This video describes how the city of Cleveland, and one housing court judge, are dealing with the massive foreclosure crisis. In particular, the city is tearing down condemned homes and making the owners and the banks cover the cost.
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Poker fans all over American suddenly become interested in politics now that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is trying to slip in a provision legalizing online poker into the tax cut compromise.
Now some lawmakers want to allow U.S.-based casino companies to get into the game — and a cut of the $25 billion-a-year pie — by quietly pushing for a change in the law before the end of this year.
A draft bill, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and obtained by ABC News, would legalize online poker playing in the U.S., and establish licensing and reporting requirements for companies, as well as safeguards for consumers. It would also generate tax revenue from wagers, for state and federal governments.
Forms of online gambling other than poker would remain prohibited under the bill.
Legalization of online poker forums has long been sought by the U.S. casino industry which says federal gaming regulations have unfairly handicapped their business in a flourishing online marketplace and left American consumers vulnerable.
The problem is that the bill is rigged to favor established casino interests in Nevada, so you have many saying the bill isn’t fair and that it’s a payback to Reid’s campaign supporters.
That said, it’s ridiculous that millions of Americans are prohibited from participating in an activity they enjoy.
Where does it stand now? Many Republicans are against it – they want to tell you how you can live our life.
But Harry Reid insists he still pushing the deal in the lame-duck session. It’s an uphill climb, but anything can happen.
WikiLeaks has created another firestorm with its latest document dump, this time covering tons of diplomatic files concerning international relations.
Corporate American now needs to brace itself as well – WikiLeaks is gearing up for massive document dumps involving a major US bank, revealing thousands of pages of corporate secrets. More document dumps from other corporations will follow. Forbes reports on the story along with an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”
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Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells. Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.
He jokes with the writer about calling these mega document dumps “megaleaks.”
The most interesting thing is this notion of “involuntary transparency.” In a time when huge corporations are amassing an incredible amount of power, Assange may have found the great equalizer. Corporations are generally amoral, and many of its executives are immoral, so now we the public will get a window into the workings of a company that blows past the carefully crafted public image. Can you imagine the frenzy this will create in the PR department of these companies?
Democrats have taken a lot of heat for the stimulus package, and public perception of the package certainly hurt Democrats in the midterm elections.
But we’re getting more evidence that the stimulus worked, as the CBO has come out with a new report about the impact of the package.
The massive U.S. stimulus package, widely panned by voters, injected life into the otherwise-sluggish economy between July and September, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act put between 1.4 million and 3.6 million to work in the third quarter of this year, a time when more than 15 million Americans were unemployed, CBO said.
It also boosted national output by between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent during that time, the CBO said.
During the third quarter, the economy grew by an annual rate of 2.5 percent. Economists say a rate faster than 3 percent is needed to make any noticeable dent in unemployment.
Here’s even more impressive data.
The unemployment rate, currently 9.6 percent, would have been between 10.4 percent and 11.6 percent without the Recovery Act, the CBO said.
The stimulus created the equivalent of 2 million to 5.8 million jobs during the third quarter as part-time workers shifted to full-time work, or employers offered more overtime work.
The Obama administration made the fateful error of predicting that the stimulus package would prevent unemployment from going over 8%, and that hurt the public perception of the package.
It’s clear, however, that the stimulus package helped to save the US economy.
General Motors had a very successful IPO last week, and the Obama administration is taking justified credit for bailing out GM instead of letting it die in a forced liquidation in bankruptcy.
It’s hard to argue here with success. The administration took a huge amount of grief for this decision, and it clearly hurt the President and the Democrats in the midterms, but this was the right decision. The auto industry is thriving, and we avoided a death spiral in the auto industry and the supplier base that would have occurred under a forced liquidation.
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