Subprime Mortgage Crisis

The subprime mortgage financial crisis, which has yet to be resolved, is the sharp rise in foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market that began in the United States in 2006 and became a global financial crisis in July 2007. Rising interest rates, increasing the monthly payments on newly popular adjustable rate mortgages, together with property value declines from the demise of the United States housing bubble, left many home owners unable or unwilling to meet financial commitments, and lenders without a means to recoup their losses. Many observers believe this has resulted in a severe credit crunch, threatening the solvency of a number of marginal private banks and other financial institutions. The sharp rise in foreclosures after the peak of the housing bubble caused several major subprime mortgage lenders, such as New Century Financial Corporation, to shut down or file for bankruptcy, with some accused of actively encouraging fraudulent income reporting on loan applications. This led to the collapse of stock prices for many in the subprime mortgage industry, and drops in stock prices of some large lenders like Countrywide Financial. This has been associated with declines in stock markets worldwide, several hedge funds becoming worthless, coordinated national bank interventions, contractions of retail profits, and bankruptcy of several mortgage lenders. Observers of the meltdown have cast blame widely. Some, like Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut, have highlighted the predatory lending practices of subprime lenders and the lack of effective government oversight. Others have charged mortgage brokers with steering borrowers to unaffordable loans even though lenders offered these borrowers programs that found them acceptable risks, appraisers with inflating housing values, and Wall Street investors with backing subprime mortgage securities without verifying the strength of the portfolios. Borrowers have also been criticized for over-stating their incomes on loan applications and entering into loan agreements they could not meet. Some subprime lending practices have also raised concerns about mortgage discrimination on the basis of race. The effects of the meltdown spread beyond housing and disrupted global financial markets (see financial contagion and systemic risk) as investors, largely deregulated foreign and domestic hedge funds, were forced to re-evaluate the risks they were taking and consumers lost the ability to finance further consumer spending, causing increased volatility in the fixed income, equity, and derivative markets. The impact on the economy of this American problem was also felt in Europe, where the European Central Bank tried to control the crisis by injecting over USD$ 205 billion in the European financial markets.

Global Warming

Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. This is a good thing because it keeps our planet habitable. However, by burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests we have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures are rising.

The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence.1 The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.

We’re already seeing changes. Glaciers are melting, plants and animals are being forced from their habitat, and the number of severe storms and droughts is increasing.

Diamond Crisis in Africa

Who hasn't heard of the slogan "A diamond lasts forever"? Diamonds have always occupied a very high status in the world of jewelry. Fueled by tradition and intense marketing campaigns, diamonds have achieved incomparable status. Starry eyed young men present gorgeous diamond rings to their girlfriends. Married couples exchange diamond studded jewelry over the years as symbols to their undying love. Celebrities and personalities don fabulous diamond jewelry whenever they go out in public. There is absolutely no doubt as to how valuable and sought after diamonds are. As with most things in life, there is always something bad mixed with the good. A diamond may be a woman's best friend but a diamond can also be the bane of some people's existence - and I am not talking about the man's pocket here. The term conflict diamond, or blood diamond as others call it, became quite well-known to the average person in 2002 when the James Bond movie "Die Another Day" was released. This contribution to the legendary James Bond saga revolved around the idea of smuggling conflict diamonds. So what is a conflict diamond? The UN formally defines a conflict diamond as a "diamond that originates from areas controlled by forces or factions opposed to legitimate and internationally recognized governments, and are used to fund military action in opposition to those governments, or in contravention of the decisions of the Security Council." In short, a conflict diamond is any diamond that is mined from an area in which there is war, or armed conflict. The idea is that diamonds are very much in demand and that they fetch such a high price in almost any market. If you mine diamonds and sell them to other countries - of which there is definitely no shortage - you can get a large amount of money for them. Where does the profit from these sales go? You guessed it - to finance wars and other forms of armed conflict in the affected areas. The manner of mining and selling conflict diamonds is usually done in secret. You can just imagine what the reaction of the (average) buyer would be if he learned that he was financing a war somewhere in Africa with his transaction. Thus, people involved in the conflict diamond business do not really advertise what they are doing. Although these activities have been going on for quite some time, it was only in 2000 that the international community formally recognized the gravity of the situation. In December of that year, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the role of rough diamonds in furthering the conflicts in specific areas in Africa. The General Assembly came up with a resolution aiming to severe the connection between the illegal sales of diamonds and wars in concerned areas. With this resolution in place, countries that buy diamonds from Africa became more aware of the illicit trade. International sanctions were then put in place. In addition to these sanctions, individual countries set up their own methods and processes to curb the practice of trading conflict diamonds. The idea is that if no one will buy, then no one will sell. People who take advantage of conflict diamonds would have no market and thus the practice would stop.
We all know however, that in the real world, things are never as simple as they usually seem to be.

Cost of War in Iraq (casualties & dollars)

The numbers truly speak for themselves. This is absolutely ridiculous. You may recall that you got rid of your loyal White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey back in 2002 after, among other sins, he claimed that a war in Iraq might cost as much as $200 billion. At the time, White House staffers sneered that Lindsey was being alarmist. Hardly. One commonly cited estimate of Iraq's cost, based on an August analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is $1 trillion, and that's probably on the low side. A report released last week by the Democratic staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee put the war's 2002-08 tab at $1.3 trillion.
But all these figures don't quite get at Iraq's real cost. Indeed, we usually don't even frame the question the right way. We'd do better to recognize what we've lost, rather than focusing only on what we've paid. We often think of cost simply in terms of dollars spent, but the real cost of a choice -- what economists call its "opportunity cost" -- consists of the forgone alternatives, of the things we could have had instead. For instance, the cost of seeing a movie is not just the dollars you plunked down for the ticket, but also the subtler cost of missing a dinner at home or a cocktail party at work. This idea sounds simple, but if applied consistently, it requires us to rethink and, yes, raise the costs of the Iraq war.
Set aside the question of what we could have accomplished at home with the energy and resources we've devoted to Iraq and concentrate just on national security. Here, the hidden cost of the war, above all, is that the United States has lost much of its ability to halt nuclear proliferation.

Mr. President, when the war started, I was convinced by your arguments that we had to stop Iraq's dictatorship from getting the bomb. No longer. Let's look at some of the opportunity costs the United States has incurred so far:

1. We still haven't secured our ports against nuclear terrorism. The

$1 trillion we've probably spent on the war could have funded the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security 28 times over.

2. The human toll of the war is dreadful: more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 28,000 wounded, plus more than 1,000 private contractors killed and many more injured. It's harder to know how many Iraqis have died; some estimates claim that the war has caused a million or more Iraqi deaths, and even if that's an overstatement, the toll is still very high. But it's not just the lives that are gone; we've also lost the contributions that these people would have made to their families and to humanity at large.

3. Another major hidden cost: Many of the wounded have severe brain injuries or other traumas and will never return to "normal" life. Furthermore, Washington will find it far harder to recruit and retain quality troops and National Guardsmen in the future.

4. Don't forget the small statistics, which are often the most striking. According to John Pike, the head of the research group GlobalSecurity.org, an estimated 250,000 bullets have been fired for every insurgent killed in Iraq. That's not just a waste of ammunition; it's also a reflection of how badly the country has been damaged and how indiscriminate some of the fighting has been. Or take another straw in the wind: The cost of a coffin in Baghdad has risen to $50-75, up from just $5-10 before the war, according to the Nation magazine.

American Jobs being Outsourced

part I

part II



While America has lost 1 million jobs since 2001, employers have been outsourcing hundreds of thousand of jobs to other countries in order to lower their costs. And they've moved millions more to low-cost contractors in the U.S. that provide services on the cheap by paying low wages and providing few or no benefits to employees. Not only is the Bush Administration not helping the workers and families devastated by these job losses, they think outsourcing is a "good thing" and "a plus for the economy." But workers, families, and communities who've felt the effects of outsourcing know better.

"It's really hurting the American people . . . . They are strip-mining society."

- Mark Olesen, former software engineer, Austin, TX

"My value as a human being was taken away from me. What is going to happen to all these people who are losing their jobs?"

- Jeraldean Evans, outsourced programmer, Oakland, CA

This is not about "us" versus "them." Workers in every country deserve jobs with good pay and benefits and safe working conditions. But the current outsourcing and offshoring trends in the U.S. are hollowing out companies and our economy. These trends are producing greater income disparity, declining opportunity, and growing insecurity for U.S. workers and their families.

Contaminated Imports from China

U.S. safety officials have recalled about 4.2 million Chinese-made Aqua Dots bead toys that contain a chemical that has caused some children to vomit and become comatose after swallowing them. Bindeez, which were named Australia's toy of the year, contain a chemical that converts into a "date rape" drug. Scientists have found the popular toy's coating contains a chemical that, once metabolized, converts into the toxic "date rape" drug GHB, or gamma-hydroxy butyrate, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Scott Wolfson told CNN. "GHB is this drug that in low doses actually causes euphoria," said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. "In higher doses, it can cause people to go into a coma. It can cause seizures. It can cause something known as hypotonia, where all your muscles just become very flaccid. "And it can cause people to become amnestic, ... which is why it became a date-rape drug," Gupta said. "So this is nasty stuff, and it appears that the chemical is actually converting into it in the body." The arts and craft beads, aimed at children 4 years and older, have been selling since April at major U.S. retail stores as "Aqua Dots" and in Australia under the name "Bindeez Beads."
CPSC spokeswoman Julie Vallese said anyone with Aqua Dots at home should immediately take the toy away from children and contact distributor Spin Master Ltd. to return for free replacement beads or a toy of equal value. The toy was named toy of the year in Australia and recently made Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s list of top 12 Christmas toys. Wal-Mart on Thursday listed Aqua Dots on its Web site as "out of stock online" and had removed them from its top toy list. Toronto-based Spin Master stopped shipping Aqua Dots and asked retailers to pull them off their shelves, where they had sold for $17 to $30. Melbourne-based Moose Enterprise Pty. Ltd. recalled Bindeez Beads on Tuesday after three children in Australia swallowed large quantities of the beads and were hospitalized. "I was so frightened because I thought she wasn't going to make it," Heather Lehane told CNN affiliate Network 7 of her 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who was sickened by the beads. In the United States, the Washington-based safety commission said it has received two reports detailing the severe effects of the digested beads. The CPSC said a boy nearly 2 years old "swallowed several dozen beads. He became dizzy and vomited several times before slipping into a comatose state." The toddler was hospitalized and has since fully recovered, the commission added. In the second incident, a child vomited, fell into a coma and was hospitalized for five days. It was not immediately clear whether the child had made a full recovery. Last month, U.S. government safety officials and retailers recalled at least 69,000 Chinese-made toys over concerns of excessive amounts of lead paint, which can cause lead poisoning. E-mail to a friend

Swastika Building on Navy Base in San Diego, CA

This is very real people!

Swastika found painted on Jewish professor's door

Police are investigating a third suspected hate crime at New York's Columbia University after a swastika was spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish faculty member on Wednesday. The university said in a statement that the swastika was spray-painted on the door of a Jewish faculty member at Teachers' College on Wednesday. Police said they were investigating the incident but declined further comment.

"We feel we've been targeted precisely because Teachers College is, and historically has been, a center for deep multicultural work," Susan Furhman, the president of Teachers College, said in a statement. Columbia's Teachers College, part of the university campus in upper Manhattan, houses the nation's oldest and largest graduate school of education. New York City is known for its racial and ethnic diversity, and the suspected hate crimes follow recent national attention and protests in Jena, Louisiana, where three nooses were found hanging from a tree at a high school there last year.

NATIONAL BLACKOUT

SYNDICATED RADIO HOST WARREN BALLENTINE CALLS FOR A NATIONAL BLACKOUT DAY!

Friday November 2, 2007 radio host Warren Ballentine is calling for all African Americans to not spend money as a symbol of defiance of all the injustices that are being allowed and accepted in America. The goal is for federal legislation concerning hate-crimes in America.

As African Americans we spend an estimated 715 billion dollars a year, and if we were to stop spending for one day that is 2 billion dollars that will not be in the system. However, we ask that you do not make a mad dash to the stores days prior or the days following. If the stores have a major increase in sales right before or right after the Blackout will not create the impact we need.