The Resistance in Obama Time

ANNOTATED NEWS, Obama, Olympian-class scumbags, Political Fronts 1 Response »

May 242011

Over 2,600 Activists Arrested in the US Since Election

By BILL QUIGLEY

Obama photo-opping in NYC. Harvesting the afterglow issuing from Osama's killing. American politicians run their careers according to p.r. rules. It's all about imagery and little real substance.

Since President Obama was inaugurated, there have been over two thousand six hundred arrests of activists protesting in the US. Research shows over 670 people have been arrested in protests inside the US already in 2011, over 1290 were arrested in 2010, and 665 arrested in 2009. These figures certainly underestimate the number actually arrested as arrests in US protests are rarely covered by the mainstream media outlets which focus so intently on arrests of protestors in other countries. Continue reading »

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The Corporate Power’s Big Grab: “Big Government” vs. “Small Government”

LIBERAL BETRAYALS, MEDIA SCUM, Political Fronts, Steven Jonas Comments Off

Jan 252011

STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH | [print_link]

And so, the “small government” folks are now firmly entrenched in the House of Representatives. As they were in the last Congress, through the filibuster rule they will never be too far from the levers of power in the Senate either. But boy, since the last election they have become more vocal than ever. First and foremost they tell us that the “American people” demand “small government” and told us so in the last election. Well, they hardly ever tell us precisely what it is they mean by “small government” other than “cutting taxes” (especially for the wealthy), “down-sizing” government functions (of the type they don’t like), and de-regulation (of many corporate activities for which of course they don’t supply specifics). Indeed, not too specific all around.

Further there is this “the American people demand” stuff. Well, about 42% of eligibles voted in the last election and the GOP numbers amounted to somewhere around 22% of the eligibles. But those are numbers no one seems to bring up. Of course with a media that characterized the GOP win in 1994 as “the Gingrich landslide” when 37% of the eligibles voted and the GOP got slightly more than half of them, what do you expect, except that would it be too much to expect that a Democrat or two would do so? Well, I guess so. And so we are subjected to the “the American people demand small government” bombardment, which also includes the claim that “the American people want repeal of the health care reform” when poll after poll shows that they do not.

But let’s get back to this “small government” stuff, first raised when Reagan claimed that “government is the problem, not the solution.” Of course, Reagan wasn’t the only one. I remember cringing in my seat when in his first State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton, Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council before he became President of the United States, said “the era of big government is over.” Of course when the GOP/Tea-Party/Paulite (as in Ron and Rand, not Saint) uses/re-uses and over-uses the phrase, they are referring only to a certain particular set of Federal government functions, not just any or all of them.

These include: taxation (without bothering to tell us taxation for what), regulation of such things as financial markets (which most Tea-Partiers just don’t seem to be able to get, so they are just viscerally against it when you-know-who is for it) and the environment (which right-wingers are against until something happens to THEM, like a railroad tank-car spill or a ground pollution event or a BP blow-out disaster that could have been prevented if there had been regulation); of course health insurance reform (which they have been convinced by the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins of their world means a “government takeover of health care” when the whole operating system remains in private hands just as it is now, except for those chunks which are now in public hands, like the VA health system from which one can be sure a goodly number of Tea Partiers get their health care), and just about anything that might help the “undeserving poor” (especially if they are not white), however that term might be defined. It is absolutely fascinating that the new GOP/Tea Party Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, has actually called for the repeal of national child labor legislation. One wonders just how that would help solve the unemployment problem for so many of the nation’s adults, but that’s another matter.

So, “government,” yuck. Let’s just get rid of it and go back to “abiding by the Constitution.” Of course these folks seem to forget that the Constitution is a document that sets up a national government and gives it a whole bunch of functions to achieve the purposes set out in the Preamble (http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/185) with a whole bunch of powers spelled out in Articles I and II. But hey, why should they confuse themselves with facts. But then, is the debate really about “big government vs. small government?” Isn’t it more about what the proper functions of government are without referring to its size? After all, protestations and the wishful thinking of a few lefties to the contrary notwithstanding, polls show that the majority of Tea Partiers are GOPers. Ron and Rand are GOPers, and the former has voted with his party in Congress on most issues other than the last President’s foreign war-making. The GOPers in the Congress and those voters who identify themselves with that party, not with the Tea Party, are certainly GOPers. And they all say that their common interest, at least with this President in office, is “small government.” A nice, sort of libertarian thought, no? Well, no.

These folks are not for “small government” across the board. They are only for “small government” when it comes to certain kinds of issues, like the ones reviewed briefly above. But boy, these folks are for Big Government, VERY Big Government, in a bunch of other arenas, all of which just happen to deal with personal belief and personal behavior. Let’s see now, what might they be? Well abortion rights, for one. They want to criminalize choice in that matter. But actually that issue goes way beyond abortion, per se. Rather it goes to the matter of one’s religious belief as to when life begins. Forget about abortion, per se. They want to criminalize any belief other than that which holds that life begins at the moment of conception (http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/182). That sounds like pretty big government to me.

Then there’s the matter of gay marriage. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution that they profess to hold so dear (except of course for the part of the 14^th that provides citizenship to anyone born in the United States) guarantees equal protection of the law “to any person within [the] jurisdiction” of each State. It happens that each state has a set of civil laws that applies to the institution of marriage. Yet these “small government” folks want to deny access to that civil law to same-sex couples wishing to marry. They would thus deny them that guaranteed “equal protection of the laws,” just because the GOP/Tea Party/Christian Rightists’ religious beliefs say “no” to gay marriage. Pretty big government there, wouldn’t you say? Again, they would place one set of religious beliefs above all others. Oh yes, let us note here, that one of the three (so far) members of the Senate “Tea Party” caucus, Jim DeMint, in both of his Senate campaigns called for banning gay teachers from the classroom. DADT for teachers, Jim?

Then there is the right to die, a pretty personal matter wouldn’t you say? Attorney General Ashcroft, you know, the one who put a drape over the bare breasts of the statue of Lady Justice in the lobby of the Department of Justice, went out of his way to try to interfere with the democratically adopted law concerning that matter in Oregon. And then there was the likely 2012 GOP Presidential nominee, JEB Bush, and the Schiavo case. These “small government” folks would deny terminally ill people the right, under very carefully controlled conditions, to obtain medical assistance to end their lives at a time of their own choosing or that of their closest family member.

Then there is the use of recreational mood-altering drugs (RMADs) and drug-carriers. Certain ones, like the two major killers, tobacco products and ethyl alcohol, are “OK.” They are subject to taxation and certain civil limitations on place and time of use, and of course criminal prosecution for otherwise criminal acts committed under the influence of alcohol. Other RMADs, like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, are subject to blanket prohibition of both sale and use, totally limiting personal choice of exactly which RMAD’s to use or not, at the risk of criminal prosecution. Sounds like pretty big government once again, no?

These folks are thus very much for big government in a whole bunch of arenas. But they all have to do with personal beliefs, especially religious ones, and behaviors even when they directly harm no one else. They are for “small government” when it comes to dealing with economic issues and VERY BIG NATIONAL PROBLEMS like the crumbling infrastructure, the failing educational system, and the future supply of energy. The favorite right-winger of certain lefties (because he happened to be against the Iraq War), Ron Paul, gets caught up in this contradiction right from the git-go. It happens that this physician is as against abortion rights as anyone else on his side of the aisle in Congress. And his son Rand is a leader of the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, a tiny (3000 members out of 800,000 US physicians) but well-funded and very vocal group, which has opposed just about every liberal-progressive advances in medicine and health care since they originally organized to oppose Medicare right along with Ronald Reagan. And oh yes, they too would criminalize abortion.

This all is, of course, dictated by the Corporate Power that the GOP/Tea Party represents, without happening to let the nation as a whole in on that fact. Our side would be well-advised to indeed begin to do just that.

Author’s Note: This Commentary is number 164 in my BuzzFlash series. It is based in part on my BF Commentary No. 139 of April. 14, 2010 entitled “Big Government, Small Government: It’s All a Matter of Taste.”

STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for Truthout/BuzzFlash (http://www.truth-out.org/, http://www.buzzflash.com), Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville Post (http://www.greanvillepost.com/; a Contributor to Op-Ed News.com (http://www.opednews.com/), a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; and a Contributor to The Planetary Movement.

SELECT COMMENTS

Stephen Scott Crockett 12:46 am

The proper role of government on an issue by issue basis should be the discussion along with whose interests our government serves. The “size of government” discussion is really fuzzy logic intentionally designed to obscure the more important issues.
Government run by and for the vast majority of Americans should be our goal especially on economic, military and foreign policy issues. Republicans only serve the super wealthy and corporate power.

godblessfdr on Mon, 01/24/2011 – 10:51am.

I totally agree. Republicans-tea baggers are against government when it hurts the rich and corporations but not when it hurts the common man which they consider to be peasants who need controlling. This is the essence of Republicanism control the common man so the elite can steamroll them, too bad the average American is too dull to see this.

_________

CROSSPOST:

Published on BuzzFlash/Truthout on Sun, 01/23/2011 – 1:31pm.

URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/215

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Is America Being Neo-CONNED by Zionist Media Psyops?

MEDIA SCUM, Political Fronts, THE WORLD, US Foreign Policy, US Military 3 Responses »

Apr 122010

Is Israel Controlling Phony Terror News? The authors pose important questions which, of course, are not being asked by the mainstream media

By Gordon Duff and Brian Jobert [print_link]

W H O SAYS Al Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us pretty much all information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita Katz is the Director of Site Intelligence, primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Forces. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad “helps” her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience.

Rita Katz at the lectern.

Do we know if the information reported comes from a teenager in Seattle or a terror cell in Jakarta? No, of course not, we don’t have a clue. Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs (see below)?

It is quite likely that everything you think you know about terror attacks such as the one in Detroit or whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead comes from Rita Katz. Does she make it all up? We don’t know, nobody knows, nobody checks, they simply buy it, print it, say it comes from SITE Intelligence and simply forget to tell us that this is, not only a highly biased organization but also an extremely amateur one also.

Is any of this her fault, Rita’s? No. She is herself, selling her work. The blame is not SITE Intelligence, it is the people who pass on the information under misleading circumstances.

Imagine if a paper carried a story like this:

“Reports that Al Qaeda was responsible for bombing the mosque and train station were given to us by an Israeli woman who says she found it on the internet…”

MIDEAST-DIPLOMACY-US-OBAMA-QAEDA This is fair. Everyone should be able to earn a living and information that comes from Israel could be without bias but the chances aren’t very good. In fact, any news organization, and most use this service, that fails to indicate that the sources they use are “rumored” to be a foreign intelligence service with a long history of lying beyond human measure, is not to be taken seriously.

Can we prove that SITE Intelligence is the Mossad? No. Would a reasonable person assume it is? Yes.

Would a reasonable person believe anything from this source involving Islam or the Middle East? No, they would not.

SITE’s primary claim to fame other than bin Laden videos with odd technical faults is their close relationship with Blackwater. Blackwater has found site useful. Blackwater no longer exists as they had to change their name because of utter lack of credibility.

What can be learned by examining where our news comes from? Perhaps we could start being realistic and begin seeing much of our own news and the childish propaganda it really is.

Propaganda does two things:

1. It makes up phony reasons to justify acts of barbaric cruelty or insane greed.

2. It blames people for things they didn’t do because the people doing the blaming really did it themselves. We call these things “false flag/USS Liberty” incidents.

Next time you see dancing Palestinians and someone tells you they are celebrating a terror attack, it is more likely they are attending a birthday party. This is what we have learned, perhaps this is what we had best remember.

FOX news video broadcast on 9/11 purported to show Palestinians celebrating the WTC “terrorist attack,” but the video was really taken back in 1991 and had nothing to do with terrorism.

From an AFP article on Site Intelligence:

Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. are set to release yet another “Al-Qaeda” tape

Despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, BL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

WASHINGTON (AFP) The head of the Al-Qaeda network Osama bin Laden is expected to release a taped message on Iraq, a group monitoring extremist online forums said Thursday. The 56-minute tape by the hunted militant is addressed to Iraq and an extremist organization based there, the Islamic State of Iraq, said the US-based SITE monitoring institute, citing announcements on “jihadist forums.”

It said the release was “impending” but did not say whether the message was an audio or video tape. Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued on video and audio cassettes.

Source: ME Times

Yes, despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, BL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

Yet these two individuals manage to do what the ENTIRE combined assets of the world’s Western intelligence can’t:

Be the first to obtain fresh video and audio tapes from aL-Qaeda with Bin Laden making threats and issuing various other comments. If BL appears a bit “stiff” in the latest release, that’s because he is real stiff, as in dead.

How is it that a Jewish-owned group like S.I.T.E. can outperform the world’s best and brightest in the intelligence field and be the first to know that a group like al-Qaeda is getting ready to release another tape?

How is it possible that Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. can work this magic? Maybe looking at Katz’s background will help:

Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and an emigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.

Katz was called as a witness in the trial, but the government didn’t claim she was a terrorism expert. During the trial it was discovered that Katz herself had worked in violation of her visa agreement when she first arrived inAmerica in 1997.

She also admitted to receiving more than $130,000 for her work as an FBI consultant on the case.

SOURCE WATCH

More details about Katz and SITE’s activities can be obtained from SOURCE WATCH’s page on the group:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SITE_Institute

Source Watch notes that, “Listed under “Security for the Professional”, sponsored by Blackwater Security Consultants, Blackwater USA cites SITE Institute as “An Invaluable Resource” in its May 9, 2005,Blackwater Tactical Weekly newsletter.^[13]

Article from: VETERANS TODAY NETWORK

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

From the WikiPedia:

Katz, a fluent Arabic speaker, was born in Basra in Southern Iraq in 1963 to a well-to-do Iraqi Jewish family.^[1]^[4]After the Six Day War and shortly after Saddam Hussein‘s Ba’ath Party seized power in Iraq in 1968, her father was arrested on charges of spying for Israel.^[4] The family’s property was confiscated by the state, and the rest of the family put under house arrest in a stone hut.^[4]^[1] The following year, after having been tortured, Katz’s father was convicted and executed in a public hanging in the central square of Baghdad to the roaring applause of more than half a million Iraqis; the government offered free transportation to people from the provinces, and belly dancers performed for the crowd.^[4]^[1]^[5] Katz’s mother managed to escape on foot with her three small children to Iran, and from there they made their way to Israel.^[4]

^{The family settled in the seaside town of Bat Yam.^[4] While in Israel, Katz served in the Israeli Defense Forces and studied politics, history, and Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University.^[4] She later married a medical student, and in 1997 came to the United States with her husband, who received a National Institutes of Health fellowship, and their three children.^[4]}

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NPR Finds Right-Wing Crank to Spit on Zinn's Grave

Corporate Media, Liberaloids & Radical Centrists, MEDIA SCUM, Political Fronts Comments Off

Jan 302010

David Horowitz in ATC obituary with substance-free attack

Fair Special Alert: To spit or not to spit, that is the question

Dateline: 1/29/10 [print_link]

Howard Zinn

WHEN PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN HOWARD ZINN died on January 27, NPR’s All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with something you don’t often see in an obituary: a rebuttal.

After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR’s Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn’s grave. “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” Horowitz declared. “Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”

Horowitz’s substance-free attack contributed nothing to an understanding of Zinn’s life or work, other than conveying that he’s disliked by cranky right-wingers. (Horowitz has been best known in recent years for his race-baiting and Muslim-bashing–Extra!, 5-6/02; FAIR report, 10/1/08.) He seems to have been included merely to demonstrate that NPR will not allow praise for a leftist to go unaccompanied by conservative contempt.

Needless to say, it is not the case that NPR has a consistent principle that all its obituaries be thus “balanced.” Take its coverage of the death of William F. Buckley, a figure as admired by the right as much as Zinn was on the left. Upon his death in February 2008, NPR aired six segments commemorating him, none of which included a non-admiring guest. In two segments, All Things Considered (2/27/08) presented the remembrances of Rich Lowry (Buckley’s successor atNational Review), his son Christopher and his biographer Sam Tanenhaus.

It’s a fact that NPR has long become a bastion for centrist, anti-left commentary. In few places is the cowardice and treachery of mainstream liberals to the cause of progressive politics more clearly in evidence, and more furiously denounced by hypocrites and imbeciles on the right as a bastion of communists or worse…It could only happen in America.

One of the All Things Considered segments did include a soundbite of Noam Chomsky debating with Buckley: “No, I don’t believe that…. In fact I think that…” But what Chomsky did not believe was unclear, let alone what he actually thought.

Talk of the Nation (2/27/08) featured admirer William Kristol, while Day by Day (2/27/08) had an extended interview with protegee David Brooks. Morning Edition (2/28/08) just quoted Buckley himself.

The celebration of Buckley culminated with Weekend Edition host Scott Simon (2/29/08), who turned the cause of death into a eulogy: “Emphysema, such an unseemly thing for a man who was so often a breath of fresh air.”

In fact, there was much to criticize about Buckley, who was a supporter of, among other things, white supremacism in the U.S. South and South Africa, McCarthyism, nuclear war against China and the tattooing of AIDS patients’ buttocks (Extra!, 5-6/08). Reporting his death, however, NPR didn’t think it was worth bringing on a critic who would take a negative view. Why the same outlet took a different approach when the subject was an intellectual on the left rather than the right is perhaps something the NPR ombud could answer.

ACTION: Please ask the NPR ombud why All Things Considered brought on David Horowitz to trash the late Howard Zinn when NPR’s extensive coverage of William F. Buckley included no critical guests.

CONTACT:

You can contact NPR ombud Alicia Shepard through this web form:

http://help.npr.org/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=5670&task=ticket

Or call 202-513-3245.

You can post a copy of your message to NPR here:

http://www.fair.org/blog/2010/01/29/action-alert-npr-brings-on-david-horowitz-to-trash-howard-zinn/

BONUS:

This is what David Horowitz sounds like, straight form his mouth. Judge for yourselves. (Taken from his site David Horowitz’ Newsreal).

DAVID HOROWITZ: Spitting on Howard Zinn’s Grave?

The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave. I also knew that while I was interviewed for ten minutes, out of what I said only a 20 second sound-bite would make it onto the air. I don’t begrudge NPR this selection. That’s what their obit was and would have to be, a collection of sound-bites.

Sure enough the bottom-feeders at FAIR pounced on my bite and accused me of spitting on Zinn’s grave. So here’s what I said that was cut from the interview. I’m not putting quotes around it because it’s from memory, but it’s pretty close to some of my remarks and captures the sense of others: No one should celebrate the death of another human being unless they are child-molesters or murderers. Howard Zinn lived to a ripe old age (87), and bad human being that he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him an extra few years; he’s done about as much damage as he could.

Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain. Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.

When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which eventhe socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

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While the mass media join the lynch mob against ACORN…

american way of life, Corporate Media, Olympian-class scumbags, Political Fronts, Political Vermin, THE WORLD 1 Response »

Sep 252009

SOMEBODY HAS TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE PEOPLE—

The ACORN I Know

By dswanson – Posted on 25 September 2009 ||| [print_link]

By David Swanson

D. Swanson

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together and, after three years of work, brought the nation’s largest high-cost lender to its knees, forced it to sell out to a foreign company, and won back a half a billion dollars of what had been taken from them—one of the largest consumer settlements ever—you’d probably ask me what country this had happened in. Surely it couldn’t have been in the United States of the Second Gilded Age, the land of unbridled corporate power and radical government activism on behalf of the rich and the greedy.

Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it “predatory lending” in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That’s why more people haven’t heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN’s communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent) and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People’s Action to force banks to make loans in these communities, but the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live- checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage.

High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They’re often made to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods.

ACORN members don’t take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household’s abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household’s executives’ compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest.

The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. Members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Kentucky had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. ACORN was also getting the word out to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. They let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these lawsuits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans and they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, in the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country poured out of busses by the thousands onto the lawns of the board members and the CEO of Household. They knocked on doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered “Wanted” posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members’ neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims’ stories and contact information and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household’s predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We provoked lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times , and Forbes Magazine . We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. This campaign increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender next on ACORN’s list.

DAVID SWANSON is a longtime activist for social justice. He has worked hard in recent years to obtain an impeachment against the Bush camarilla.

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