This is not “news” but should not be forgotten. Sub Prime Mortgages were profitable for those selling them. They sure were expensive for America.

The management there, would encourage the loan officers, the subprime loan officers, to go into Baltimore city and target the churches, the African American churches, to get a relationship going with the minister or the reverend at the church and try to get that person to schedule some sort of meeting. They would call it a “wealth-building seminar” to get the parishioners of the church to attend. And any loan that was funded by Wells Fargo, whether a purchase or a refinance, $350 would then be donated to the church. And so, that was the incentive for the church to want to have these seminars there.

But what would happen is the only loan officers that would attend these seminars were generally the subprime loan officers. And on these conference calls, at one point, somebody made a joke who happened to be a white loan officer and said, “Well, will I be able to go to these seminars?” And they were told right there on the conference call, unless you were of color, you could not attend these conferences, these wealth-building conferences. So it seemed me—Wells Fargo didn’t come right out and say this; this is just what I saw—is that they wanted the African American Wells Fargo loan officers to sell loans to the African American community.

By James Howard Kunstler
Author of “The Long Emergency”
on October 19, 2009 

Last paragraph:

The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d’etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans. I can’t say how much it reflects reality. Even if it is a result of sheer happenstance - the tragic evolution of an industrial economy into a financial finagling economy - the citizens will still experience it as a stealing of their future. Whatever else one might say about American culture, it is keenly attuned to a sense of heroes and villains. We take great pride in our ability to blow away the bad guys. And life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde observed. If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein! Woody is on his way….

LINK
Steven Shaviro has written a personal piece concerning the current “crisis” at Re-public. It is well worth reading.
Shaviro is a Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI

Excerpt:
Even now, when the crisis is fully upon us, it’s impossible to understand it, or to make coherent sense of it. For the collapse takes place invisibly, and in slow motion. You can’t really see it as it happens. The day after all the credit dried up, the world looked the same as it had the day before. Eventually, you notice that there have been small, incremental changes. Some businesses have closed; there are less cars out on the street; there have been a few more break-ins in my neighborhood. But the “trickle-down” nature of these disruptions is such that you cannot ever view the changes directly.

The crisis is a disaster, in the sense described by Maurice Blanchot: “the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” My house has not been changed in the time since the crisis hit. It is physically exactly the same as it was, and it is just as comfortable to live in. But it has nonetheless been impalpably transformed. It has gone from being a source of notional wealth to being a burdensome debt. Just a few years ago, the equity I held in it was greater than my yearly salary. But now, its market value is considerably less than the principal that I still owe the bank, according to the terms of my mortgage.

Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. I still have a well-paying job; and one that, as a tenured academic, I am unlikely to lose. I should be able to keep on paying my mortgage without defaulting — even though, strictly speaking, I am paying a considerable sum each month in return for a property value that no longer exists.The bank will continue to earn a profit from me — even as my own savings are negative, and still going down. Because of my employment situation, I won’t face the consequences of this deficit until I am forced to retire — something I hope I can hold off doing as long as possible.

buffleheadcabin:

Elizabeth Warren: “The Middle Class Is Under Terrific Assault” from an article in The Huffington Post

Can anyone say Robber Barrons?

Via; no sugar added

cromarama:

“In the film I show paintings that I love – Monet, Picasso, Francis Bacon. I need them. But we had to buy the rights to show them. Buy the rights to show something that you love. Can you believe that? In the time of the nouvelle vague you could just put images on the wall. Now they have agents like monsters. To show a Francis Bacon for less than 10 seconds, I think I paid €4,000.”

Agnés Varda, discussing her new documentary The Beaches of Agnès – The Guardian.

Symptoms of the basic sickness of our political economy, ownership run amok. Art has always been about appropriation and remixing. All the great artists know it and do it.

Nils Gilman: The Global Illicit Economy aka Deviant Globalization

Excellent video presentation (28 minutes) on how deviant (or black) globalization works and how its post-modern approach to commerce and social organization may represent our future. Covers Deviant Pharma, Deviant Medical, Deviant Software

.

Via: Shaviro:
Interesting thoughts and real world examples of the “Fair Use” environment, it is a miasma.

chriscavs:

soupsoup:

quisquis:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the Public Power Monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the Municipal Water Utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Atandards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local Police Department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

(copyandpastedfromreddit)

Thanx for the reality check.

Via: Threat Level
By David Kravets July 28, 2009

A jailbroken iPhone is a weapon of mass disruption, Apple claims.

The nation’s cellphone networks could suffer “potentially catastrophic” cyberattacks by iPhone-wielding hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their shiny wireless devices — that’s what Apple claims.

The Copyright Office is considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking, in which iPhone owners hack their devices to accept software that hasn’t been approved for distribution through the iPhone App Store. Apple made the claim in comments filed last week (.pdf) with the agency.

From Fondo Libre: Max Zeledon interviews Thomas Barnett

In a Fondo Libre interview, Thomas P.M. Barnett, a foreign policy consultant to U.S. leaders on national security issues discusses China, globalization, and why we shouldn’t fear a rising Chinese middle class. Barnett taught at the Naval War College, worked at the Department of Defense as the Assistant for Strategic Futures, and is now Senior Managing Director at Enterra Solutions. His research focus is the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world in the Post Cold War Era and 9/11 attacks. He is the author of Great Powers: America and the World after Bush, he writes a column for Esquire, and maintains a fascinating blog you should definitely read.