Wooster Collective

On January 2nd, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino proposed a one-year wage freeze for city workers, including the Boston Police Department. The Boston Police Superior Officers Federation agreed to a contract on January 23, but not until after the city dismissed its residency case against West Roxbury Police Sergeant Michael Hanson. In the mix of the deal was an alleged list of more than 25 superior police officers who are living outside the city in violation of their contracts' residency requirements. Through the use of strong-arm tactics, the Mayor got his wage freeze and at least 25 of Boston's Finest got to keep their jobs. The following day, two warrants were issued for Shepard Fairey's arrest.

On Wednesday, February 4th, Mayor Menino met with Shepard and was photographed shaking his hand following the unveiling of Fairey's 'Peace Goddess' banner on the North wall of City Hall at a public event to promote his show, Supply and Demand, at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. Thursday night Shepard sat for a Q-and-A talk at the ICA which was publicized by the museum after which he signed autographs for more than an hour. Shepard was not arrested until two full weeks after the warrants had been issued and after numerous public appearances in Boston.

The Next American Revolution: Main Street vs. Wall Street -- Seeking Alpha

The impetus for the French Revolution can’t be summarized in a blog post, but there were two core elements that strike me as perfect parallels for the ongoing lack of judgment among some elites south of the border. I’ve always thought that average Americans shared many of the ideals of The Enlightenment, particularly equality and freedom of the individual.

Now that American taxpayers are bailing out many of the elites of their society, the parallels to pre-Revolution France begin to appear. Louis XVI took power during a financial crisis. France was nearing bankruptcy and the costs of the government exceeded tax revenues. Some of the most blessed in society didn’t pay tax.

Current Unemployment Rate & Statistics 2009 - Job Layoffs, Loss | Mint.com Blog

The overall unemployment rate currently stands at 7.2 percent, a 15-year high according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each day since the current recession began, in December 2007, the news has been full of reports of job layoffs. Just today the government released a report indicating that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits is at its highest level in a quarter of a century, as more workers seek government assistance. Could the news get any worse? It’s all in how you calculate the numbers.

Here is a visual guide to the truth behind the numbers

An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.

As a firm believer in the separation of Science and State I just simply had to cast my vote for Palin today. Now, where is that sarcasm html tag...

William P. O’Connor: Reflections of an Average Joe

Joe the plumber, stripped of the protection of effective representation, is convinced by the corporate media that wages like Wal-Mart’s are sufficient. Salaries stagnant since the seventies have forced the general populace to borrow on the equity in their homes, and maximize their credit card debt. The bankers and corporations are delighted to lend people money at compounded interest rather than see them compensated with fair wages. Meanwhile credit card companies fled to states without usury laws, like Delaware, to screw Joe even more. Corporations rewrote bankruptcy laws while financiers wiped out his pension and 401 K’s with credit default swaps, derivatives and other sophisticated financial instruments. When the pyramid scheme collapsed, the same banks and investment firms which screwed him for years used a complicit Congress to tell Joe it’s his shoulder they must cry on. Ninety-five percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. is now controlled by 2 % of the population; yet, Wall Street reached into the 5% already spread out among 294 million people to bail out Corporate America. Ironically complicit in this massive transfer of wealth has been Joe himself. Convinced by corporate media that any sentence containing working man and higher wages is socialism, he has venerated the ruling elite like Reagan and Bush, forgetting true champions of his cause like Walter Reuter and Eugene Debbs. These false idols have done as much to retard the common man’s progress as Robert Taft and Fred Hartley.

Yikes

U.S. Weighs Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — Alarmed by the growing financial stress at the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, senior Bush administration officials are considering a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, people briefed about the plan said on Thursday.

I wonder if it's time to pull the money out of the bank and buy a gun? This is serious end game stuff.....

DEMOCRATS WEAK ON CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, FREEDOM.

DEMOCRATS WEAK ON CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, FREEDOM.

The issue put Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. After long opposing the idea of immunity for the phone companies in the wiretapping operation, he voted for the plan on Wednesday. His reversal last month angered many of his most ardent supporters, who organized an unsuccessful drive to get him to reverse his position once again. And it came to symbolize what civil liberties advocates saw as “capitulation” by Democratic leaders to political pressure from the White House in an election year.

Cheer for common sense.

Schneier on Security: The War on Photography

The War on Photography

What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are?

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it's a movie-plot threat.

Damn good idea

John Carlin on why Iceland has the happiest people on earth | World news | The Observer
All the more so because if you are in a job the state gives you nine months on fully paid child leave, to be split among the mother and the father as they so please. 'This means that employers know a man they hire is just as likely as a woman to take time off to look after a baby,' explained Svafa Grönfeldt, currently rector of Reykjavik University, previously a very high-powered executive. 'Paternity leave is the thing that made the difference for women's equality in this country.'

Fyi

For those not in the know, Clinton served on Wal-Mart’s board for six years prior to her husband’s run for the presidency. She recently received $5,000 from Wal-Mart. I’ve raised the Wal-Mart relationship repeatedly in my current race against Clinton and it causes deep unease among voters. I believe it speaks to the incumbent’s close ties to abusive corporate power: her large corporate financial contributions, her support for so-called “free trade” (which is simply trade to benefit corporations) and her unwillingness to confront corporate power that denies every American, among other things, universal health insurance. So, I had to chuckle when I read that Clinton, having never said a bad word about the company in the past, recently said that Wal-Mart should pay more for its workers’ health benefits. And, to boot, she returned the $5,000 she had received from the company. But, when asked what she did about the company’s benefits for workers when she served on the board, she replied, “Well, you know, I, that was a long time ago ... have to remember…”

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t promote an image of being an intelligent woman who has a pile of facts at her fingertips but, at the same time, you suffer a sudden bout of amnesia when asked to answer for your record. And it would be an inconvenient record to defend.

In 1992, Wal-Mart was simply smaller than it is today. But it was still huge, with $43.9 billion in net sales, 1,714 stores and 371,000 employees. Even in 1992, Wal-Mart was already the world’s largest retailer.

And the board Hillary Clinton sat on was rabidly anti-union, was exploiting sweatshop labor around the world, discriminating against women workers, forcing workers to labor off the clock and destroying communities that did not want them. This should not be a shock: Clinton was a partner in the Rose law firm, one of the most active anti-union law firms in the country.

So, the question still remains: what did Hillary Clinton do—or, not do—when she served on the board of Wal-Mart? Maybe, if her memory was refreshed, she could tell us how she protested the company’s relentless union-busting, expressed feminist outrage at the widespread discrimination against women and was horrified that the mushrooming wealth of the Wal-Mart family was made possible on the backs of slave labor around the world.

Thanks Steve

Subprime was just the beginning. Wait until California's prime borrowers start handing their keys to the bank.


Why the next mortgage crisis may be worse. - By Mark Gimein - Slate Magazine

Just two banks, Washington Mutual and Countrywide, wrote more than $300 billion worth of option ARMs in the three years from 2005 to 2007, concentrated in California. Others—IndyMac, Golden West (the creator of the option ARM, and now a part of Wachovia)—wrote many billions more. The really amazing thing is that the meltdown in California is already happening and virtually none of these loans have yet reset.

* In San Bernardino, a house bought for $310,000 in 2005 is now being offered by the bank for $199,900. * A 2,000-square-foot ranch house in Rancho Santa Margarita is down from $775,000 to $565,000. * A starter home in Sacramento, sold for $215,000 in 2004, is now down to $129,900.

These are not sale prices. They are asking prices. Don't doubt that they are negotiable.

US kept slow in broadband lane


BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | US kept in slow broadband lane

We all know that America is the technology hub of the universe. It is home to Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, MIT - the list is endless. So why, when it comes to the basics, like delivering the internet to its citizens, has it fallen way behind many other nations? In Manhattan people pay about $30 (£15) a month for a download speed of three megabits per second (Mbps) via a DSL line. Many people are very happy with that, until they realise what is going on elsewhere in the world.

"In Japan you can get 100 megabits for $35," says Selina Lo of Ruckus Wireless.

Holy smokes


The Big Picture | Lender-Abandoned, Non-REO Foreclosures

"In some cities that have low property values, where there are dense concentrations of foreclosures, you see lenders who file foreclosure proceedings but don't actually take control of the properties, because the lenders have to maintain them and pay taxes on them." "There are areas in some parts of the country where property values are quite low, and there are no large-scale expectations of them going up. They don't know that they will ever recoup those costs," and so the lenders never re-take title to the properties, allowing them to become derelict." (emphasis added)

There you have it: Abandoned, Non-REO Foreclosures.

Yowza, this is just starting.....

Wheeee!!!! Good times!!!


Some homes worth less than their copper pipes | Reuters

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India. In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.