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Insider Trading Probe Has Boehner In Tough Spot

by New York Times on February 11, 2012

Huffington Post…

An ethics investigation of Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) has put Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a politically tricky spot. Years ago as minority leader, Boehner called on Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) to relinquish his Ways and Means Committee chairmanship during a high-profile ethics investigation.

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Insider Trading Probe Has Boehner In Tough Spot

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10 Great Careers For Post 50s

by money.msn.com on February 11, 2012

Huffington Post…

If you want to be a fashion model, bike messenger or ball boy, it pays to be young. However, if you want a job in which you’re expected to convey reliability, wisdom or gravitas, you have an advantage if you’re over 50.

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10 Great Careers For Post 50s

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Woman’s Small Claims Court Win Could Rock Entire Auto Industry

February 11, 2012

Since an improbable victory over Honda last week in a California small-claims court, a woman who sued over the disappointing fuel economy on her Civic hybrid says she has fielded hundreds of inquiries from disgruntled owners asking how they can follow in her footsteps. Heather Peters says she has been happy to answer questions, and she’s curious to see how many file small-claims court cases of their own. She’s not the only one. Automakers, legal experts and consumer-rights advocates are keeping an eye on what happens in the aftermath of her victory. Every car company today must advertise fuel economy to comply with regulation. But many–Ford, Hyundai, Chevy, Toyota and Honda, for example– regularly trumpet fuel economy ratings in an attempt to convey quality and innovation, as well as appeal to pocketbooks when gas prices spike. They’ll all have a clearer idea of what they are facing from disappointed consumers and judges soon.

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The States With The Most Homes in Foreclosure

February 11, 2012

While some of the states with high foreclosure rates have had substantial improvements in their economies, others continue to be hit hard. In Nevada and Florida, two states with the highest foreclosure rates, homes lost roughly half of their value over the past five years — and prices are still falling. Foreclosures that began several years ago and that are still active cannot be the only reason nearly 12% of Florida’s homes with mortgages were in foreclosure last year. Home prices in the state fell nearly 50% over the past five years, unemployment remains extremely high, and 17.4% of people with mortgages in the state were 90 days or more late on their mortgage payments.

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U.S. Calls Big Swiss Bank A ‘Fugitive’

February 11, 2012

NEW YORK — The U.S. Justice Department called Switzerland’s largest private bank a fugitive from justice on Friday after it didn’t send any representatives to a court hearing in New York, where it has been charged with conspired with American clients to hide $1.2 billion from the Internal Revenue Service. Wegelin & Co. is accused of helping at least 100 U.S. clients conceal huge sums of money from the IRS in overseas accounts. Federal prosecutors said the bank recruited American customers who were concerned about possible prosecution for tax violations at home, including some that had already pulled money out of other Swiss banks because of growing pressure from U.S. law enforcement. Three of the bank’s client advisers were indicted in January. The bank was added as a defendant in the case on Feb. 2 U.S. officials, however, have yet to find a way to move the case forward. The three Wegelin advisers charged in the case, Michael Berlinka, Urs Frei and Roger Keller, have not been arrested and the Justice Department has decided that any attempt to extradite them from Switzerland is unlikely to succeed. The bank was summoned to appear before a federal judge in New York on Friday at 3 p.m., but neither a bank officer nor a lawyer showed. In a statement issued in Switzerland after the court hearing, the bank said it had not been properly served with the criminal summons, and was therefore under no obligation to appear in court. As for the charges, the bank suggested that there was a conflict between US and Swiss law. “The circumstances create a clear dilemma for Wegelin & Co: If it were to adhere to current US legal practice aimed at Swiss banks, it would have to breach Swiss law,” the statement said. The bank added that it would “make every effort to resolve this matter within the boundaries of respectful cooperation.” It is unclear what prosecutors can do next. Wegelin doesn’t have an office in the U.S. Federal authorities have frozen $16 million that the bank had in a correspondent account in the U.S., but that amount is tiny compared to the large sums involved. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is presiding over the case, asked prosecutors to make a proposal on how to move the prosecution forward, and suggested involving the State Department, but the hearing ended without any immediate resolution.

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Fishermen Meet Amid Potentially Disastrous Cod Prospects

February 11, 2012

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. (AP) — Fishermen and federal officials grappled Friday with the increasingly bleak prospect of finding some way for the historic New England industry to avoid collapse amid troubles with the health of Gulf of Maine cod. Their meeting came in the week after regional regulators bought fisherman a yearlong reprieve from what would have been devastating cuts in 2012. But projections discussed Friday showed fishermen still face disastrous cuts in 2013 that most won’t survive. “It’s going to be hard to preserve the industry at those low numbers (in 2013) and that’s something that concerns us a great deal,” said Sam Rauch, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries arm, who led the meeting of fishermen, scientists and regulators. “This truly is one of the iconic fisheries,” he said in an interview after the meeting. “When you think of what the U.S. fisherman is, it’s an inshore Gulf of Maine cod fisherman. That’s why we are so devoted to working through this process to try to overturn every possibility we can. But the future, 2013, does not look rosy.” The cod in the Gulf of Maine has been crucial to New England fishermen from Cape Cod to Maine for hundreds of years, and four years ago, after a major assessment, it was thought to be one of the region’s strongest species. It brought in $15.8 million in 2010, second highest amount behind Georges Bank haddock among the region’s 20 regulated bottom-dwelling groundfish. But data released last year indicated the fish was so severely overfished that even if all fishing on it ended immediately, it wouldn’t rebound by 2014 to levels required under federal law. As a result, fishermen were looking at an 82 percent cut in what they were allowed to catch in 2011, a catastrophic reduction that would have wiped out fishermen around the region — not just those who rely on cod. That’s because major restrictions on cod severely limit fishing on the other key groundfish species, such as flounder and haddock, in order to protect the cod they swim among. Last week, regional regulators at the New England Fishery Management Council asked NOAA to adopt a one-year emergency rule that would enable regulators to avoid the massive cut. And they recommended allowing fishermen to catch either 6,700 metric tons or 7,500 metric tons of Gulf of Maine cod in 2012. On Friday, Rauch signaled that NOAA would allow the 6,700 catch limit in the 2012 fishing year, which starts in May. That would mean a tough 22 percent cut from what they were allowed to catch in 2011, though not nearly as deep a reduction as first feared. The problem, according to new projections discussed Friday, is that after the emergency rule expires in 2013, fishermen are again looking at a cut in cod catch just as severe as the huge reduction they were originally facing. From the first indications of cod trouble, fishermen and their advocates have questioned the science behind the new data and Friday was no exception. “We don’t trust your data,” New Hampshire charter boat fisherman Bill Wagner told regulators. “We don’t believe there’s a shortage of codfish. We don’t believe there’s a crisis in codfish.” Massachusetts Rep. Ann-Margaret Ferrante, who represents the port of Gloucester, criticized what she characterized as the constant, massive swings in scientific assessments on the size of fish populations. “We’re always in the same dilemma and I don’t understand why,” she said. Gloucester fisherman Al Cottone said the new assessment has put the fishing industry “on death row.” “The anxiety the industry feels is unprecedented,” he said With so much doubt about the science behind the new data, Cottone said, regulators should give fishermen as much fish to catch as possible while they try to remove uncertainties in the numbers. “To basically flip the switch on the industry with so much reasonable doubt would be irresponsible,” he said. Rauch said the verifying and improving the science is a top priority, and no one can predict if the new work can find something in the next year that significantly improves the assessment of cod health. “It’s always possible we’ll find something there, but even if we don’t, this year allows us time to better plan … for where this industry may end up,” Rauch said. “Fishermen are resilient, they figure out ways to adapt. But this will be hard to adapt to.”

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WATCH: Tilted Kilt Employees File Sexual Harassment Lawsuit

February 10, 2012

Nineteen employees of the Celtic-themed “breastaurant” Tilted Kilt’s Chicago Loop location on Wednesday filed a lawsuit alleging that the eatery’s bar manager sexually harassed them. The lawsuit [ PDF ] contains disturbing details of incidents that allegedly occurred between the manager, the location’s owners and their scantily-clad staff at the restaurant, located at 17 N. Wabash Ave. According to CBS Chicago, Mark Roth, an attorney representing the women, accused the location’s former manager, whom he described as a “predator,” and the location’s owners of making numerous disturbing comments to his clients . “There were requests for sex,” Roth told CBS. “There were degrading comments that were made. Something that no woman should have to put up with anywhere, let alone by their manager in the workforce.” As the Chicago Tribune reports, the women in June filed a sexual harassment complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, upon which they received “right to sue” letters . The women, according to the Tribune , allege a “sexually hostile, offensive, humiliating and degrading work environment” where, among the 30 incidents outlined in the lawsuit, the location’s manager and owners made comments such as “Meow, meow, you’re a dirty kitty” and “You don’t know what I’d like to do to you” to the employees. Women who spoke out against these remarks alleging were giving less busy shifts. According to Fox Chicago, other incidents included grabbing employees’ breasts, putting licking employees’ ears and attempting to kiss the women . The manager and many of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit no longer works at that specific Tilted Kilt location, according to the Tribune. A company spokeswoman said in a statement that Tilted Kilt “does not tolerate sexual or other types of harassment either within its own organization or within its franchisees’ organizations” and pointed out that the company utilizes a franchise model where each location is independently owned and operated , NBC Chicago reports. The chain is no stranger to controversy in its Chicago-area operations. When the chain opened a Schaumburg location, it was met with complaints from several area residents, including one who argued that the restaurant attracted “men that come in there want more than just hot wings .”

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’99 Percent’ Protest CPAC

February 10, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Conservative Political Action Conference drew crowds of protesters on Friday, as members of the Occupy Wall Street movement and labor groups demonstrated against the annual confab as a powwow for the “1 percent.” (CLICK HERE FOR LIVE UPDATES) Inside the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., students affiliated with Occupy silently interrupted a speech by GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. The protesters, wearing “We are the 99%” stickers over their mouths and shirts that read “If money is speech, poverty is silence,” were escorted from the building by security. While leading figures in the conservative movement continued to meet inside, outside the hotel the atmosphere was more raucous, with several hundred people rallying at noon beneath a giant inflatable “fat cat.” They held signs, chanted, and set up a few tents at the bottom of the hotel’s winding driveway. But when protesters began marching up the driveway shortly after noon, several D.C. police officers impeded their path and instructed protesters — and members of the media — that they needed to move back. Police said the driveway was private property and that those still on it risked arrest. The protest began moving back down the driveway as CPAC attendees watched from the sidelines. Police continued to keep protesters and members of the media off the driveway but allowed the protest to spill off the sidewalk, blocking the street. The protest saw a number of outlandish attendees, from the Brooklyn “Tax Dodgers,” a faux baseball team who satirically support former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, to “Candidate Walmart,” aka Ben Waxman, who said he was standing up for a corporation’s right to run for president. It also drew a mix of Occupy protesters, union supporters and members of local groups. “We’re protesting CPAC’s propping up of policies that don’t force U.S. corporations to pay their fair tax share, and really promote obscene income inequality in this country,” said James Adams, a coordinator with Our DC , another group of protesters that focuses on jobs. “The dreams of Americans who make up the 99 percent are being squashed by CPAC and their poster boy, Mitt Romney.” Although protesters expressed concern on issues from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to foreign policy, most said they were focused on economic policy. “We’re trying to create more jobs here in the District, and we feel by holding Congress and big corporations accountable for not paying their fair share of taxes, they can create more jobs by doing so,” said Dwayne Devoe, another member of Our DC. “A lot of them are talking about creating jobs, but at the end of the day, what they’re saying doesn’t really relate to their message.” Jeanae Paul, a member of Good Jobs Baltimore, said she was trying to call attention to the plight of the jobless. “I’ve been unemployed for over a year now, and it’s been really hard,” Paul said. “I’ve been going on interviews, but there’s no jobs out there. They’re non-existent. And it’s hard to feed my family, it’s hard to buy clothes, to celebrate the holidays.” Paul said she made the trip to Washington because she wanted the Republican candidates for president to hear stories like hers. “It’s important to let them know that we’re people, too,” she said. “We want to be heard. You know, they need to know the real stories, instead of listening to what their 1 percent is saying. Because we’re the 99 percent.” Brendan Duke, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, an organization of 2.1 million members, told The Huffington Post that there were 600 protesters on hand, including 300 unemployed workers from the D.C. area. He said the protest was scheduled to last until 2 p.m. Most CPAC attendees simply walked around the rally, but several stopped to speak with protesters. Byron Sanford, a Catholic University student who supports Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), seemed sympathetic. “I agree with Occupy Wall Street on one of the things they stand for — I think corporations are ripping off the American people,” he said, admitting that he was actually more comfortable with the atmosphere outside the conference. “I feel much better out here.” Others were less impressed. “I’ve been to a couple of these things, and it’s pretty typical — it’s the same slogans,” said John Sexton, who writes for Verum Serum, CPAC’s 2012 Blog of the Year. “Individually, they can be very reasonable, but in groups, you’re not thinking.” Another protest outside CPAC is planned for Friday evening. Michael Calderone contributed to this report. CORRECTION: The original version of this story quoted James Adams and Dwayne Devoe as members of Occupy DC. They are part of the group Our DC.

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White House Proposes Tax The Rich, Chop Medicare, In Election-Year Budget

February 10, 2012

WASHINGTON — The White House will propose deep cuts and modest tax hikes Monday in a budget that aims to stick to last summer’s debt deal by trimming Medicare and other programs while making the well-off pay more. Senior administration officials said the spending blueprint would lower tax rates overall. But it would end the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich enacted in 2001 and 2003. It would do that by cutting tax loopholes — or tax expenditures, as they are called — for high earners and corporations. Part of that is implementing the Buffett rule, named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, which would ensure that no one earning more than $1 million in a year pays less than 30 percent in taxes, as Buffett does now. Overall, the plan calls for $2.50 in spending cuts for every dollar raised in taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year. The proposal cuts the budget by $1 trillion over 10 years, and trims $4 trillion from the deficit. For the first time in five years, the deficit would fall below $1 trillion, at $901 billion in 2013, according to the proposal. The White House projects that by 2018, the deficit would drop to $575 billion, or 2.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. A large chunk of the deficit reduction over the next decade — $1.5 trillion — would come from still-unspecified tax reforms, although the expiring Bush tax cuts would account for much. The largest cuts would come from the defense budget and Medicare. Defense spending would be slash some $487 billion from the Department of Defense’s projected budget, including savings from winding down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Health programs, primarily Medicare, would be targeted for $360 billion in savings, with most expected from cuts to providers, not beneficiaries. Another $278 billion in cuts would come from farm subsidies, federal worker retirement and other programs. The numbers in the White House blueprint would look a lot like the assessment unveiled in September. The budget is likely to get a cold reception from Republicans in an election year, and reads itself like the political message President Obama has been delivering since his speech in Kansas late last year. “We now face a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it,” says the introduction to the “fact sheet” summarizing the plans. “After decades of eroding middle-class security as those at the very top saw their incomes rise as never before and after a historic recession that plunged our economy into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover, it is time to construct an economy that is built to last,” the document says, repeating the president’s State of the Union theme. Officials said the budget to be proposed on Monday was the third part of a three-act play that started with the Kansas speech and continued with the State of the Union address. “We must transform our economy from one focused on speculating, spending, and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating, and building,” the budget introduction says. “That begins with putting the nation on a path to live within our means –- by cutting wasteful spending, asking all Americans to shoulder their fair share, and making tough choices on some things we cannot afford, while keeping the investments we need to grow the economy and create jobs.” The plan calls for more than $350 billion in short-term spending to spur job growth, including extending the payroll tax cut that Congress is battling over now, $30 billion to modernize 35,000 schools, and $30 billion to help keep and hire new teachers, police and firefighters. There is also a commitment to building research, development and manufacturing, with $140.8 billion slated for research and development. Such spending is a sign the president is not backing off initiatives like the green-energy push that has been tarred by the failure of solar company Solyndra. The budget will recommend boosting spending for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Laboratories. It also calls for a six-year, $476 billion transportation reauthorization bill that the administration says would “create thousands of new jobs and modernize a critical foundation of our economic growth.”

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S&P Downgrades Huge Number Of Italian Banks

February 10, 2012

MILAN, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded 34 Italian banks on Friday, including heavyweights UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, citing a reduced ability to roll over their wholesale debt and expected weak profitability. The move follows S&P’s downgrade of Italy’s sovereign rating last month to BBB+, part of a mass downgrade of nine euro zone countries. In a statement, S&P said its so-called Banking Industry Country Risk Assessment had worsened to group 4 from group 3 — out of 10 groups — reflecting its more negative view on Italy’s banking system. “Italy’s vulnerability to external financing risks has increased, given its high external public debt, resulting in Italian banks’ significantly diminished ability to roll over their wholesale debt,” it said. “We anticipate persistently weak profitability for Italian banks in the next few years, and a risk-adjusted return on core banking products that may not be sufficient for banks to meet their cost of capital. We believe this may be negative for the Italian banking industry’s stability.” Italian banks have borne the brunt of a sell-off in Italian assets since the euro zone’s third-largest economy was dragged into the single currency bloc’s debt crisis last summer. Because of their vast holdings of domestic government bonds, Italy’s top five banks have been asked to find some 15 billion euros by June to meet tougher capital requirements set by the European Bnaking Authority. Lenders have also been effectively shut out of wholesale debt markets and have increased their reliance on cheap funds from the European Central Bank. Italian banks tapped a whopping 116 billion euros of nearly 500 billion euros of three-year funds offered by the ECB last December, easing funding strains. A similar operation will be held at the end of February and analysts expect Italian banks to further increase their borrowing from the ECB. S&P said weak profitability and increased cost of capital could lead Italian banks to write down a large part of the goodwill they booked during a wave of industry consolidation over the past decade. Such writedowns forced UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank by assets, to announce a 10.6 billion euro loss in the third quarter of 2011. Among the banks downgraded, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena and Banco Popolare had their rating cut below that of Italy’s sovereign debt. For a list of the banks affected by S&P’s downgrades, please click on

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The 10 Tech Companies Taking The Biggest Stand Against Climate Change

February 10, 2012

How are some of the world’s biggest IT companies taking a stand against a climate change? A list released by Greenpeace this week ranks some of the world’s largest information technology companies based on their efforts to mitigate climate change. The fifth edition of the Cool IT Leaderboard puts Google at the top, with Cisco and Ericsson grabbing second and third. According to a press release , the list “ranks 21 IT companies on their clean energy leadership potential, willingness to embrace clean energy solutions and potential to influence energy decisions.” Neither Apple nor Facebook were included in the list, as they have not pursued “market opportunities to drive IT energy solutions” to the same extent as others, according to Greenpeace. Greenpeace International IT analyst Gary Cook said, “Technology giants have a real opportunity to use their power and influence to change how we produce and use energy — Google tops the table because it’s putting its money where its mouth is by pumping investment into renewable energy.” As Wired notes, the highest scoring company, Google, only received a score of 53 out of 100 . Cisco was last year’s winner, with 70 points, but dropped to 49 this year. Greenpeace says Cisco’s fall is due to “a much less forceful support for priority climate and energy policies.” For more information on some of the greenest companies around, check out Newsweek’s 2011 list of the 30 greenest tech companies . List courtesy of Greenpeace . Read their full report here . Scroll down for the companies ranked 11-21. The companies which did not make the top 10 include: 11. Wipro 12. Dell 13. Microsoft 14. SAP 15. AT&T 16. HCL 17. NTT 18. NEC 19. TCS 20. Telefónica 21. Oracle

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Nathan Gardels: Democracy Is Not Self-Correcting

February 10, 2012

Recently, I wrote an article posted here about the protests in Italy against the “undemocratic” government of meritocrats in Italy led by Prime Minister Mario Monti. Many responders, following the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, worry that Europe is entering a “post-democratic” phase, not just because of a government like Monti’s, but because European institutions, such as the appointed European Commission, are seen to be beyond the accountability of the public. Behind such sentiments is a suspicion of delegated authority of any kind in democratic societies. My response is to consider this: The argument against the delegated authority of meritocracy based on experience and expertise is that it can get it wrong without adequate feedback. Without the capacity to self-correct it can end up oppressing the people instead of serving them. The argument for one-person-one-vote democracy always is that it gets is right because, like the free market,it is self-correcting. But that is no truer for democracy than for the market, as we saw in the 2008-09 financial crisis. Democracy, both representative and direct, also has its rigidities (ideology, populism, self-interest of voters, money as free speech). Often the accumulation of individual choices produces unintended consequences against the public good. As I pointed out in my earlier article, after a series of direct democracy initiatives to curb property taxes and punish criminals, California now spends more on prisons than higher education, thus undermining the foundations of its future. What matters for good governance is an open society — freedom of expression and the rule of law to protect feedback — not whether the system is meritocratic, democratic or a hybrid. Is China’s “monitory webocracy,” where the Communist government is acutely responsive to the public clamor over weibo on everything from tainted milk or toys to train wrecks to pollution, any less self-correcting than American democracy where the Wall Street banks that precipitated the financial crisis and were bailed out because they were “too big to fail” are now even larger and remain unregulated?

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Owner Of ‘Illegal’ California Gold Mine Surrenders To Face Charges

February 10, 2012

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A man who state and local officials say is running a massive illegal gold-mining operation in California’s Sierra Nevada surrendered Thursday to face 14 criminal charges of operating without permits and polluting a creek. Joseph Hardesty also faces state fines of nearly $900,000. He was booked into El Dorado County Jail on the charges, which include four felonies, and was being held in lieu of $75,000 bond. His attorney, William Brewer, says Hardesty turned himself in after investigators from the district attorney’s office searched for him at his mother’s home and the home of his partner in the Big Cut Mine, near Placerville. Hardesty surrendered a day after The Associated Press published a story about the mine, which is in the Sierra foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, and his three-year battle with authorities. “It’s unfortunate that our government has decided in this case to take away our liberties and our rights without adequate process,” said Brewer, of San Diego. “Joe really is a very honorable person and I just wish things were different.” He denies his client is mining gold, saying he is operating a sand and gravel business to complement another he owns in Sacramento County. State and local officials say they have evidence and statements indicating the site is being mined for gold at a time when the precious metal’s price is hovering near $1,700 an ounce. Hardesty, 54, had promised to surrender last week but failed to appear. Authorities said Hardesty turned himself in at the sheriff department’s office in Placerville about 11:30 a.m. and was taken to jail without incident. Brewer said investigators had looked for his client everywhere except where he was — his home in Elk Grove, south of Sacramento. Hardesty contends that he has a historic right to operate the Big Cut Mine on nearly 150 acres he bought seven years ago, based on a reclamation plan he had filed with El Dorado County in 2009 and $188,000 in bonds. Local authorities and the State Mining and Geology Board disagree. On top of the mining board’s fines, El Dorado County charged Hardesty with mining and grading without permits, working despite stop orders, releasing sediment into Weber Creek, violating zoning laws, and using hazardous materials without proper permits. Hardesty, his wife, Yvette, and his partner, Rick Churches, brought in heavy equipment to cut into a steep ridge high above the creek, although Joseph Hardesty is the only one facing charges. The site is guarded by locked gates covered with “no trespassing” signs, but an AP reporter and photographer were able to view the mining operation from a heavily forested ridge a few hundred yards away. Late last month, local and state inspectors with a warrant entered the property and documented at least 30 acres stripped bare, four drainage ponds and a football-field-sized gravel bed about 60 feet deep. Inspectors previously found gold on what is called a shaker table, which is used to separate the heavy metal from sand and gravel. Bruce Person, an engineer with the county transportation department who helped inspect the property, said a previous owner found an ancient riverbed on the property could produce between 1 and 3 ounces of gold for every ton of material. El Dorado County Deputy District Attorney Michael Pizzuti declined to comment Thursday on Hardesty’s arrest. He previously told the AP that Hardesty’s partner told a county inspector that they intended to remove gold and sell the rocks it was separated from as gravel. Hardesty already was on probation after pleading no contest last year to a misdemeanor charge of storing unpermitted hazardous waste in Sacramento County. He now faces allegations that he violated his probation by continuing to operate at both the Sacramento and El Dorado locations. The fines were levied in January by the State Mining and Geology Board, a division of the California Department of Conservation. The penalty climbs by $15,000 for each day he continued to operate.

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When The Poor Have Health Care Coverage, The Cost Goes Down For All

February 10, 2012

The concept of support for universal health care is taboo among Republicans who scrutinize the Affordable Care Act — dubbing it the “Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” — and call for its repeal. But a new UC Irvine study challenges the GOP argument that the health care law is too costly, with data illustrating that health care costs on the whole fall when poorer, uninsured patients are provided with insurance. “In a case study involving low-income people enrolled in a community-based health insurance program, we found that use of primary care increased but use of emergency services fell, and — over time — total health care costs declined,” David Neumark, a co-author of the study, said in a release accompanying the findings. The study — which focused on uninsured people in Richmond, Virginia who fell 200 percent below the poverty line — found that over three years, health care costs fell by almost 50 percent per participant, from $8,899 in the first year to $4,569 in the third after they received insurance. Participants who enrolled in health coverage made fewer trips to the emergency room, which are notorious for running up patient bills. Instead, insured participants went for more primary care visits. “A lot of the debate about health care reform surrounds the issue of whether we’re setting up something that’s going to cost us more by increasing use of medical services or something that will cut costs through more appropriate and timely use of medical services,” Neumark said in the release. “[O]ver time, costs can be reduced through increased use of primary care and reductions in emergency-department visits and hospital admissions, but it may take several years of coverage for substantive savings to occur.” Health care spending in the U.S. has been on the rise for years. Americans spent more than three times on health care in 2008 than they spent in the 18 years before, according to a Kaiser report. Low-income, uninsured individuals tend to rack up exorbitant health-care bills because they often rely on emergency room visits instead of primary care. In the long run, these bills are paid by taxpayers. The Affordable Care Act “is set to extend Medicaid benefits to about 16 million uninsured, low-income adults and children by the end of 2014,” according to the study. In an extreme example of the societal cost of leaving some uninsured, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell once chronicled the medical costs of a homeless man in Nevada who “used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state.” “It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment,” Gladwell wrote. Mandatory health care already saw some success in Massachusetts last decade, when current GOP presidential candidate and then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney signed a health care law that inspired the Affordable Care Act. Today, Massachusetts has the highest percentage of insured residents of any state . Though he initially supported the plan, Romney’s rival, GOP candidate Newt Gingrich, continues to slam Romney for enacting the health care law. “Your plan essentially is one more big-government, bureaucratic high-cost system.” Gingrich said . Gingrich’s views are reflective of a majority of Americans who say they are in favor of repealing the health care law. A repeal of the act could potentially add “at least a trillion dollars to the deficit,” according to HealthCare.gov .

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The Story Of Obama’s Brush With Political Disaster

February 10, 2012

Shortly after four o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 13, 2011, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner walked down the hallway near his office toward a large conference room facing the building’s interior. He was accompanied by a retinue of counselors and aides. When they arrived in the room — known around Treasury simply as “the large” — four people were seated at a long walnut table on the side near the door. Geithner and his entourage greeted them, then walked around to the far side and took their seats.

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Lehman Brothers Suing Citi Over Huge Account

February 10, 2012

NEW YORK — Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and its creditors are suing several units of Citigroup Inc. to recover $2.5 billion the failed investment bank transferred to a backup account at Citi months before seeking bankruptcy court protection. In the complaint filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, Lehman claims that Citibank is wrongfully withholding the money as a potential source of funds in a dispute over derivative contracts. Lehman also is asking the court to disallow what it says are $2 billion of “inflated and legally unsupported” claims that Citibank has asserted against it. In a statement Thursday, Citigroup vowed to defend itself and its right to recover losses from Lehman’s collapse. It called the lawsuit unjustified and accused Lehman of trying to renege on its obligations and claw back assets to which it has no right. According to the lawsuit, Citi demanded on June 12, 2008, that Lehman transfer between $3 billion to $5 billion into an account to cover potential overdrafts by Lehman subsidiaries that were using Citi’s clearing and settlement services. Lehman agreed that same day to set aside $2 billion from its account at Citibank into a segregated account, on the condition that the bank would have no lien or other rights to the funds. In its statement, Citi said that it tried to help Lehman prior to its bankruptcy filing, but needed to obtain the guarantees and cash deposits from Lehman in order to protect its shareholders from potential losses. Lehman claims that by holding on to the $2 billion, Citibank is violating the U.S. bankruptcy code, state law and going against the conditions both agreed to when the funds were set aside. In addition, Lehman asserts that Citibank has refused to return another $500 million in cash that was transferred into its broker-dealer subsidiary just hours before Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing in September 2008 was the biggest in U.S. history and triggered more than 75 separate bankruptcy proceedings. The company listed more than $600 billion in debts when it filed. Lehman Brothers Holdings is the company that controls what’s left of the investment bank’s assets. Citigroup shares ended regular trading down 57 cents to $33.66 on Thursday. The stock slipped another 8 cents to $33.58 in extended trading.

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U.S. Clamps Down On ‘Sex In The City’ Counterfeit Perfumes

February 10, 2012

The ladies of “Sex and the City” are still cool enough for China’s massive counterfeit market. Counterfeit perfume seizures by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection surged in the United States last year, jumping 471 percent to a total value of $9.4 million. And of all perfumes seized, the one most often found was called “Sex in the City,” a counterfeit variation on the HBO trademark. The surge in fake fragrance raids was the result of new partnerships between U.S. Customs and Border Protection and American companies like HBO trying to protect their trademarks, the agency said in a report . “The collaborative effort that we’ve had with Customs have been incredibly effective and we’ve been happy with the results,” said HBO spokesman Jeff Cusson of the seizures. U.S. fragrance companies have turned to law enforcement for help in battling counterfeits after nearly a decade of weak sales, which dropped 20 percent between 2005 and 2010, according to Euromonitor International , a market research group. While the recession is partially responsible, the groups says, top-level brands may no longer hold the same weight over imitations that they once did. “Fragrances have lost their mystique and become less ‘special’ and commoditised,” Euromonitor wrote in a May 2011 report . “With over a hundred new fragrance launches a year, the glut of fragrances in the marketplace has also created consumer confusion.” Or perhaps Americans are simply no longer willing to pay $100 for designer fragrances when cheap versions abound. The “Sex in the City” fake, for example, is sold all over the Internet for less than $10. Versions like Lust, Kiss, Love and Dream are currently available on Amazon.com , Overstock.com and many other beauty sites. Three of the four countries most often responsible for counterfeit perfumes seized in 2011 are located in Asia — China, India and Hong Kong — but the perfumes also often originated from Germany, according to Customs seizure data. Most fans of the fragrance likely don’t know that the “Sex in the City” perfume is a fake at all, especially since the HBO-approved scent was only

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David Kiley: The Great Debate Over Chrysler’s Super Bowl Ad

February 10, 2012

When I saw Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad at halftime on Feb. 5, I emailed the executive who conceived it, Chrysler marketing chief Olivier Francois, and told him I didn’t like it so much. It was my first viewing of the ad, and thus my initial reaction from the gut. I thought it was too dark. Unlike last year’s Eminem Super Bowl ad, I thought it didn’t do enough to lift Detroit or Chrysler — and wasn’t that the point? But after watching the video perhaps 10 times since that initial viewing, I have warmed to the ad, and recognized that my initial reaction seems to be in the minority. I’ve also come to think my response was tainted by all the election year claptrap and hogwash I watch and listen to on cable TV and satellite radio on a daily basis. Driven by the sharp reactions to the ad communicated via Twitter and in post-game interviews from political pundits and power-brokers like GOP fundraiser and former Bush Administration official Karl Rove , the media seized on the fact that the ad seemed to feature working-class folks from a Midwestern industrial town and the ad copy seemed to be right out of an Obama campaign speechwriter’s notebook, extolling the virtues of the auto industry bailout. The charge that Chrysler was somehow sending an early Valentine to the Obama campaign as thanks for the 44th president green-lighting the federal bailout of Chrysler in 2009 started to take shape on the airwaves. I initially thought the ad was a clever piece of marketing Jiu Jitsu, designed to create maximum buzz and chatter for the Chrysler after the game. Casting well-known Republican libertarian-cum-bailout criticizer Clint Eastwood was supposed to inoculate Chrysler from the pro-Obama charge. How could it be, I asked myself, that all these smart people at Chrysler and the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy had no clue their commercial would be seen through a political lens, especially just a couple weeks before the Michigan GOP primary? Even the line, “It’s Halftime in America,” made me think immediately of Ronald Reagan’s “Its Morning Again in America” spot — and that it’s coming up to “halftime in the Obama two-term presidency.” Francois says a possible political interpretation of the ad never come up in conversations during the two months of its development. He also says “creating buzz and chatter was never even part of the consideration.” Should we believe this very clever, intelligent, French-born executive heading both Fiat and Chrysler’s global marketing? No buzz intended? Olivier says the ad’s aim was to offer a logical sequel to last year’s Eminem ad, which ushered in the “Imported From Detroit” tagline as a slogan for the Chrysler brand. That line, repeated in this year’s ad, is now being used as an umbrella theme for all the company’s brands, including Dodge, Jeep, Ram and Mopar. “We are trying to shine a light on the values we hold in Detroit, values that we are trying to embrace for Chrysler and the values we think our customers identify with,” Francois said. “I know I am French and come from an Italian company, but I feel very much like I am gaining cultural citizenship in America, if not legal citizenship. And our team, which is led by Sergio Marchionne, is very serious about communicating what we think is great about this place and these people to the rest of the country.” Francois said Marchionne, the Fiat and Chrysler CEO, was intimately involved in the creation of this year’s ad, right down to writing and editing copy. Chrysler brand marketing chief Saad Shehab also had a hand in its writing and editing. And Clint Eastwood also had a lot to do with shaping the ad, choosing locations and writing copy. Eastwood was surprised Republican critics and Obama supporters felt that the ad was “pro-Obama.” But Eastwood’s spoken lines tee up, like it or not, an inevitable political discussion that will take place this month in advance of the Michigan GOP primary and into the fall, especially if Michigan native Mitt Romney goes on to face off against President Obama in the general election. Was the bailout the right thing to do? Was it money well spent? Was it fair to industries and companies that did not get bailed out? Was it too generous to the unions? The key lines: “[The people of Detroit] almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now, the Motor City is fighting again … but after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one, because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times. And if we can’t find a way, then we make one … how do we come from behind … how do we come together, and how do we win … it’s halftime, America, and our second half is about to begin.” The vast majority of Republicans, including all the current presidential candidates, were against the government-assisted bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. They believed the companies should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy court without aid from Uncle Sam, so that creditors could just pick over the companies, buy or be granted what they thought was valuable — Chevy, Jeep, Ram truck, Cadillac, real estate, etc. — and liquidate the rest. But amid the meltdown of the financial sector, there was no financing for an organized bankruptcy that would have allowed the companies to come out as whole at the end of the process, meaning it would have been a liquidation free-for-all. And as private equity companies usually do, there would have been a fire-sale of assets, followed by an inevitable move to get as much headcount and production out of Michigan and into Southern states and Mexico — as far away from the stronghold of the United Auto Workers as possible. The reason Southeast Michigan is clawing its way back is because hiring is happening. GM is the biggest automaker in the world again, and making billions. Chrysler is in the black and posting solid progress. Ford is making billions. Suppliers are bouncing back financially. The companies did not close or move away. GM and Chrysler have made substantial investments in the city and surrounding suburbs. Communities are still fighting to get back to par, but they haven’t been destroyed. The sentiments and words in Chrysler’s ad reflect the way the automaker’s executives and Eastwood feel about the values they find in the working people who design, engineer, market and sell the vehicles produced by the company. Their words also seem to support the idea that high-value manufacturing, such as automobiles, is an important industry to protect and nurture in the U.S. Those values and thoughts also happen to be shared by Obama’s administration, and they are a cornerstone of his campaign rhetoric and prose as president. It all seems to be a right-cross to the jaws of the GOP presidential candidates and the establishment conservatives who both opposed the auto bailout and regularly express disdain for the UAW. All on the biggest TV day of the year with over 100 million people watching. So it’s not difficult for many people to think the content and timing of Chrysler’s commercial could have been planned and calculated to maximize buzz, the currency on which most successful ads trade these days (no matter what Francois says he was looking for). The Chrysler executives and Eastwood say these political themes some of us think we saw were not in their minds or conversations. They sought to make an ad, they say, that simply touched and engaged everyone, not one party or another. Late Thursday, four days after the game, there were 5.8 million YouTube views of the ad. A cursory patrol of comments left by real people — not pundits or members of the media — shows those of us in the media are, indeed, in the minority of those who found it possibly pro-Democrat or pro-Obama. We won’t see the ad on TV again, says Olivier. Unlike last year’s Eminem ad, it won’t be shown in shorter versions for normal ad break. It was meant as a one-time-only event. My guess is that it will be remembered and talked about for at least a few days more. Then the YouTube hits will slow down, and we will move on to other topics. But the ad — intentionally or not — meshes well with the Obama message for the Midwest and especially Michigan. So it wouldn’t surprise me if we see the ad pointed to by the president and Democrats for months to come as a reminder of the grit, determination and values of Detroiters and Southeast Michiganders — and of just who kept the Michigan economy from falling of a cliff.

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GOP Crafts Plan To Kill Obama Birth Control Rule

February 9, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s rule requiring most employers’ insurance plans to pay for birth control with no co-pay for employees has infuriated conservatives at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, renewing the calls for repealing health care reform. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told The Huffington Post that Congress needs to try to reverse Obama’s decision, which has caused a firestorm among many conservatives because religiously affiliated groups are not exempt from the rule. King suggested killing it by attaching a measure to a piece of must-pass legislation, such as the upcoming Surface Transportation Bill. “If the president vetoes it, then we’re back to square one,” he said. “So if it goes on a piece of must-pass legislation like maybe a Surface Transportation Bill, there’s a chance that the president will sign a bill like that. I’m going to let others push on that strategy — Surface Transportation Bill or some other must-pass piece of legislation.” The new rule stems from the Affordable Care Act. Most women employed in the U.S. will have the cost of their birth control covered with no co-pay , effective Aug. 1. The rule exempted employers, including churches and other places of worship whose primary purpose is imparting religious beliefs. But many religious groups argued it was too narrow and should apply to religious-affiliated organizations as well. The Obama administration disagreed, but gave these employers an extra year to comply with the new law. Ultimately, King added, Congress needs to push for the repeal of health care reform, where the new rule originated. “This is the president’s decision, made by Kathleen Sebelius,” said King, referring to the secretary of Health and Human Services. “This decision was not made at HHS. It was made in the White House. Barack Obama made this decision or approved this decision and the way to rectify it is to repeal Obamacare.” WATCH: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has already put forward a bill that would allow religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and other organizations that morally oppose contraception to refuse to cover it for their employees. He said no decision has been made on the timing of bringing legislation to the floor. Asked if he sees any middle ground with the White House, he proposed letting individual churches choose whether to pay for contraception for their employees. In the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the House Energy and Commerce Committee is taking the lead “through appropriate legislative channels.” The Senate’s $109 billion Surface Transportation Bill moved to the floor on Thursday. It reauthorizes federal public transportation programs at current levels for two more fiscal years. The broader House bill would cover five years of transportation spending. The House GOP leadership has planned on a Feb. 17 vote . UPDATE — 7:54 p.m.: The Huffington Post’s Mike McAuliff reports that Senate Republicans did end up going with the strategy King mentioned, offering an amendment to the transportation bill aimed at countering birth control regulations under the health care law. They attempted to block the rule before it even took effect by amending the Surface Transportation Bill that the Senate had voted 85 to 11 to start debating. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took umbrage at the move, saying, “Here is a bipartisan bill to create and save jobs. Every state in the union is desperate for these dollars. But to show how the Republicans never lose an opportunity to mess up a good piece of legislation, listen to this: They’re talking about First Amendment rights, the Constitution.”

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SEC May Target Big Banks In Lawsuit Over Mortgage-Backed Securities

February 9, 2012

Regulators may be preparing a lawsuit against some of the country’s largest banks in order to probe their role in the acceleration of the financial crisis. The Securities and Exchange Commission is planning to formally warn a number of firms that sold mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the meltdown of an impending enforcement action, the Wall Street Journal reports. At issue is whether banks knew at the time that the mortgages backing their securities were of poor quality — and whether the banks nevertheless presented a picture of the loans that was misleadingly reassuring. Mortgage-backed securities are generally believed to have played a central role in the near-meltdown of the national banking system a few years ago. The country’s largest financial firms repeatedly bundled subprime mortgages and used them to guarantee securities that were sold to investors. When those mortgages proved unsound, it triggered a series of financial failures that dealt a severe blow to the national economy. If such a lawsuit does come to pass, it would be part of a broader effort on the part of the federal government to assign responsibility for the financial crisis — and to better regulate hazardous trading practices and high-risk financial instruments in the hopes of preventing another one. At the same time, the SEC has been criticized for not doing more to stamp out misconduct. In 2009, one prominent whistleblower called the agency ” captive to the industry it regulates .” Multiple lawsuits and inquiries have already raised the issue of whether banks misrepresented the health of mortgage-backed securities during the housing boom. JPMorgan Chase faced one such suit last year, as did Washington Mutual and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division . Goldman Sachs is currently facing a potential class-action suit from investors over whether it purchased a number of mortgage-backed securities in 2005 without first examining their health. Goldman was also accused last year, by an investigatory Senate panel, of misleading Congress and investors as to the safety of the mortgage-backed securities it was selling. News of the possible suit comes at a moment when banks are already being called to account for their handling of another result of the collapsing housing market: the foreclosure crisis. On Thursday, the government announced that it had reached a $25 billion settlement with some of the country’s largest financial firms — among them Citigroup, Ally and BofA, all said to be targets of the SEC investigation — over charges that the banks engaged in systematic and widespread mortgage fraud. No major bank executives have yet to face prison over their role in the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression.

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U.S. Bans Health Insurance Company Fine Print, Allows Baffling Terms

February 9, 2012

The Obama administration aims to demystify shopping for health insurance and has created a standard form that explains in plain language without the fine print what plans actually cover. What they couldn’t do was make health insurance itself less complicated, so consumers will still be confronted by baffling terms including “allowed amount,” “balance billing,” and “usual, customary, and reasonable charges.” The health reform law requires insurance companies to use a new document that presents a uniform summary of deductibles, co-payments and other features so consumers can compare one health plan to another. The new rules also eliminate the fine print: insurers can’t use a typeface smaller than 12 points. Administration officials including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unveiled the forms Thursday and companies will have to comply beginning Sept. 23. Consumer groups including Families USA and Health Care for America Now praised the policy as an important step that enhances transparency in the health insurance market. These new summaries of benefits and costs will help people choose the right health plans and are a big improvement over the confusing information and marketing material insurance companies currently use, said Lynn Quincy, a senior policy analyst at Consumers Union who helped develop the new form. The “plain language” isn’t always so plain and the jargon-heavy nature of the form underscores that health insurance is complicated. While the administration will require that insurers provide a four-page glossary of industry terms , shoppers will have to contend with terminology that isn’t always easily understandable. “We don’t want to over-promise here about what a form can do laid over top a very complex product,” Quincy said. “We have to wait and see if the new form actually helps people.” The insurance summary can’t be longer than eight pages and includes facts about a plan such as what its deductibles are, whether benefits are capped at a certain dollar amount every year, and if patients need referrals to visit specialists. Though the administration proposed last year that premiums be listed, that requirement isn’t part of the final rule. The monthly price for a health plan, which may not be available until after an insurance company has reviewed a customer’s application, will be provided separately. The form includes examples of medical expenses, such as the birth of a child, so consumers can estimate how much would be covered by insurance and how much would come out of their own pockets. The administration characterizes this feature as a “Nutrition Facts” label for health benefits. The health insurance industry’s top lobbyist said the rule places too heavy a burden on companies and takes effect too quickly. “The final rule requires an almost complete overhaul and redesign of how information must be provided to consumers,” Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement .

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Who Does And Does Not Qualify For A Piece Of The $25 Billion Mortgage Settlement

February 9, 2012

The government’s $25 billion settlement with five of the nation’s largest banks could help up to one million homeowners . About $21.5 billion is earmarked for consumer relief, with the remainder going to state and federal governments. Distressed homeowners should not expect a check or aid tomorrow, however. According to the government’s National Mortgage Settlement website, it will take up to two months to select an administrator to oversee the process, identifying who is eligible to receive help, and six to nine months to start with the actual housing help. Help could come via partial loan forgiveness or “principal reduction,” refinancing or, cash payments of up to $2,000 for those who have already lost their home. The program only applies to homeowners who have or had mortgages serviced by Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial. Those with loans owned by housing giants Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac are not affected by settlement. Homeowners from Oklahoma, the only state to not sign the settlement agreement, are not eligible. Here’s more detail on who’s eligible for relief: Principal reductions Servicers are required to provide at least $17 billion worth of direct relief to current homeowners, most of which will go to provide help for principal reduction for first and second mortgages. Other money will be used to facilitate short sales–where the home is sold for less than the mortgage value. The funds also cover anti-blight measures, and enhanced homeowner transition programs. Principal reductions could be anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 on average but the amount will depend on each homeowner’s market. Homeowners who think they qualify should contact their lender directly. Who is eligible? Homeowners who are still in their home, but are not current on their payments and are struggling to make them. Refinancing Servicers will have to provide up to $3 billion in refinancing relief nationwide to help homeowners get better interest rates on home loans to reduce monthly payments. Current rates for 30-year and 15-year fixed rate mortgages are under 4 percent. Who is eligible? Homeowners who owe more on their home than it is worth and are current on their mortgage payments. Cash Servicers will divvy up $1.5 billion among 750,000 homeowners who have already lost their homes to foreclosure. That comes out to $2,000 and checks will be mailed over the next six to nine months. Who is eligible? Homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure between Jan. 1, 2008 and Dec. 31, 2011. For homeowners who lost their house but are concerned it could be difficult for the administrator to track you down, please contact an Attorney General’s Office . For more information: Ally/GMAC : 800-766-4622 Bank of America : 877-488-7814 Citi : 866-272-4749 JPMorgan Chase : 866-372-6901 Wells Fargo : 800-288-3212

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Pamela Yellen: Five Tips for Relationship Fiscal Harmony

February 9, 2012

Money is the leading cause of marital and relationship troubles.  40% of married couples have serious, recurring arguments about money, according to Matt Bell, author of Planning for Fewer Fights with Your Spouse . 49% of those battles have to do with what to buy or not buy, 33% are about debt and 26% about savings. According to a survey by American Express , 27% of those who responded have lied about the amount of a purchase to their partner, and 30% have hidden purchases from their partner. And would it surprise you to learn that some people admitted to knowing their partner’s weight but not their salary? How compatible are you and your partner when it comes to money and finances? Many couples have different values where money is concerned and neglect to take the time to hash out issues that can potentially ruin their relationship. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve put together five tips for improving the fiscal harmony in your relationship… Tip #1:  Hold a monthly financial discussion night Since so many couples don’t talk openly about money, when money issues do come up, it becomes a sensitive subject and leads to conflict. The solution is to sit down with your partner every month and go over your spending and savings plan.  Look at everything you bought during the past month and everything you’re thinking of buying soon, and ask yourselves, “Is this really a need or a want”?   Awareness is the key to taking control of your spending habits, and asking questions like this one is very powerful. Also discuss and update your long-term and short-term financial and savings goals, and then ask yourselves if the purchases you’re considering will truly move you closer to those goals. Tip :  If you have children over age 6 or 7, include them in your monthly family finance night — it’s a great way to prepare your kids to be financially successful and responsible adults. Learn more about how to teach teens financial responsibility .  Tip #2:  Share responsibility It’s common today for one partner to play the primary role in managing finances.  But both partners should be aware and involved.  Make all decisions about major purchases together. Trap :  Allowing the partner with the biggest income to make major financial decisions alone. Tip #3:  Eliminate debt to outside financial institutions Debt is deadly to many relationships, and a top priority should be to reduce and eliminate debt to banks and credit card companies. One way to speed up that process is to make your spending decisions more consciously.  (See Tip #1 above.) Another key is building an emergency fund that can help you weather life’s emergencies. For tips on creating a rainy-day fund, including how much you should be setting aside, see the video, The Secret to a Financially Stress-Free Life .  Tip #4:  Have a “Plan B” One topic to be sure to cover during your family finance discussion night is what’s your back-up plan if things change.  What if one partner loses their job?  Or what if one partner wants to go back to school?  What if one of you gets a job in another part of the country? Tip #5:  How to take the first step There’s no time like the present to start or deepen the money conversation with your partner.  And here’s a fun, non-threatening way to do that… Begin by taking our Love and Money Financial Self-Assessment . I encourage you and your partner to take the 3-minute assessment , either separately or together, and see how your money values differ from one another.  I think you’ll find this to be eye-opening! As a consultant to financial advisors, Pamela Yellen investigated more than 450 savings and retirement planning strategies seeking an alternative to the risk and volatility of stocks and other investments. Her research led her to a time-tested, predictable method of growing and protecting savings now used by more than 400,000 Americans. Pamela’s book, Bank On Yourself:  The Life-Changing Secret to Growing and Protecting Your Financial Future is a New York Times Bestseller. Learn more at www.BankOnYourself.com

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Stanley A. Dashew: How to Succeed in Small Business Even During Hard Times

February 8, 2012

I entered the job market at the height of the Great Depression, and launched my first business in 1950 — five years after the end of World War II. Points of reference: Boomers, this was before color TV and rock ‘n’ roll. Gen Xers, this was before video games and the Internet. Millennials, a “smart mob” would have been an oxymoron. Since then, I have launched a half-dozen successful businesses and been responsible for a score of inventions (and more than 40 patents) in fields as diverse as credit card processing, mining, mass transit, medical equipment and off-shore oil transportation. I’ve also weathered a dozen recessions. You could say that when it comes to free enterprise, I’ve been around the block. A few times. My first piece of advice for those thinking about starting a small business: Don’t wait. There’s never a right time. You might think that the current hard times would be the time to hunker and wait for the passing storm before testing your entrepreneurial mettle. Don’t fool yourself. A tough economy can present as many opportunities for a great — and profitable — business idea as when the good times are rollin’. Here, then, are my five sure-fire steps for becoming a successful entrepreneur, even during hard times: 1. Identify The Problem : What bothers you? I mean, what really grates on your nerves? Chances are, whatever the problem, others feel the same way. I made my first fortune in starting a company that automated the credit card industry, because paper cards were very problematic and really grated on the nerves of bankers. Now, I knew nothing about high finance much less retail, but beginning in 1957 I began reading about new-fangled “charge cards” that some banks were beginning to offer their customers. And when I began talking to bankers who were offering the cards, what really bothered them was what they were made of: paper. The paper cards would tear and fray, and become difficult to read both at the merchant and bank-processing levels. Yep, I had an early Diner’s Card made of paper and they were exactly right. Rightly so, banks also were predicting a huge market for credit cards so they wanted a way to issue cards in large volume at low-cost and then be able to maintain faster files and accounts on the state-of-the-art technology at the time: IBM punch cards. Bing! Problem identified. 2. Find The Fix : In the case of credit cards, the solution was clear: Create durable credit cards with data lines such as account number and expiration dates, name, street, address, city and state. Like the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie The Graduate , it was revealed to me that the answer to all my problems — well, at least this one – was “plastic.” I had to find a way of creating a plastic credit card. About that time, I had heard through my old contacts at Addressograph-Multigraph (the company that gave me my first job during the Great Depression), that a young man, Dunstan Sheldon, had come up with a plastic material that could be embossed upon. Fortunately for me, my ex-employer was sitting on the idea. I tracked down the material, which hadn’t been patented, and next, set to work devising a way to fulfill the banks’ other requirement. 3. Connect The Dots : OK, problem identified. Check. Material (emboss-able plastic) found. Check. Now what about all that data processing the bankers were wanting for their customers’ credit cards? Here’s where I had to really jump into the skin of a banker and see why this whole processing thing was so important to them. After doing more research, I learned that the flow of credit card paperwork began with the merchant at the point of sales. If that starting point couldn’t be automated, the entire system would fall like a house of (credit) cards. 4. Gather The Troops : OK, I’m not an engineer, but I have some engineering genes in me. Also, I knew some very talented engineers. This is why it is so important to form strategic partnerships with people who have skills which you lack. I hired then to work with me on reproducing and embossing a keyboard embosser that embossed plastic credit cards with their name, account number, and expiration date. This machine was operated by punch cards, one for each customer. It was able to emboss 1,000 cards per hour. We also developed an imprinting machine which imprinted all the information on a plastic card, which was inserted into the imprinter and printed out all the info on the card, and was then signed by the customer. These machines printed account numbers, dollar amount, merchant number and date onto a sales draft that could later be scanned and read by optical character readers. The results were not only faster but foolproof. The problem of human error — caused by sales clerks writing down the wrong information or bank clerks misreading the right information — was eliminated. We used existing technology to build these machines. However, it was the application of this technology in a new way that met the bankers needs that proved decisive. In 1958, Dashew Business Machines received an initial order from 300,000 BankAmericard plastic credit cards and 3,000 imprinters and 1 electronic Databosser to emboss the credit card information on the plastic credit card and from the IBM punch cards. Here’s the takeaway: When you lack the skills or experience to overcome a roadblock to your success, don’t be afraid to ask — you friends, family, existing clients, vendors or colleagues — for help. 5. Roll With The Punches : Business looked good for Dashew Business Machines in 1958, if only all the players remained in place. Of course, they did not. Joe, the Bank of America executive who had helped me secure my deal, was out. He lost his bid to be president and along with his departure, we were shown the door. And the final kick in the pants was that we had just ordered costly parts for 10,000 credit-card imprinters in anticipation of the millions of BankAmericards we were going to be making. Rather than throw in the towel (and I did think about it, more than once), I eventually came up with what I thought was a pretty original strategy. I hired Joe, now newly unemployed, to find a way of creating an entirely new credit card that could be used nationwide — an ‘unheard of’ concept at a time when bank charge cards, like banks themselves, were restricted by law to do business in only one state. It was an enormous undertaking and truth be told, we never accomplished it. (The first “national” credit card would not emerge until 1966 with MasterCharge, which would later become MasterCard.) But something even better happened. While speaking with Chase Manhattan Bank (now Chase Morgan), Joe got us a deal to take over its failing charge card operations. Chase was, and is today, such a blue-chip brand name in the banking industry, that it was relatively easy to raise financing on Wall Street to cover the deal. And here’s the cherry on top: Soon, American Express came calling and bought the company we had created to handle the Chase operations. The deal called for cash and a generous amount of Amex stock. Within a year, following the successful conclusion of a lawsuit, Amex stock skyrocketed. It was now 1965, and I was in the thick of the revolutionizing the financial habits of middle America. It was BIG and we knew it.

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House Dems: Drilling Fines Are ‘Pocket Change’ For Oil & Gas Companies

February 8, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal policing of oil and natural gas drilling on public lands is lax and inconsistent, with only 6 percent of violations resulting in monetary fines over 13 years, House Democrats said in a report Wednesday. Fines over that time totaled less than $275,000, an amount that the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee characterized as little more than “pocket change” for oil and gas companies. The report said federal regulators issued no fines in the period studied, February 1998 to February 2011, in eight of the drilling states. The report, obtained by The Associated Press before its public release later Wednesday, said the government does little to ensure accountability or protect the environment, even as drilling on federal land has increased in recent years. The increase is driven in part by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a drilling technique that has allowed companies to extract oil and gas long locked underground. The report focuses on drilling activity that occurred on federal land in 17 states during three administrations, two Democratic and one Republican. A total of 2,025 citations for safety and drilling violations were issued to 335 companies, the report said, with 64 companies fined a total of $273,875 “It would be an overstatement to even call these fines a slap on the wrist. For oil and gas companies making billions from drilling on America’s public lands, this kind of inadequate oversight and enforcement is little more than a pin prick,” said Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, the committee’s top Democrat. Markey and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., requested the report. “American citizens and workers should feel confident that oil and gas companies are conducting business in the safest manner possible, and when they don’t, that the U.S. government will step in and make sure they pay the price for their actions. This report indicates that confidence in the oversight of drilling on public lands should be limited, at best,” Markey said. The Obama administration is considering new rules for fracking at oil and gas wells on federal land. President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union speech last month that the Interior Department will require energy companies to publicly disclose chemicals used in drilling for natural gas on public lands. Federal rules for fracking on public lands are set to be released in a few weeks. Adam Fetcher, a spokesman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, said the department received the report Wednesday and will review it. At Obama’s direction, Interior is taking additional steps to ensure that domestic energy resources are developed safely and responsibly, “including measures to enhance public confidence in hydraulic fracturing on public lands, Fetcher said, referring to the new fracking rules expected in a few weeks. “It is essential that the public have full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place,” Fetcher said. Officials said several large penalties have been assessed recently against drilling companies, including a $2.1 million civil settlement last year with Denver-based Berry Petroleum Co., after an employee disabled production gauges that could have affected royalty payments on more than 150 Utah oil wells. In fracking, millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped into wells to break up underground rock formations, allowing oil and gas to escape. Energy companies have greatly expanded their use of fracking as they tap previously unreachable shale deposits, including the lucrative Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania, New York and neighboring states. The drilling practice has also attracted increased attention from Congress and regulators, as private groups and government agencies research whether it poses a danger to drinking water. The report found that more than 2,000 violations were handed out by the Interior Department to oil and gas companies drilling on federal land. Of these, 549, or 27 percent, were classified by committee staff as a major environmental or safety violation. More than half the major violations stemmed from a nonfunctioning or missing blowout preventer, the same device that failed in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the report said. A total of 113 major violations cited inadequate well-casing or cementing, another problem that occurred in the BP spill. Onshore, well-casing and cementing are a key defense against groundwater contamination. On at least 54 occasions, oil and gas companies began drilling on federal land before receiving formal approval to do so, the report said. Despite those problems, monetary fines were rarely issued, the report said. In eight states — Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Nevada, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia — no fines were issued for the period studied. Thirteen companies were cited for at least 30 violations over the period studied, topped by Oklahoma-based Williams Production RMT Co., which received 98 citations and seven fines totaling $6,000. Colorado-based Encana Oil & Gas Inc. received 63 citations and four fines totaling $11,000, while Texas-based Anadarko E & P Co. received 61 violations and one fine totaling $5,000. ___ Online: House Natural Resources Committee: http://naturalresources.house.gov/ ___ Follow Matthew Daly: Twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC

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Is The Dow Jones Still Relevant?

February 8, 2012

One day in October 2006, my editor gave me the same assignment that hundreds of other editors were giving their business writers. He told me to go to a trading floor to witness the magical moment when the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 12,000 points. He may have envisioned cheers, shouts, balloons, traders cutting one another’s ties and (this being 2006) dousing one another in Cristal. Instead, the traders obliviously entered orders into their computers while I stood around looking for the story. It got me thinking: Why do we still care so much about the Dow?

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Groupon Reports Earnings Results For First Time

February 8, 2012

NEW YORK — Groupon investors were expecting a better deal than the surprise loss the company delivered on Wednesday. The online deals site, reporting for the first time as a public company, said its fourth-quarter revenue nearly tripled, but it lost money and its shares fell sharply after hours. Groupon Inc., which went public in November, makes money by taking a cut from the online deals it offers on a variety of goods and services, such as restaurant meals, manicures and weekend getaways. Investors are watching whether this business model is sustainable and leads to growth over the long term – and whether the company can not only grow its customer base but make more from each subscriber. Groupon’s net loss totaled $42.7 million, or 8 cents per share, for the final three months of 2011. A year earlier, as a private company, it booked a larger loss of $378.6 million, or $1.08 per share. The company said its adjusted loss was 2 cents per share in the latest quarter. On this basis, analysts were expecting a profit of 3 cents per share, according to FactSet. Groupon said an unusually high international tax rate hurt the quarter’s adjusted results. Groupon’s revenue was $506.5 million, nearly triple the $172.2 million it reported for last year’s fourth quarter. Analysts, on average, had expected lower revenue $473.1 million, according to FactSet. For the current quarter Groupon expects revenue of $510 million to $550 million. Analysts are forecasting $501 million. CEO Andrew Mason called 2011 a “phenomenal growth year” for Groupon. But he stressed that the company wants to keep expanding and that will require continuing investment in technology. “While Groupon is the clear market leader in online local commerce, we estimate that we still participate in less than 1 percent of total local transactions,” Mason said. Groupon had 33 million active customers at the end of the quarter, nearly four times as many as a year earlier. It defines active customers as those who have purchased a Groupon in the previous 12 months. Customers spent $1.25 billion on all the Groupons the company sold in the quarter. That “gross billings” figure doesn’t include taxes or account for the money the company paid to merchants. Benchmark analyst Clayton Moran called the sharp share price drop unwarranted, though he noted that the stock has been “volatile, hotly debated” and “somewhat controversial” since its IPO. Nonetheless, he said Groupon’s first quarter as a public company was impressive and strong where it counts, notably revenue and other key metrics. Chicago-based Groupon’s stock tumbled $3.59, or 14.6 percent, to $20.99 in after-hours trading. The stock, which closed at $24.58 on Wednesday, has traded in the range of $14.85 to $31.14 since pricing at $20 ahead of its initial public offering on Nov. 4.

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Barry Levinson: Don’t Know Much About Oil

February 8, 2012

I don’t know much about the business world, I don’t know much about economics. So you’ll have to take what I say with a grain of salt. It’s more about what I don’t know than what I do know. Here’s my question: why does the gasoline price at the pump vary from day to day? You see this change on the signs. Suddenly it’s up three cents. Up seven cents. Down four cents. It’s always in flux. Why? The answers we’re always hearing are, “Government upheavals in the Middle East,” or “Issues with super tankers.” Or, “Nervous about the economic health of the global economy.” All those issues may in fact be real, but why does the price of the oil at your nearby station suddenly jump at the first sign of oil company anxiety? The oil at the gas station is sitting under the pump. It’s been bought at a certain price. So why does it change daily, based on the fears of the oil company? If you went into a car dealership and you were interested in some Buick at a given price, the salesman doesn’t suddenly come in and say the Buick went up $36 today because they’re having difficulty with supplying enough grills to the front of the car. They bought the car at a certain price, therefore they sell it at a certain price. Sometimes at a lower price. But one thing is for certain, the price of the Buick does not go up and down throughout the course of the week. To take it one step further, the earthquake in Japan, which disrupted the entire Japanese auto industry, did not set off an uptick in the cost of a Nissan or Toyota or Honda. The oil industry doesn’t need a natural disaster to actually happen though. Just their anxiety over the possible disruption of the Straits of Hormuz can cause the gas to increase in your neighborhood by four or five cents overnight. Another analogy. You decide to go for a big purchase. You hear that art is a good investment. You gather your courage and you go to your local gallery. You see a painting, a Julian Schnabel that catches your attention. You’re interested in it. You see the price. You wonder if you could afford it. Suddenly the gallery gets a phone call. “Schnabel has sprained his thumb on the hand that holds the brush. He may or may not be able to paint full time.” Suddenly the gallerist quickly hangs up the phone, crosses the gallery, and increases the painting’s cost by $183. “Why?” asks the potential buyer. The gallery man responds, “We have anxiety over Julian Schnabel’s thumb.” And then the oil industry has the other gimmick they throw in there. Look carefully. Gas is $3.87.04. Or $3.87.05. It is the only commodity I know of that you pay a percentage of a penny on. You don’t go for a Big Mac and it costs $3.37.03. Whatever is happening in the cattle markets, cows coming down with diseases or what have you, does not shake the price of the Big Mac or the Big Whopper or whatever Wendy’s calls its beef patties on any given day. Same price. Every day. The fries do not fluctuate no matter what’s going on in the potato world. Coke and Pepsi hold the price line. Nothing fluctuates daily in price like oil. And for whatever reason, we have accepted it. One final thing: In your local area, why is all gasoline almost the exact same price? Exxon Mobil. BP. Shell. At the local pumps, almost identical price. Why is that? You would think one of them would be known as “The Low Price Oil Company.” Their slogan: “The highest performance gasoline at the lowest price.” As opposed to other types of companies, oil companies never have special sales. Never the “Winter Sell-Off.” Never the “Spring Clearance.” Never “The Back-to-School Sale.” All other businesses have some kind of sale celebrations going on periodically. Not when it comes to oil. Years ago there used to be price wars. One station undercutting another. But that’s when real people used to own the gas stations. That’s when hardworking men maintained their service station and provided services, like checking your tire pressure. Your oil. Cleaned your windows. Pumped your gas. And were happy to see you. And actually kept their toilets clean, just as a bonus. Just because they cared. That’s when gas was probably around 29 cents a gallon at the pump. Any way, these are just a few questions. Unfortunately, I have yet to find one intelligent answer. Or at least one that I can comprehend.

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Super Bowl: Online Viewership Ratings Are In

February 8, 2012

The 2,105,441 viewers who watched NBC’s first live stream broadcast of the Super Bowl discovered that the Internet experience still can’t entirely replace the television one. And that’s exactly what the network intended. Before NBC shared the ratings for the online broadcast, which set a record for a sporting event, NBC spokesman Christopher McCloskey told The Huffington Post that the live stream was meant to complement the traditional television broadcast, not replace it. Viewers tend to use the best screen in the house, and that’s usually the TV, McCloskey said, citing NBC research. “There’s a small number using [the computer] as a television,” he said. “That’s why we construct it as a two-screen experience.” Viewers watching NBC’s live stream of the Super Bowl got to see all the plays that took place during the game. But they missed out on the commercials that accompanied the network’s TV broadcast and couldn’t watch Madonna’s halftime show either. Given the numbers released Tuesday night, the online broadcast is not yet a threat to the televised version. NBC had little motivation to stray from its previous policy of offering alternative content in its live streaming of sporting events. The strategy reinforces TV’s primacy when it comes to mega-events such as the Super Bowl. It also gives advertisers exactly what they paid $3.5 million per 30 seconds for — the chance to reach a large television audience. NBC will not air the Super Bowl again until 2015, so McCloskey said he wouldn’t speculate on any changes the network might make in the future. Many news outlets reported less-than-satisfied reviews from critics and viewers who watched the Internet version . Instead of the much-hyped line-up of Super Bowl commercials on TV, online users got a running loop of five advertisers. They could, however, click on the TV commercials after their broadcast. “We know that the television commercials are part of the entertainment experience,” the spokesman said. “That’s why we have the on-demand component.” Rather than having the opportunity to view Madonna and M.I.A.’s wayward finger, Internet spectators got NBC Sports’ and ProFootballTalk.com’s Mike Florio, who hosted a halftime analysis show. Asked if NBC was prohibited by law from showing the regular roster of commercials as they aired, McCloskey reiterated that the network designed the streaming as a companion medium. NBC has followed the same online protocol in covering the Olympics, Notre Dame football and Sunday night NFL football, he said. The interactivity, on-demand video and social media connections available online are mostly designed to enhance the broadcast experience, McClowskey said. The idea of viewers using a computer monitor to watch the game because they don’t own a TV or don’t want to pay hefty cable bills is yet another matter that networks might have to tackle more aggressively in coming years. The Nielsen ratings indicated that 111.3 million viewers watched the broadcast of the New York Giants beating the New England Patriots. But in the future, the live stream of the Super Bowl could take on far more prominence. Said McCloskey: “It’s possible that one day the online stream will require its own production.”

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In Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Economies Languish As GOP Candidates Vie For Votes

February 8, 2012

When Republicans in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado cast their votes for presidential candidates Tuesday, many will no doubt have the economy on their minds. Tying the three economies together is government, among the top three employers in all three states. And in all three states, government employment is falling too. Missouri particularly struggled last year, losing jobs while nationwide employment grew. And nearly a third of Missouri’s mortgages are underwater — a larger share than the national average. The state is also less confident about the future of the economy than 35 states. Though Minnesota and Colorado’s economies are doing better than average, they are still far from healthy. Minnesota’s home prices plunged 20 percent over the past five years. And Minnesota’s unemployment rate is lower than the national average largely because of slow population growth, said Troy Walters, an economist at IHS Global Insight. Coloradans may feel a bit wealthier than the nation as a whole since the same housing bust has not been as severe there. Home prices have fallen just 5 percent over the past five years, and 16 percent of Colorado mortgages are underwater — far below the national average.

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Banks Paying Homeowners To Sell Houses, Avoid Foreclosure

February 7, 2012

Some struggling homeowners are getting paid by banks to sell their houses and stave off foreclosure. Many banks, including JPMorgan Chase, are offering delinquent borrowers as much as $35,000 to sell their houses for less than they owe on them, Bloomberg reports. Some banks are finding the transactions to be more cost-effective and efficient than the complex and multi-stage foreclosure process. The attempt to clear the deluge of delinquent properties awaiting foreclosure echos others, including so-called “cash for keys” programs in which banks pay homeowners and renters to vacate their homes without an eviction. Banks have had to get creative in dealing with a massive foreclosure pileup that confronts them. Overall, foreclosure filings fell dramatically last year in large part because banks were hesitant to rush the process , after investigations into robo-signing practices, which sped up foreclosures, indicated abuse. The foreclosure process now takes nearly triple the amount of time that it did in 2007 , according to LPS Applied Analytics. The extended time period for foreclosures means that millions of properties are sitting in the pipeline and weighing on home values. Homes that are in foreclosure drive down property values twice as much as vacant properties , according to an October study by the Cleveland Federal Reserve. The Justice Department lent support to another means of avoiding foreclosure last month. The agency argued that foreclosure mediation — or the process whereby struggling homeowners can negotiate with lenders so they don’t lose their homes — is worthy of a government boost in research and possibly funding . Ben Bernanke also lent his two cents on how best to fix the housing market last month, when he published a paper saying that relying heavily on foreclosures to deal with delinquent borrowers is “costly” and “inefficient” for the housing market. Foreclosures “can result in ‘deadweight losses,’ or costs that do not benefit anyone, including the neglect and deterioration of properties that often sit vacant for months (or even years) and the associated negative effects on neighborhoods,” the paper said . Bernanke also floated some alternatives including combing a deed-in-lieu — or a program where homeowners return their house to lenders without going into foreclosure — with a rent-back agreement. The Home Affordable Modification Program, an aim touted by the Obama Administration in February 2009 as having the ability to help 3 to 4 million homeowners modify their loans and avoid foreclosure, has only netted nearly 1.8 million trial modifications for homeowners so far, according to a recent government report.

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Liz Ryan: How to Help a Hiring Manager Remember You After the Interview

February 7, 2012

“My gosh, Liz,” said my friend Kortney, “I’m six feet off the ground.” “What’s the story, Kort?” I asked, and she said “I just came from the greatest job interview ever. The manager and I really connected. He loved my thinking and vice versa. It was like interview nirvana.” “This is magnificent news!” I said. “Let’s write a thank-you letter right now. We want to imprint a huge KORTNEY message in this guy’s mind.” “Imprint?” she asked. “This manager and I are tight. We solved half the world’s problems in a two-hour interview. I’m sure I’m getting the job.” Kortney waited a week and heard nothing. She started to get antsy. On the 10th day after her interview — the conversation she had left with the boss’ words “I can’t wait to talk again” ringing in her ears — she called the guy. He picked up the phone. She told me later, “I got the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach as we talked and I realized he had no idea who I was.” There’s a happy ending — Kortney got back on track with the manager, and is moving through the process now. The incident jarred her into a realization she’d always understood deep down, but hadn’t thought about consciously before: namely, the realization that people are goldfish. Their minds are like steel traps sometimes, and like sieves the rest of the time. The same guy who spent a rapt two hours with Kortney completely forgot her name, her story, and her amazing problem-solving skills just a few days later. Let’s be easy on the guy: he had plenty of other fish to fry. Undoubtedly, he left the interview thinking Kortney was a terrific candidate, but the next day he met someone else, and then someone else after that. Too much data in too little time creates overload conditions, and when that happens, all bets are off. I’m looking at a hoodie right now. It’s draped over the back of my chair. I bought it last year at Target, for my eight-year-old. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it; it’s a standard kid’s hoodie. I remember when I bought it. My 17-year-old daughter was with me. “Look at that hoodie,” I said to her that day. “Your brother would love that.” Target had just brought in some new Spring merchandise, and my son’s hoodie on the rack looked like something I couldn’t live without. The colors were bright, and different from the colors in the store at my last visit — Target had changed its lineup of Spring fashions. What fun! A year later, it looks like just another hoodie to me. “Mom, you are truly invertebrate,” scolded my daughter. “Look! Shiny colors! All Target has to do is put some bright-colored thing on the rack, and my mom throws it into her cart.” “Don’t hate,” I said, and snapped up some irresistible chili-red bath towels. People are limbic nerves wrapped in frontal-lobe’s clothing, and the sooner we realize it, the better. That hiring manager didn’t make a conscious decision to wipe all traces of Kortney’s existence from his mind. He just forgot. If we realize that the people who meet us and even brainstorm with us in the fast-paced interview pipeline are all but certain to forget us shockingly quickly, we won’t get affronted when the inevitable failure-of-recollection takes place. We can build it into our planning. It’s no big deal to be forgotten, as long as you’re ready for it and can adjust accordingly. It happens to all of us. I found one of my dearest summer-camp-mates on Facebook, and sent her a friend request. “Did we go to camp together?” she asked in reply. She couldn’t remember me. We slept in the same cabin with six other girls for five years running. My name is the same as it was then. That’s okay. I withdrew. A year from now, she’s likely to write “Say, did we go to camp together?” At times I struggle to put names to my own children, so how could I blame my old friend for a little memory lapse? In a job interview situation, we can’t assume that a great interview will lead to a job offer. We have to stay top-of-mind for a hiring manager. In a thank-you letter, the very first thing we must do is bring ourselves back to mind for the recipient. We do that by mentioning a specific conversation the two of us had (about model cars, or Beyonce’s baby, or who knows what). I’ve heard hiring managers confess “I just spent twenty minutes talking with a brilliant applicant, one of the four people I met last Friday. The whole time we talked, I was trying to remember which guy it was. He told me his name when he called, and I had his resume in front of me — but I couldn’t get the face back, or the guy in general. It was awful!” That unfortunate candidate spent twenty minutes on the phone, certain he was winning big points for his sparkling observations on the hiring manager’s issues. But he got no bounce from that pithy conversation, because the hiring manager couldn’t match the guy on the phone with the memory of a person he’d met the week before. It’s easy to overlook the fact that until the manager has you firmly back in mind (your face, your voice, and your back story) you can’t advance in the selection pipeline. You can’t even make points for brilliant observations on the telephone. Don’t take a hiring manager’s memory for granted. Keep your brand and story front and center in every interaction. Maybe the hiring manager made a comment about you at some point, or maybe you’ve noticed that he thinks of you in a certain way (“the ex-Navy guy” or “the guy with the supply chain background,” for instance). If so, use that. When you write to the hiring manager at any point in the selection process, start with “Dave Smith here — the Navy guy.” You’d be amazed how that quick descriptor cuts through the fog that plagues every overstressed hiring manager. Seeing yourself through another person’s eyes and helping the other person snap you back into focus isn’t just useful in job-hunting. It’s good training for lots of situations. As long as we’re living among goldfish disguised as humans, we may as well get used to communicating the way (or at least we’ve always imagined) our fishtank-dwelling fellow creatures do.

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Key U.S. House Panel Advances Keystone Pipeline Plan

February 7, 2012

* House Energy and Commerce approves plan, 33-20 * Would give permit power to FERC * Next step for bill: vote in full House * Senate Finance won’t attach bill to highway bill By Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – A plan to fast-track the stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline was passed by a key committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, as Republicans made yet another attempt to spur approval of the project that has become a major issue in the 2012 elections. The bill would wrest decision-making on the pipeline from the Obama administration and hand it to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would be compelled to issue approval permits quickly on the Canada-to-Texas project. But the plan would need to clear several more congressional hurdles, including getting through Democratic opposition in the Senate, before it could land on President Barack Obama’s desk for approval. In a decision last month that pleased environmental groups, Obama blocked TransCanada’s $7 billion project, citing the need for further review of its route as the line would have traversed sensitive lands and an aquifer in Nebraska. Republicans have made the pipeline a symbol of what they believe are unnecessary regulations that are stifling job creation and energy production in the United States. On Tuesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 33-20 to send its Keystone bill to the full House, where it will likely become part of a highway and infrastructure funding bill that House Speaker John Boehner wants to see passed this month. Republicans also have not ruled out trying to attach a Keystone provision to must-pass payroll tax-cut legislation. “We’re going to use all options, so we’ll see,” said Fred Upton, the Republican chair of the energy committee, who is also part of a joint Senate-House conference panel working on the payroll tax-cut compromise. GLUT IN MIDWEST The latest Keystone debate comes as a glut of crude oil in the U.S. Midwest widens the discount between what refiners pay for oil around the key delivery point of Cushing, Oklahoma, compared to the price paid by refiners on U.S. coasts and the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Canadian production is surging on expanding output from the oilsands. With exports to the United States up 34 percent year-over-year, existing pipeline capacity is full. The lack of pipeline space has pushed the discount between Canadian crude and benchmark prices to multi-year lows, eating into the profits of the Canadian oil industry, including its two largest producers, Suncor Energy Inc and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. Canadian oil producers are desperately looking for alternative markets in Asia and elsewhere, though it will be years before any new export lines can be built. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is leading a large, high-level trade mission to Beijing this week, and told Reuters that Canada will focus on exporting oil to China even if the U.S. decision on Keystone is reversed. KEYSTONE ROUTE IN SENATE UNCLEAR Republicans in the Democratic-controlled Senate also are trying to resurrect a quick start for the pipeline, but have not yet determined a strategy for advancing legislation. On Tuesday, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch withdrew a proposal to link Keystone to the Senate’s highway funding bill. “It is absolutely tragic that the prime minister of Canada is now negotiating with the Chinese to take their oil because we’re too stupid to allow a pipeline to go through,” Hatch said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the powerful panel, convinced Hatch to withdraw his measure. “The inclusion of Keystone would take down the bill,” Baucus said, although he noted he strongly supports the pipeline. LAWSUITS AHEAD? On Tuesday, House Democrats tried but failed to amend the bill to block exports of oil and refined fuels from the pipeline, and to bar TransCanada from having the ability to expropriate land for the pipeline from private owners. Also defeated was a proposal to postpone action on the pipeline pending results of a study, expected sometime in 2013, on whether pipelines carrying petroleum from Canada’s oilsands are at greater risk for spills than those carrying other types of crude. John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan who supports the pipeline, argued the authority to approve the line should remain with the president rather than being fast-tracked by Congress. Dingell said he worries environmental groups would tie up the pipeline with lawsuits if the Republican plan goes ahead. “It’s going to infuriate the environmentalists who are going to be on this like a duck on a June bug,” Dingell said. The Natural Resources Defense Council panned the bill, saying it attempted to “jam” the project ahead in a rush. “We hope the Senate will use common sense and avoid trying to undermine proper review using politically motivated legislative maneuvers,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the group, in a statement. But Lee Terry, a Republican from Nebraska, said the Obama administration has dragged out the process for too long, making it essential for Congress to take charge. “It is the president that made this a political football,” Terry said.

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Twitter, Facebook Are Least Used Sources Of Political News

February 7, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — In this campaign season, the social networks have nothing on the news networks. A new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds cable news most frequently cited as a regular source of political campaign news, followed by local TV news, network news, the Internet and finally local newspapers. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were at the bottom of the list. But with only Republicans choosing a presidential nominee this time around, fewer people are interested in following campaign news in any medium. This year’s poll marks the first time that cable news topped the list of campaign news sources, with 36 percent of those surveyed reporting that they regularly learn something about the campaign or the candidates from pay TV news. Cable has not gained as a source since early in the 2008 cycle, when 38 percent identified it as a top source. But the share who said they regularly get news from other TV sources or newspapers has declined. Asked where they get most of their campaign news, 74 percent cited television, in keeping with findings over the past few election cycles. Thirty-six percent said the Internet is their main source, up 10 points from this point in 2008, and newspapers provided most of the news for 23 percent, down 7 points. Use of the Internet as a regular campaign news source has held steady at 25 percent, on par with the 24 percent who regularly turned to the web in 2008. Pew attributes the lack of growth to declining interest in campaign news overall, particularly among younger adults, the primary users of online news. In January 2008, 34 percent of adults said they followed election news very closely. But that dipped to 29 percent this year, with the steepest declines among those under age 30 and Democrats. The 2008 campaign saw a relatively slim, 8-point difference in strong election interest by age. This year, however, senior citizens are twice as likely as those aged 18-29 to say they are following campaign news very closely. Among older age groups, the share saying they turn to the Internet regularly for campaign news has held steady or climbed, but among those under age 30, that figure has dropped sharply, from 42 percent in December 2007 to 29 percent now. A majority of those surveyed said they use social networking sites like Facebook, but most do not use them for news. Just 6 percent regularly turn to Facebook for campaign updates, and 2 percent go on Twitter. But the low standing of social networking sites doesn’t mean they aren’t a news source with potential for broader appeal. In early 2000, just 6 percent of survey recipients said they got most of their campaign news from the Internet. That grew to 13 percent by the start of the 2004 campaign and has nearly tripled, to 36 percent, in the eight years since. Among current Twitter users, 41 percent said they turn to the site at least sometimes for news, among users of other social networking sites, 36 percent sometimes or regularly use Facebook for news. Those using online news sources this cycle are most likely to turn to traditional news sites, such as CNN and Yahoo News, and aggregators, such as Google, over the candidates’ websites or social networking sites. CNN (24 percent) and Yahoo News (22 percent) top the list of online sources, followed by Google (13 percent), Fox News (10 percent), MSN (9 percent) and MSNBC (8 percent). All other sites were named by 5 percent or less, including Facebook, Twitter, the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. Interaction with a candidate’s online campaign is generally not seen as a key source of information. Just 2 percent who use the Internet for campaign information say they turn to candidate websites for news, but many more have had online contact with a candidate. Among registered voters, 15 percent say they have visited a candidate’s website and 16 percent have received email from campaign or political groups. Six percent say they have followed a candidate on Twitter or Facebook, rising to 12 percent among those under age 30. But whether online, on TV or in print, few Americans find it fun to keep up with politics. Overall, just 23 percent said they deeply enjoy following campaign news. The number dips to 17 percent among political independents, and to 13 percent of those under age 30. The Pew Center’s campaign news survey was conducted Jan. 4-8 and included interviews with a random national sample of 1,507 adults contacted by landline and cellular telephone. Results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. ___ Online: Pew Research Center: http://www.people-press.org

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Endeavour Press: Even in a Bear Market, You Can Still Get Rich

February 7, 2012

By John Carlucci, author of Ashes to Riches: How to Profit Spectacularly During the Economic Collapse of 2012 to 2022 . In 2008, the financial world was hit by its own version of the meteorite that killed off the dinosaurs. Huge investment banks disappeared into thin air, the stock market went into a terrifying plunge and shell-shocked politicians warned that the world economy was within days of imminent collapse. Millions of ordinary investors saw their world turned upside down as years of planning and saving, years of accumulated wealth were suddenly vaporized. But catastrophe clears the field for new opportunities and whoever can adapt to the new world thrives. To be a successful investor in our post-meteorite world, you need to embrace several key ideas. First, realize that much of what you are told by financial “experts” is deliberately incomplete and blatantly self-serving. The truth is, their primary interest is looking out for their income stream, not you. They make money kneading and rolling “Assets Under Management” – your dough. If your account does well, they make money on service fees. And if your account crashes, as in 2008, they’ll beg and plead that you stay in the market because they still collect fees servicing the little you have left. What they don’t make money on is you selling all your stocks and going to cash or other safe haven. With that unsettling thought in mind, their conventional “Buy and Hold” strategy has not just become obsolete, but absolutely lethal. That’s because in 2000, the market fundamentally transformed from a long term or “secular” bull to a secular bear. The steady upward trend in the market, averaging 18.6% per year from 1982 to 1999, suddenly flat-lined. Since 2000, the S&P has averaged a paltry 0.46% gain per year and there are strong indications we’re in for a downward trend that won’t be over for at least another decade. Not surprisingly, most financial “advisers” are still recommending the long term “Buy and Hold” zombie strategy because it guarantees their income as long as you stay invested. But to survive and thrive in a multi-decade-long bear market you must zero in on the short term ups and downs that last for only a few years at most. What are referred to as the “cyclical” bull and bear swings — within the larger long term secular bear period. Instead of buying and holding for decades on end, you buy at the bottom of a cyclical swing and sell at the top. It’s the only strategy with any hope of getting you through this secular bear intact. It isn’t good for your broker’s income, but you have to put your own interest first — just like he does. Likewise, learn how to protect yourself. No sane person would get onto an elevator that didn’t have an emergency brake. Likewise, no rational person should invest a dollar without attaching a “stop loss” order to it. What’s a “stop loss”? It’s a standing order that protects your investments just like an elevator emergency brake. If your stock price drops to a pre-determined level, either a percentage drop or a dollar amount drop that you choose in advance, the stop loss order automatically executes, selling your stock at the exact price you ordered or as close to it as possible. Your broker never told you about stop loss orders? You’re not alone. From the market peak in 2007 until it hit bottom in March 2009, investors lost approximately $11 trillion in asset value. The entire GDP of the United States in 2008 was $13 trillion. This occurred because very few average investors were protected by stop loss orders. They followed their financial advisers’ advice to hold and rode the catastrophe all the way to rock bottom. It was like holding tight to the walls of the elevator as it fell through space. It’s likely to get pretty rough over the next few years but if you keep these few simple ideas in mind at least you won’t be as surprised as you would have been, and as millions of others are going to be. In fact, there’s even a very good chance you’ll thrive in our brave new financial world. Ashes to Riches: How to Profit Spectacularly during the Economic Collapse of 2012 to 2022 , by John F. Carlucci, is published by Endeavour Press Ltd.

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Craig Aaron: When Whinosaurs Attack!

February 7, 2012

From the same people who brought you Fear Factor , Temptation Island and When Animals Attack! comes one of the most-shocking-but-true stories of hubris, greed and endless griping imaginable. This is a tale of the vastly powerful but sniveling giants who control your TV, dictate much of our political discourse and get rich doing it — all while evading even the most basic forms of public accountability. This isn’t just another reality show — it’s the reality of what’s airing on every local TV station. And as far as station owners and their lobbyists are concerned, their business is none of yours. Broadcasters have pocketed gazillions over the years while using the airwaves free of charge. In exchange, they’re supposed to serve the public interest with programming that reflects community needs. But the Federal Communications Commission’s modest attempts to hold broadcasters to their end of the bargain are being met by a teeth-gnashing, fire-breathing rhetoric… and pitiful mewling about how hard it is to use a computer. But like so many of the reality stars before them, these whiny media dinosaurs — or whinosaurs for short — have no shame. A Series of Rubes So what kind of onerous government inquisition has drawn the whinosaurs’ ire? Well, the FCC has asked broadcasters to put the “public files” every station is supposed to keep upon the Internet, so it’s easier for people to view them. While nearly every other industry has found electronic record-keeping to be a better way of doing business, broadcasters are desperately clinging to their dusty file cabinets. They’re actually claiming, in the year 2012, that putting this basic information online — in other words, PDF-ing a document and posting it to the Web — is far too laborious. Somehow, these broadcasters, who have managed to make pictures fly through the air and into your living room for 70 years, are still relying on paper records and perhaps abacuses. Their arguments basically boil down to: “Keep your newfangled Google machines out of our buildings.” It’s ridiculous. As a coalition of public interest groups recently wrote to the FCC: “Those broadcasters that continue to rely solely or primarily on handwritten documents and manual updating of political files would do well to reevaluate their business practices with an eye to joining the modern world.” Steve Waldman, the main author of last year’s exhaustive FCC report on the future of media, has been the leading voice in favor of the FCC’s proposals and against the whinosaurs. “The rest of the world has figured out ways to use the Internet to reduce workload and cost,” Waldman recently wrote on the Columbia Journalism Review website . “I’m not sure the broadcasters want to take the position that they will be the one industry that can’t possibly be expected to use the Internet to improve efficiency.” Back in the USSR The FCC is also pushing broadcasters to put records of political ad buys online — records the stations are already required to keep. This information is especially important in 2012, when broadcasters will rake in billions of dollars from election ads. So why not give the public a way to know who’s trying to influence them? As Waldman explains : “Putting that information online would allow the public and reporters to better understand the flow of money in political campaigns.” Yet according to Allbritton, the TV station owner and publisher of Politico , this is nothing less than the first step on the road to a “Soviet-style standardization of the way advertising should be sold as determined by the government.” Because the Ruskies are so renowned for their transparency efforts? All this hyperventilating and hyperbole is especially galling when it comes from organizations that are supposed to be practicing journalism. As 12 leaders of the nation’s top journalism schools wrote in a letter to the FCC: “Broadcast news organizations depend on, and consistently call for, robust open-record regimes for the institutions they cover; it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principle to themselves.” But hypocrisy is another telltale trait of the whinosaur. Get with the Program Lastly, the FCC is proposing that stations keep basic records on what kinds of programming they put on the air. Imagine the audacity in asking broadcasters, who have made money hand over fist from squatting on the public airwaves, to report back on how much news or locally originated programming they actually do. Yet according to the FCC filings of 48 state broadcast associations, the request for standardized reports “carries with it the high risk that the commission will find itself not just at the edge of a First Amendment cliff, but in a catastrophic plunge that intertwines the commission and its staff for the indefinite future in the journalistic news judgments of television stations nationwide.” Such claims are preposterous. The FCC has not proposed any quotas or programming requirements — all it is asking, in exchange for an exclusive and lucrative license, is for broadcasters to report back on what they are already doing. Maybe the broadcasters are just unwilling to face up to the disconnect between their consistent claims that they’re giving the audience what they want, and the conflicting reality that wherever you go the one thing people are sure to agree on is that their local news must be the worst in the country. Now is the time to tell the FCC to ignore all this whining and move forward with its common-sense plans to encourage transparency and accountability. The whinosaurs have a reputation as fierce lobbyists and are good at making a lot of noise. But the climate is changing. So whinosaurs be warned: You either evolve, or you go extinct.

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Foreclosure Settlement’s Deadline Passes

February 7, 2012

* Dozens of states meet deadline to join mortgage deal * Many states won’t comment about their participation * Deal faces another setback after banks balk at NY suit * California angling for more control over relief By Aruna Viswanatha and Karen Freifeld Feb 6 (Reuters) – A proposed mortgage settlement in the works for more than a year will move forward with more than 40 states joining the deal before a Monday deadline, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said in a statement. States had been given two weeks to assess a proposed settlement, under which top U.S. banks would pay up to $25 billion in exchange for resolving civil government lawsuits about misconduct in servicing home loans and pursuing faulty foreclosures. “The sign-on deadline for the proposed joint state-federal mortgage servicing settlement passed Monday with more than 40 states signing on. This enables us to move forward into the very final stages of remaining work,” Miller said. “Federal and state officials, as well as representatives from the banks, continue to address matters that they must complete before finalizing any settlement,” Miller added. Officials had hoped to announce a final settlement as early as this week. It is unclear if the Obama administration and a group of states will move ahead with a smaller settlement if holdouts continue to drag their feet. Some states and activist groups have been concerned the proposed deal would release banks from too many claims and does not provide enough relief to homeowners. California Attorney General Kamala Harris, whose participation would grow the size of the settlement by some $6 billion to $8 billion, was not expected to issue any statement on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. On Friday, Harris told Reuters she was “less concerned with the timeline than the details” of the settlement. A New York lawsuit filed on Friday against JPMorgan Chase , Bank of America and Wells Fargo has also become a stumbling block, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. This person said on Monday that the banks are balking at a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that accuses them of fraud in their use of the electronic mortgage registry MERS. The lawsuit is based on claims that were expected to be resolved through the settlement. The multi-state settlement talks are focusing on the three banks named in Schneiderman’s suit, as well as Citigroup and Ally Financial. Schneiderman has been a key opponent of the proposed settlement. However, Schneiderman said Jan. 27 that the liability releases in the draft settlement had become narrow enough so that a full investigation by a new mortgage crisis unit that he will help lead could move forward. Jennifer Givner, press secretary for Schneiderman, declined to comment on Monday. HOLD OUTS Other states continued to weigh the details until the last minute. In a statement, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Masto said her office is continuing to review the settlement and is advocating for improvements to address Nevada-specific needs. Masto sued Bank of America last year and accused it of violating an earlier agreement meant to resolve mortgage-related claims from its Countrywide unit, and lawyers for the office are in discussions about what impact the settlement will have on the lawsuit, people familiar with the matter said. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Tom Horne of Arizona said on Monday afternoon that Horne was still evaluating the settlement and “may decide by the end of the day.” Even Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi who has been on the committee negotiating the deal has not publicly committed to the settlement. A spokeswoman said in a statement that Bondi “remains involved in the settlement discussions in order to reach the best resolution for Floridians and all Americans.” And a spokesman for the attorney general in Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, who has been a critic of the proposed settlement, said her office would not have a comment on Monday. Coakley separately sued the same banks in December and accused them of deceptive foreclosure practices, but she has not ruled out joining the multi-state settlement. Her office has been in discussions to carve out certain foreclosure issues specific to her state, people familiar with the matter have said. In particular, Coakley does not want the settlement to allow banks to avoid a look back at past foreclosures after Massachusetts’ highest court voided two home seizures saying the banks failed to show they held the mortgages at the time they foreclosed. California’s Harris, too, has expressed state-specific concerns that the relief provided in the settlement go to those “most distressed” in her state, and has pressed for some certainty that the relief is regionally proportionate, according to people familiar with California’s concerns. The state has faced some of the worst foreclosure rates in the country. One in every 31 housing units in California received at least one foreclosure filing last year, according to RealtyTrac. Meanwhile, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan has been pushing hard in recent weeks to close and sell the deal. He spoke to left-leaning bloggers in a conference call over the weekend to convince them of the merits of the settlement. Representatives of several other state attorneys general either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

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Chris Weigant: Romney’s "Very Poor" Choice of Words

February 7, 2012

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling. … I’m not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, then I will repair it. — Mitt Romney , in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien Mitt Romney’s gaffe last week (reproduced in full, above) is going to wind up the “gaffe that keeps on giving” for Barack Obama and the Democrats in this election cycle. Because the more Romney’s comment is examined and dissected, the worse it looks for him. This could, in fact, be the defining moment for Mitt Romney as a national political presence. That phrase is often bandied about in politics, but I use it here in the full literal sense of “defining moment” — a point in time which absolutely cements an image in the public mind of who you are and what you stand for as a politician. The image, quite obviously, is not a good one for Romney. The statement caused an initial media frenzy, which almost exclusively focused on the sound bite — “I’m not concerned about the very poor” — which was being spliced into Democratic ads before the sun had even set. Even Newt Gingrich piled on that part of Romney’s statement, fulminating that anyone running for president should have the good sense to be concerned with all Americans (or at least say so in public , for Pete’s sake). This is Politics 101, folks, and the fact that it took Newt Gingrich to point it out to Romney was highly amusing to Lefties everywhere. Romney desperately tried to spin his statement, and wound up floundering : “You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying — and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different.” Um, well, that would be true of just about any political gaffe, wouldn’t it? If you got to go back and re-edit your own words in such a manner, then gaffes wouldn’t even exist. Unfortunately for Mitt, they do. Romney, of course, is going to complain loudly when the “not concerned about the very poor” soundbite is used against him in ads, but he simply has no leg to stand on when it comes to “context.” He has no credibility on the subject, and no moral high road to take. He has already, in this election, run an ad of Barack Obama saying: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What Obama said — with context — was actually the exact opposite : “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Romney’s campaign, when the ad came out, defended its use , saying “We used that quote intentionally.” So good luck begging for context in political ads now, guys. Even more unfortunately for Mitt, the out-of-touch and elitist image this gaffe conjures up is exactly the image a lot of folks already had of Romney. He appears to many as the type of guy who has no idea who the “very poor” are, or how they live. The only way a guy like Mitt Romney interacts with poor people — when not actually on the campaign trail — is either in an employer/employee relationship (as with the domestic help in his multiple houses) or a patron/servant relationship (the valet parking his car, the busboy clearing his table, or perhaps a ski lift operator). Neither breeds any sort of real understanding of what it is like to occupy this rung of the social ladder in Mitt — or, for that matter, the fears many middle-class folks have of being one financial emergency away from a dive headfirst into that safety net. The man has lived in a bubble for almost his entire life — and it shows. But while most of the attention so far has been focused on the “out of touch” nature of Mitt’s “very poor” choice of words, the real damage to Mitt as a Republican candidate stems from how he attempted to explain what he really meant. Ignore the soundbite/gaffe part of Mitt’s statement, and things get even worse for him among his party’s base. Chalk this one up as a victory for the Occupy Wall Street movement, because all of a sudden the Republican Party as a whole was having a debate about their party’s poverty policies . In a million years, I never could have imagined that happening without the outside force of the Occupiers changing the frame of the nation’s political debate. Think about it: when is the last time any Republican used the word “poor” in any political speech? For the life of me, I certainly can’t remember it, unless it was some part of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” flim-flam that my subconscious has just completely blocked out. Which brings me to my main point — Mitt’s explanation for his bad soundbite was extraordinary because it used the framing of Democrats . Mitt is arguing his point on a field created and defended by Democrats — not the usual Republican language. This is stunning, because Republicans are normally so adept at speaking of just about any issue in their own private terminology. It’s also stunning because it is such a losing position for Romney to take. First, the language. Republicans never say “poor” (as I’ve already mentioned) much less “very poor.” As far as conservatives are concerned, poor people either (1) deserve what they get in life because of their own bad choices, (2) are lazy and cheating the system to get a free ride through life, or (3) are budding conservative heroes, because we all live in a Horatio Alger novel and just need to grasp strongly on those bootstraps and pull. But Mitt’s bigger error wasn’t saying “very poor,” it was in fact using the term “safety net” — over and over again. And then doubling down on his error, by promising to “fix the holes” in the safety net, if it “needs repair.” This is where Mitt’s playing ball on a Democratic field, and not just because it fits in so perfectly with the campaign Barack Obama is teeing up to run, either. Republicans, as a general rule, never speak of the “safety net” unless in seriously derisive terms. They prefer, instead, to speak of the “culture of dependence” or people who use “entitlements” (Marc A. Thiessen has a good example of this over at the Washington Post today, for reference, complete with reverent Ronald Reagan genuflections). The weakness for Romney is that his statement — ignoring the gaffe, and giving him all the context he wants us to consider — is absolutely laughable, on the face of it. This is what comes from playing on the opposition’s turf. Because Republicans today are all about “entitlement reform” — which means, stripped of its own spin, “less money for the safety net.” This basic disconnect cannot be reconciled with Romney’s statement, no matter how much context we add. It is necessary to commit an act of doublethink to even try. Romney is for Paul Ryan’s budget. The Ryan budget shrinks the safety net. So how, exactly, is Romney going to “fix” the safety net? How will making seniors pay an extra $6,000 a year for health insurance do that? How will cutting funds to Medicaid fix things? How is giving the ultra-wealthy (which you also say you’re “not concerned with”) another round of tax breaks going to fix the safety net, Mitt? Please explain, with figures and budget projections to back your claims up. Anytime you’re ready…. These are the questions some intrepid reporter needs to ask Mitt Romney, and soon. Because talking about the “safety net” was Mitt’s real “very poor” choice of words. You want to talk about the safety net, Mitt? OK, then let’s talk about the safety net — and your proposals to fix the holes in it. That would, indeed be a conversation worth having. And if the media doesn’t ask Mitt, I’m sure Obama eventually will — the first time they face each other in a debate.   Chris Weigant blogs at: Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant Become a fan of Chris on The Huffington Post  

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Two Occupy DC Activists Remain Jailed In McPherson Square Police Clash

February 7, 2012

WASHINGTON–Two members of Occupy DC will remain jailed until at least Thursday on charges they assaulted police officers during Saturday’s clash with police who razed a downtown encampment. A handful of others were arraigned on less serious charges that included failing to obey police and released. Charges were dropped against two. One person was arraigned down the street in U.S. District Court on a failing to obey police charge and released. Those arrested were rounded up early Saturday as U.S. Park Police razed activists’ months-long encampment at McPherson Square. Police raided nearby Freedom Plaza the next day, but left many tents in place. The moves, though anticipated by the Occupy activists, shocked them nevertheless as police arrived with a dump truck and protective hazmat suits. A D.C. Superior Court judge set a hearing for Thursday for the two charged with assaulting police officers and said they would remain jailed until then. One is Jeremiah Desausa, accused of throwing a Coke bottle that struck a police officer in the eye. Police said over the weekend that the activist had thrown a brick, but a court document described it as a soda bottle filled with liquid. About a dozen Occupy DC activists showed up to watch the arraignments, in a Superior Court basement. They included one legal observer as well as lawyer Ann Wilcox. Several took careful notes, some on newspaper. It was a contrast from McPherson Square. Instead of screaming Occupy chants, the activists had to obey the courtroom’s no-talking policy. Whispering was met with a courtroom minder’s stern warning and threat of eviction. It was a long afternoon. Those arrested face charges ranging from failure to obey an officer’s order to felonious assault of a police officer. One by one, they were brought into court in chains and cuffs, some in white jumpsuits. One appeared with his arm in a brace and sling; the activists said his arm was broken . Brian Eister, 25, who was charged with failure to obey, was one of the first released. He said he wanted to return to McPherson Square for some yoga exercise. Wade Simmons, 41, had been charged with making threats to a police officer. He denied wrongdoing and was released after being arraigned, pending his next court date. He was most upset over the judge granting a stay-away order, temporarily banning him from Freedom Plaza. “How long is this?” he asked the judge. She replied that he had to check with his lawyer. He had been camping with Occupy DC since Oct. 15. Michael Patterson , 21, an Iraq War veteran arraigned on a felony charge of assault on a police officer, said outside the courtroom that he “didn’t do anything.” Patterson said Occupy DC’s eviction did not matter. “The camp was just a tactic,” he explained. He had traveled from Anchorage, Alaska, to join to Occupy DC in early-October. Now, he can’t go near the place; he too got slapped with a stay-away order.

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Sarah O’Leary: The Race for the Exits: How Komen Can Stop the Exodus

February 6, 2012

Drastic action is imperative if Race for the Cure hopes to stave off a catastrophic implosion. Now that Susan G. Komen has reversed its decision to stop funding breast cancer screenings for Planned Parenthood, it must take drastic, meaningful and very public measures to win back the hearts and minds of supports, consumers and corporate sponsors. One “mea culpa” apology will not be enough to shore up sponsors or win back consumers’ loyalty. As anyone working for Komen can attest, surviving a traumatic event doesn’t mean you’re healed. It’s an even odds bet that Komen, will remain highly toxic to promotional partners and their target audiences for months and years to come if it doesn’t make substantive change and voice it to the public immediately. When using borrowed equity to sell products or services, marketers seek out the best fit for their brand and their consumers. Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure was the Cinderella story of all charitable efforts, arguably the most popular nonprofit in history. Yoplait, General Mills, American Airlines, Evian and a host of other big players partnered with Komen to lift their brands among a coveted audience, Shopper Moms. Those of us marketers around at the beginning remember the truly groundbreaking arrival of Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Komen, singlehandedly, changed how marketers felt about what was, historically, a verboten subject. Before Susan G. Komen, the vast majority of marketers thought pairing cancer with their products or services was brand suicide. Marketing agencies bold enough to suggest Komen tie-ins heard in more than one corporate conference room, “You want us to do WHAT? Tie candy in with BREAST CANCER? It’ll ruin our BRAND!” Then came Race for the Cure. Pink ribbons began to show up everywhere, on everything. And Shopper Moms LOVED it. They were buying up Komen related products in droves, and corporate sponsors reaped the rich rewards. Shopper Moms were passionate in their support of women’s health, and their actions taught many in marketing a crucial lesson. An association with Breast Cancer and Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure didn’t harm a brand, it could skyrocket it. Sadly, today is a completely different day for Komen. Marketers need to be beyond certain that the pink ribbon and Susan G. Komen logo will make shoppers want to buy a box of corn flakes rather than avoid or (marketing gods forbid) intentionally boycott it. With all of passion on both sides of the issue, Komen has a long, uncharted and potentially perilous road ahead of it. If you’re a member of Yoplait’s marketing department, for example, the logical step would be to sever the relationship with Susan G. Komen as it exists today in support of another worthy breast cancer charity. As a multi-million dollar brand trying to sell more yogurt, Yoplait simply can’t risk shopper backlash. Susan G. Komen cannot, unfortunately, turn back the hands of time and erase their grievous error in judgment. However, doing nothing past issuing an apology will permanently damage what almost three decades of painstaking efforts have established. Komen must shore up marketing and consumer support by ridding itself of those whose thinking got Komen into this mess in the first place. The current board, President, CEO, CMO and Director of Public Policy should resign, effectively immediately. By eliminating the leaders who approved the Planned Parenthood grant debacle, it will send a loud and clear message that the Komen women knew, loved and trusted is back in business. When outraged consumers no longer fault Komen for its incompetency, supporters will return and partnerships with Komen will be viable for corporate sponsors. If Komen continues with the old guard that got them in the mess in the first place, consumers and marketers will have no assurances that such an error in judgment won’t happen again. In addition to replacing the leadership at Komen, the organization should consider inviting a respected voice from the breast cancer-screening arena at Planned Parenthood to sit on the Race for the Cure board. Also, Komen would be smart to partner with the breast cancer screening area of Planned Parenthood on a share promotional effort. The two could execute a cooperative campaign with one of Komen’s corporate sponsors. “Support Breast Cancer Screenings for Women in Need,” benefiting Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening initiatives, would help a) put the focus back where it belongs — on breast cancer and women’s health and b) show consumers and marketers that Komen is serious about change that’s devoid of politics. Even if Susan G. Komen implemented the suggestions herein, there would still be a massive amount of repair that must take place. Consumers’ loyalty is a fascinating in regard to its potential benefits and liabilities. If you meet consumers’ wants, needs and desires, they will stay true. If you forget who your audience is, even for a couple of days, it can take a brand like Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure generations to recover. The mission of Komen is simply too important to women to wait that long. Sarah O’Leary is a 25-year marketing veteran and author of Brandwashed: Why the Shopper Matters More Than What You’re Selling”.

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You’ve Got… Personal Branding

February 6, 2012

TV Host and business guru Donny Deutsch discusses how individuals brand themselves in the digital age.

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Mike Lux: Heart of Darkness

February 6, 2012

The completely mind-blowing story “A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded,” by Gretchen Morgenson in the Feb. 4 New York Times , along with a ProPublica story a couple of weeks back on how Freddie Mac had placed multi-billion dollar bets for years that paid off if homeowners stayed trapped in bad mortgages, are major reminders of the need to conduct full-scale investigations of the fraud perpetrated by big financial institutions. It’s a Jupiter-sized reminder of the need to staff up the new financial fraud task force, take the road blocks to effective investigations down, and be wary of a soft settlement on robo-signing. Beyond those more immediate issues, though, is a far more fundamental reminder about the nature of power. When a company, and an industry, become too powerful (either in the marketplace, in the political world, or both), corruption is inevitable. The big players start to believe they can act with impunity, that they can intimidate people and break the law at will, and it will never come back to hurt them. They always assume that because of their power, they will never be caught or called out for bad behavior, and that if they are, there are plenty of ways to avoid pain: public relations people to make the bad behavior sound not so bad, lobbyists to help them change inconvenient laws, pliant regulators who will look the other way or change the rules for them, minor fines with no admission of guilt (almost always paid for by stockholders instead of the guilty party) if worse comes to worse, and bailouts by the Federal Reserve or taxpayers if the whole financial system goes down. What we have learned with the banking meltdown is once this kind of corruption takes root in a company or a small set of companies, it keeps growing and growing until it infects not just the corporation or corporations involved, but, as in the financial system’s case in the last decade, the entire industry. In any honest book that has been done in the past four years on what happened, and there have been plenty of them, you get exactly the same story: a system utterly corrupted and out of control. The good risk managers were fired or demoted, on-target analysis (like the internal Fannie Mae legal memo Morgenson cites in her piece) was ignored, the traders trying to stay on the straight and narrow were marginalized. Everyone who raised red flags about what was going on — and there were actually plenty of them — were cast aside and laughed at. The entire culture of the industry became so deeply warped that at least in some ways, some of these companies started to operate as though fraud — multiplied several different ways — was built into the business model. One of the foundational cornerstone ideas this country was based on was the idea of pluralism — that distributed power, checks and balances, were essential to building a democratic republic. A lot of the conventional wisdom on that fundamental idea, though was overly focused on distributed power in the workings of government alone. But founders like Madison, Jay, and Jefferson were not thinking only about government when they wrote about pluralism. They knew that if any one private interest, any one section of the country, any one business or industry, became too big and powerful, it would warp everything else. If the plantation owners of Virginia, the merchants of Boston, the Anglican Church leadership, the sea-going trading industry, or the bankers in New York got too powerful and dominated everyone else, our democracy would become warped and twisted up, and we would be in a world of trouble. Not in everything, but definitely in this, the founders were right. The financial industry got too powerful, and they assumed and operated as if they were above the law. And the rest of us paid a huge price, and are paying it still. Not all bankers are bad people, but the system itself became corrupted by too much power, and when the system itself is rotten, the good people will be driven out, or will become worse themselves. That is why, for the sake of all of us including the bankers themselves (for I do worry about their souls), the system needs to be disinfected: the bankers that egregiously broke the law need to go to jail (making that financial fraud task force the president appointed incredibly important), and the big banks desperately need to be broken up into smaller companies that are not too big to fail. Here’s the thing, though, because I admit I tend to have become very focused on banking since Wall Street took down our economy: it’s not just banking. Read this incredibly important and truly scary article by Barry Lynn in Harper’s . Growing monopoly or oligopoly power in industry after industry is killing off small businesses, entrepreneurialism, competition, and our democracy itself. Massive conglomerates are buying up or destroying their competitors, and using their power to dictate terms to everyone else. And for way too long our government has been passively letting it happen, or even encouraging it to happen: anti-trust laws are weakly enforced, small businesses are allowed to go out business in massive numbers, unions are broken, new technologies are not allowed on the market. Once the competition, and any check on industry power, is destroyed and one or just a few companies dominate a market so completely, corruption can’t help but set in. When a company or industry has that much power, sooner or later it is inevitable that it will be abused. Ironically, this is one area where progressives and most of the business community — all those small businesses desperately trying to stay alive in the face of industry concentration — should be in absolute alignment. Progressives believe in a true, vibrant free-market economy, where competition flourishes, entrepreneurs innovate, and consumers have plenty of different choices. From the 1930s to the 1970s, this country encouraged that kind of competition, and partly as a result, this country, especially our middle class, was the most prosperous the world has ever seen. Too much power creates a heart of darkness, whether for an individual or a corporation. We need to restore a country where true competition and distributed power flourish.

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Cassidy: Who Gets Counted In The Unemployment Rate And Why

February 6, 2012

I would like to respond to something many commentators, on this site and others, have picked up upon: a suggestion that the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (B.L.S.) cooked the unemployment rate by removing 1.2 million Americans from the labor force. Some critics claim that these people should have been counted, and the unemployment rate should be considerably higher than 8.3 per cent.

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Art Brodsky: The Jack Nicholson Answer to Hollywood Moguls on SOPA and PIPA: ‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’

February 6, 2012

Earlier today (Feb. 6), a most extraordinary group of people sent a letter to Capitol Hill, in the latest round of the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), telling Congress it was time to reject the well-worn lobbying of the big media companies. More than 70 grassroots activist organizations and emerging Internet companies got up the nerve to show Congress that it was time to stop fooling around with bills that helped to generate the largest online protest in recent memory.  More than 100,000 Web sites participated in the Jan. 18 blackout day.  Tens of thousands of people called and visited their Congressional representatives, all with one message: These bills are dangerous, and shouldn’t be allowed to proceed. The letter, coordinated by Public Knowledge, said, “Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective.”   The message that there were, and are, fundamental concerns coming from a wide and comprehensive communities is one that doesn’t come across in comments that big executives have made lately. It’s a shame that Hollywood moguldom didn’t get that message and instead is still playing make believe.  Lawmakers should realize that their constituency in Hollywood is lacking a grasp of reality and missing the mark by a mile. One hand, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was quoted by deadline.com as saying at a conference that Hollywood didn’t lose the SOPA/PIPA fight on the merits of their case.  It was, instead, because there was “a lot of misinformation” from Silicon Valley.  He blamed the ” mob mentality ” and “unfortunate rhetoric” for the bills’ troubles. Speaking at the same All Things D conference, Chase Carey, the number-two exec at Fox, said it was “the message getting twisted” by that nasty Interweb that caused the bills to go down.  Carey admitted he hadn’t read the bills, but rejected working with Silicon Valley on a solution.  That’s fine.  It really isn’t Silicon Valley’s place to work out a solution with Hollywood anyway. It boggles the mind that Hollywood, which exists to tell stories, thinks it has let its story get away.  Let’s define the issue in a way Hollywood would understand, with this adaptation and then quotation from A Few Good Men : Int.  THE COURTROOM We are in a courtroom, in a tense moment of a trial.  It’s a court-martial, and the participants are all in the military.  At the prosecution table is Navy LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE DANIEL ALLISTAIR KAFFEE (Tom Cruise in the movie), who has been performing unevenly throughout the trial, but now is gaining confidence.  He’s questioning COLONEL NATHAN R. JESSEP (Jack Nicholson), a decorated Marine commander who looks down on KAFFEE as if he’s an inferior life form.  Back and forth they go, with KAFFEE asking and JESSEP grudgingly answering, until this, from the movie (as opposed to the play from which the movie was taken):   JESSEP   You want answers?   KAFFEE   I think I’m entitled to them.   JESSEP   You want answers?!  KAFFEE I want the truth.   JESSEP   You can’t handle the truth! That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?  Hollywood can’t handle the truth about SOPA and PIPA. First , they can’t handle that there were dangerous elements to the bills.  That was why so many people, the very people Congress left out of the discussion, were moved to get involved.  The bills were much more complex than “cracking down on overseas pirates,” and yet those pushing the bills either disregarded or didn’t recognize the threats to a free Internet.  Certainly their testimony before Congress didn’t give any indication that they did either.  When anyone brought up their objections, Hollywood executives and their legislative allies dismissed them.  Who cared what cybersecurity analysts, law professors, artists, human rights groups, public-interest organizations and others had to say?  Eventually the sponsors caved on the security issue, but only after a long-standing dispute. Unlike the moguls, the activist letter recognized: “A wide variety of important concerns have been expressed — including views from technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and above all, individual Internet users. The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed door negotiations among a small set of inside-the-beltway stakeholders.”   Second , the executives didn’t recognize that the protest against the bills was not a product of classic special-interest lobbying.  It was not Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley.  As this article in PC World (and other publications) showed, Google did not create the protest against the intellectual property bills.  Rather a network of groups with substantive concerns worked with organizations from around the country, which, once informed of the dangers of the bills, spread the word to their members, and constituent organizations. Third , there really is some question about what “the truth” is in these cases.  The only numbers for “harm” come from the industry and haven’t been duplicated by anyone.  It’s time to find out what the “harm” really is. That time-out is necessary to “determine the true extent of online infringement and, as importantly, the economic effects of that activity, from accurate and unbiased sources, and weigh them against the economic and social costs of new copyright legislation. Congress cannot simply accept industry estimates regarding economic and job implications of infringement given the Government Accountability Office’s clear finding in 2010 that previous statistics and quantitative studies on the subject have been unreliable.” This is too important to hand over law making to one industry, as Congress did in the case of these bills.  Too much is at stake to try to rework the bills in a slapdash manner, behind closed doors.  That’s the truth.

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John Fox: 1 Stat Picks Super Bowl Winner… and Business Success?

February 6, 2012

Just like the previous 45 games, the winner of this year’s Super Bowl came down to one stat. Turnovers. According to Stats, LLC, the team that wins the turnover battle wins the game. Not the team to win the coin toss (that’s true only 49 percent of the time), scoring first (66 percent) or even the team that leads after the 3 rd quarter (84 percent). Rather, the team that hangs onto the ball ultimately is the victor. Winning the turnover battle is even a better stat to watch than the more sexy “average more yards per pass play” stat (78 percent). The odds that a team will win the Super Bowl when the following events occur, based on the previous 45 years of Super Bowl history: Event Odds of Winning Win the coin toss 49% (22 of 45) Score first 64% (29 of 45) Gain the first play of 25-plus yards 58% (26 of 45) Lead after the first quarter 68% (23 of 34) Lead after the second quarter 79% (34 of 43) Lead after the third quarter 84% (37 of 44) Lead midway through the fourth quarter 95% (40 of 42) Average more yards per pass play 78% (35 of 45) Win the turnover battle 92% (33 of 36) Source: Stats LLC and WSJ.com Sure, this year’s battle had only one turnover (an interception), but there could have been two turnovers had not NY been called for a penalty for having 12 men on the field (and who knows what the score would have then been). Do Turnovers Predict Business Success? I started my sales career with Intel — back in the go-go days of the late ’70s. Intel was not the chip leader it is today. While we were dwarfed by Texas Instruments, Motorola and many others, Intel sales management was maniacally focused on customer wins. When we won a new account, the Customer Win was celebrated. As a sales guy, it was a nice notch in your belt, especially when it was recognized with a Telex from the sales vice president, Hank O’Hara, or a handwritten note from a regional manager like Frank Gill. But the bigger prize was a Customer Win earned by taking away an account from a competitor. It didn’t even matter how big the account was or if the customer had some marquee value. Nope. Stealing an account created heroes. Same, too, for battling it out with a competitor for a current account. Nothing seemed to get management worked up into a lather like the prospect of losing an existing customer. Even a young field sales rep like me was given full license to call upon anyone in management to fly in for a customer presentation. It was just part of Intel’s DNA to never ever lose an account and to pull out all the stops to win a new account. Turnovers in Your Business? Since I left Intel several years ago I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of small businesses with revenues under $50 million. Some are rising stars. Unfortunately, though, most have flat-lined — having reached a steady-state of customer wins vs. customer losses. With eerie predictability, the “Turnover Stat” holds true. Even in slow-growth industries, those businesses driven by customer retention AND customer acquisition just do better. They make more money, have happier customers and are better places to work. Everyone just seems to understand the priorities without mission statement plaques. How about your business? Does this “Turnover Stat” apply to you? Do you track it?

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Federal Official: ‘We’ve Got To Stay Focused On Mine Safety’

February 6, 2012

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — If there’s one lasting cultural change Mine Safety and Health Administration Director Joe Main wants to make in both the federal agency and the industry it regulates, it’s ending the cycle of intensity and complacency. After every high-profile disaster, regulators step up their enforcement and most coal operators take a second look at safety. Then, over time, both grow complacent. Until the next disaster. “You look away for a second, you let your guard down for a second, and bad things can happen here,” Main said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’ve got to stay focused on mine safety. It has to be the priority every minute of every day, and we have to be out there with a find and fix mentality — find it and fix it before it hurts somebody.” When the Sago Mine exploded near Buckhannon, W.Va., in 2006, trapping and killing 12 men, MSHA had a different leader and a shortage of inspectors. It’s since hired and trained hundreds, and it was about to begin retraining them when Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine exploded near Montcoal in 2010, killing 29 men. “You can’t go through these phases where enforcement intensifies and then slacks off. You pay for those things,” Main said. “These past events have happened when there’s been a slacking off, and it takes time to reset the stage.” Though MSHA has been criticized for its handling of Upper Big Branch before the blast, Main insists inspectors used the tools they had and were trying to correct problems. In the year before the blast, MSHA issued more violation orders there than at any other U.S. mine. It shut the mine down 48 times but had to let it reopen when problems were fixed. Main said his agency has made many changes since then, including creating an impact inspection system for mines with a history of violations, and he plans to make more once an audit of MSHA’s performance at Upper Big Branch is completed. He’s also hoping for tougher tools from the three mine-safety bills pending in Congress. MSHA helped craft the one proposed by Rep. George Miller, ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee. Whatever version ultimately passes, Main wants it to address critical issues such as: giving workers a voice and protecting them when they use it; giving MSHA federal subpoena power in investigations rather than forcing it to rely on state laws; and holding people accountable for criminal conduct. “I do not believe in treating people who are not criminals like criminals,” Main said. “But I do believe that people that engage in that kind of activity need to be dealt with accordingly. And we have to have a law in place that contains that kind of respect.” Ultimately, keeping a mine safe is the operator’s responsibility, and Main said he’s disappointed by those who didn’t get the wakeup call from Upper Big Branch, the nation’s worst coal mining disaster in four decades. “It’s like people passing a wreck on the highway: Just how does that impact folks? And this should have impacted folks bigger,” he said. Even shortly after the tragedy, his inspectors found mines with so much explosive coal dust hanging in the air that they could barely see the cutting machines. “It goes to show we have a serious problem here,” he said. Preliminary data for 2011 show signs of at least short-term improvements: The total number of mining citations and orders were down, and there was progress at 14 mines notified in 2010 that they might be designated potential pattern violators. Main said his agency is also in the process of rewriting the inspectors’ handbook, consolidating and clarifying policies that may be confusing or contradictory “to say exactly what we mean.” That, he said, should help them do their jobs better and make enforcement efforts more consistent.

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Ex-Lehman Brothers Trader: Only On Wall Street Could You ‘Get Paid So Much For Doing So Little’

February 6, 2012

The fallout from the financial crisis has already changed the way much of America views Wall Street. It may also be changing the way the financial industry views itself. After years of huge paychecks and bonuses, financial industry workers are seeing their compensation capped and cut thanks to anxiety surrounding the global economy and oncoming regulations. But when a salary or bonus can serve as evidence of an accomplishment, it’s disappearance can also amount to an erosion of self-worth. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” an ex-trader for Lehman Brothers told New York Magazine as part of a piece about the changing dynamics of Wall Street. You can read New York ‘s entire Wall Street piece here. Though the former Lehman trader may be one of the first Wall Street workers to express that sentiment in print, he’s echoing the views of others. The head of Britain’s top financial watchdog has said that what takes place on Wall Street is largely a “socially useless activity,” according to a 2010 New Yorker report. Some have argued that such high levels of pay create an incentive for bankers to prioritize short-term profits over a firm’s long-term health. Such is the reason for a Dodd-Frank financial reform law that requires firms to “claw back” pay in certain circumstances , like if the deal on which a bonus is predicated turns into a loss in a certain number of years. Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and the author of one of the more controversial measures in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, told New York that Wall Street turned into a place that constantly needed to prove its greater utility . “Finance became a self-justification” he said. Paul Woolley, who founded a center at the London School of Economics that studies “capital market dysfunctionality,” put it even more bluntly to the New Yorker in 2010. “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” he said. May the jig finally be up? Morgan Stanley capped its cash bonuses at $125,000 for 2011 and its top executives didn’t net any cash bonuses at all, according to The New York Times . At Goldman Sachs, bonus day was like a “bloodbath” one mid-level executive told CNBC; some bankers and traders learned they would be taking home no bonuses at all, while the firm halved the pay of some of its highest-level employees. Yet Wall Street will likely remain a top draw for America’s best and brightest for the foreseeable future. At Bank of America, a company that has struggled since the financial crisis , average overall compensation for an investment banking associate will likely remain in six-figure territory , even after preparations for pay packages an average of 25 percent smaller than last year. And they’ll still likely be making more than workers in many other high-paying professions with more tangible societal benefits. After 10 years of deal-making, a banker will have taken home more than ten times that of a cancer researcher during the same period, according to Bloomberg. Still, James Gorman, the CEO of Morgan Stanley , said earlier this month that employees upset with the drop in their pay need to have a reality check. “If you put your compensation in a one year context to define your overall level of happiness, you’ve got a problem that is bigger than the job,” Gorman told Bloomberg TV.

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Amanda Feinberg: From EA to Anywhere: How to Get Promoted From Assistant-Level

February 6, 2012

We all dream of snagging a glamorous, high-paying job right out of college — not necessarily answering phones or scheduling meetings all day. But many of us do start our careers at the assistant-level, and if you think it’s a job that’s going nowhere, think again. I’ve found that starting your career as an executive assistant can be a great way to make connections, gain experience, and get promoted. All it takes is a little time, hard work, and willingness to step out of the box. Here’s how to make the most of your job as an assistant — and use it to get wherever it is you really want to be. See the Bigger Picture Your position as an assistant allows you to see an industry and a company at a higher level than many people in entry-level jobs get to. Use this to your advantage: Treat everything that comes across your desk as a learning experience. Take time to thoughtfully read the reports, projects, and memos that you handle. When you work with people from different departments, ask questions about what they do and what they’re working on. Think about career paths within the company you’d be interested in, and use your role to find out as much about them as you can. Be the Girl Everyone Wants to Know Depending on who you’re supporting, the exposure you get to people, places, and knowledge can be tremendous, and you can quickly become the person to know in the office. You have the authority to schedule meetings and make exceptions. You ultimately are the one who decides who gets face-time with the boss and who can wait in line. Use your power as the gatekeeper wisely. If you’re the reliable, responsive, and competent assistant everyone wishes they had, others will want to know you (or even poach you!). The more good contacts you can make, the better off you’ll be when you want to look for that next step. Prove Your Worth Chances are, your role will require you to frequently interact with a variety of people. Leverage this and offer to take on tasks outside your role to test the waters on different aspects of the industry or company. Ask to help with a project in an area that’s understaffed or to take the lead on a task no one else is keen on. Use your exposure to other teams as a key opportunity to augment your resume and to show your current boss and potential employers what you’re capable of. Become a Trusted Confidante Bottom line: Be the best employee you can be to your boss. You will likely be trusted with confidential projects or information — don’t betray that trust. Also, your role may occasionally blur the line between personal and professional — for example, selecting gifts for a spouse or family member, or helping out with a personal real estate acquisition. But instead of getting frustrated, look at it as an opportunity to become close with your boss — an opportunity that most people won’t get. If you think your boss is taking advantage and using you more as a personal assistant, then by all means, sound the alarm. But, start with the mentality that no task is too small or too big, and you’ll be seen as a team player. Working as an executive assistant can get you unique exposure to an industry and can be a great way to help set your career in motion. Think broadly, learn as much as you can, and establish a good relationship with your boss. The experience you gain can catapult you toward your dream job — or one you hadn’t even known about. This post was originally featured on The Daily Muse .

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David Isenberg: SIGIR Reports: Hey, Anybody Know What Happened to the $2 Billion?

February 6, 2012

The latest Quarterly and Semiannual Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) was released January 30, 2012. What follows are relevant excerpts of some of the more noteworthy contractor related activities. On December 21, a U.S. contractor was sentenced to 3 months confinement followed by 2 years of supervised release for lying to federal agents during the course of an investigation. The agents were investigating a fraud scheme involving the theft and resale of generators in Iraq to various entities, including the U.S. government. When he was initially interviewed in Iraq, he denied any involvement in the fraud scheme. The investigation demonstrated that he had in fact signed fraudulent U.S. documents and received money on several occasions for his part in the scheme. As of December 31, 2011, the Defense and State departments and the US Agency for International Development had reported 88,380 contracting actions, projects, and grants, totaling $40.31 billion in cumulative obligation. As of January 23, 2012, 15,154 employees of U.S.-funded contractors and grantees supported DoD, DoS, USAID, and other U.S. agencies in Iraq. The number of contractor employees declined by 72% since the end of last quarter, dropping from the 53,447 registered as of September 30, 2011. As you would expect, now that the U.S. mission has been handed off to the State Department, the largest number of contractors, 9,228, are working for State, with 3,823 of those being American. The second largest share is working for the U.S. Army, which has a total of 5,118 under contract, with 2,737 of the American. One very interesting point comes towards the end, in the section on oversight. To appreciate this a little trip down memory lane is in order. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) — anyone remember Paul Bremer? — was established in May 2003 to provide for the temporary governance of Iraq. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 created the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) and assigned the CPA full responsibility for managing it. The DFI comprised revenues from Iraqi oil and gas sales, certain remaining Oil for Food deposits, and repatriated national assets. It was used, in part, for Iraq relief and reconstruction efforts. During its almost 14-month governance, the CPA had access to $20.7 billion in DFI funds and directed expenditures of about $14.1 billion. The CPA had $6.6 billion under its control when its mission ended on June 28, 2004. The Government of Iraq OI gave DoD access to about $3 billion of these funds to pay bills for contracts the CPA awarded prior to its dissolution. Most of these funds were deposited into a DFI sub-account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) established for this purpose. SIGIR initiated an audit to determine whether DoD properly accounted for its use of the $2.8 billion deposited into the DFI sub-account at the FRBNY after the CPA dissolved, and $217.7 million in cash that remained in the presidential palace vault when the CPA dissolved. Here is what it found: DoD cannot account for about two-thirds of the approximately $3 billion in DFI funds made available to it by the GOI for making payments on contracts the CPA awarded prior to its dissolution. Most of these funds ($2.8 billion) were held in the DFI sub-account at the FRBNY; the remainder ($217.7 million) was held in the presidential palace vault in Baghdad. FRBNY records show that DoD made about $2.7 billion in payments from the DFI sub-account. However, the FRBNY does not have specifics about the payments or financial documents, such as vendor invoices, to support them. It required only written approval from the GOI to issue payment. Although DoD had responsibility for maintaining documentation to support the full $2.7 billion in expenditures made from the FRBNY subaccount, it could provide SIGIR documentation to support only about $1 billion. Although DoD established internal processes and controls to report sub-account payments to the GOI, the bulk of the records are missing. As a result, SIGIR’s review was limited to the $1 billion in available records. SIGIR examined 15 payments from this group and found most of the key supporting financial documents.

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Radcliffe: The Rich Should Subsidize Poorer People ‘Who Work Just As Hard’

February 6, 2012

Daniel Radcliffe has already defeated Voldemort. Now he’s moving on to the tax rates of one percenters like himself. The actor, best known for his starring role as Harry Potter and worth an estimated $47,448,000, said he’s dropping his support for the U.K.’s Liberal Democratic party in large part because of their stance on taxes , according to an interview with Attitude Magazine slated to be published this week, cited by the Guardian . “I think, if you make a lot more money than most people — like I do — you should pay more tax and subsidise people who work just as hard as you, but don’t earn as much,” Radcliffe said . Radcliffe joins some of his super-wealthy counterparts in the U.S. who are advocating for a tax boost on the wealthy, an issue that has become central to the presidential campaign. Warren Buffett first highlighted the issue in an August op-ed in The New York Times , where he argued that the super-rich should be taxed at a rate that is at least the same or higher as that of the middle class. Buffett’s proposal inspired President Obama to create the “Buffett Rule” and touted it as part of his American Jobs Act, as well as during his State of the Union address last month. Meanwhile, Republican front runner Mitt Romney fueled the debate over taxing the wealthy, when he revealed his 2010 tax returns after mounting pressure from opponents. Though Romney and his wife make hundreds of millions combined, they paid a tax rate that is the same as that of many middle class households. Many prominent super-rich Americans are taking up Buffett’s cause and arguing that tax breaks for the wealthy are unfair. Comedian Chris Rock said in an interview earlier this month that he’d be willing to pay higher taxes , while billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said late last year that he’s “generally in favor of the idea that the rich should pay somewhat more” in taxes than everyone else. Other notable people to support higher taxes for the rich include former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and the American people themselves. More than half of Americans say capital gains — or profits from investments and property — should be taxed at the same rate as work , according to a recent CBS/ NYT poll. The wealthy typically benefit most from capital gains.

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