Imagine you are a homeowner who has made your mortgage payments on time. Or pretend for a moment that you have been informed you are entitled to relief or promised a modification. Now, imagine that in spite of all that, you receive a foreclosure notice, which the bank follows through on.
That is the reality for the 4 million people the banks wrongfully foreclosed on between 2009-2010. Tuesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve announced the beginning of payments for some of those people whose homes were wrongfully taken from them.
As Hayes explained in the clip above, "given the scale of the deception and error, the amount of money on the table for those who've been victimized, is in most instances, cartoonishly small."
Fox News host Steve Doocy on Monday likened the latest Occupy Wall Street protests to the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
During a segment on Fox & Friends, Doocy asked Fox News contributor (and conservative "comedian") Steven Crowder to comment on protests in New York City that mark the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
"But a new report from the AP says the group is in total disarray, it's completely fallen apart," Doocy told Crowder. "Would you agree with that assessment? You know what, they just don't know what they're doing these days?"
"Here's the thing, the movement is entirely based on selfish motives," Crowder explained. "So, it has to implode under its own weight. I talked with Tucker Carlson about this yesterday. You know, the tea party -- because it's the most comparable movement in the last decade -- is inextricably tied to conservatism. It's attached to an ism. The ism of life, freedom, pursuit of happiness, constitutionally limited government. The Occupy movement is based on wanting more free crap. It's like herding cats, and that's why you see the biggest mark the Occupy movement has made, Steve, really over the last year has been a mark of crime."
"Sure," Doocy agreed. "And we're looking at some of the video next to our faces right now and that almost looks like what happened last week in Libya and in Cairo, and we're talking about the Occupy forces moving out. In the last year, 7,000 arrests in 119 different cities."
"The tea party leveraged their ideology into really political influence of keeping conservative candidates accountable to the platform they publicly professed," Crowder insisted. "Occupiers were able to do none of that because -- Steve, you can say it with me -- they just want more free crap. We'll make it a sing-song for them. Exactly, they can follow the dancing crack pipe."
As Current TV's John Fugelsang, filling in for Eliot Spitzer this week reminded us, when average citizens break the law we have to pay fines that might actually act as a deterrent or face jail time and when these bankers and Wall Street commit crimes, they get a slap on the wrist compared to the profit they already extracted and give up their bonuses.
As John noted, you don't go to prison for Wall Street crimes, but you can't say the same for those protesting Wall Street. And he's right, if they cracked down on these bankers stealing the same way they have park zoning laws, there would be no need for an Occupy Wall Street movement.
Barclays Bank PLC has agreed to pay more than $450 million to settle charges it attempted to manipulate key interest rates.
The London-based investment bank announced settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the British Financial Services Authority.
Investigators found the bank manipulated the London InterBank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or EURIBOR, benchmark interest rates used in the world's financial markets. [...]
Under the settlements, Barclays would pay the Justice Department a $160-million penalty and cooperate with its ongoing investigation to avoid prosecution. The bank would pay the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission $200 million, with the rest going to the British Financial Services Authority.
In a statement, Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond said he and other top executives would forgo bonuses this year.
“The events which gave rise to today’s resolutions relate to past actions which fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires in the conduct of its business," Diamond said. "When we identified those issues, we took prompt action to fix them and cooperated extensively and proactively with the authorities. Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays; I am sorry that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values."
Bill O'Reilly's been on a hell of a tear this week attacking the Occupy Wall Street movement. On this Monday's show, he was calling them "terrorists" because a protester was giving him a hard time while watching a show on Broadway. Our friends over at News Hounds have more on that and O'Reilly's double standard when it comes to what sort of protesters he likes.
And never mind the hypocrisy of someone like Bill O'Reilly having the nerve to call protesters "terrorists" when he's done his best to inspire a few actual terrorists of his own as Dave Neiwert wrote about here: Bill O'Reilly has Dr. George Tiller's blood on his well-stained hands.
Bill O’Reilly Asks: Who is Backing the Occupy Protesters and Why Won’t President Obama Repudiate the Movement?
Thousands of protesters and members of the Occupy movement hit the streets of Chicago during the NATO summit. 90 people were arrested and dozens were injured including a police officer who was stabbed. Tonight on The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly looked further into who is really behind the movement, which he notes is now very well organized. He called it a “hardcore, far-left movement designed to cause as much trouble as possible.”
He found that the movement is being run out of Washington, D.C. in offices belonging to the Institute for Policy Studies. The director of the Institute is John Cavanagh, a longtime liberal activist and his nonprofit accepts money from George Soros through the Tides Foundation. O’Reilly also reported that the Service Employees International Union headed by Mary Kay Henry is paying rent for the OWS crew in D.C. at about $4,000 month.
O’Reilly stated, “It is long past time for President Obama to condemn the anarchistic element of the occupiers, which is now dominant. Instead, the president falls back on protecting freedom of speech platitudes. Sure, tell that to the Chicago cop who got stabbed, Mr. President.”
The Institute for Policy Studies' John Cavanagh responded to O'Reilly's attacks on their organization and Occupy Wall Street later that same evening here: The Nonsense Zone:
Activists with the Occupy Wall Street movement are claiming that police in Minneapolis gave them illegal drugs and other items for participating in a study on impairment.
In a 35-minute documentary produced by Twin Cities Indimedia, Rogue Media, Communities United Against Police Brutality and Occupy Minneapolis, multiple activists describe being offered illicit drugs.
The report alleges that police gave out drugs, cigarettes and fast food as part of the Minnesota State Patrol's Drug Recognition Evaluator program, which trains officers in detecting drug impairment. Police reportedly picked up suspects near Peavey Plaza and drove them to a facility in Richfield where they were tested.
An activist named Panda told filmmakers that after getting stoned in front of police, they asked him if he wanted to smoke even more.
"I stopped in my tracks, said 'yes,' and then I smoked with a cop," he recalled, adding it was "some of the best shit I've had in a while." On the way back from the testing facility, Panda said officers bought him a double cheeseburger from McDonald's.
Later Panda explained that officers had offered him "a quarter more" of marijuana if he would become an "informant" to snitch on other Occupy protesters.
"They checked our eyes, they checked our ears, checked our lungs," another participant recalled after police got him "high as fuck."
"They checked our blood pressure, our pulse and all that. There were a lot [of police officers]. There were like 30 or 40."
The claims first came to light during a controversial City Hall hearing on Wednesday about banning overnight activity in Minneapolis' public plazas.
"They gave me a full bag of weed," Forest Olivier told the Council. "And they gave me a pipe to smoke it out of. And they just took us out to – I forgot the name of the airfield – but its somewhere in Richfield, out near the bus line. 66th and Cedar. And they let us smoke it on the sand hills where the dirt pits were."
In a posting on the E-Democracy forum, Council Member Cam Gordon called the allegations "disturbing."
"Last night, I was called by a concerned mother who was very upset because her son had been given free drugs by a police officer when he went out to participate in what he thought would be social action in a public plaza to help improve his community and country," Gordon wrote. "She was shocked to learn from her son later that police gave her son illegal drugs and asked him to use them, indicating that it was okay and that it was part of a police program."
"Her trust in the police was broken and she was baffled at how such a thing could ever be condoned by her government. She felt that it was the police's responsibility to help keep her son safe and protect him from harm and consider that by their action the police had put him in harms way and as a violation of a public trust," he added.
"One of the things that is most concerning about this to me is how the young and vulnerable appear to be being targeted," Gordon said. "Beyond that, I cannot see how this program, practiced how it apparently is being practiced, can be considered ethical or in the public interest."
Minnesota State Patrol spokesman Lt. Eric Roeske told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that officials were "looking into" the allegations.
Watch the full video report from Communities United Against Police Brutality, uploaded May 2, 2012.
Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews apparently have a little bit of a problem reading poll numbers. On this Thursday's edition of Hardball, both of them claimed that President Obama had better not be talking too much about the issue of "class warfare" and ever repeating his statement, heaven forbid, that he "was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth" because heaven forbid that might not poll well with some of the voters out there.
I took a look at the survey linked to Chuck Todd's First Read and either I missed it, or Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews completely misrepresented what the polling data there said.
I would love for someone to explain for me how these numbers and the question asked about the "ultra-rich" are harmful to President Obama and why anyone who is not an idiot on the Democratic side of the aisle should be telling him to shut up about it.
Here's the question from the survey that I believe Todd was talking about:
Now, I’m going to read you some statements you could hear about government and the economy from candidates running for president. After I read each statement, please tell me if you would be more or less likely to vote for that candidate, or if it would make no difference in whether you would vote for that candidate.
Says what drags down our entire economy is an everwidening gap between the ultra-rich and everybody else.
Here are the responses:
Total More likely 45 -- includes *
Much more likely 23*
Somewhat more likely 22*
Less likely 29
No difference 24
Not sure 2
Someone please explain to me how that equals bad polling numbers for Obama on that question. Either Todd is citing a completely different poll that his blog didn't choose to link today that has the name NBC attached to it, or he's lying to the Hardball audience here and assuming they'll never actually read the poll.
If Todd is going to carry water for the Romey campaign and try to pretend that the Occupy Wall Street argument about income disparity, and class warfare being waged on the poor and middle class is not a valid one that might resonate with voters, maybe he ought to try to find a poll that doesn't prove just the opposite of the points he was trying to make.
UPDATE: For clarification, the "more likely" number of 45 percent is a combination of the following two numbers labeled "much more likely" which was 23 percent and "somewhat more likely" which was 22 percent. I missed the word "total" when I copied the stats out of the poll. The correction has been made above. And as I said, I do not see how these are bad numbers for Obama or something to be running from which is the way Todd was characterizing them in the Hardball segment.
Lou Dobbs regularly looked like he'd come close to losing his mind when he was still raging on about illegal immigrants day after day on CNN. It appears he's well past that point now with this bit of insanity from his show on the Fox Business Channel from this Tuesday.
Beloved icons of childhood entertainment in America, or subtle forms of anti-business indoctrination that brainwash your kids into hating capitalism?
Thank goodness we have Fox to ask these questions.
Lou Dobbs sounded the alarm again tonight on his Fox Business show:
DOBBS: Now, an "Unmentionable" -- a story you won't hear anywhere in the liberal national media, or nearly all of the national liberal media. Hollywood is once again trying to indoctrinate our children. Two new films out this year, plainly with an agenda, plainly demonizing the so-called "1 percent" and espousing the virtue of green-energy policies, come what may.
The first, Dobbs said, is an animated film called The Secret World of Arrietty, and the second is Universal Pictures' computer-animated version of the 1971 Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. Read on...
Keith Olbermann takes apart one of Andrew Breitbart's latest smears of the Occupy movement that we all sadly got a dose of the other night when he was screaming at the protesters outside of CPAC; that the movement is full of rapists.
What you have not seen are the facts behind the transparently dishonest "list" with which Breitbart is trying to smear Occupy as rapists. Sadly, it appears his people's efforts consisted of finding stories in which both the word "Occupy" and some report of sexual misconduct.
It doesn't look like anybody bothered to read the links. Nearly every one of the stories shows Occupy participants were the victims and not the alleged perpetrators, or the incidents had nothing to do with Occupy.
You can read the entire list and the details in Keith's post at KOS, but here's the summation:
So. Seventeen stories Breitbart claims are cases of Rape at Occupy. Just reading the stories, googling the names of those identified, following up - this only took me about 70 minutes. The final result:
-- Two stories on the list were duplicates.
-- One story turns out to have been about consensual sex.
-- One case, in Scotland, led the Occupy group to disband for the sake of safety.
-- One case of an arrest for child porn, with Occupy immediately banning the alleged perpetrator.
-- One case of a girl disappearing -- ignoring the fact that she was home and unharmed a month later.
-- Four cases in which police said neither the victim nor the assailant were apparently even associated with Occupy.
That leaves seven others stories, all of which show police identifying Occupy participants as the victims, six of which show police identifying the alleged assailants as not being Occupy participants.
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur decided to have a bit of fun with the creepy footage by combining it with some of the Blair Witch Project.
But first he reminded everyone that Rick Santorum is not just your average, everyday working class guy he's been trying to portray himself as. He ran the K Street Project for the Senate. Here's more from Salon Cenk quoted on that -- Santorum’s well-compensated love of fracking:
As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it’s the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it’s not home runs, it’s oil and gas cash.
He's another 99 percenter like the rest of them, bought and paid for by the oil and natural gas industries.
