that don't do what the paper management wants.  It's the kind of thing you hear about in Europe, and particularly Russia (or the Third World), but now we have it in America too (like we used to a long time ago).

Well, the Republicans have been saying for a while that they wanted to go back to the traditional ways of doing things.  Apparently, they included corruption in that mix.

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Spanish bailout leaves market nervous

When many wonder if the latest bailout will actually work, there's a problem. When the bailout of one country leads everyone to start looking at the next state bailout, there's a really big problem. Guess where we are now?

A bailout of up to €100bn for Spain's ailing banks failed to calm nerves about the future of the euro on Monday amid confusion over the plan's details and worries that Greek voters might choose to abandon the single currency.

The hurried bailout announcement after an emergency video conference of eurozone finance ministers at the weekend was meant to ease pressure on Spain and other troubled European economies ahead of Sunday's elections in Greece.

But Spain's borrowing costs rose on Monday, nudging closer to levels that are considered unsustainable and dragging Italy towards the danger zone. Europe's stock markets fell slightly, despite an early bounce, the FTSE 100 in London finishing down 0.05%.

The banks continue to drag down the global economy and not so surprisingly, they continue to get away with financial weapons of mass destruction.

Spanish banks went on global expansion missions in recent years including in the US. Santander and BBVA are based in Spain so US regulators need to confirm what the impact will be with this crisis. Maybe they're fine, but there's a strong possibility that this crisis could impact US banks. Read the rest of this post...

Fed chairman defends Jamie Dimon on board of NY Fed

Just in case anyone needs yet another example of what's wrhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifong with the financial system, here you go. This cozy relationship that is managing the banking system has proven itself to be a failure year after year. We don't need a social club running the banks but that's what we have today.

Let me ask the question again: why is Jamie Dimon still on the board at the Federal Reserve?

Lee Bollinger, chairman of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, defended Dimon on Monday ahead of a Congressional appearance on Wednesday where he will be grilled over the bank's recent $2bn plus trading loss and his role on the New York regulator.

"I do not think he should step down," Bollinger said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. He said critics attacking the Fed have a "false understanding" of how it works, and that it is "foolish" to say Dimon's presence on the New York Fed board creates an appearance of a conflict as the law requires bankers to serve on such boards.

But Simon Johnson, professor of global economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, dismissed Bollinger's comments and said Dimon should step down immediately. "I can tell you I don't have a false understanding of how it works," he said.

Dimon is there because he can be there for as long as he likes. The ruling class really doesn't care what the 99% thinks and they're happy to rub it in our nose every day. Read the rest of this post...

Norquist upset with Jeb Bush for saying Reagan too moderate for today's GOP

Ronald Reagan was elected president over thirty years ago.  Anyone trying to fix America's problems of 2012 with the solutions of 1981 is insane (it's a bit like going to your doctor and him telling you you don't need to get a physical, he can just look at your blood tests from 1981).

But insanity rules the GOP.  They were never one for substance.  Much better to protect the flag itself (from burning, for example) than what the flag stands for.  Same goes for the Constitution.  That Second Amendment is all fine and dandy, but the rest of the Constitution (except maybe the "takings" clause") was merely a suggestion.

It's the same approach the GOP takes to issues today.  Whatever ails us, the solution is always tax cuts and increased defense spending (with a little anti-gay anti-abortion saber-rattling thrown in for good effect).  The Republicans just don't seem to have any actual answers to anything.  And at some point, "let the market do its magic" doesn't really cut it when the market almost sent us into another Great Depression.

Government can and does do good.  Guaranteeing student loans and mortgages and bank accounts come to mind.  Roads.  Medicare and Medicaid.  The FAA ensuring planes don't collide.  Social Security (costly but necessary).  And World World II wasn't so bad either.  Obviously government does a lot more worthwhile things, but you'd never hear that from a Republican.  If it doesn't involve invading a foreign country, the Republicans prefer to bash federal employees and government, and in the case of Mitt Romney, even diss cops and firemen and teachers.

So Jeb Bush is right.  Ronald Reagan is too moderate for today's GOP.  But the larger message from Bush, whether intended or not, is that, just like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Ronald Reagan is dead.  The Republicans need to deal with his death and get over it (especially now that they have a nominee who doesn't even like Reagan).

Reagan's recipes for what ail us are stale and out of date.  The Republican party needs to stop mourning a guy who hasn't been in power for nearly 25 years, and start looking to their and the country's future. Read the rest of this post...