Government Got What It Asked for in Housing Bust

By Caroline Baum / Bloomberg

In its rush to hold hearings, assign blame and seek redress for the collapse of the housing market, the U.S. Congress has looked every which way but inward.

No wonder. Homeownership-for-all has been a goal of policy for so long lawmakers have forgotten the role they played in the current spate of ``no-doc'' loans gone bad.

From legislation to root out discrimination in mortgage lending, to the resultant relaxation of lending standards, to the tax-advantaged status of housing, ``the aggressive pursuit of homeownership as a benchmark for success is at the root of the problems we're seeing today,'' says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Reasonable people can disagree over the extent to which the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, designed to eliminate the practice of ``redlining'' minority neighborhoods and denying those residents credit, contributed to today's rising default and foreclosure rates among subprime borrowers. But most agree that government policy played some role.

The CRA was designed to ``encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate,'' according to its Web site.

Banks would probably say ``encourage'' understates the thrust of the law. Any bank interested in expanding through mergers and acquisitions had to earn enough points from minority lending to get regulatory approval, says Bob Litan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

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Molten Steel Flowed Under Ground Zero for Months After 9/11

By George Washington's Blog

In response to the numerous reports of molten metal under ground zero, defenders of the official version of 9/11 have tried to argue that it was not steel, but some other kind of metal with a lower melting point.

Well, here are what top experts who eyewitnessed the molten metal say:

• The structural engineer responsible for the design of the WTC, described fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks (page 3)

• A retired professor of physics and atmospheric science said "in mid-October when they would pull out a steel beam, the lower part would be glowing dull red, which indicates a temperature on the order of 500 to 600 °C. And we know that people were turning over pieces of concrete in December that would flash into fire--which requires about 300 °C. So the surface of the pile cooled rather rapidly, but the bulk of the pile stayed hot all the way to December"

• The head of a team of scientists studying the potential health effects of 9/11, reported, "Fires are still actively burning and the smoke is very intense. In some pockets now being uncovered, they are finding molten steel"

• Hazardous materials experts also stated that, six weeks after 9/11, "There are pieces of steel being pulled out [from as far as six stories underground] that are still cherry red" and "the blaze is so 'far beyond a normal fire' that it is nearly impossible to draw conclusions about it based on other fires"

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Reuters: OPEC President Sees $200 Oil Possible

Also see: $200 Dollar a Barrel Oil Is Bilderberg Plan To Destroy Middle Class!!!

OPEC President Chakib Khelil does not rule out oil prices reaching $200 a barrel, even though supply is adequate, because the market is driven by the dollar's slide, Algerian government newspaper El Moudjahid reported on Monday.

"Questioned about a possible rise which would go to $200, the minister did not rule out this eventuality, explaining that this rise is indexed from now on to the fall in the dollar or to the rise in the dollar," El Moudjahid reported.

"In terms of fundamentals, stocks are high, demand is easing, supply is satisfactory. Therefore normally, without geo-political problems and the fall of the dollar, the prices of oil would not be at this level," he was quoted as saying.

Khelil, a former World Bank official, is also Algeria's Minister of Energy and Mines.

He added: "The prices are high due to the fact of the recession in the United Sattes and the economic crisis which has touched several countries, a situation which has an effect on the devaluation of the dollar, and therefore each time the dollar falls one percent, the price of the barrel rises by $4, and of course vice versa," he was quoted as saying in brief remarks to journalists on Sunday.

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FDA Allowed Testing of Artificial Blood Despite Risk of Death!!

A new analysis concludes that the Food and Drug Administration approved experiments with artificial blood substitutes even after studies showed that the controversial products posed a clear risk of causing heart attacks and death.

The review of combined data from more than 3,711 patients who participated in 16 studies testing five different types of artificial blood, released today, found the products nearly tripled the risk for heart attacks and boosted the chances of dying by 30 percent.

Based on the findings, the researchers questioned why the FDA allowed additional testing of the products to go forward and why the agency is considering letting yet another study proceed.

"It's hard to understand," said Charles Natanson, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who led the analysis, which was released early by the Journal of the American Medical Association so the data could be presented at an FDA meeting on the subject. "They already had data that these products could cause heart attacks and evidence that they could kill."

An FDA official defended the agency, saying it had carefully weighed the risks and benefits of each study individually and had convened this week's two-day meeting to address the very concerns raised by the analysis.

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Democrats Cave In On Iraq War Funding

House Democratic leaders are putting together the largest Iraq war spending bill yet, a measure that is expected to fund the war through the end of the Bush presidency and for nearly six months into the next president's term.

The bill, which could be unveiled as early as this week, signals that Democrats are resigned to the fact they can't change course in Iraq in the final months of President Bush's term. Instead, the party is pinning its hopes of ending the war on winning the White House in November.

Bay Area lawmakers, who represent perhaps the most anti-war part of the country, acknowledge the bill will anger many voters back home.

"It's going to be a tough sell to convince people in my district that funding the war for six months into the new president's term is the way to end the war," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, a leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus who plans to oppose the funding. "It sounds like we are paying for something we don't want."

The bill is expected to provide $108 billion that the White House has requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lawmakers who are drafting it say it also will include a so-called bridge fund of $70 billion to give the new president several months of breathing room before having to ask Congress for more money.

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Rural Residents Feel the Push from Trans-Texas Corridor

Minutes south of Interstate 10 and Sealy, the pastures along FM 1458 are their own silent world in the morning. Mists lift to reveal black cattle, brown and spotted horses, snow-white egrets underfoot in lush green grass.

Then a concrete mixer comes churning down the blacktop.

Just up the road is a small subdivision. More are sure to come as city dwellers, including weekenders and retirees, move out in search of a quieter, simpler life — and relief from city traffic.

Although the gradual influx may bring greater changes in the long run, what disturbs residents most is the planned Interstate 69/Trans-Texas Corridor, or I-69/TTC for short.

If it is built, the corridor likely will start out as a four-lane divided tollway. Eventually, the Texas Department of Transportation could expand it to 1,200 feet in places, with toll lanes for cars and trucks; tracks for freight and passenger trains; and space for pipelines, power lines and communications.

The exact route has yet to be determined. TxDOT has recommended the route come from a study corridor, ranging from a quarter-mile to four miles wide, between Texarkana and Mexico. Most of the route will stay close to U.S. 59, the agency says, but to speed traffic around Houston, it veers through rural land west of the city.

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U.S. Government Eavesdropping On Terror Suspects Attorney-Client Phone Calls and E-Mail

Thomas Nelson, an Oregon lawyer, has lived in a state of perpetual jet lag for the last two years. Every few weeks, he boards a plane in Portland and flies off to the Middle East to meet with a high-profile Saudi client who cannot enter the United States because he faces terrorist-financing charges here.

Nelson says he does not dare to phone his Saudi client or send him e-mails out of what many prominent criminal defense lawyers here say is a well-founded - and growing - fear that all of their attorney-client contacts are being monitored by the government.

Because he is constantly shifting time zones to see his client face-to-face, "I just don't sleep normally anymore," Nelson said. "But I don't have a choice. It's very clear to me that anything I say to my client or to other lawyers in this case is being recorded."

All around the United States, and especially in Oregon, it seems, lawyers who represent suspects in terrorism-related investigations complain that their ability to do their jobs is being hindered by the suspicion that the government is listening in, using eavesdropping authority it obtained - or granted itself - after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Steven Wax, a Portland lawyer who is also involved in several terrorism cases, says he now tells clients to assume that everything they say to him is being secretly monitored by the government. Wax says he now "self-censors" his e-mails, even to other lawyers and friends. The situation, he says, has elements of "Kafka and Alice in Wonderland."

The Justice Department does not deny that the government has sometimes monitored attorney-client phone calls and e-mail exchanges as part of its investigations of terrorist suspects in the United States and overseas since the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Israeli Blockade Stalls Palestinian Economy

Billions of dollars in aid pledged to the Palestinians to bolster peace talks with Israel are having a muted effect because of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, the World Bank said Sunday.

The lending agency told donor nations in a report that per capita income in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 2008 would be static, if not lower, despite the $7.7 billion in aid pledged to the Palestinians in December.

The World Bank said modest gains in economic growth in the occupied West Bank, where the government of the Western-backed president, Mahmoud Abbas, holds sway, were not sufficient to offset the "severe contraction" seen in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Israel tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip after the Islamist group's took control in June from more secular Fatah forces loyal to Abbas.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, said that although the Palestinian Authority "has moved ahead with its economic reforms, albeit slowly, there has been little progress on relaxing movement and access constraints."

The World Bank said the impact of these restrictions, including hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank, "cannot be overestimated."

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The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy: Why the U.S. Has Gone Broke

By Chalmers Johnson

The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room" -- the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to the U.S. debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relation to the national security of the U.S. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

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Nobel Prize Winner: Greenspan, Bush to Blame for U.S. Crisis

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the government of President George W. Bush were to blame for the U.S. financial crisis, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz said in a magazine interview.

"This man (Greenspan) has unfortunately made a lot of mistakes," said former World Bank chief economist Stiglitz, according to a preview of the interview to be published on Monday in profil magazine.

"His first one was to support all the tax cuts which were introduced under Bush -- they didn't stimulate the economy very much ... This task was then transferred more towards monetary policy, though then (Greenspan) created a flood of credits with low interest rates," Stiglitz was quoted as saying.

Earlier in April, Greenspan said in an interview with CNBC television that the U.S. economy was in recession and defended his chairmanship of the U.S. central bank against charges that his policy missteps had laid the groundwork for the crisis.

He said decisions during his charge had been rationally constructed based on evidence at the time.

Stiglitz said Bush's government was also to blame.

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Few States Let Overseas Troops Vote By E-mail

U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan can speak to their families by Web camera and fight insurgents using sophisticated electronic warfare. Yet when it comes to voting, most troops are stuck in the past.

Communities in 13 states will send overseas troops presidential election ballots by e-mail this year, and districts in at least seven states will also let them return completed ballots over the Internet, according to data compiled by the Associated Press and the Overseas Vote Foundation.

That still leaves tens of thousands of service members in far-flung military bases struggling to meet voting deadlines and relying largely on regular mail to get ballots and cast votes — often at the last minute because of delays in ballot preparations in some states.

Adding an electronic boost to the process would ease those problems, but it raises security and privacy concerns.

Pentagon officials have been urging more states to move into the electronic age before November, a move that could help reverse recent trends in which thousands of military members asked for ballots but either didn't vote or had their ballots rejected for flaws.

The push comes more than seven years after problems with overseas military voting set off an uproar in President Bush's narrow 2000 victory.

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Why would an Al-Qaeda member have to be tortured about 9/11?

By Alicia Hope / GangsterGovernment

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to stop terrorist attacks can legally use torture tactics that would otherwise be prohibited by our own constitution and international law. The Justice Department is trying to lay out an argument that makes torture legal!

Would Al-Qaeda members need to be tortured about 9/11? Wouldn't they readily admit involvement in the most successful attack on U.S soil since Pearl Harbor? After all, it would have been their proudest moment and a great recruiting tool. A strike against the U.S., to an Al-Qaeda member, would have been tantamount to reaching Heaven without the inconvenience of dying first. It would have been a get out of jail free card that would have allowed them to go straight to the Lord of the Worlds without detouring.

Any Al-Qaeda member would have been proud to have been a part of the 9/11 attacks! The CIA wouldn't need to torture members to get them to admit to involvement. Let's not forget, UBL denied involvement three times after the event. Torture is a good way to create culprits! Torture is a good way to get people to say things that are not true in order to stop the pain! That's why the U.S. government wants these cases handled by a military tribunal and not a jury!!

Murat Kurnaz was held for 5 years without proper charge or trial. After intensive campaigning by his friends, family and Amnesty International members all over the world, he was finally released. He was electrocuted while hanging from his arms while inside an airplane hanger. All the while, the ignorant interrogators were trying to get him to admit to knowing Muhammad Atta! Why wasn't General Mahmoud Ahmad (head of the ISI) tortured since he wired 100,000 dollars to Atta? And why was Ahmad at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairman of the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the morning of 9/11?

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Internal Emails Show 12,000 Attempted Suicides Per Year by U.S. Troops

The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who have attempted suicide, Sen. Patty Murray said Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year while the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.

"The suicide rate is a red alarm bell to all of us," the Washington Democrat said, adding that the VA's mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans even as the department seeks to downplay the situation. "We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get accurate information we can't be there to do our jobs."

Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield apologized during a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing, telling Murray and other senators he did not think there was any deliberate attempt to mislead Congress or the public.

But Murray remained skeptical, saying the VA has shown a pattern of misleading Congress when it comes to the increasing number of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan seeking help and putting a strain on DOD and VA facilities and programs.

Keep reading here.

Read HuffPost's Rachel Sklar on the "hidden epidemic" of military suicides.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/23/va-lying-about-number-of_n_98307.html

Judicial Watch Calls on FEC to Investigate McCain

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it filed a formal complaint, dated April 22, 2008, with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) related to a fundraising luncheon held at London’s Spencer House to benefit Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign.  The venue for the event was apparently donated to the campaign by foreign nationals, in violation of federal campaign finance laws.

Recent news reports suggest that Sen. John McCain and John McCain for President may have accepted an in-kind contribution from foreign nationals Lord Rothschild OM GBE and the Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild of Great Britain in contravention of federal election laws,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton wrote in a complaint letter dated April 22, 2008.  “On behalf of Judicial Watch and its supporters, I hereby request that the FEC investigate the matter.”

The McCain fundraiser was held on March 20, 2008 at London’s Spencer House, billed as “London’s most magnificent 18th century private palace.”  The McCain campaign distributed an invitation indicating that the site for the luncheon had been provided “by kind permission of Lord Rothschild, OM GBE and the Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild,” who are both foreign nationals.  In statements to the press, the McCain campaign referred to the luncheon as a “fundraiser.”

While it is, as yet, unclear how much money was raised during the luncheon, had the venue not been donated to the McCain campaign, the net profit from the event would have been significantly reduced.  The donation of the venue, therefore, represents an illegal in-kind campaign contribution.

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Maryland Loses Track of State ID Cards!!

Maryland has lost track of an unknown number of identification cards granting bearers unrestricted access to secure government buildings and courthouses across the state, officials said yesterday.

The ID cards, issued to state employees, lobbyists, contractors and others, have also been issued without appropriate efforts to verify the identities of the applicants, according to a report by the Office of Legislative Audits.

"As a result, there was a lack of assurance that all state ID cards issued were proper," the audit found.

The audit also found that Department of General Services employees have been issuing the cards without review by a supervisor to make sure that applications were accompanied by proper documentation such as a driver's license.

State officials have also failed to recover identification cards — allowing bearers access to government buildings without passing through metal detectors and security checkpoints — from employees who are no longer working for the state.

Dave Humphrey, a spokesman for the Department of General Services, which operates a police force that protects state buildings, could not say yesterday how many identification cards are unaccounted for. Auditors estimated that 70,000 identification cards had been produced since 2005.

Mr. Humphrey declined to discuss whether the cards might compromise public safety at government facilities.

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Missing Evidence in the U.S. Presentation About Israeli Airstrike

Also see: U.S. green lighted Israeli air raid

The Bush administration this week asserted that an Israeli airstrike in Syria Sept. 6 destroyed a nuclear reactor being constructed with the assistance of North Korea.Intelligence officials said in briefings that they believed the reactor was weeks away from being operational. The intelligence community said it had "high confidence" that the target was a nuclear reactor designed for the production of plutonium, "medium confidence" that North Korea was involved, and "low confidence" that Syria had a related weapons program. A CIA video shown to reporters extensively used computer simulations to press the case against the reactor, while including a few still photos. None showed North Koreans at the site, although intelligence officials said they had visited. The full range of U.S. intelligence information on the site is unclear, but skeptics have pointed to several key uncertainties:

Bush Admin Caught Flat-Footed by Escalating Food Prices

The Bush administration and Congress have been caught flat-footed by rapidly escalating global food prices and are scrambling to respond to a crisis that they increasingly view as a threat to U.S. national security, according to government officials, congressional staffers and human rights experts.

The White House released $200 million in emergency wheat stores for developing countries last week, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the administration is planning "further steps to help ease the burden of rising food prices on the world's neediest people." Options include building more overseas storage facilities and roads to reduce food spoiling, and making the food crisis a top priority for the G-8 summit of industrialized nations in July, administration officials said.

Top Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing the White House to devote more money to emergency food aid -- up from $350 million to $550 million -- as part of a supplemental Iraq war budget package.

But administration officials and legislative aides acknowledge that they have only recently begun to focus on the severity of the problem, and humanitarian groups fear that assistance from the United States, which already supplies about half of the world's total food aid, may come too late to provide much benefit in the near term.

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Iraqis Accuse Blackwater of Shredding Documents!!!

Families of Iraqis who died in a shooting involving Blackwater Worldwide contractors accused the company Friday of shredding documents and destroying evidence.

Lawyers for the families made the accusations in court documents but identified the source of the information only as former employees. They said officials at the company's North Carolina compound shredded documents related to ongoing investigations sometime around March 18.

Company lawyers had no immediate comment Friday night, but they are quoted in court documents as saying Blackwater took appropriate steps to make sure documents were not destroyed.

Lawyers for the Iraqis do not say what investigation the documents relate to. Blackwater, a major security contractor in Iraq, is under scrutiny in several matters.

Most notably, its guards are under investigation for a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. There is no indication the Justice Department is investigating shredding as part of that case.

Family members are already suing the company for alleged wrongful death in connection with the September shooting, and they asked a judge Friday to let them add document destruction to that lawsuit.

The families also say Blackwater destroyed evidence by repainting and repairing its trucks after the shooting. The company has said the work was done to protect the guards from retribution and was approved by the State Department.

U.S. Justice Department Talks With Wachovia About Deferred-Prosecution

Wachovia Corp. is one of several U.S. banks under federal investigation as part of a probe of alleged drug-money laundering by Mexican and Colombian money- transfer companies, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the probe.

The bank is talking with the U.S. Justice Department about a deferred-prosecution agreement that would require federal oversight of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company's compliance system, the Journal said.

``Wachovia is not currently nor has it in the past engaged in those discussions,'' Wachovia spokeswoman Christy Phillips- Brown told Bloomberg News in a telephone interview. ``Wachovia doesn't comment on the status or existence of investigations. The bank is committed to a strong-anti-money-laundering program.''

The remittance industry transmits more than $50 billion from the U.S. to Latin America annually, the Journal said. Most of the money involves wages being sent to relatives, although drug traffickers may use the system to move proceeds from their U.S. narcotics sales.