Fed proposes to end unfair, deceptive credit card practices

Today, the Federal Reserve and other regulators have decided to take on the credit card companies. According to this AP report, changes are coming.

The proposed new rules would prohibit:

-Placing unfair time constraints on payments. A payment could not be deemed late unless the borrower is given a reasonable period of time, such as 21 days, to pay;  Read more 

Andrew Cuomo Takes On Insurers

For example, Cuomo’s investigation found that in New York City, where a physician might bill $200 for a typical office visit, the amount the insurer would reimburse based on reasonable and customary rates was just $77. So a consumer who expects to pay 20 percent, or $40, for this hypothetical visit would actually get stuck with a bill for $138, because the insurer would only pay 80 percent of the $77 reasonable and customary rate—or $62. “I don’t think most people understand this,” says Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a healthcare consumer advocacy group.  Read more 

Via Atrios: Health Net ordered to pay $9 million after canceling cancer patient’s policy

One of California’s largest for-profit insurers stopped a controversial practice of canceling sick policyholders Friday after a judge ordered Health Net Inc. to pay more than $9 million to a breast cancer patient it dropped in the middle of chemotherapy.

The ruling by a private arbitration judge was the first of its kind and the most powerful rebuke to the state’s major insurers whose cancellation practices are under fire from the courts, state regulators and elected officials.  Read more 

UnitedHealth Poised for 13% Growth Unimpeded by Cuomo

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) — UnitedHealth Group Inc., the largest U.S. health insurer, is poised to reach its forecasts of 13 percent profit growth this year and next, even after being accused of cheating customers by New York’s attorney general.

Don’t even know where to begin.

AL gets letters:

A friend writes from Tehran:

Here the political weather is terrible. You might know that the parliamentary election is near and the reformist nearly are not allowed to be involved. About 80 per cent of reformist candidates has been labeled as unqualified by the Government. Mr Khatami and Rafsanjani had a meeting with the Supreme Leader but it had no fruit. We are waiting for much worse days.

The Iranian film festival has been just finished with no movie by great directors of the country. All movies were about Islam, religious rites and Imams. Good for Ahmadinejad!

I love my country but i really hate it. That’s iranian life. Always dealing with dilemmas.

To which I’d like to respond:  Read more 

It’s a busy weekend for me, but I hope folks get a chance to check out what sounds like a Most Excellent book about religion in America today. Posner looks to have done some great research, and the Alternet excerpt is especially useful, on this day when ’religious voters’ in the Black community are on the verge of handing Obama a needed victory. “And what does it profit a man to gain the whole world…” heh.

nside the Trinity Christian Church in Irving, Texas, a crowd starts gathering in the afternoon for a Victory Healing and Miracle Service that is to begin at 7 p.m. that evening. People have traveled from as far away as Ohio and Arkansas and Georgia to participate. Most are waiting in the perimeter lobby of the church, camping out with pillows and Bibles, ordering pizza, and waiting for an event that has been hyped on Christian television for months. I approach one woman, an African American member of televangelist Rod Parsley’s World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. Judging from her clothes, the woman could scarcely afford the plane ticket she bought to see a performance of the preaching phenomenon whose services she can attend three times a week at home in Columbus. She’s almost in a trance, barely able to focus on me or what I am asking her, and she brushes me aside as I inquire about her journey.  Read more 

Today, President Bush unveiled his “solution” to the record rate of American home foreclosures in a speech from the Roosevelt Room in the White House. The president’s plan relies almost entirely the cooperation of a private sector group called the “HOPE NOW Alliance.”

I’m sure we are all so relieved now. I’m so HOPE-ful! What could possibly go wrong with a Bush plan?

Other than the vagueness of the “plan,” deficiencies in enforcement and complete lack of qualification criteria, who could question such a bold step by our ruler to prolong his artificial economic boom?  Read more 

The recent posts on prisons and drugs, combined with the housing meltdown and accompanying credit crunch (PDF), got me thinking of Catherine Austin Fitts, who’s the only thinker I know who’s integrating all of these seemingly disparate trends. On the tapeworm economy:

In a tapeworm economy a small group of insiders centralize political and economic power at the expense of people, living things and the environment, in a manner that destroys real wealth. A tapeworm economy is one in which it is considered acceptable to make money from our popsicle index going down. In investment terms, it is an economy with a negative return on investment. It is parasitic in nature.

The way an actual tapeworm operates is to inject its host with a chemical that makes the host crave what is good for the tapeworm and bad for the host. So the Tapeworm Economy is adept at using media and education and numerous financial incentives to get us acting against our own strategic interests and instead supporting and depending on the Tapeworm.

Sound familiar?

The symptoms of the Tapeworm are many - narcotics trafficking that targets our children, runaway exploitive and predatory corporate practices such as the patenting of life, terminator seed and the destruction of our topsoil and food supply, fraudulent inducement of debt to homeowners, students and consumers, suppression of knowledge and renewable energy technology, criminal mismanagement of government credit and resources, black budget operations and the manipulation of currency, financial and precious metal prices and markets. These practices introduce organized crime throughout all aspects of our lives… these transactions drain our families and neighborhoods on a daily basis – much like a tapeworm drains its host.

As we understand the history of these drains in our lives – who is doing them and how we are complicit – we begin to understand the power of the opportunity to transform them in a manner that is safe and profitable for ourselves and those we love.

As we begin to pull our resources out of the Tapeworm, and learn to invest our time and assets in building the world we want, by building real wealth and financial liquidity outside the Tapeworm, and by raising our popsicle index without putting others’ at risk, the Tapeworm stronghold will weaken and the excellence of local living economies and diversified enterprises will prosper worldwide – one neighborhood, one enterprise and one investment at a time.

Hopefully.  Read more 

Historical antecedents:

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it—and profit from it. As we shall see.

We’re all niggers now, eh?

* * *
For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I’ve read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifique Avedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein’s thesis.* I’m going to fair-use a lot of it here:  Read more 

We got a Google hit on this undeservedly obscure topic, so I thought I’d reinforce it. Here’s the concept:  Read more 

While most of our farmers would really disagree if told they were being pampered, it is the U.S. policy of subsidies that has caused World Trade talks to break down again this morning.

Our subsidies are presently being protected from scrutiny which Canada has requested, accusing the U.S. of exceeding its commitments to WTO for many years.  Read more 

A push from Congress and the White House for huge increases in biofuels such as ethanol, is prompting the oil industry to scale back its plans for refinery expansions - which could keep gasoline prices high, possibly for years to come.  Read more 

Somebody shake me this can’t be real.

“The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn’t go out of business,” state Rep. Dorothy Butcher said. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work.  Read more 

The guys at Karmabanque were right the carry trade tsunami is here, the water has just receded and the elephants are long gone. I hate to disagree with MJS this isn’t gambling it’s a stick up.

From Investopedia :

A strategy in which an investor sells a certain currency with a relatively low interest rate and uses the funds to purchase a different currency yielding a higher interest rate. A trader using this strategy attempts to capture the difference between the rates - which can often be substantial, depending on the amount of leverage the investor chooses to use.  Read more 

I know this is mainly about, as the Turtleneck would say, “The Jooos,” but I still count this as good news for all us Festivus people. The more religious diversity in Congress, the better. The best part of this article:

The Republican Party has sunk millions into wooing the Jewish vote, but Jewish voters, traditionally Democratic, have moved ever further from the GOP in recent years. In the midterm elections, nearly 90 percent of Jewish voters voted Democratic, according to exit polls, one of the largest proportions in history.  Read more 

Damn I miss America.

Thai Billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra denies that he and the billionaire elite are staging terrorist attacks against Thai citizens. The alliance between telecom, finance and terrorism is one of the intersections of modern global domination that goes unnoticed.  Read more 

Most people, particularly those in the Blogosphere, don’t know or don’t care to know – it’s about to be on. Compton is about to look like Rio; Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Long Beach, Detroit – all those deeply impoverished areas, urban and rural; black, brown, yellow and white, are about to explode. France, Rio, Mexico. This is here in America, all the immigrants from America’s proxy wars in Latin America, the veterans of the drug war, they are all here getting hungrier by the day.  Read more 

When was the last time anyone watched “Three Days of the Condor?” "Syriana?" "The World is Not Enough?" Just checking.  Read more 

Please don’t ever say “we” won’t do these jobs. An immigration raid left, in its wake, work.

 

By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain

The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.  Read more 

Season’s greetings, everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Festive Kwanzaa. My wish for you all: Love should overcome, peace should arise, equality should emerge, liberty should endure.

In response to CD's question, I thought I dig up an oldie but goodie:  Read more 

A great piece by the crew at Karmabanque. Broadcast on Al Jazeera and brought to you on You Tube.

Karmabanque.

Cantaloupe full of salmonella now, too… Happy Turkey Day, everybody. Canada
and Arizona and Georgia.

Imagine a 40% crash in housing prices . Seriously just run through the scenario in your head. How much of your net worth is accounted for in your house? How much of your retirement nest egg? How much have you drawn out of said house in equity? What would that wonderfully extended mortgage look like, you know the adjustable one with the interest only for the first five years or so; the mortgage that will last you a good fifty years – yeah that one. You in the service industry, the paper pusher who is about to be down sized, the data entry operator or phone jockey making more than you know you should – you. How would you like to be holding a mortgage on a property that is worth about half what you paid for it, making half of what you used to? Get the picture? I’ll buy it off you for transaction cost.  Read more