Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Arizona's 'Bull' Connor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/19/sheriff-joe-arpaio-arizona-bull-connor

With his racial-profiling policing, Maricopa County's sheriff and his thugs in badges recall the civil rights violators of the 1960s

By Peter Morales, guardian.co.uk

Sheriff Joe Arpaio faces legal action, yet again, on charges that he has violated the rights of Latino citizens in Maricopa County, Arizona. Already, the county has paid out something like $50m in damages over the years. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) are bringing suit in federal court on behalf of several plaintiffs.

Poor Joe has become something of a caricature of late. He is a symbol of mean-spiritedness, cruelty and racism. He proudly promotes his actions designed simply to humiliate prisoners. The US department of justice has accumulated a mountain of evidence against him, yet drags its legal feet while the racial profiling and arrests continue.

Less than a month ago, I, along with several other religious leaders, were treated to a tour of Arpaio's infamous "Tent City" jail. There, prisoners are kept in tents that reach 130F heat in the Arizona summer.

The other religious leaders, including the Rev Geoffrey Black, president of the United Church of Christ and the Rev Dr William Schulz, president of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (and former president of Amnesty International), and I were appalled. The Maricopa sheriff's department has become a collection of thugs with badges.

Several thousand of us – Unitarian Universalists from across the country working mano en mano with local activists and religious leaders – held a vigil outside Tent City last month. It was profoundly moving to see a sea of thousands of people wearing their "Standing on the Side of Love" T-shirts, waving candles and singing in protest. They are taking that determination to work for justice and compassion across the country.

What is happening in Maricopa County must be seen to be believed. I am ashamed that this is happening in my country, that the people of Maricopa County continue to re-elect this tyrant, and that the legal system of my country does little more than scold like an inept parent. 

Two years ago, I was arrested along with more than 20 fellow ministers from across the country and a number of local activists. We were protesting Arpaio's "sweeps" in defiance of the ruling of a federal judge. A year ago, I stood trial for that act of civil disobedience. During that trial, I saw deputies of the Arpaio's perjure themselves so blatantly (and artlessly) that the judge disregarded their testimony. 

While I applaud the courage of MALDEF and the ACLU, and wish them every success, I am more convinced than ever that the fundamental issues before us are not legal. Arpaio continues to break the law with impunity not because there is a lack of conclusive evidence. Arpaio continues unchecked because some people are afraid and because decent people who know better are timid. This is what always occurs when tyrants rule.

What is truly frightening is that the fear and racism that feeds Arpaio is not limited to Maricopa County, or to Arizona. Arpaio is a hero to the extreme right. Arizona's law is being copied elsewhere.

No American my age can watch what is happening in Arizona and not have flashbacks to Alabama and Mississippi of the 1960s and law enforcement officials like the infamous "Bull" Connor. I would think no European can see sweeps and racial profiling and not recall images of the 1930s.

No one should be treated the way Arpaio treats people. No one.

I hope this lawsuit is successful. More importantly, I pray that people will turn away from fear and demagogues. I pray that we will see our common humanity and embrace our common future.

Foreclosure crisis hits older Americans hard

JOSH LEDERMAN, Associated Press

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Foreclosure-crisis-hits-older-Americans-hard-3717444.php

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 1.5 million older Americans already have lost their homes, with millions more at risk as the national housing crisis takes its toll on those who are among the worst positioned to weather the storm, a new AARP report says.

Older African Americans and Hispanics are the hardest hit.

"The Great Recession has been brutal for many older Americans," said Debra Whitman, AARP's policy chief. "This shows that home ownership doesn't guarantee financial security later in life."

Even working two jobs hasn't been enough to allow Jewel Lewis-Hall, 57, to make her monthly mortgage payments on time. Her husband has made little money since being laid off from his job at a farmer's market, and Lewis-Hall said her salary as a school cook falls short of what she needs to make the payments on her home in Washington.

Lewis-Hall and her husband have been making their payments late for about a year, but panic didn't set in until recently, when the word "foreclosure" showed up in a letter from the bank.

"You're used to living a certain way, but one thing leads to another," Lewis-Hall said. "It's not like I have a new car or anything. I'm driving one from 1991."

According to AARP:

—About 600,000 people who are 50 years or older are in foreclosure.

—About 625,000 in the same age group are at least three months behind on their mortgages.

—About 3.5 million — 16 percent of older homeowners — are underwater, meaning their home values have gone down and they now owe more than their homes are worth.

AARP said that over the past five years, the proportion of loans held by older Americans that are seriously delinquent jumped by more than 450 percent.

Homeowners who are younger than 50 have a higher rate of serious delinquency than their older counterparts. But the rate is increasing at a faster pace for older Americans than for younger ones, according to AARP's analysis of more than 17 million mortgages.

Americans who are 50 or older are hard-pressed to recover from the collapse of the housing market that started in 2006 and was compounded by the recession that started in 2007. Eight in 10 of them own homes, but many live on fixed incomes, have little savings or have already burned through much of their retirement savings. They also have fewer working years left to build back what they may have lost.

And those who are forced to re-enter the workforce often find they can't command the same salary that they did in the past.

Older minorities are facing foreclosure rates that are almost double those faced by white borrowers of the same age, mirroring a nationwide trend seen in other age groups as well. Among older African Americans, 3.5 percent were in foreclosure at the end of 2011, and the rate was 3.9 percent for Hispanics. Just 1.9 percent of white homeowners were in foreclosure.

The issue has become so dire in Rep. Elijah Cummings' Maryland district that he has assigned one of his 20 staffers to work full time to help struggling homeowners, and his office holds regular foreclosure prevention workshops. He said the federal government can do its part by promoting principal reduction and loan modification programs.

"These are people who in many instances have never missed a payment in 20 years," Cummings, a 

Democrat, said in an interview. "You see grown men crying because of the potential loss of a home."

Among older homeowners, those who are 75 or older are in the worst shape when it comes to foreclosures, the report showed. In 2007, one out of every 300 homeowners 75 or older was in foreclosure. Five years later, about one in 30 face that same fate.

Many of those oldest homeowners may have lost income they were counting on, such as the retirement benefits of a deceased spouse. In the meantime, their mortgage payments have stayed the same.

The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better, AARP officials predicted, because of a housing market that is recovering at a snail's pace.

"This crisis is far from over," Whitman said. "We need to think about more creative solutions now that we have this data."

quote from It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

"But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty."

University of Virginia to offer free online courses

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/morning_call/2012/07/university-of-virginia-to-offer-free.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search

The University of Virginia    announced on Tuesday that it plans to offer free online courses a month after its president was fired briefly in part for her perceived hesitation to embrace online education, WJLA.com reported.

Online platform Coursera said that U.Va. is among 12 institutions that plan to offer the free, non-credit courses through its Internet-based learning system. The school and Coursera said they had worked for several months to reach the deal, which involves no exchange of funds.

Lawmakers Condemn Michele Bachmann’s Claim of an Islamist Plot

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/lawmakers-condemn-michele-bachmann-s-claim-of-an-islamist-plot/

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

Representative Michele Bachmann’s recent claim that Islamists have infiltrated the highest levels of the federal government drew strong condemnation on Wednesday from her colleagues in Congress.

A handful of Republican lawmakers led by Ms. Bachmann of Minnesota sent letters on June 13 to five federal agencies demanding investigations of a conspiracy to influence American foreign policy to favor the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.

A letter to the State Department singled out Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, prompting an impassioned defense on the Senate floor on Wednesday from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

“These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way,” Mr. McCain said. “These attacks have no logic, no basis, and no merit and they need to stop. They need to stop now.”

Citing a report by Frank J. Gaffney Jr., the president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative policy group based in Washington, the lawmakers said Ms. Abedin’s mother, brother and late father had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement whose members recently gained power in Egypt.

“Her position affords her routine access to the Secretary and to policy-making,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, before listing several instances where the State Department and Mrs. Clinton took actions “that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

“We believe these actions and policies are deeply problematic,” the lawmakers wrote. “They may even pose security risks for this nation, its people and its interests.”

Ms. Abedin, 37, was born in Michigan and began working for Mrs. Clinton in 1996 when she was first lady. She stayed by Mrs. Clinton’s side in the Senate and during her 2008 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and is now her deputy chief of staff. A Muslim, she is married to former Representative Anthony Weiner, who is Jewish. Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress last year after he admitted to sending inappropriate photos of himself to women on Twitter. The couple have a 6-month-old son, Jordan.

Mr. McCain said he had known Ms. Abedin for more than a decade and considers her a friend.

“Put simply, Huma represents what is best about America,” he said.

The accusations, he added later, were an affront to all Americans. “When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it.”

The lawmakers sent similar letters based on the policy group’s report to the inspectors general in the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The letters were also signed by Representatives Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Tom Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.

Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and a Muslim, requested evidence from Ms. Bachmann to back her claim. Her response, he wrote in a letter to Ms. Bachmann, “simply rehashes claims that have existed for years on anti-Muslim websites and contains no reliable information that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the U.S. government.”

Ms. Bachmann responded Wednesday afternoon saying that the letters were “unfortunately being distorted.”

“The intention of the letters was to outline the serious national security concerns I had and ask for answers to questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical group’s access to top Obama administration officials.”

[…]

The Key Feature of Contemporary Capitalism

"This is why the key feature of contemporary capitalism is not only the hegemony, but also the (relative) autonomy of financial capital:  it may seem like the banks are just engaging in speculation, shuffling numbers here and there, and nobody is exploited, since exploitation happens in "real" production. But why did we have to give billions of dollars to the banks in 2008 and 2009?  Because, without a functioning banking system, the entire (capitalist) economy collapses.  Banks should thus also count as privatized commons:  insofar as private banks control the flow of investments and thus represent, for individual companies, the universal dimension of social capital, their profit is really a rent we pay for their role as universal mediator.  This is why state or other forms of social control over banks and collective capital in general (like pension funds) are crucial in taking a first step towards the social control of commons.  Apropos the reproach that such control is economically inefficient, we should recall not only those cases in which social control was very effective (this was, for example, how Malaysia avoided crisis in the late 1990s), but also the obvious fact that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered precisely by the failure of the banking system."
--Less Than Nothing, p. 247

The Conscience of a Liberal

Paul Krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/finance-capitalism/

JULY 17, 2012, 6:18 PM

Finance Capitalism

One more point about this whole business of "attacking capitalism": to the extent that Obama is attacking anything other than Mitt Romney, he's questioning a system in which the financial sector has grown to an unprecedented share of the economy (pdf):

[…]

So we're hearing a lot of people -- including some alleged progressives -- declaring that you can't criticize the way we've run our economy for the past 30 years. Why not? The metastasizing finance sector eventually led us into the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression; that seems reason enough to question the model.

And bear in mind that Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal financial reform. It seems to me that in the wake of the global financial crisis, that -- not Obama's very mild reformism -- is the radical position.