SkydiveJonathan

Eric Schneiderman, who was elected New York attorney general almost two year ago, alleges that Bear Stearns systematically mis-sold mortgage-backed bonds to investors in the pursuit of profit. Buyers of the bonds lost $22.5bn in 2006 and 2007 alone as US house prices fell, according to the charges which Schneiderman announced at the Department of Justice in Washington on Tuesday.

A bit of history...

Among those arrested were Will County Board member Jackie Traynere, the Rev. Craig Purchase of Mount Zion Tabernacle Church in Joliet, the Rev. Raymond Lescher of Sacred Heart Church in Joliet and Charlotte Droogan, lay minister at Universalist Unitarian Church of Joliet, the Southtown Star reports. Mike Compton, one of the striking warehouse workers who walked off the job, said after working at the warehouse for three months, he was a veteran worker because the turnover is so high. He said everyone quits because “They call us bodies and that’s what we feel like.” Walmart, famous for union-busting and employee abuse, is heavily subsidized by the state i.e., US taxpayers with many of its employees relying on food stamps and state-run health insurance for survival. Despite these dire working conditions, Walmart claims the WWJ is out to fulfill a nefarious agenda.

After replacement refs bestowed on the Seattle Seahawks a game clearly won by the Green Bay Packers, GOP standard bearers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and even Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the figurehead for GOP union-busting, called for the National Football League to restore its locked-out union refs.

http://www.alternet.org/marijuana-revolution-making-election-day As we approach November, the leading Democrat and Republican presidential candidates remain conspicuously, though predictably, silent regarding the question of marijuana law reform. By contrast, much of the public and the mainstream media can’t stop talking about pot politics. That’s because voters in six states this November 6 will have their say on the subject. If present polls hold, federal officials on November 7 will have little choice but to acknowledge that they have a full fledged reefer rebellion on their hands. Voters’ impending rejection of the drug war status quo shouldn’t come as a surprise, at least not to anyone who has been paying attention. Opinion polls over the past 12 months indicate record levels of public support for ending America’s multi-decade failed experiment with cannabis criminalization. Are a majority of Americans finally ready to voice their drug war dissent at the ballot box? In mere weeks, voters in six states will have the opportunity.

When about 650 members of community, labor and faith organizations rallied today in Elwood, Illinois in support of workers at a key Walmart warehouse striking to protest “poverty wages,” sexual harassment, racial discrimination and extreme work conditions, they were met with riot-gear-clad police and the private security Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System Mobile Field Force who surrounded them, arrested all 47 who committed civil disobedience by sitting in the road, and told the other peaceful protesters to disperse or risk “chemical or less lethal munitions being deployed.”

And get crushed in a first past the post election system.

The Tea Party has successfully destroyed the GOP. Well done.

The Tea Party was their undoing.

A judge has thrown out the arrests of 92 Occupy protesters last October as a violation of their First Amendment rights, slamming Mayor Rahm Emanuel - who had touted the city's handling of the protests - for selectively enforcing an overnight curfew and trying to "discriminate against defendants based on their views." Cook County Judge Thomas Donnelly noted Grant Park's long history as "the quintessential public forum," including for hundreds of thousands who gathered there in 2008 after Barack Obama was elected.

Not hundreds - thousands.

17 miles average distance is correct.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/sep/30/republicans-monarchy-royalists-taunton It might seem that the last two years of royal pageantry mark a low point for British republicans, but paradoxically the organisation has grown from 9,000 supporters on the eve of the announcement of the royal wedding to 26,000 today. Blanket coverage of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Queen's jubilee produced emotions from excitement to warm indifference to the monarchy to opposition. Republicans view the uncertainty surrounding an ageing monarch as a great opportunity to raise the profile of their cause. "Let's say the Queen lives for another 20 years – that's a big opportunity there. The older she gets the more debate there will be about what happens next. When will the succession take place? Do people want Charles or William? It's all a bit morbid and weird and it will heighten the absurdity of it all," said Smith. "The succession will be huge. There were no questions asked in 1952. This time people will ask why is this person being handed this job without being voted for."

On Wednesday, French President Francois Hollande told the U.N. General Assembly in New York, “Today we need to … introduce a tax on financial transactions – that has already been agreed to by several European states – so that the capital movements that profit from globalization can contribute to international development and the fight against pandemics.” In Washington, meanwhile, current U.S. policy is traced to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who has forcefully come out against the idea of an FTT. If Barack Obama wins another term in the November elections, however, Geithner has stated that he would step down from his current position. “There’s a good chance there will be fresh thinking on FTT in the next administration,” Sarah Anderson, with the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank here in Washington, told IPS. “Not only will there be new economic policy leaders coming in, but the international debate has changed dramatically since President Obama first took office.”

Despite the fact that Romney has faithfully adopted virtually every position the tea party has demanded of him, the true believers are already preparing the ground for his increasingly inevitable election-day repudiation. And their story is going to be exactly what you think: Romney was never really one of them and the American public sniffed that out. They wanted a real red-meat conservative, and Romney wasn't that guy. You see, true conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. Welcome to 2013.

Mississippi now ranks worst in the nation with 31.8 percent of children living in poverty, and worst in the nation in child well being according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2012 Kids Count Data Book, a national and state-by-state effort to track the well-being of children. For every 100 families with children in poverty in the state, only ten now receive TANF cash assistance. In 2009-10, according to the CBPP, there were 117,327 families with children in poverty, and just 11,773 TANF cases. As for those parents who are being sanctioned off of welfare because they are unable to meet the work requirement or they reach lifetime limits: “They are now virtually invisible to the country and in the current political discourse,” says Burnett.

I met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-lit Chevys. He says, “And who’s going to give these kids a credit card?” Of course, you can always get ID from a state office . . . if you already have ID.

And who are the white folk lacking ID? The elderly, like the sisters, and students like Angela Hiss and Allyson Miller, whose official state IDs don’t list their dorm room addresses and so can’t be used to vote. Black folk, the elderly, students, poor whites blocked from registering and voting—a federal judge didn’t think it was all that coincidental. Justice Terence Evans could see a pattern: “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too- thinly veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.”

The average voter’s distance to the office is seventeen miles. By definition, the folks that need the ID don’t drive. And the ninety-eight-year-old is pretty darn slow in her walker. A lawyer for Indiana voters told me that the average bus trip back and forth, requiring two changes, takes an entire work day. They tested it. But Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the law was fair and provided “equal protection” to all voters because “seventeen miles is seventeen miles for the rich and the poor.”

About four hundred thousand voters (9 percent of Indiana’s electorate) are African American. Nearly one in five (18.1 percent) lack the ID needed to vote, according to Matt Barreto of the University of Washington. That’s twice the number of whites lacking ID. Therefore, as many as 72,000 black voters will get the boot when they show up to vote this November. Coincidentally, that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state in 2008. Coincidentally.

Today's French budget contains around €20bn of new taxes, broadly as expected. It's interesting that the most controversial measure, the 75% income tax on the wealthy, is only expected to raise €210m. It is expected to affect between 2,000 and 3,000 people. Changes to France's wealth tax (levied on those with high personal wealth) will bring in almost five times as much.

I blame globalisation.

Gains in the trust for Romney’s heirs remain free of gift taxes and potential estate taxes. Public exposure of Romney’s various tax avoidance tactics may spur legislation cracking down on them, according to Breitstone. Romney “uses every trick in the book,” Breitstone said. “It’s going to be harder to do tax planning in the future. He’s bringing attention to things that weren’t getting attention.”

Digging It Romney’s vehicle is known as an “intentionally defective grantor trust” or by the acronym IDGT -- hence the nickname: “I Dig It.” Such trusts permit donors to give potentially unlimited amounts to children free of estate and gift taxes. Here’s how they work: the person setting up the trust, like Romney, contributes assets such as an interest in a fund or shares in a company. If he makes that contribution before those assets appreciate -- particularly when they are privately held and difficult to value -- he can claim the gift tax obligation is low or non-existent since the declared value is low or zero. If the trust generates any income -- such as by selling stock -- the eventual tax bill is the responsibility of Romney, not the trust. By paying the capital gains tax, which was 20 percent in the late 1990s and is now 15 percent, he can avoid depleting the funds in the trust -- in essence making an additional donation that’s free of gift taxes. That benefit in particular makes this type of trust “a more powerful driver of wealth transfer in estate planning than almost anything else,” said Breitstone, the wealth preservation attorney.

Hundreds of thousands of anti-austerity protesters took to the streets of Greece on Wednesday as the country was paralysed by a general strike in the first mass confrontation with Athens's three-month-old coalition government. In one of the biggest demonstrations in the capital in recent years, as many as 200,000 marched on the Greek parliament, according to unions in the public and private sector, which called the strike to oppose new wage and pension cuts – the price of further rescue funds from international lenders. Clashes broke out between riot police and hooded youths hurling rocks and petrol bombs at the finance ministry. The protesters, many shouting: "We can take no more. Out with the EU and IMF," and said to be part of the crisis-hit country's vibrant "anti-establishment" movement, then set light to rubbish cans and bus stops, sending plumes of acrid smoke above the capital. TV footage showed demonstrators running for cover in Syntagma Square, seat of the Greek parliament, as noxious fumes filled the air. More than 100 people were detained.