AP - A teenager trying to get into his apartment after school is confronted by police. A man leaving his workplace chooses a different route back home to avoid officers who roam a particular street. These and hundreds of thousands of other Americans in big cities have been stopped on the street by police using a law-enforcement practice called stop-and-frisk that alarms civil libertarians but is credited by authorities with helping reduce crime.

21:59 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

There's a book I'd like to recommend to these vampires: Dead Souls. Or maybe they've already read it.

Wall Street's reticence on health care reform suddenly makes a a whole lot more sense. If the courts allow this perversion of the market, we are setting up an economic and moral debacle that will make the current crisis look like a cake walk.

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

(link) [New York Times]

20:48 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Have we figured out who really runs the country yet? How can anybody claim that this administration is "Marxist" or "socialist"? Geithner hobnobs with the same folks Paulson did. I think we've all got it backwards - it's not the government that took over or bailed out Wall Street...

Audacity? Maybe. Change? Not so much. Hope? You gotta be kidding me.

AP - Even during his most frenzied days, when Congress is demanding answers or the president himself is calling, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner makes time to talk to a select group of powerful Wall Street bankers.

07:24 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link