Group items tagged

New Jersey Title, an underwriter of title insurance policies in the northeast, has become a casualty of a financial and real estate crisis that has taken many victims. Some of these casualties might never have occurred if the events of the past few years had not taken place, but because they did there are firms and individuals who now face the need to find alternatives at a time when those alternatives may be difficult to come by.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file - "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

One the oddities about the current economic doldrums afflicting the developed world is that if you look at the global average, this is almost certainly the best time to be alive in human history. Not only have we seen rapid per capita GDP growth in many poor countries, but even in countries that haven't gotten richer major development progress has occurred. Last, but by no means least, the world is getting much less violent: In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace. This is major good news.

A whopping 70,000 questions poured into Change.gov over the past week, in response to the Obama transition team's call for citizen queries to the President-Elect. After votes from about 100,000 people, the top ranked question asks Obama whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture and illegal surveillance by the U.S. government. I've been working with activist Bob Fertik to organize support for the question, and several progressive bloggers urged readers and Obama supporters to vote for it last week. Digby, who has written extensively about the Bush administration's abuse of the rule of law, recently reported on the progress:

"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence, or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." Martin Luther King Jr. delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

President Obama submitted three free trade agreements to Congress based on the flawed North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model that has been devastating to our economy, American workers and to labor and environmental standards. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs have been displaced and outsourced as a result of our pursuit of trade policies which are adverse to the economic interests of the American people. My home State of Ohio is one of the top-ten states posting the biggest job losses since the passage of NAFTA. Unfortunately, the proposed free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama do nothing to address the significant flaws in the free trade model that prioritize the rights of multinational companies over the rights of workers and the American economy. The Korea-US and US-Colombia Free Trade Agreements are expected to increase our trade deficit by over $16 billion and result in the displacement or loss of over 200,000 jobs. This is on top of the over 2 million American jobs that have been displaced or eliminated over the past 10 years as a result of our increased trade deficit with China. The last thing American workers and our economy needs is more NAFTA-style free trade agreements.

A Rose By Any Other Name Or Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil Things have been a little quiet on the healthcare debate front over the past day or two, but the 800 pound gorilla is still in the room and is still very much alive and well. During this short lull I wanted to take a look at the critical public option piece for the program, and the fact that it is apparently losing its luster with many on the near left as a it remains a huge impediment to any legislation having a chance of being passed. And not getting something passed will doom the democrats in mid-term elections...

A Must Watch with thrilling revelations by Major (r)Nadeem Dar exposing Army Elite.!!... Ahsan Iqbal PML-N, Fouzia Wahab PPP, Wasim Akhtar MQM, Brig. (R) Imtiaz Ahmed (ex-IB), Maj (r) Nadeem Dar (ex-ISI) and Lt. Gen. (R) Asad Durrani (ex-ISI) in an explosive Capital Talk on past Army Operations with Hamid Mir.

Ahsan Iqbal PML-N, Fouzia Wahab PPP, Lt. Gen. (R) Asad Durrani, Brig. (R) Imtiaz Ahmed and Wasim Akhtar MQM in fresh episode of Capital Talk. Hamid Mir continues from yesterdays's Capital Talk on past Army Operations.

If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year-and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate-has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy." What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE's total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and, according to The New York Times, for the past three years 82 percent of the company's profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits. That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines." Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it

Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others - last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left). The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:

One of the most original and provocative books of the past decade is "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (Rowman & Littlefield). "A critical look at salaried professionals," says the cover, "and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." Its theme is postmodern America, but also applies to Britain, where the corporate state has bred a new class of Americanized manager to run the private and public sectors: the banks, the main parties, corporations, important committees, the BBC.

The DOJ, with the exception of two likely murders, closes the book on all of the past decade's torture crimes

Wikimedia Commons/thesupermat. Some rights reserved. So we are all 'populist' now? Many in the media and in academia seem to think so. In Europe, various political movements and politicians are described as 'populist'.

I include my reacations to this review in which I think Covel misleads readers about Moore's movie.