By David Dastych  

Warsaw, Poland-Early morning on Sunday, September 28, Mr. Piotr (Peter) Stanczak, an engineer from a Polish GEOFIZYKA Krakow Ltd. seismic survey company, drove in his Jeep, along with a Frontier Corps (FC) guard, a driver and an assistant driver.

According to a local police report, about 06:20 a.m. they arrived at the field camp near Pind Sultani village of Tehsil Jand Attock district in the NWFP province of Pakistan, when three to four unknown persons attacked his Jeep No-B-2748(NWFP), killed his Pakistani companions, kidnapped him and escaped in an unknown direction.

The whereabouts of the Polish engineer remain unknown at this time. The Pakistanis shot by gunmen were FC guard Muhammad Saleem, driver Anayatullah and his assistant Riaz. Their bodies were taken to a local hospital in Attock town for post-mortem, and then returned to the company’s camp.
 
 So far, no person or organization has claimed responsibility for the attack.
 
Yacoob Malik of “Dawn” daily wrote on Monday:  “Local people said that the engineer might have been taken to tribal areas near Kohat, about 25km from the camp.” The incident occurred some 85-120 km from Islamabad, in the area of Pakistan inhabited mainly by Pashtu nationals. The area is located close to the boundary of North West Frontier Province, where pro-Taliban militants seized two Chinese telecommunication engineers in late August.
 
Provincial Police officer, Mr Durrani, said it was strange that a foreign technician was sent to the field camp located in a deserted area early in the morning. The camp was without proper security arrangement. Other police officials told media that foreign companies conducting oil exploration and other activities in the district had been cautioned by the government a number of times to make proper security arrangements, particularly during their staff’s movement (Malik, Dawn). “Attackers seized the Polish employee and shot dead his Pakistani driver and guards when they tried to put up resistance,” a senior police official said on condition of anonymity. Somehow, the news of the attack had been reported to a local police station, probably by a Pakistani guard or driver, before they lost their lives in gunfire.

Peter Stanczak worked for the Poland-based Geofizyka Krakow Ltd, which is exploring natural resources reservoirs in Basal area. Many foreign companies are drilling for oil and gas in Attock, where they have their own security staff in addition to local police and a small contingent of the Frontier Corps paramilitary force.

Foreigners and diplomats in Pakistan are feeling at risk as the insurgents have intensified their attacks on “high-value targets” to avenge military operations in the restive northwestern regions, as well as in other parts of the country (Indo-Asian News Service.)
 

Prospecting for oil and gas in Pakistan

Geofizyka Krakow (GK) is one of the two largest Polish companies of this type (the other is Geofizyka Torun (GT), in Northern Poland). Since 1956, Geofizyka Krakow has been helping its clients to successfully explore hydrocarbon and geothermal water deposits, as well as monitor natural resources reservoirs throughout the world. The Polish company maps the world’s basins using the latest technology and highest qualified staff. It is GK’s main preoccupation to sustain close partnership with their clients. This is managed effectively through GK foreign branches duly registered in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Pakistan and Libya.

In Pakistan, equipped with a brand new set of vibrators Sercel Nomad 65, Geofizyka Kraków (GK) commenced 3D Soghri seismic survey, a large project that covers more than 600 sq. km and use 2688 of active channels, what makes it probably the largest seismic venture in Pakistan. The operation is running in agricultural terrains that require particular care and effort to minimize possible damage occurrence. The contract is performed for Oil & Gas Development Company Limited – a Pakistani national oil corporation with whom GK strengthened the cooperation through several projects during its almost 10-year activity in the Pakistani oil and gas market.
 
Since 1998 when the company set its foreign branch in Islamabad, many geophysical surveys have been successfully performed for international and local clients. Up to date GK has been specialized especially in explosive seismic projects performed in difficult terrain conditions of mountainous areas with limited access for heavy track equipment. From the beginning of the year 2008, GK has widened its vibroseis services offer and has become the only contractor performing vibroseis operations exceeding 60, 000 lbs peak force.
 

A brave man

Polish media are still hiding the identity of the captured engineer. They claim that is for security reasons. But the hiding game has caused strange reactions. Some readers of a major Polish Internet magazine, http://www.onet.pl wrote that (Mr. Piotr Stanczak) might be an agent of the Polish Military Intelligence under engineer’s cover and that he might have been kidnapped by Taliban or al-Qaeda operatives for that reason. What nonsense!  As his name has been already revealed by Pakistani and world media, there is no reason to keep it under the carpet.
 
Mr. Piotr (Peter) Stanczak, from a historical southern Polish city of Krakow (Cracow), is a sporting man in his 40s, with a long professional record working abroad. His sister reported to Polish media that her brother was due to return to Poland at the end of October. “He never said it was dangerous in Pakistan. He said all was OK,” she added, telling of his last cell phone call made on Saturday, two weeks ago. “My brother is a brave, resolute man. But I don’t know how he could react now, how he might feel.”

In a short interview for a Polish private television channel TVN-24, his sister, older than him and also living in Krakow, told a TV reporter that her only brother was a “tough man” but “a much loved brother” and he was helping her and their ill mother. In an other TV program, his neighbor said Mr. Stanczak had built a nice house and planted beautiful trees. She also added he helped her family in some difficulties. “He is calm and rational”, she added, and “he can manage in all situations.”
On Monday afternoon, September 29, there was still no breaking news about the kidnapped engineer. The President of Geofizyka Krakow Ltd., Mr. Leopold Sulkowski, told Polish media that they expect some news tomorrow morning. The company HQ is in permanent contact with their subsidiary in Islamabad and with the field camp northwest from the capital. There are still 18 Polish workers there, who remain under the protection of the Pakistani Army. Due to the Sunday incident, the contract might be suspended and they would return to Poland, when the situation is safe enough to fly.
 

No rescue by force planned

Ever since the Sunday kidnapping the Polish authorities were negotiating Mr. Stanczak’s rescue with the top Pakistani authorities, the military and intelligence. Rumors were circulated about a planned use of a Polish special task force GROM, deployed in Afghanistan, but the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr. Bogdan Klich, strongly denied them. . A crisis control group had been organized in the MFA, and the Polish Ambassador in Pakistan, Mr. Krzysztof Debnicki, recently met with the Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. The Pakistani authorities are giving all possible assistance to the Polish counterparts and they have organized a search and rescue operation themselves.
 
The situation is developing.

 Via The Gazette:

Searchers on Pikes Peak believe they have located the body of a Fort Carson soldier who went missing Sunday, authorities say.

The soldier - a 23-year-old lieutenant whose name is being withheld pending family notification - appears to have died in a fall, said El Paso County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Lt. Lari Sevene.

Sheriff’s detectives are en route for a death investigation, and members of El Paso County Search and Rescue are evaluating how to get the body down, Sevene said. A helicopter may be required, she said.

The body was found at the base of the Y couloir, and preliminary evidence suggests the soldier may have been attempting an ice climb, said Steve Sperry, a spokesman for Pikes Peak Search and Rescue.

Pikes Peak Rangers found the soldier’s car at the top of the peak Sunday night in their routine sweep to ensure visitors have descended at the mountain’s close.

Rescue crews searched for the man for more than five hours Monday night. It was unclear when the search resumed this morning.

"The Mountain Post Family is deeply saddened by the death of one of our 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division Soldiers," Shannon Davis, Fort Carson chief of staff, said in a written statement.

"Our heart-felt condolences go out to the Family and friends of this Soldier. Our Army Family is grieving the loss of one of our own, and we are committed to helping his Family in any way possible."

——————-

Look, let’s be honest here, he was a lieutenant, they’re not known for common sense (in WWII and Nam they were shot by their own—friendly fire) and Ft. Carson doesn’t give a rat’s ass about families. In fact, Ft. Carson, like Ft. Bliss, is out-a-control.

SAN JOSE (BCN) ― A representative from Her Royal Majesty the Queen of England will come to San Jose Tuesday to ask the Independence High School Marching Band to travel to London and perform in the 2010 New Year’s Day Parade.

An official ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. at the school when Lord Roger Bramble requests the presence of the marching band in London, marching band booster club member Kathy Tsukamoto said. Brable and two other representatives will meet the band and officially invite them to London.

The marching band is a two-time California State Champion in its marching division, in 2006 and 2007, Tsukamoto said.

"Word got out that they were doing so well," she said of the band members.

The students must raise $256,000 to fly to London and participate, as the school district will not fund the trip, according to the school.

"We’re going to make it happen," Tsukamoto said of the fundraising. We will be doing some extensive sponsorship searching, as well as other fundraising, because we have 55 to 65 students who will be taking
the trip, she added.

Community leaders as well as members of the East Side Union High
School District will be at the ceremony at 1776 Education Park Drive.

By Scott Ott for ScrappleFace

Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, in an effort to demonstrate the leadership qualities which will make him a great president, today offered his own proposal to defuse the current financial crisis in the wake of yesterday’s failure of the Bush-Pelosi financial-sector bailout plan.

“The House rejected the bailout because folks don’t trust [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson — a complete stranger — to manage the distribution of $700 billion in taxpayer money,” said Sen. Obama. “My plan calls for putting in charge of that cash pile someone the people of the world can trust — namely me, Barack Obama.”

The Barack Obama Modified Bailout plan would place the same virtually-untrammeled powers in the hands of a man who has already earned the peoples’ trust by distributing tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to consultants, caterers and charter airlines.

Sen. Obama said that once given the authority, he would start to stabilize markets by ensuring the election of Democrats who have received large campaign contributions from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other financial giants.

“Those investments are at risk if Democrats lose in November,” said Sen. Obama. “Uncertainty is the enemy of free markets. By using part of the $700 billion to guarantee that Democrats own Congress and the White House, credit markets will loosen up and money will flow freely again. Then we can return to the days when the news wasn’t dominated by bad mortgages, imprudent investments, and irresponsible CEOs escaping accountability. People don’t want to hear that stuff. My plan will help them recapture their bliss.”

By Douglas J. Hagmann

A week ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the unprecedented step of temporarily banning the fairly common practice of "short selling" securities in response to the widening economic crisis in the U.S. The essence of the ban is that the SEC has placed a hold on "short selling" in 799 financial institutions until October 2, 2008, in tandem with the FSA, which is the British counterpart of the SEC.

In a press release issued September 19, 2008, the SEC made the following announcement (excerpt):

The Securities and Exchange Commission, acting in concert with the U.K. Financial Services Authority, today took temporary emergency action to prohibit short selling in financial companies to protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence. The U.K. FSA took similar action yesterday.

In its most basic definition, short selling (or selling short) is the act of a person or entity selling a security instrument, such as a stock, expecting, for whatever reason, that the price of the security will decline. For example, a person sells the stock today to a buyer at the current price, buying the stock back later at the anticipated reduced price, keeping the difference as profit. Because a person does not actually own the stock they are selling, such transactions are conducted through securities lenders, such as Goldman Sachs, for example.

The concept of short selling is rather simple: the greater the decline of the particular stock, the more money the seller stands to make in pure profit. The inverse is also true: should the value of the stock rise, the seller would then lose money on the transaction. Perhaps the biggest factor that one must keep in mind about selling short is this: the profit is limited but the loss is unlimited. Therefore, the short seller is taking an exceptional risk when engaging in such transactions -an important fact as you read on.

Short selling of stocks: Sound familiar?

At least in part, short selling transactions have been identified as contributing to the demise or imminent demise of a number of longstanding and historically revered investment firms, including but not limited to Lehman Brothers. According to analysts and experts in the financial markets, there has been a very sharp upsurge in market transactions of this type, ultimately causing a portion of the market woes that we are presently experiencing within our financial markets.

Many might recall one of the murkier aspects of 9/11 conspiracy theories involves the speculation of airline stocks in the weeks before the attacks. It has been proven that the options market for United and American Airlines, two of the airlines involved in the attacks, was unusually busy in the days before 9/11 with an extremely heavy volume of "put options," or selling the stocks "short." The activity was unusual enough that both the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated investigations into the unusual trading activity.

Concurrent with the publication of the 9/11 commission report, the Securities and Exchange Commission stated that they found no evidence of U.S. trading based on inside information related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack that resulted in wide price swings in some options contracts.

It is important to note that investigation conducted by the SEC and their counterparts was narrowly focused. I am making this statement from my professional opinion as an investigator, and with full knowledge that such a statement will undoubtedly come under attack, citing the fact that the investigation encompassed a review of 103 companies, trading in seven markets, and involved numerous other domestic and foreign oversight and law enforcement agencies.

Consider, however, that the primary focus of the investigation was to determine whether this activity could have been the result of advance knowledge of the attacks, with the trades made for the sole purpose of profiting from the attacks. The focus, as a matter of practicality and necessity, appears to have been rather limited in its scope. But what if those suspicious transactions were not done to merely profit from the attacks, but were part of a larger attack on Wall Street - and the U.S. economy - involving more than those trades?

I’m no economist, so I will defer to the recent statements attributed to Joe Besecker of Emerald Asset Management Company. He was the subject of an article titled Terror Attack on US Financials? Details of SEC Short Ban.

The following is excerpted from that article, referencing the musings of Mr. Besecker:

"He [Joe Besecker] raised an intriguing issue: None of the many hedgies he knew were pressing their bets recently. The bear raids on the banks and brokers were NOT a case of piling on by US- based hedge funds. And from what he was seeing and hearing about in terms of order flow, the vast majority of the financial short selling the past week or so were being done overseas. It appears that the lion’s share of shorting was coming out of overseas bourses such as London and Dubai.It may not be a coincidence that the financial short selling ban is both here and in London.

Then there is another coincidence: The huge increase in shorting of the financials occurred on the anniversary of 9/11. And on top of that, the same institutions attacked on 9/11/01 were the ones suffering in recent days.

Joe asked the question: Is anyone investigating whether this is a case of financial terrorism?

Obviously, I believe that the majority of the blame for our current financial crisis lies with unethical CEOs of various financial organizations, the lack of oversight of government subsidized entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, white collar criminals, and some members of Congress. With the countless threats made before and since 9/11 against the U.S. economy, however, isn’t it possible that some aspects of our recent economic woes has been - or is being caused by our enemies? Were the threats posted against Wall Street by Islamic terrorists, some with financial backing from the Saudi’s, interpreted too literally?

I’m not entirely convinced that the SEC investigation into the whole aspect of trading activity concurrent with the 9/11 attacks was performed honestly or adequately. Considering we are now being asked to contribute to a bailout of unfathomable proportions, aren’t we entitled to get some real answers to legitimate questions?

Via Daily Mail:

A Russian nuclear stealth bomber was able to fly within 90 seconds of the British coast without being picked up by radar, it was revealed today.

The supersonic ‘Blackjack’ jet flew completely undetected to within just 20 miles from Hull in one of the worst breaches of British security since the end of the Cold War.

RAF radar eventually picked up the plane, but the only two pairs of fighter jets used for air alerts were on other duties.

A Tupoloev ‘Blackjack’ bomber similar to the jet that flew within 20 miles of the British coast completely undetected

The embarrassing breach late last year has called into question Britain’s defence capabilities after four jet squadrons were cut from the RAF’s budget four years ago.One senior RAF pilot told The Sun: ‘The Russians made us look helpless. It was a disaster - it basically gave the Russians the green light to fly wherever they want.’ The supersonic jet had taken off from Engel’s Air Base near Saratov on Russia’s Volga delta.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed the incursion took place but said it had a ‘multi-layered’ approach to deterring enemy aircraft.

A spokesman said in a statement: ‘We are satisfied we have the flexibility to launch as many aircraft as the situation requires.’

Media reports said the Nikon digital camera was put up for sale on internet trading site eBay and sold for just £17 ($38).

Its memory had names of al-Qaeda members, fingerprints and suspects’ academic records as well as pictures of rocket launchers and missiles, The Sun newspaper reported.

The camera also had detailed information about an MI6 computer system, while The Sun said 46-year-old Abdul al-Hadi al-Iraqi, being held at Guantanamo Bay after being captured by the CIA in 2007, was named in material found on the memory.

"We can confirm we seized a camera after a member of the public reported it," said Hertfordshire Police after the camera was handed into Hemel Hempstead police station.

"Intelligence services are investigating," the statement added.

The incident is the latest in a series of embarrassing data losses to affect the intelligence services and the Government.

Yesterday, prosecutors announced that a senior public official who left top secret intelligence assessments of al Qaeda and the security forces in Iraq on a London commuter train is due to face charges under the Official Secrets Act.

Last year, a civil servant lost computer discs containing the names, addresses and bank details of 25 million people last year, while in January, the Ministry of Defence said it had lost a laptop containing personal data on 600,000 recruits.

The Home Office said in August that a contractor had lost personal details of every prisoner in England and Wales.

National security services rate the current threat of a terrorist attack as "severe," the second-highest state of alert.

 It says the most significant threat comes from al-Qaeda.

Source

Heads_Up Rantburg

By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com

After years of battling al-Qaeda on land, Western forces now face a terrorist war at sea. In a recent communiqué, the Islamist organization claimed responsibility for this year’s surge in pirate attacks in the vital Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. Dozens of vessels from different nations have been seized and held for ransom, shaking the world’s shipping industry. Al-Qaeda calls its maritime campaign “a new strategy which permits the mujahedeen” to hijack shipping, since “fighters who aspire to establish the caliphate must control the seas and the waterways.”

Counterterrorism consultant Olivier Guitta revealed the al-Qaeda connection in his Asia Times column, writing that the terrorist organization “intends to take control of the Gulf of Aden and the southern entrance of the Red Sea.” Guitta called the area “strategic” for the radical Islamic group.

Al-Qaeda’s goal is the removal of Western military bases from the Arabian Peninsula. It believes sea lanes “weakened by acts of piracy,” combined with mujahedeen attacks, will force concessions from Western powers. And while Al-Qaeda has not abandoned its more traditional tactics – it has a presence in both Somalia and Yemen and attacked the American embassy in Yemen this month, killing 16 – the organization is increasingly focusing its terror on the high seas.

Al-Qaeda’s sea war is already having an effect. Piracy attacks have increased so dramatically in the Horn of Africa that a London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) spokesman called the waters off Somalia, a Muslim country, the most dangerous in the world. A failed state, Somalia has possessed neither a navy nor a central government since 1991 – factors exploited by criminal organizations and al-Qaeda, sometimes working together. As a result, in the first two weeks of September alone, Somali pirates attacked 17 ships, four more than in all of 2007, and last week captured a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 T-70 tanks. “In my time here, I must say, this is the most concentrated period of destabilizing activity I have seen in the Gulf of Aden,” said Keith Winstanley, a British naval officer patrolling the gulf.

Altogether, piracy accounts for about 60 attacks against oil tankers and cargo vessels in the Gulf of Aden this year. Most scandalous, however, is that these maritime terrorists are currently holding 14 ships and 300 of their crewmen for large ransoms in Eyl, a pirate town in northern Somalia. On Sunday, the terrorists demanded $20 million for the Ukrainian ship alone, although ransoms for most other captive ships are in the $1-3 million range.

The Gulf of Aden is not a sea route ships can avoid. Situated at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula between Somalia and Yemen, the 2,500-mile waterway is strategic for the world’s economy. It connects Europe and North America with Asia and East Africa via the Suez Canal. About 1,500 ships, ten percent of global shipping traffic, pass through it every month, including four percent of the world’s daily crude oil supply. The only alternative route, around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, is thousands of miles longer and much more expensive, considering larger ships cost about $20,000 daily to run.

As it is, the financial costs of piracy in the Gulf of Aden are high enough. The pirates stand to gain an estimated $50 million dollars in ransom money this year. But this sum does not include the losses shipping companies incur for their ships’ inactivity after capture. Increased insurance rates and thousands of dollars in extra fuel consumption costs from ships traversing the gulf at higher than normal speeds to avoid pirates are additional financial burdens facing owners.

The threat that piracy in the Horn of Africa poses to international trade and to freedom of movement is substantial. After two of its vessels were hijacked last month, a major Malaysian shipping company, MISC Berhad, announced that its ships are going to stop using the Gulf of Aden.

World leaders also are waking up to the problem. The United Nations passed a resolution last June giving countries permission to pursue pirates into Somali territorial waters, while French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently sent commandos to wrest an elderly French couple and their yacht from Somali pirates.

The U.S. also has gotten involved. As an anti-piracy measure, the United States in August established a protected shipping corridor in the gulf that Combined Task Force 150, an international naval force under US 5^th Fleet command, is patrolling. But although the CTF has thwarted 12 pirate hijackings since then, ships are still being attacked, even in the protected zone, indicating the extent and strength of the piracy problem. Captains are now even being told to traverse the gulf in convoy.

The IMB estimates that about 1,000 pirates are active in the gulf. One sailor, a pirate prisoner for 174 days, said his captors are well-organized in groups of 15-20. Armed with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and scaling ladders, they operate hundreds of miles off shore from two or three larger “mother” ships, from which they launch their attacks in speed boats against unsuspecting victims. Naval officer Winstanley said there was a degree of organization in their attacks, “Which is why we are taking action.”

Security experts fear the ransom money the pirates are receiving will allow them to buy better equipment and weapons for larger operations. Another concern focuses on the threat to the world’s energy supply. A Japanese tanker, for example, was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade last year, spilling hundreds of barrels of oil into the gulf. A spate of successful sinking would see sky-rocketing oil prices climb even higher.

Such financial disruption would please al-Qaeda, since it has long targeted the American economy for destruction. It knows the Western world derives its military and cultural strength from its economic power, hence its attack on the World Trade Center. Al-Qaeda also wants to draw America into as many Gulf of Aden-type military sideshows as possible in order to drain American resources.

That may prove a fatal error. A sudden, resolute attack on the pirates’ Somali bases would sink al -Qaeda’s high seas terror war and restore calm to the waters of the vital Gulf of Aden. Before long, the terrorist organization may discover that its chances against American forces are no better on sea than they are on land.

Heads_Up the lying liberal leftist Huffington Post

 Via the pro-Obama Denver Post:

"Hey, Miss N. Sorry I’m not in class today," bellowed a student from the bleachers at Mountain Range High School.

"No problem," answered government teacher Sunni Nucci. "I’m not in class, either."

Normally, Nucci is a die-hard on attendance, requiring students to stand in the back of her classroom for being tardy.

But on Monday, the day Barack Obama came to speak, the sight of so many kids skipping school buoyed her as an educator.

"We don’t tend to teach enough about heroes. Finally they have a manifestation of that right before their eyes. And it’s not a rap concert. It’s something so much more. They get that. They feel it. They know this election matters," she said.

"The Nuccinator," as students call her, likes Obama. She likes his affinity with the middle class, his stance on investing in education and his call to end a war that has traumatized and even killed her students.

But because she is a pro, she conceals her views in the classroom. This month, she feigned the same enthusiasm during the Republican National Convention as she felt the week the Democrats came to Denver.

"It’s been a tough year to present both sides without showing a bias," admitted the 37-year-old Democrat.

Nucci and fellow government teacher Mandy Byrd were hounded Monday by students figuring they had extra tickets to Obama.

They didn’t. Mountain Range’s faculty — even its civic teachers — had to stand in line like everyone else Sunday for passes to the next day’s rally. About 10 percent of teachers took off personal days, and dozens of students followed suit.

"It took lots of pleading with my mom," said senior Patrick Kenney, who spends Saturdays volunteering for Obama. "This is the man who will keep me from moving to Canada."

Students in Nucci’s and Byrd’s classes are taught to stand up for whatever they believe. Both require students to queue up in human political spectrums on issues such as guns, war and the economy. The majority, they say, are moderate Democrats, as are voting-age residents of suburban Adams County.

Both teachers say they have watched kids lose respect for the presidency over the past seven years. Both describe students’ growing angst about gas prices, college loans and even a possible draft.

And, more than ever, they say, students are hankering to be part of the political process, even if they can’t vote.

"It pretty much sucks," senior Adam Hunt said of the fact that he turns 18 two days before Election Day yet will miss the Oct. 6 registration deadline. "It sucks because we’ve got the most at stake. We’re the ones sent to war. We’re the ones who need to pay for school and find jobs and support ourselves.

"People think young people don’t understand about policy and don’t care. But we’re here today. So tell them we do."

The crowd of 2,000 waited an extra hour and a half Monday while Obama worked phones to Washington getting briefed on the House of Representative’s rejection of the bailout plan and urging congressional leaders to "get it done."

He finally emerged in the gym noticeably distracted and uncharacteristically fumbling for words.

"Now is not the time for fear. Now is not the time for panic," Obama told his supporters. "It is time we had some adult supervision in the White House."

And there were the Mountain Range teachers, on their feet, whistling and stomping on the bleachers as they played hooky with their students.

As the Nuccinator tells it, these are not times for holding one’s tongue.

—————————————-

What was that again about the "Nuccinator" not showing bias?

This isn’t an unbiased education, it’s indoctrination.

 Via Delaware OnLine

 By HIRAN RATNAYAKE • The News Journal

Donna Reyes created one of her most valuable medical tools.

A registered nurse who works with expectant mothers, Reyes filled eight pages of a spiral notebook with handwritten questions in rudimentary Spanish so she could communicate with Spanish-speaking patients who had immigrated to Delaware.

¿Tiene dolor por las contracciones? Do you have pain due to contractions?

¿Tiene dolor? Do you have pain?

¿Dónde le duele? Where does it hurt?

"I would take it right in the room with me when I was talking to the patients," Reyes said of the notebook, which sits on her desk at Westside Family Healthcare. "I still have it here."

She rarely needs it now. Having worked with so many Hispanic patients in her four years at Westside, Reyes has mastered just enough Spanish to do her job.

Increasingly, patients at Delaware’s federally-qualified health centers, which serve as safety nets for the indigent, hail from Central America, South America and the Caribbean. They labor as landscapers in Wilmington, poultry workers in Georgetown and mushroom farmers across the border in Kennett Square, Pa.

Delaware faces a general nursing shortage over the next decade, but it also faces a specific shortage: nurses who can communicate with the growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The fear is, that with few Spanish-speaking health care workers, those who speak Spanish only, or little English, will be less likely to seek medical treatment.

"There is a specific shortage of bilingual, bicultural nurses," said Maria Matos, executive director of the Latin American Community Center. "Those who do not speak English well are less likely to see health care for a chronic disease."

Matos is on the Governor’s Consortium on Hispanic Affairs, which commissioned a recent survey that found that 22.3 percent of Hispanics won’t seek out a doctor or nurse for a checkup because they are not proficient in English. More than one in four Hispanic adults in the United States lacks a usual health care provider, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"Part of the reason is that they don’t understand what’s going on and they don’t understand the health care profession," Matos said. "You’re less likely to go back to a place where people don’t understand you and where you came from."

Delaware saw the country’s 19th highest rate of growth in its Hispanic population from 2000 to 2007, rising 51 percent to about 56,000, according to Pew Hispanic Center tabulations of U.S. Census data.

A report by the Delaware Health Care Commission on the First State’s nursing shortage found that fewer than 1 percent of nurses were Hispanic.

Delaware should respond by training more nurses to be culturally competent, said Dr. Jane L. Delgado, a psychologist who heads the National Alliance for Hispanic Health.

"You also need to train the people that you already have there. It’s like if you lived in a community and went from serving teenagers to serving an older population," she said. "You would have to change what you do."

Strangers to health system

The language barrier is just one of many problems. Challenges occur because many immigrants — legal or not — don’t understand how the U.S. health care system works.

Many don’t understand the concept of prescriptions. When their medicine runs out, some fail to return for refills. Since many are uninsured, they skip appointments if they can’t pay.

Some wait until their illness becomes debilitating before seeking help. Some pregnant women, having given birth before without the guidance of a medical professional, wait until the third trimester before going for prenatal care. Some fear they’ll be ridiculed for their home remedies and don’t divulge them, running the risk of violent interactions with prescribed drugs.

Crucial to improving these patients’ health and increasing their knowledge of health care is a favorable first visit.

"Nurses have that very unique role where they are closer to their patient than the doctors and other health professionals," said Delgado. "They are much more attuned to what the patients are dealing with."

When Reyes was a nursing student at the University of Delaware, she took a class on providing culturally competent care. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in nursing four years ago, she joined Westside Family Healthcare, the largest federally-qualified health center in Delaware, with three clinics in New Castle County. Fifty-one percent of the patients who go to Westside are uninsured and 39 percent are on Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor.

She started at the center’s West Fourth Street location in Wilmington and now works at the Newark office, where about half the patient base is Hispanics who speak only Spanish.

Translations a problem

The proportion of Hispanic patients at Westside Family Healthcare is 64 percent. At La Red Health Center in Georgetown, it’s just slightly lower — about 60 percent — and most of them speak Spanish only. The other two local organizations that run federally-qualified health centers — Henrietta Johnson Medical Center and Delmarva Rural Ministries’ Kent Community Health Center — also treat immigrant patients, though not as many. Because questions about immigration status are not directly related to health, patients do not have to reveal whether they have illegally entered the United States.

When a translator isn’t available at the centers, sometimes a patient’s bilingual child is asked to translate. Misunderstandings can arise out of this situation, leading to medical errors, according to the National Center for Cultural Competence at Georgetown University.

La Red has four translators and several bilingual employees, said Barbara Richards, a registered nurse who helps expectant mothers. But it would be preferable if nurses could communicate with patients directly, she said.

"We need to decide whether they need to come in and see a doctor or go to the hospital or take a Tylenol," said Richards, who does not speak Spanish. "In order to do that you really need to be able to communicate with them rather than having someone else translate the entire visit."

Richards has memorized questions she needs to ask her patients in Spanish.

"I can get through most of my translation without assistance, but if there’s anything new that they have to say, or if I have my doubts about what they’re saying, I’ll have to run and grab a translator," she said.

With many of those patients, she has to spend several minutes trying to gain their trust.

"No matter what country they’re from, they tend to not want to give away all their private information when they first meet you," she said. "You have to take some time to warm up with them, and explain to them that whatever they tell us is confidential and will not be going outside the doors."

Six months pregnant

Many pregnant patients at La Red do not seek care until they are in their sixth month, too late for some tests on the fetus’ health.

Often, the visits are complicated because patients do not want to admit they don’t understand what is being said.

"You have to explain the importance of what they need to do and explain it multiple times," Reyes said. "I’ll do a lot more pointing and use a lot more motions."

That means some visits that should last 30 minutes go on for an hour and a half.

Over the years, the Hispanic community near La Red has become more trusting of the center. But many are still reluctant to seek help because they fear that they won’t be able to afford the cost or will risk exposure of their immigration status.

"I can’t give you an exact percentage, but probably half the patients I see have something that should’ve been taken care of a long time ago," Richards said. "They are showing up at the door really sick."

Immigration issues can severely complicate care. A recent Hispanic patient of Reyes’ was a mother who had diabetes and a sexually transmitted disease. Her boyfriend was arrested for physically abusing her and deported. The boyfriend had been paying for her medicine. She couldn’t afford the medicine on her own and had to stop taking it.

"When you have to choose between food and other things that you need, you might have to make the decision where you won’t go see the doctor," Richards said. "They’ll ask if there’s something they can do over the phone rather than having to come in and be seen."

Many will visit botanicas, which sell herbal remedies and provide access to curanderos, or folk healers. Richards asks Hispanic patients to list medicines and herbs they are using because of potential interactions.

Reflecting the change in the patient population, nursing students at Wilmington University can obtain a Hispanic Cultural Certificate. The program consists of 18 undergraduate credits, including three Spanish-language classes, and students are required to practice in community health settings that treat Hispanic patients.

"We believe it’s important, because in order to treat someone appropriately, it is important that some of the health beliefs and values that other cultures may have are understood," said Sheila M. Sharbaugh, coordinator of the bachelor of science in nursing program. "Different cultures have different beliefs with health and with illness."

Jane Boyd, an instructor at Wilmington University’s Georgetown campus, teaches "Cultural Diversity in Health and Illness." The course’s lessons range from immigrants’ cultural heritage to their sleep patterns to the type of work they do. Many patients who work in the poultry industry come to the emergency room with trauma-related injuries. Many of their children play soccer, making them susceptible to physical injury or heat exhaustion.

"How you seek care and how you respond to a provider is also based on your background," Boyd said. "Some of the things we do are just like what they do. … But to be culturally competent, you need to understand your world views and the views of the patient."

Prenatal visit

On a recent day, Reyes met with 27-year-old Griselda, a Mexican immigrant who has had two children and one miscarriage. She came because she was pregnant again.

Griselda works in construction eight hours a day and speaks little English.

Reyes asked one question after another in Spanish. Each question was slow, and she hesitated several times, making sure that she was as clear as possible.

Reyes ran her hand across Griselda’s midsection and asked about her condition.

Reyes spoke to Griselda about nutritious diets and the dangers to a fetus from periodontal disease. Care in the United States is much different than in Mexico, Griselda said.

"If you have money you get seen more often there," she said through a translator. "But here they treat you and it’s affordable. I’ve learned what [healthy foods] to eat while I’m pregnant. I tell my friends about Westside."

At the end of the appointment, Reyes ran a monitor across the her abdomen so she could hear her baby’s heartbeat. It was 150 beats per minute, ideal for a fetus of 25 weeks.

"Muy bien," Reyes said.

By Steve Sailer

Whose fault is it?

Last week, the mainstream conservative punditry finally picked up an idea I had first put forward in August 2007 (and developed with more detail last June): that an underestimated factor in the financial crisis set off by the mortgage meltdown is our reigning ideology of multiculturalism and diversity.

In other words, this is a minority mortgage meltdown—and it may trigger a Diversity Recession.

Unfortunately, not having studied the question as long as I had, some of the conservative talking heads tended to put forward naïve, self-serving, or unpersuasive versions of this theory—such as that the banking crash wasn’t the fault of greed in the financial industry, it was the result of the Democrats in Congress passing the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act in 1977.

The reality is that blame is very widely shared: among Democrats and Republicans, businesspeople and politicians, Congress and the Executive Branch, borrowers and lenders, and whites, blacks and Hispanics.

There’s one man, however, who has so far escaped any blame. Few have realized something that turns out to have been staring us in the face all along: that the mortgage mess was, in sizable measure, an outgrowth of the primary political goal of the Bush Administration.

That man’s name is Karl Rove.

And the primary political goal of President George W. Bush’s political strategist: to bring Hispanics into the Republican Party.

As you’ll recall, Rove’s best-known tactic to appeal to Latino voters was repeatedly pushing "comprehensive immigration reform" (i.e., an amnesty for illegal immigrants).

Rove, though, had other arrows in his quiver. One was a plan to turn Hispanics into Republicans by providing them with loose credit so they could become homeowners.

(Rove’s belief that there’s a connection between being able to afford a home and voting Republican is not totally irrational. As I’ve documented, since 2004 states with higher degrees of "affordable family formation" do vote Republican more than states where people can less afford to buy houses. That’s why the Republican "Red States" tend to be inland, where land for housing is abundant and cheap, while Democratic "Blue States" tend to be expensive because oceans or Great Lakes restrict suburban expansion.)

As part of this plan, George W. Bush made several speeches rallying enthusiasm for his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. For instance, there was his classic Bushian effort on June 18, 2002:

"The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America. Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. … So I’ve set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010—million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) … "

The five and a half million marginal minority homeowners that Bush bunglingly called for is a big number. At a mortgage of, say, $127,000 each, that would add up to, let me check my calculator, oh…

$700 billion—the size of the current bailout. Well, whaddaya know …

Bush rattled on:

"I’m going to do my part by setting the goal, by reminding people of the goal, by heralding the goal, and by calling people into action, both the federal level, state level, local level, and in the private sector. (Applause.) …

“And so what are the barriers that we can deal with here in Washington?"

Well, there’s one obvious barrier to minority homeownership: many American minorities don’t earn enough money to be able to afford their own home.

You might think, therefore, that the way to help minorities make higher wages would be to alleviate competition for their jobs by cracking down on legal and illegal immigration. Especially because illegal immigration is, well, illegal. And that’s what the Chief Executive gets paid to do—enforce laws.

Nevertheless, Bush and Rove apparently hoped that amnestying illegal immigrants would win over Hispanic citizens, so they did almost nothing about illegal immigration (other than trying to legalize it, of course) until an outraged public forced their hands in the last couple of years.

Bush and Rove didn’t have a plan for helping minorities earn more. Instead, they had a plan for helping minorities borrow more.

Bush went on in his June 18th speech:

"Well, probably the single barrier to first-time homeownership is high down payments. "

Uh-oh.

Traditional standards requiring "high down payments" existed for, as we see now, very good reasons. Being able to pony up 20 percent, or even just 10 percent, was cold, hard evidence of borrowers’ credit-worthiness. It showed you hadn’t spent every penny you ever earned. And a big down payment meant you instantly had substantial skin in the game. That you had paid out tens of thousands of dollars meant you were likely to do whatever it took to avoid losing your house by failing to pay off the loan.

To Bush and Rove, however, old-fashioned down payments were just keeping minorities from their fair share of the American Dream. Bush burbled on:

"People take a look at the down payment, they say that’s too high, I’m not buying. They may have the desire to buy, but they don’t have the wherewithal to handle the down payment. We can deal with that. And so I’ve asked Congress to fully fund an American Dream down payment fund which will help a low-income family to qualify to buy, to buy. (Applause.)

We believe when this fund is fully funded and properly administered, which it will be under the Bush administration, that over 40,000 families a year—40,000 families a year—will be able to realize the dream we want them to be able to realize, and that’s owning their own home. (Applause.)"

If you do the arithmetic, you’ll see that Bush’s silly little American Dream slush fund for subsidizing 40,000 families per year would take, not the eight years Bush promised to add 5,500,000 minority households to the ranks of homeowners, but 137.5 years. But, obviously, subsidizing all 5.5 million new minority homeowners out of the taxpayers’ money would be so insanely expensive that white voters would rebel.

No, it had to be done on the sly, through the magic of fractional reserve banking, which, as the Federal Reserve notes, "permits the banking system to ‘create’ money." By taking more risks, by handing out more mortgages to likely deadbeats, the financial system could simply "create" the cost of 5.5 million homes for minorities.

CNN reported after Bush’s June 17 speech at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta:

"Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the federal Home Loan Banks—the government-sponsored corporations that handle home mortgages—will increase their commitment to minority markets by more than $440 billion, Bush said."

(Thomas Allen wrote a must-read article on Fannie Mae’s push for more—and more dubious—lending to immigrants way back in 2004.)

In December 2003, when signing the American Dream Downpayment Act, Bush bragged:

"Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we’re making progress toward that goal. In the past 18 months, more than 1 million minority families have become homeowners. (Applause.) And there’s more that we can do to achieve the goal. The law I sign today will help us build on this progress in a very practical way."

What was truly significant about Bush’s 2002 speeches (including the doozy he delivered on October 15, 2002 at his White House conference, which you should read for the schadenfreude alone) was not the legislation he endorsed—but the unsubtle message he was sending to lenders and, most importantly, to his own employees, the federal regulators.

Bush made clear at his October 15, 2002 conference that he opposed not merely discriminating against borrowers who might turn out to be bad credit risks—he wanted more money to go to documented bad credit risks. He brayed:

"Freddie Mac recently began 25 initiatives around the country to dismantle barriers and create greater opportunities for homeownership. One of the programs is designed to help deserving families who have bad credit histories to qualify for homeownership loans."

Let’s put Bush’s influence in perspective. I’m not saying that financial institutions would intentionally make hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad loans just on the President’s say-so. But what I am saying is that federal employees, such as financial regulators, do listen closely to what the Chief Executive says about what he wants done regarding those iffy loans.

Let’s review: As long as the federal government ends up bailing out lenders, financial regulation is a necessity.

Lenders like to lend. That’s what they do. That, typically, is for what they get paid bonuses.

Overly exuberant lending, unfortunately, leads to financial crises. And taxpayers and savers always seem to wind up paying to resolve them, either through formal programs like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or through ad hoc bailouts (of which we’ve seen so many in 2008).

Thus, since the government is on the hook for excessive lending, the government regulates lending.

The job of these federal regulators is to "take away the punchbowl just as the party gets going," as former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin said long ago.

In his many speeches on minority housing, however, President Bush was telling his underlings to keep their hands off the punchbowl. Heck, maybe the regulators should add another bottle of Everclear just to be hospitable.

And if private lenders started worrying that giving mortgages to dubious credit risks could backfire on them, Bush’s speeches could be read as hinting that his Administration would try to help them out, to the tune of, say, $700 billion.

Bush summed up:

"And part of the cornerstone of America is the ability for somebody, regardless of where they’re from, regardless of where they were born, to say, this is my home; I own this home, it is my piece of property, it is my part of the American experience. "

My emphases. In other words, under the Bush Administration, the American Dream isn’t just for Americans. For instance, at his White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, Bush orated:

"I appreciate so very much the home owners who are with us today, the Arias family, newly arrived from Peru. They live in Baltimore. Thanks to the Association of Real Estate Brokers, the help of some good folks in Baltimore, they figured out how to purchase their own home. Imagine to be coming to our country without a home, with a simple dream. And now they’re on stage here at this conference being one of the new home owners in the greatest land on the face of the Earth. I appreciate the Arias family coming. (Applause.) "

This orchestrated push for more minority homeownership wasn’t some random caprice of the President. It was part of the master plan of his political Svengali, Karl Rove. As Rove told every reporter who would listen in 2000 and 2001, Bush was supposed to be the new William McKinley, whose 1896 campaign manager Mark Hanna had figured out how to build a Republican coalition combining the business interests with (some) new immigrants to make the Republicans dominant until the Great Depression.

In 1999, the Washington Post reported on the McKinley Mania launched by Rove in Republicans Admire Bill … McKinley, That Is:

"Marshall Wittmann of the conservative Heritage Foundation explains: ‘1896 was the year that McKinley and Hanna tried to redefine the Republican Party. Instead of rehashing Reconstruction and the Civil War, McKinley offered an appealing image to new immigrants, rising entrepreneurs and working folks.

“’The theory of the Bush campaign,’ Wittmann continues, ‘with the slogan of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ is to similarly expand the base of the Republican Party, specifically by appealing to minorities and more centrist voters.’"

In 2001, for example, Rove told reporter Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times:

"If you’re a Mexican-American … if Mel Martinez comes to town and talks about his life story and this administration’s policies to encourage homeownership, and you hear Bush talking a tax cut, education and leaving no child behind, and he’s seen with Fox, and the first place he goes when in Europe is Spain—you say, ‘Hey, Bush gets it. Our community is important to this guy.’"

Before the 2004 election, Rove boasted:

"[T]here are more people owning homes—particularly in the Hispanic and African-American communities—than ever before. This is a result of wise policies instituted at just the right time."

At the height of the housing bubble, on Mayday 2007, the day of planned pro-amnesty marches, Rove’s protégé, Ken Mehlman, the campaign manager (under Rove’s guidance) of Bush-Cheney 2004, wrote of how the GOP was wooing Hispanics:

"There are several steps we can take to ensure that America’s fastest-growing and most conservative voter bloc joins the GOP. …Home ownership has always been an important element of the American Dream, and Hispanic-Americans have made enormous progress thanks to the hard work of many families and the innovative policies of the president. Hispanic home ownership is at an all-time high with 50 percent of Hispanics owning their homes."

And these increases in minority homeownership due to government initiatives going back decades were true … temporarily.

But now minority homeownership rates appear to be falling as foreclosures hit Hispanics and blacks harder than whites and Asians. [Foreclosure Activity Increases 12 Percent In August, RealtyTrac.comSept. 12, 2008]

Foreclosures appear to be one of the few things in America not tracked directly by race. But the circumstantial evidence that blacks and Hispanics account for a disproportionate share is agreed upon by all who have looked into the question closely.

This map from RealtyTrac shows that the foreclosure disaster is largely regional. There are high rates of foreclosure in states such as Georgia and New Jersey, but the two main default dumps are the Midwestern Rustbelt and the heavily Hispanic Sunbelt.

The first regional meltdown is centered in Detroit, where the auto industry is perpetually dwindling. It’s hitting black neighborhoods particularly hard.

There’s a certain sense of tragic inevitability to this. In 2006, the New York Times did a sad story on the foreclosure on a single mother of four who had bought a house in the slums of Cleveland paying only three percent down:

"Over the years, Ms. Roberts’s monthly expenses rose because of repairs to a dilapidated porch and the birth of two grandchildren, but the $880 a month she takes home after taxes from her job as a home health aide did not. Ms. Roberts, 35, also receives $1,100 in Social Security benefits because two of her younger children have learning disabilities. " [For Minorities, Signs of Trouble in Foreclosures, By Vikas Bajaj And Ron Nixon, February 22, 2006.]

I guess that America losing money on 35-year-old grandmothers who earn $880 per month is what you might call the Slavery Tax, and we’re just going to have to keep paying it.

Yet the Rust Belt default catastrophe is dwarfed by what’s happened in California, along with its neighbors Arizona and Nevada, and in Florida. And this is much more of a self-inflicted wound, occurring in seemingly prosperous places where immigrants have flooded in.

The highest foreclosure rate is in Nevada. (“Talk about ‘moral hazard!’" I can imagine Nevada residents scoffing, “You want your money? Then come get it from me Las Vegas Style. If you’re not man enough, Mr. Banker, to dangle me by my ankles off a hotel balcony, then tough luck.")

As of August 2008, California alone, with 12 percent of the national population, accounted for 29 percent of all foreclosures. Add in the two California wannabes, Nevada and Arizona, and states with just 15 percent of the population are responsible for 36 percent of the foreclosures. Add in Florida, and four states with 21 percent of the population are home to half the foreclosures.

This is not to say that Hispanics account for most of the defaults in those four states. Plenty of white speculators bought homes figuring they could rent them out to all the Latino laborers who had flocked across the border to build exurban homes. And other whites wanted to move to the exurbs to get their children out of public school systems overwhelmed by the children of illegal immigrants. (Notice the circularity of the economic logic of this decade—which Dennis Dale aptly calls “The Blunder Years”?)

The foreclosure rate per capita in California is 2.9 times that of the other 49 states. And because houses are so much more expensive in California than elsewhere, the tarnished Golden State by itself probably accounts for something approaching half of the value of all foreclosures in America. The median house price in California is currently about twice the national average. At the peak of the bubble was closer to triple the national average.

In defense of Bush and Rove, as Texans they may have had a misguided sense of the scale of what they were unleashing. Texas Republicans are prone to blame the limited supply of housing in California on Not In My Back Yard politics used by homeowners to raise their home values and keep out undesirables. And some of that is true. But there are topographical reasons for limiting development in mountainous California—such as smog and traffic. They aren’t easily understood on the Texas prairie.

The result: in California, unlike in Texas, it takes many years for increases in housing supply to catch up to increases in demand. That’s why the loose credit policies of the Bush years turned into higher home prices in California than in Texas.

To be precise, a Los Angeles home averaged 2.56 times the price of a Dallas home in 2001 and 4.69 times in 2005. Even in 2005, the median Dallas home only cost 2.8 times the local annual income, while the median Los Angeles home cost 12.7 times what the median Angeleno was making.

Most white pundits can’t believe that minorities had an impact on the mortgage meltdown because they don’t really grasp the number of minorities now in the country. After all, there aren’t a lot of Hispanics at dinner parties in Georgetown and the Upper West Side. (At least, not sitting down.)

The National Association of Realtor’s webpage entitled "Diversity Is Good Business" quantifies where we’re headed. Minorities are expected to comprise 64 percent of the net new households over the next decade and 54 percent of first-time homeowners by 2010.

USA Today reported in 2007:

"Across the nation, black and Hispanic borrowers helped fuel a multiyear housing boom, accounting for 49% of the increase in homeowners from 1995 to 2005, says Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. But Hispanics and African-Americans were far more likely to leverage the American dream with subprime loans — higher-cost products for buyers with impaired credit — that are now going bad at an alarming rate. About 46% of Hispanics and 55% of blacks who took out purchase mortgages in 2005 got higher-cost loans, compared with about 17% of whites and Asians, according to Federal Reserve data."

Not surprisingly, for the fifty states, I’ve found a fairly high (r = 0.54) correlation between the foreclosure rate per capita and the Hispanic share of the population.

In retrospect, it might have been less costly to the taxpayers and savers if the Bush Administration had just given every Hispanic voter in America a giant flat screen TV inscribed: "A gift from the Republican Party. Vote for George P. Bush Garnica for President in 2016!"

The only problem was that they just don’t let you do that.

They do let you hand out racial preferences, but there are limitations. For example, you have to include African-Americans. Rove is not a stupid man (he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s not stupid). So he never thought the GOP had much chance to get black voters. Still, you can’t just hand out affirmative action to your targeted immigrant group and exclude the descendents of slaves.

Worst of all, the Bush-Rove assault on credit standards meant that the white majority could qualify for doubtful debt, too.

White people sometimes get up in arms when the quotas get too obvious. Thus, it’s often easier for politicians just to toss out all the standards, such as substantial down payments. And that often makes the effect more pervasive than if a straightforward quota had been used.

Attacking down payments and the like is the same as when the National Organization for Women protests as discriminatory against women a fire department making job applicants perform a minimum number of pull-ups to show they can carry unconscious smoke-inhalation victims out of burning buildings. One alternative is to impose upon yourself a simple quota of female firefighters (or, as they are known in the heroic New York Fire Department, "firewatchers"—there is a reason 343 firemen died on 9/11, but zero firewomen). At least with a quota you can keep your upper body strength test in order to still get strong men. Unfortunately, some fire departments respond by eliminating the strength test to stop N.O.W. from whining. That way, the fire department ends up hiring both women and men too weak to save your life.

Similarly, the Bush jihad against traditional credit standards meant that not only more Hispanics and blacks could get loans they couldn’t pay back—but more whites could, too.

Why didn’t the financial institutions realize what was going on. Were they greedy?

Of course they were greedy. Greed is an omnipresent constant on Wall Street. Greed and fear, famously, drive the markets.

When I was getting an MBA back before the 1980s boom started, the word on the student grapevine even then was that the only answer to the standard job interview question "Why do you want to work for us?" that would make the investment bank recruiters sit up and take interest in you was, "To make an obscene amount of money."

The relevant question is: Why wasn’t greed balanced by fear? Why did the Wall Street financial engineers concoct a mountain of leverage on the back of the pebble of probability that these California mortgages would be paid off?

One reason is obvious: political correctness, enforced by anti-discrimination lawsuits. Expressing "prejudices" about the likelihood of protected minorities paying off loans violates anti-discrimination laws.

It’s now legally dangerous to express fear in writing. Imagine that an executive in a financial firm had sent an email to a fellow executive saying:

"I see that the median home price in California is heading toward a half million bucks. Isn’t California full of Mexicans? How can a bunch of Mexicans afford to pay off half million dollar mortgages once the price of homes stops going up and they can’t refinance anymore. Aren’t we headed for disaster in California if we don’t go back to traditional credit standards?"

An email like that would wind up in the hands of plaintiffs’ attorneys during discovery in discrimination lawsuits. The author would be fired. The CEO would have to go apologize to the National Council of La Raza and promise to give a whole bunch more zero down payment loans to people whose names end in Z.

You can only mutter heresies like that over drinks to close confidants.

Anyway, if you’d asked about how Californians could pay off their monster mortgages, you’d probably just hear that the firm’s rocket scientists had taken everything into consideration in their immensely complicated calculations. They’ve got decades of data on California mortgages! What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, one little thing had changed over the decades that the Wall Street quant jocks didn’t include in their numbers: the Californians themselves.

The current average resident of California just doesn’t have the same human capital as in the old days. In the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test, California’s 8th graders came in 49th out of the 50 states in reading.

study recently found that 53 percent of the adult residents of Los Angeles are functionally illiterate in English.

If you stopped and thought about it, you might wonder how they would earn enough to pay back those massive mortgages. But stopping and thinking about the shortcomings of minorities is the road to legal ruin in modern corporate America.

In summary: for eight years, I’ve argued in VDARE.com that the Bush-Rove plan to convert a majority of Hispanics into Republicans would not work politically. (By the way, the latest poll of Hispanics in seven swing states shows Barack Obama with a 63-26 lead over John McAmnesty.)

Latinos, I’ve argued, will remain mostly conventional tax-and-spend Democrats. On average, they simply aren’t going to make enough money to make it rational for them to switch to the party of cutting taxes and spending. The main reason they won’t make enough money: they typically lack the human capital to earn enough.

But now, for similar reasons, Latinos have turned out to lack the earning power to pay off enough California-sized mortgages.

Still, never mind that political correctness has ignited this financial apocalypse.

Having doubts about whether minorities could pay back their mortgage obligations are, as Bush and Rove would say, just “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

By Warner Todd Huston  

The candidate of change, the shining proponent of a “new way” in national politics, says that you aren’t allowed to bring a sign to his rally. So much for the right of free political speech. 

To add insult to injury, this rally was held at the publicly funded University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. So, now the government is lending the weight of its authority to squelch free speech. So, where is the hew and cry about this unAmerican activity? Did the media even note this heavy-handed policy?

But, it is all true nonetheless. The rally was held and weak-spined school officials bent over and meekly accepted the rules derived from the fascistic penchant of the Obama campaign with its anti-first amendment proclivities. Some few small voices questioned this oppression of American rights, but for the most part no one seems to have noticed that Virginians had their Constitutional rights quashed that day. Shockingly, some even thought it was a good idea.

The Obama campaign, falling back on the oldest dodge in the book, claimed that campaign signs were not allowed because of “security concerns.” Who can doubt, though, that it was instead because of “camera concerns”? The Obama campaign was far more interested in photo ops clear of McCain signs or other unwanted reminders that there are other opinions out there among the unwashed masses than that of sycophancy for The One.

On one hand, I see the logic in a campaign making sure that it controls the atmosphere of a campaign stop. It’s only good sense. And if this control were to be exerted on private property with the full acceptance and participation of the property owners, well who can deny that? But it wasn’t. This rally happened on public land.

Now, let us harken back to the “reason” that Sarah Palin was refused the podium at the anti-Iran rally last week, shall we? She was denied because of the so-called “equal time” rule, remember? This is a shadowy “rule” that seems to state that no politician may speak in public unless his opponent also appears to speak.

So, one wonders: did the University of Mary Washington invite the McCain campaign to the rally with Obama? And if not, why not? After all, this is a publicly funded institution. Are we to accept that such a place would violate that sacrosanct “equal time” rule? Are we to believe that a place funded by our money not only didn’t invite the opposing candidate, but used its publicly derived authority to squelch free speech by disallowing signs?

I suppose we’ll have to believe such a thing, after all.

Of course, the media doesn’t mind. Who can deny that such heavy-handed campaign policies smoothes the waters for their messiah. I can only chuckle at this. I mean, Obama is the first messiah that needs average men to smooth the waters for him instead of being all powerful enough to smooth them himself. How shallow must be the water he walks upon?

No wonder Obama’s campaign posters remind one of Stalinist propaganda.

By Jayme Evans  

”Can’t we just all go out there and say everything’s OK?” - President Bush during contentious negotiations over his 700 billion dollar corporate welfare program

I make a comfortable living exposing defects in the work products of others. It matters not whether it be a system of integrated software components, a supply chain, transportation system or electrical grid; the search for defects in processes or their physical implementation that result in the failure of major systems must always start at the failure itself and work backwards until the root cause(s) can be found.

Most major disasters cannot be traced to a single point of failure. Rather they are the result of a combination of factors. Generally speaking, if any one of those factors is removed from the equation, the disaster becomes a near-miss. But the fact remains, every disaster is dependent upon one or more root causes that often involve human intervention. And many disasters turn out to be completely avoidable. 

The root cause of our current economic woes can be summed in one, single word:

Greed

We all know how we got here, the big question is how we move forward. But don’t look to your leadership for those answers. When it came to providing the information that so many Americans sought this weekend concerning precisely what action the government was ready to take or what the actual consequences were to taxpayers for either acting or not acting, we were not well-served. The dishonesty, spin and finger-pointing emanating from Washington was palpable, shameful and entirely un-American.

• We were told that if we don’t act; and act now; our entire economy will meltdown.
• We were told that credit will freeze and our nation will grind to a halt.
• We were told that the only way to fix this mess is to enact yet another welfare package for failed financial institutions. A 700 billion dollar behemoth that the taxpayers will chain themselves to, inheriting the very  poisoned debt that caused this mess, making us all culpable for the misdeeds of others.

On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lambasted the injection of politics into the process and then immediately injected politics into the process, slamming John McCain. One of those candidates will inherit the mess, so they should both be heavily invested in the solution. But the candidates offered little more. During the Friday night Presidential debate, host Jim Lehrer took multiple opportunities to ask both John McCain and Barack Obama whether they supported the plan as discussed. Neither would directly address the question. It was only by examining their answers to other questions that we learned they both support it.

Then on Saturday came an urgent announcement:
First there was a deal.
Then there was no deal.
Then there was a bill, followed by no bill.
Then there was an agreement in principle, followed by no agreement but a pledge to cooperate through tough negotiations.

Recessing Saturday after midnight, Democrats called a photo-op to pat themselves on the back and remind us that they were still there.

Finally, on Sunday came the announcement that agreement had been reached. Over the vehement objections of the vast majority of Americans and just in time for the opening of the Asian stock markets. 

Let’s be clear: Democrats have the majorities in both Houses of Congress. They had the votes necessary on Friday to pass any bill they chose. What they wanted was political cover. We’re less than two months away from an election and the last thing they want is to be politically exposed. With no guarantees their unprecedented scheme will even work, if they go down in flames, they want Republicans to share in their demise.

This legislation centralizes far too much power. It very broadly defines “troubled asset” to mean essentially any financial institution or mortgage instrument the government (hence Treasury Secretary) deems in trouble. It either insures those institutions against their losses or allows the Secretary to buy them outright at his own discretion. With YOUR money. It opens up the possibility of aid to ALL financial institutions, regardless of size, geography or assets. This includes securities brokers and insurance companies. It effectively forgives lenders and borrowers who are equally culpable for the mess.

If we choose to do nothing, opinions range from complete financial meltdown to tighter credit and recession. The truth is nobody really knows. Yet our government is expecting us to simply fall in line like timid little sheep and allow them to saddle us with this mountain of bad debt.

After cutting through all the weekend spin, the doom and gloom predictions are simply nonsense. What will happen if we don’t intervene, is that those institutions who gambled will fail, those homeowners and house-flippers who gambled will foreclose. The real estate market will surely suffer the consequences, but it is only one segment of the entire U.S. economy.

Roughly 20 percent of America will find it harder to obtain credit. That is roughly the percentage of Americans who gambled and incidentally, the same number of Americans who support this garbage. We’ll all pay more as a result and we could very well slip into recession, but the dire warnings of complete collapse are utter nonsense.

I’d like to know how many Congressional pensions are tied up in this worthless paper? That would indeed tell us how many in Congress are under financial pressure to act. Either way we’ll suffer, but it will be far less painful for those who had no hand in this mess if we do nothing.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the purpose of which was to address those deficiencies in corporate financial controls and reporting that allowed Enron to happen. Yet all it succeeded in doing is stifling productivity. It has done absolutely nothing in terms of preventing another Enron as we have now seen.

The overwhelming majority or Americans are self-sufficient. They live within their means, pay their bills on time, maintain good credit, pay their taxes and want the government to stay the hell out of our affairs, much less confiscate our wealth or socialize our economy. It is not our responsibility to bail out crooks on Wall Street, or those who gambled on the housing bubble and lost.

Eighty percent of America is absolutely, unwaveringly opposed to this action by our government. All across the political spectrum. In some districts, calls to Congressmen were going 100-1 in opposition to the plan. Has any of this had any impact on Congress whatsoever? Just before they began debate on this monstrosity, they sent President Bush a spending bill with 2,332 earmarks and pet projects totaling $4.9 billion dollars.

The airlines, hurricane victims, the auto industry, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. And now they gather for yet another bailout. Where the hell does this end?

This Administration, this Congress and the greed that their policies have fostered in Corporate America have gotten us into this mess. It was a bipartisan effort and a collective failure. Corporate lobbyists and Congressional earmarks will ensure it remains that way. More legislation and more money thrown at this problem is not going to fix it. The only way for us to end this as Americans is to let the chips fall where they may. And then we must completely clean House. Enact taxpayer-led term limits by voting out all incumbents in Congress.

This taxpayer-funded corporate welfare program will bankrupt this nation while those who directly contributed to it retire in comfort. In this particular case, we must have the intestinal fortitude not to reward that most loathsome of human vices, greed. We must have