By Bob Van Voris and Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg News, November 1, 2011
Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp., which last year claimed to be the biggest closely held mortgage broker in the U.S., was sued by federal authorities for alleged fraudulent lending practices.
....The government claims one-third of the 112,324 loans originated by Allied from 2001 to through 2010 defaulted, forcing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pay $834 million in insurance claims, according to a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan today.
By Richard J. Goldstone, Guest Op-ed, New York Times, Oct. 31/Nov. 1, 2011
[....] The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.
One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies.[....]
[....] You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe. [....]
By David Graeber for Occupied Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2011
On August 2, 2011 at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street, about a dozen people sat in a circle in Bowling Green. The self-appointed “process committee” for a social movement we merely hoped would someday exist, contemplated a momentous decision. Our dream was to create a New York General Assembly: the model for democratic assemblies we hoped to see spring up across America. But how would those assemblies actually operate?
The following, the second part of a two-part series, is excerpted from a talk originally given by Saul Bellow in 1988 and now published here for the first time. A footnote has been added by the editors.
Update 11:24am: readers nevermind: he fixed it; see his comment below.
Just in case you don't see it, too, here are copies of some stuff that is appearing appeared on the site, of the type which also appeared a day or two before the last trouble with signing in. The following appeared at the top of the page in a pink box when I edited my last comment:
By William K. Rashbaum, New York Times, October 27/28, 2011
Eleven people, including two doctors and a former union president, were charged on Thursday in a “massive fraud scheme” in which hundreds of Long Island Rail Road workers made false disability pension claims that could have cost a federal pension agency about $1 billion, according to court papers. [.....]
Economic growth in the United States picked up in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday, in an encouraging sign that the recovery, while still painfully slow, has not stalled.
By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post, October 24, 11:32 AM
The federal government on Monday announced new rules that would allow many more struggling borrowers to refinance their mortgages at today’s ultra-low rates, reducing monthly payments for some homeowners and potentially providing a modest boost to the economy.
By Colum Lynch, Turtle Bay blog @ Foreignpolicy.com, October 21, 2011
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to condemn Yemen's bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters, and endorsed a regional political initiative aimed at securing President Ali Abdullah Saleh's commitment to leave office. The passage of the resolution marks the first time the 15-nation council has weighed in on the political crisis, which has played out over more than 9 bloody months.
Guest op-ed by Jared Bernstein, New York Times, October 23/24, 2011
I challenge you to find a stump speech by a politician running for any office from dog catcher to president that doesn’t invoke the importance of small businesses.....
.....don’t most people work for small businesses, and aren’t such businesses the engine of job growth?
By Seamus McGraw (author of "The End of Country,") New York Times Sunday Review, October 23, 2011
Ellsworth Hill, Pa.--A cloud of dust and sand and diesel exhaust, thick as a desert windstorm, snaked up into the sky and blotted out the midsummer Pennsylvania moon. The scene was backlighted by 100 high-powered lights glaring from the top of a 70-foot-tall, hundred-yard-square acropolis of broken stone carved into our hillside.
A man being used to tar Occupy Wall Street as anti-Semitic has long trolled the financial district.
This story is mainly on the "Google Wall Street Jews" protestor that was the topic of bslev's October 5 blog entry. I would have preferred to post it as a comment there rather than here, but it appears that thread has been locked to further commenting.
