by Robert Reich

Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke.

The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren’t allowed to run deficits. That’s meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.

Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been cancelled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked.

Pre-K programs have been shut down. Community colleges are reducing their course offerings and admitting fewer students. Public universities, like the one I teach at, have raised tuitions and fees. That means many qualified students won’t be attending.

Last year the nation committed $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, the engines of America’s financial capital, because we were told we’d face economic Armegeddon if we didn’t.

We’ve got our priorities backwards. Our schools are the engines of our human capital, and if we don’t bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armegeddon years from now.

Financial capital moves instantly around the globe to wherever it can earn the best return. Human capital – the skills and insights of our people – is the one resource that’s uniquely American, on which our future living standards uniquely depend.

Starting immediately, the federal government should give states and local governments interest-free loans to make up for all school and university budget shortfalls. The loans can be repaid when the recession is over and local and state tax revenues revive.

Over the longer term we must shift incentives away from financial capital toward human capital. A tiny one half of one percent tax on all financial transactions would generate about $200 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That might put a crimp on Wall Street bonuses but it’s enough to fund early childhood education, smaller K-12 classes, and lower tuitons and fees for public higher education.

The Street’s financial capital is important to the American economy, but over the long term the classroom’s human capital is absolutely crucial.

Republished with the permission of the Robert Reich blog.

Aaah the good old days. Remember waaaay back to 2007 when a couple of Google sellouts left to start this 140 character micro-blogging service called Twitter? We just laughed and laughed. Who on earth would tell someone, “I’m offline now and using the loo”? Are they crazy? Most “experts” (present company included) predicted this service would last about, 30 seconds.

(Even when we read amazon founder Jeff Bezos invested heavily, that looked like his first dumb business move… right?) Well in the 30 seconds it took you to read this far 3,600 Tweets went flying across cyberspace.

Yeah… laugh clown laugh I hear you saying. Twitter announced today on its blog these astonishing Tweet numbers:

2007 5,000 Tweets oer day
2008 300,000 Tweets per day
2009 2,500,000 Tweets per day
Today? 50,000,000 Tweets per day…

Or…  600 Tweets per second!

Now I make a large percentage of my income helping companies manage the flow and integration of their social media Tweets, Status updates, Pings, Up-to’s, Shouts, blips, flickrs, clips, feeds and a myriad other means used to keep in touch with each other and many more businesses and individuals each day make a lot of money.

The chart is scary. Whether you are Mr. Demi Moore (Ashton Kutcher) racing CNN to 1 million (now 4.6), Ellen DeGeneris (remember when she tried to get to 100K followers in the 1st week now 4.3 million) or Stephen Fry here in the UK (1.4 million) the famous and not so let the world know what they are up to and far, far too many people care.

Businesses though are understanding there is gold in them thar Tweets as people talk about your company. Everything from customer satisfaction and care to special deals, the world is talking. The question is are you going to be part of the dialogue or in constant react mode?

I love it when business owners turn up their noses and say, Twitter? Facebook? My kids use those (followed by? Wait for it) I don’t have time for that.

Just keep repeating to yourself, 600 Tweets per second. If one of those per minute was a lead for your company or you created a passive income stream to make money while you slept would you then have the time? No. You’d make the time.

I’m in the book.

by Robert Reich

Washington is paralyzed by snow and partisanship. Nothing is getting done – even as the Great Recession pulls more Americans into its maw.

In the midst of this paralysis, the President was asked about the giant pay packages of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co. ($17 mullion for 2009) and Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs ($9 million). “First of all, I know both those guys,” Obama said. “They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”

Free market system? As I remember it, American taxpayers forked out hundreds of billions to keep JPMorgan, Goldman, and other big Wall Street banks afloat through most of 2009. Had we not done so, Dimon, Blankfein, and most other top executives on Wall Street would not have earned a dime last year. In fact, some would be out on the street, reather than sitting pretty on the Street.

The free market system has been unleashed instead on average Americans. According to real-estate data firm First American CoreLogic, about one-fourth of American households with a mortgage are under water – owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Mortgage-bond trader Amherst Securities estimates that 7.1 million of the 7.9 households now behind on their mortgage payments will lose their homes to foreclosure if nothing is done to modify their loans. Already cities and towns are littered with foreclosure sales, pulling down the values of all homes in the area.

Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and most of the rest of Wall Street don’t worry about what’s happening to homes on Main Street because their savings are invested in stocks and bonds. But most middle-class Americans do worry because most (if not all) of their savings are in their homes. As home values continue to slip, average Americans’ one big asset is shrinking.

The best way to help reverse this downward slide would be to let bankruptcy judges restructure shaky home mortgages, reducing what borrowers owe. The problem is, the big banks hate this. If mortgages could be restructured this way, the banks would take big hits. They’d be forced to cut the amounts owed by borrowers. They figure they do better by squeezing as much as they can out of distressed homeowners, then collecting as much as they can on foreclosed properties.

So, not surprisingly, the big banks have been mounting a major lobbying campaign to block legislation that would allow homeowners to use bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy has been part of the “free market system” for hundreds of years, but its details are determined through politics – the same politics that arranged the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. In fact, you might say that during 2009, Wall Street went through its own kind of bankruptcy restructuring, with the generous aid of American taxpayers. JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, along with their top executives, traders, and major investors, have benefited handsomely.

Now, a quarter of American homeowners need help restructuring their loans, but Wall Street is blocking the way.

Rather than defending the outsized paychecks of Dimon, Blankfein, and the rest of Wall Street as part of the free market system, the President needs to demand that Wall Street help homeowners on Main Street. The Obama White House should have made this a condition of getting the giant bailouts in the first place. The least it can do now is to is to make the free market system work for everyone.

Republised with the permission of Robert Reich

by Paul Kiel, ProPublica

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Lesa Herron of Santa Rosa, Calif., opened a letter from Chase Home Finance (PDF). She’d been denied a permanent modification under the federal government’s loan-mod program, Chase said, because “Your hardship is not of a permanent nature.” No other reason was given.

For Herron, that was hard to understand. She was working two jobs and her mortgage payment still amounted to more than half of her income. She’d fallen two payments behind. If her money troubles were only temporary, it was news to her.

We at ProPublica reported last month that mortgage servicers are often not following the Treasury Department’s rules for the program and provided three examples. One involved another homeowner who, like Herron, had been denied a modification because his hardship was not “permanent.”

Homeowner Lesa Herron’s letter from Chase Home Finance states that she was denied a loan modification because her ‘hardship is not of a permanent nature.’

Since that story, we have found several other similar cases: homeowners who may well be eligible for the program but who were denied because their troubles were not deemed “permanent.”

The cases ProPublica found all occurred before Treasury explicitly barred such denials in December. Despite the change in guidelines, however, those homeowners are still in limbo. Some face the possibility of foreclosure.

Through interviews with housing counselors and homeowners, we found six cases in which homeowners were denied because the hardship was found not to be “permanent.” All were in November. All were denied by Chase Home Finance, JPMorgan Chase’s mortgage servicing arm.

Chase seems to be alone among the largest servicers in having used that reason for denial. It’s unclear just what criteria Chase used to judge a hardship temporary.

Housing counselors told us that homeowners denied a modification for that reason should reapply. The program does not allow homeowners to appeal denials, and housing advocates have often criticized the program for not providing an effective way to challenge servicers’ determinations.

Christine Holevas, a spokeswoman for Chase, said that the company “adapts as quickly as possible” to Treasury’s guidelines. When asked, she did not say whether Chase would review the applications of homeowners who’d been denied because their hardships were considered temporary.

As we reported last month, the largest servicers have lagged in approving homeowners for modifications. Together, those servicers account for more than 60 percent of the 3.4 million mortgages eligible for the program, but very few homeowners have been approved for lasting modifications. About 425,000 Chase customers are eligible for loan mods, according to the Treasury Department. Only a little more than 7,000 have received permanent modifications.

The Treasury Department has laid out extensive guidelines for the $75 billion program in an attempt to standardize servicers’ evaluations of applicants. When a servicer joins the program, it signs a contract that says it will abide by those guidelines. In return, the servicers receive incentive payments from the government for each modified mortgage.

To receive a modification under the program, homeowners must demonstrate that they can’t afford their mortgage payments. But Treasury’s guidelines, first issued last April and updated repeatedly since, never mentioned testing the permanence of a homeowner’s difficulties when evaluating an application. Last December, a new guideline explicitly prohibited servicers from distinguishing “between short-term and long-term hardships.”

A Treasury spokeswoman said that since the program’s launch, servicers had developed “varying interpretations of the guidelines” and that Chase’s use of the “temporary hardship” denial before the guideline update was “reasonably consistent” with the program’s rules. She said that homeowners who’d been denied for that reason can contact a hotline staffed with housing counselors for help.

It’s impossible to say how many homeowners were denied for that reason. Servicers were not required to systematically collect and report the reason for denials before December. The reporting system includes only 14 possible reasons for denial; having only a temporary hardship is not one of them. Holevas did not respond to a question about the number of denials.

Jennifer Murphy, director of servicer relations at the nonprofit Center for New York City Neighborhoods, said that she had often seen homeowners rejected for modifications because their hardships were deemed “not permanent”—both before and after the launch of the federal modification program last year. As a result, she said, she advises homeowners to state that their hardships are permanent when they apply.

ProPublica could not find an example of any of the other top three largest servicers using the same denial. Spokespeople for Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s servicing arm said they do not evaluate the duration of the hardship for the purposes of the program. A spokesperson for Bank of America gave a more general reply and said the bank follows the program’s guidelines when evaluating homeowners.

Homeowners must meet certain basic qualifications to be eligible for a modification under the program: the home must be the primary residence and the homeowner must be able to show she can’t afford the mortgage payments. If those hurdles are cleared, the servicer is supposed to run a secret formula developed by the Treasury Department to determine whether the investor would make more money modifying the loan or not. The program lowers the mortgage payments to 31 percent of the homeowner’s monthly income. If modification is likely to be more profitable, the servicer is obligated to offer the homeowner a modification.

Chase’s criteria for a “hardship … of a permanent nature,” meanwhile, aren’t so easily explicable. The denial seems to have been applied in a range of cases. Some homeowners had been current on their payments when they applied for a modification, some were months behind. Some had been denied even a trial modification, while some had been denied after making trial payments for over half a year. The program is supposed to feature a three-month trial period before modifications are made permanent (as we’ve reported, trials frequently stretch much longer).

In the example we reported on last month, Chase told a mortgage broker named Nathan Reynolds that he’d been denied a modification because Reynolds had expressed optimism that the administration’s policies might rescue the housing market and thus boost his income. He told ProPublica that he’d likely declare bankruptcy if he didn’t receive a modification.

Yves Andre Vital, a housing counselor with Brooklyn Housing & Family Services, told ProPublica that Chase had denied one of his clients on the rationale that unemployment was only a temporary hardship.

In Lesa Herron’s case, she says a Chase employee told her she’d been denied because her gross income had not decreased since she refinanced into her loan in 2006. Herron works as an X-ray technician at a state-run center for people with developmental disabilities, but has supplemented her income by delivering pizza three nights a week for the past nine years.

Since last fall, she’d struggled to keep current on her loan, which carries a 9.5 percent interest rate and amounted to more than half of her income. But when she couldn’t cover the property tax, she fell two months behind. She was accepted to the federal program last May and was able to make the trial payments, because they’d been cut almost in half, from $3,350 to about $1,778.

Herron made six of those monthly payments before she received the denial letter for a permanent modification last November. She didn’t know what to do next. “I stopped paying my mortgage so that my family and I could get the money together to move when the bank made their next move.” She says she might try reapplying now that she knows her denial is against the federal program’s guidelines.

Write to Paul Kiel at paul.kiel@propublica.org.

Republished under a mutual Creative Commons licence with ProPublica.org.

by Olga Pierce, ProPublica

If you’ve been following our coverage of the nation’s unemployment insurance system, you may have concluded that things are pretty bad. (See our interactive feature showing whether your state’s fund is in the red.)

But what about some historical perspective?

It’s official, recession hounds: The 26 states with insolvent unemployment insurance trust funds have now borrowed more than was borrowed during 1981 and 1982, the last time there was a severe recession in the U.S., and oft-used benchmark for when things are Officially Really Bad.

According to this long-buried CBO document (PDF), in March 1983, total outstanding state loans were 13.7 billion, a figure that includes borrowing during 1981 and 1982 and the first quarter of 1983 plus carried-over borrowing from 1975 to 1980.

In 2009 dollars, that’s $29.5 billion. Current state borrowing is now just over $30 billion.

As we’ve written, borrowing from the federal government, which occurs when states have spent all of their own unemployment trust fund reserves, will affect states for years to come. States that cannot repay their loans before 2011 will face tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments. To shore up their funds, states have also been forced to raise taxes and in some cases cut benefits.

Of course, there are other ways of looking at historical borrowing. It’s not just how much states have borrowed – it also matters how quickly they will able to generate revenue to pay it back.

There are more workers paying into the system now than in 1983. Won’t states be able to generate more tax revenue and pay loans back faster?

Turns out, not so much – in part because many states only tax the first few thousand dollars of each worker’s earnings. (The federal government only requires states to tax the first $7,000 of earnings, a figure hasn’t changed since … 1983.) In 1981, 42 percent of eligible workers’ earnings were taxed. In 2008 that figure was only 27 percent.

In 1983, states’ borrowing was equal to about 3 percent of total taxable wages. Today, that borrowing is equal to about 2.4 percent. But never fear – states only have to borrow $6.5 billion more to make up the difference, and California alone is projected to borrow $11 billion more before the recession is over.

Republished under a mutual Creative Commons licence with ProPublica.org

By Denis Campbell

Every day the 1st hour of the US NBC Today Show downloads onto my iPhone. At 34 minutes after the hour, the camera crew steps outside the studio to pan the crowd of fans gathered and there is one man who is always there. He is African American, always wears a hat or hooded parka and slowly points his index finger with a faint smile as the camera passes by him. A few times I have heard host Matt Lauer call out “good morning Linny.” So who is this man?

“My sister called me on my cell a little while ago and said I was crazy!” says a brown parka clad Linny Boyette, 69. It was very cold and we stood together leaning against metal barriers in frigid and blustery 17°F (-10°C) temps on the ‘Plaza’ outside the street-level studio. Every Monday-Saturday morning from 7-9 am for the last 17½ years, Linny has watched their live broadcast. Forget the US Postal Service and their “neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow will keep us from our daily appointed rounds” mantra, this guy lives it and puts them to shame.

This long-underwear wearing UK-based, teeth chattering reporter was no match for two hours of cold and snow. Yet there was a diehard crowd of 20 or so people who cheered every time the camera trained its eye on the group. I watched most of the event from behind the safe and warm picture window of the nearby Dean and DeLuca coffee shop. I was very curious though to meet this ‘biggest’ fan of the The Today Show’s Big Four: Matt, Meredith, Al and Ann.

Linny is a Jamaican-born Brit who has lived in New York and London and now resides in the NYC borough of the Bronx. Every morning he rises at 3:30 am, leaves his house by 4:40 and then takes a series of subway trains to Rockefeller Center where he stands outside the 49th Street studio of the Today Show.

During this particular show he stood next to the featured visitors as interviewed by weatherman Al Roker and the camera always includes him in the opening shot of the interview. It was fascinating to watch the steady stream of camera operators, lighting technicians and crew members who went out of their way to come over and say good morning to Linny. Their attention caught the eye of everyone else assembled who in turn would visit with him. When Al came out for his weather shot, the first person he greeted was Linny with a big smile before working the rest of the crowd. Same with Matt and Meredith.

You then saw many in the crowd come up to him with a combination of “who are you’s?” and “oh wow, yes, I’ve seen you before, can I have my picture taken with you?” Linny never once changed his demeanour and was kind to all comers. This was his theatre.

For most of the time he is off-camera, Linny chats up visitors and poses for photos. “This is therapy for me, I love this show.” Said Linny. “It energises me.” Having lived a full and interesting life, he is quite philosophic, almost zen-like about his daily two hours of joy.

Boyette served as a medic in Vietnam where he saw lots of unspeakable pain and suffering so now he just enjoys each day. The cast and crew missed him for almost a month a few years back as he recovered from surgery. When he returned, there was a special chair waiting for him and the entire NBC production took up a sizeable collection for him. Now, on the rare day Linny is missing, a call goes out before the show airs to check on his well-being. Literally it seems this is one show that cannot go on without him.

During Thursday’s driving snowstorm he was gone shortly after the 8:00 hour outdoor segment. But Friday, with the sun shining brightly, he hung around to the bitter cold end. While it was far too cold for a Friday concert on the plaza, Linny squeezed between the barricades and left as silently and anonymously as he arrived.

Of course I waved and watched his departure from inside that coffee shop with both frozen hands tightly gripping a freshly made cup of cappuccino for warmth.

SCOTUS Guts McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform
By Denis Campbell

George Orwell was right. It took 25-years beyond 1984 but Big Brother got a Big Win today. In a typically ideological 5-4 decision worse than 1857’s Dred Scott, The US Supreme Court blew the call very badly and now the American consumer will be assaulted as never before with election time corporate and union funded campaign disinformation SPIN. Dred Scott, denying slaves and their children constitutional rights, looks mild by comparison today.

So get ready as China, ‘Big’ Oil, Insurance, Power, Pharma and Banks can buy elected officials to run against President Obama or anyone they disagree with’s successor and roll all reforms back. He who has deepest pockets will ultimately scream the loudest and thus affect the electorate with lies and even more damnable lies, forget statistics, they’re not needed anymore.

Here in the UK and across the EU there are strict campaign finance laws, no campaign advertising except specific blocks of time given to each party and we see generally sober and sombre elections. In the US it already a cuckoo’s nest as lobbyists buy their issue and their candidates, the small donations of individuals mean nothing.

If you loved ‘death panel’ adverts, get set for more as the industry sponsored shadowy groups that spent $1.5 million dollars a day trying to defeat US healthcare reform through their shadowy Political Action Committees, just had the last semblance of restraint removed by SCOTUS.

Voting for free speech over common sense this narrow decision divided America even further. Republicans love it, Progressives hate it. The President promised quick action and, most likely, nothing will happen.

The lunatics are now free to run the asylum. The Capitol Hill Cuckoo’s Nest own Nurse Ratched, aka Minority leaders Mitch McConnell and man-tan John Boehner praised the ruling in the name of free speech as the corporate master’s hands pulling their strings bulged openly from the back of their jackets.

Congress will now be even more beholden to the golden rule. What’s that you say? Do unto others, etc… Nope. The golden rule of Congress is: “he who has the special interest gold makes the rules.” It is a very dangerous and difficult time.

Look how easy it was to make death panels and Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate gain traction last summer. Now imagine the volume fully unleashed in October of 2010 in key Congressional districts as lies are fomented and funded without any fear of retribution.

They are so good at what they do, they will actually get a group of Tea Baggers frothing at the mouth protecting their right to screw us as they have during the entire healthcare debate. The “hands off my healthcare” crowd are all on Medicare to begin with so when they demand no governmental care they actually already receive it.

Imagine that fertile ground now seeded by millions of unscrupulous lobbyists and PACs. US Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University said on MSNBC last night he was concerned that “a monopoly of two parties strangling the life out of the Republic” while applauding the opinion on free speech grounds.

Indeed. We’re screwed.

UPDATED by The Rev Dr. Britt Minshall

As you know I have been travelling to Haiti on mission for 13 years. My friend Pat Smyth joined me on my third trip and has been going on his own for 10 years.  You can imagine the horror we and the other Haitian Helpers across the country have been experiencing for the past week.  My heart goes out to Jerry and Esther, Don, Lani and John whose daughter KC lives at the Wings of Hope orphanage for disabled children in Kenscoff.

Let me say first the Haitian people are the hardest working kindest people on the face of the earth.  Pat Robertson and some other radical TV clerics have said these people “worship the devil” and sacrifice children, so “God is punishing Haiti,” others still believe the 1950’s fiction of zombies and witch dolls - ALL LIES!!!!

The truth is the land is poor, poverty abounds due to over population and much of the international community especially the United States has traditionally acted out badly toward this “first Black Republic” in the new world.  Many of our political leaders, even as recently as five years ago, have severely interfered with Haiti’s development.

I have been uniquely blest.  I have met two of Haiti’s Presidents, many governing people, many of the wealthier residents, scores of young business folks trying to restart their country, dedicated relief workers from everywhere, lots and lots of wonderful but really poor children, and have been welcomed into the homes of the poorest of all in cite sole and along the harbor.

I have stayed in fine hotels, a disabled children’s orphanage, several pastor’s homes and even a small hut in a jungle village.  I have traversed mountains, travelled deserts and been honored to preach in the slums at the City of God in the heart of Port-au-Prince.  My partner pastor Rev. Jean Menes Valme is truly one of the most Godly dedicated men in the world.  Today, much of what I have seen is gone, gone to the ground in one of mankind’s worst natural disasters.  Many friends are dead and missing.  Many tears have been shed!  Haiti’s people, rich and poor, are now just brothers and sisters to each other and to you and me.

There are about a thousand of us who share this newsletter each month.  I vowed to NEVER ask you for money as these newsletters are a gift from God to us all.  BUT now I must beg, implore, beseech, and pled for help for Haiti, now but especially for the long run.

You may donate on your cell phone or, as I did, directly to the RED CROSS or to DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS or CNN has a link on their web page.  Let us all work together, to put a permanent end to a continuing misery which just became the horror of the century.  Don’t do it for me, for a tax deduction or for profit, but rather - For God’s Sake.

Merci - Bondye Beni tout moun (thank you God bless you all).

###############

(The following is an eyewitness account of relief efforts that arrived just after publication from one of Britt’s aid worker  friends in Port au Prince. -Ed.)

Port Au Prince, Haiti
January 17, 2010
Songs of Grief and Solidarity

Dear Patrick,

Apologies if these notes seem unpolished…that is because they are…we barely have time to write and Internet is patchy so I will do what I can to get out information but I don’t promise eloquence.

Love to you all and know that we are safe and taking precautions. Thank you to everyone who has sent words of love, encouragement and support.

Last night we (myself, Cat Laine, Paul Namphy, Wisnel Jolissaint, Lisius Orel and Baudeler Magloire) arrived in Port Au Prince just before sunset. As we came into the city with our truck piled full of water, gas, shovels and food we got a flat tire. The news reports of looting have been so exaggerated that we were concerned that a mob of people might come take everything before we even made it into the city. I am pleased to report that, as per usual, reports of violence in Haiti are largely disinformation. Yes, we did hear shooting late last night, and yes we did see a fight over a mattress at a camp in the city but our overall impression has been sheer amazement at the solidarity displayed by communities.

We drove into the city past the airport and along Delmas 33. Initially it looked like about 1 in 5 houses had sustained damage and perhaps 1 in 20 had completely collapsed. However as we got father in towards Delmas the damage looked much more severe with perhaps 1 in 5 buildings completely collapsed. I have never seen anything like this, honestly it is hard to even feel. People have not even begun to mourn as everyone is still in a state of crisis. As we drove by the police station on Delmas 33 we saw someone carrying a severed foot of a police officer out of the wreckage…I barely even blinked…everything is so surreal.

We went straight to Matthew 25, a guesthouse which remained relatively untouched by the quake. We went to locate our friend Amber who has been helping to coordinate volunteer efforts. We are so grateful for the way in which we have been received by the guesthouse, they immediately allowed us to remove all of the materials from the car and invited us to sleep in the backyard (no one is sleeping inside as the aftershocks have continued over the past few days). I was so amazed to run our dear friend Ellie Happel at the guesthouse. She flew in from NY the day after the quake to help with relief.

Once we had unloaded the car we all went with Marcorel to see his family in Jake. When we arrived it was already dark and there were people sleeping everywhere in the streets. As we waited for Marcorel to make his way through the camp to locate his family we saw several young men from the neighborhood setting up a large light rigged to some batteries. As light flooded the crowd of people they burst into song. Songs of solidarity, songs of grief, songs of thanks that they had survived. We followed Mako through the blankets and makeshift tents to where his family (8 brothers and sisters and his mom and dad) huddled together on a pile of blankets. They were so happy to see him and we all piled into their bed and Ellie, Paul, Cat and I were each handed a baby. The singing continued in the background as Marcorel’s family told the story of where they each were when the quake hit.

After leaving the camp we visited the site where Caribbean Market once stood. As I stared in disbelief at the pile of concrete and twisted shopping carts I remembered my many trips to this market over the years. I remember that Caribbean market was the first place that I visited on my own in Port Au Prince, cautiously walking through the streets in 2004 by myself, not speaking any Kreyol, knowing only the market. To see it in ruins was unimaginable. American FEMA firefighters were still picking through the rubble. They said that they were still hearing voices inside and that they had been working for 30 hours without a break.

Around 8:30 we headed back to the guesthouse where we were incredibly blessed to have access to power and fruit. I could barely blink my eyes, the lids so heavy with exhaustion and shock. After several coordination meetings we finally tumbled into sleep, all of us gathered in the backyard, under the stars, sleeping to the sound of the songs of grief.

Please keep sending your love and prayers. Also you can help us by getting your friends to sign up for the SOIL group on Facebook and follow our posts. Also any fundraising help is deeply appreciated and will go 100% towards disaster relief. You can donate online at www.oursoil.org.

With love from Port au Prince,

Sasha

By Denis Campbell

BREAKING: The Bosch motor alternator plant in Miskin, near Cardiff is closing. After teetering on the financial brink for 18-months, an official announcement is due shortly. With the loss of Hoover last fall, South Wales is down to Ford’s motor assembly plant in Bridgend as the remaining big manufacturing hope.

Cue the media tsk-tsk machine. 24-hours of sombre-toned gnashing of teeth then throw it to the sport desk for Test cricket and rugby, worry about another 4 cms. of snow or gasp, fog crippling the nation and that will be that.

In a nation where 70% of the jobs are in the public sector, the same sector that enjoys its regular pay rises and a great pension, what’s 300-900 more people on the dole? That, ladies and gentlemen, is the question we have been asking for most of 2009.

What specifically are our ‘public servants’ charged with business development and inbound investment doing with the millions of pounds they spend?

Apparently it’s just fine that both the WAG and the two publicly funded agencies responsible for developing business and attracting inward investment in South Wales, International Business Wales and Cardiff and Co continue to live in lavish style and a tone-deaf vacuum? Their press officers will find a way to immediately SPIN the story, they always do and the MSM (Main stream media) always worried about “fairness” will allow them to speak total rubbish completely unchallenged, but… I digress.

Shall we predict the response?

They will insist there is nothing wrong, they have no control over what any one company decides, tout the latest positive press received here in South Wales abroad, claim credit for anything that moves in or near the city, tout (again) The Ashes and Ryder Cup and convert column inches of positive press to a (phantom) monetary figure to show how much they have done to attract (equally phantom) business to Wales.

And we’ll just let it all happen.

Let’s review though their past year’s greatest hits parade shall we?

International Business Wales heads out shortly for two trips in the 1st Quarter to Dubai. Now aside from headlines made with an over-compensating ½ km high phallic symbol built on sand, their economy is even worse than ours. At least they have oil to sell. We’re stuck with demon coal.

We have a completely broken airport in Cardiff where one must now drive 90-minutes to Bristol to avoid paying £400 for a business flight to Amsterdam (and early morning charter flyers getting pissed at 5:00 am on their way to Spain). But hey, they are spending 8-figures to spruce up the building! Why does “lipstick on a pig” keep coming to mind?

Cardiff and Co can’t seem to get their heads out of their backsides. They mailed an invitation across the business community last week for a gala event at the Cardiff Museum. Problem? The event was held back in November, 2009. Now that YOU mentioned it again, just how much of the Cardiff Council’s £500K funding mandate was spent on that black-tie dinner for local businesses, board members and their wives? Shame!

But aside from the £700K in credit card bills discovered by the Lib Dems last summer, IBW spent £3 million pounds over the last 18-months to market Wales to the Pacific Rim. Now these are highly educated, motivated and poorly paying economic powerhouses. What specifically does our nation have to sell there? What would they do other than steal our technology and people? My neighbour lost his manufacturing supervisory job and is a month-to-month contractor flying to Shanghai 2-3 weeks at a time. He is away from his infant children doing his job which is… to train his successor. But hey he’s only one guy, how can he matter?

Cardiff and Co’s Chairman though gets the Nero award though for yet another debacle. He was last seen waving to us from the sides of Cardiff Bus double-deckers. Now I may be daft but how is Bill Savage’s face riding out to the airport in Rhoose going to attract inbound investment to Cardiff? Is there a manufacturer there with 900 jobs willing to relocate to Cardiff that I don’t know about? Or is he just lying (deliberate pun) in wait to claim credit for anything that comes to the UK and save his job?

Watching the Rhodri Morgan’s farewell video that was produced on the eve of his departure by BBC Wales’ Political unit, what stood out were the dozens of ‘public officials’ and ‘businesspeople’ on these trade missions. Many were there on the public teat. There were several great photo ops on these lovely junkets.

I remember going on a few back in the states but here’s the difference, we paid our way and were given industry sectors to make meetings happen in, not just along for the ride. If you could not develop business, you did not go. So how do meetings with the UK Ambassador a lovely chap I’m sure) bring real business or generate enough inbound investment to even cover the trip’s cost?

Where is the accountability?

Where is the outrage?

We have got to stop fiddling. We built this city and now it is burning.

It’s time to light a new fire under these agencies, nationalise the airport if you have to to fix it and kick some tail (or we’ll even lose the booze air charter business).

It is time to consolidate all the duplicative and duplicitous agencies and create one agency. It’s time to bring in a real inbound investment pro, someone who has done this in another industrial area. You will need to pay him or her a dump truck load of money and then get out of the way. Fill these positions with political pals and we all continue to suffer the consequences. But hey, at least everyone will have great tickets for the Ryder Cup!

That seems an inordinately high price to pay for three days of golf, especially if Tiger takes the full year off and does not even play? Now how poetic on the justice scales would THAT be?

by Charley James

Responding quickly to the Christmas Eve terrorist threat aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit from Amsterdam, the US Dept. of Homeland Security announced new security procedures today in addition to not letting passengers use toilets one hour before landing.

Enhancing its screening passengers at security checkpoints, starting tomorrow all passengers on every flight arriving, departing or flying over the US will be required to remove their trousers or skirts at boarding gates for a last-minute underwear check.

According to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, news reports that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – the man accused to trying to blow up NW253 – concealed explosives in his underpants are accurate “so we want to be sure that, along with making people walk barefoot through check points, and banning shampoo and deodorant, no one is trying to sneak explosives aboard in their knickers.”

She also announced that, as part of the new measure, passengers will be required to put their underwear on the outside of their clothes at checkpoints and, halfway through each flight, flight attendants will have each passenger give their bra’s, panties and briefs or boxers to the person sitting directly in front of them “who will wear them for the balance of the flight.”

Dismissing suggestions that this is a slapstick strategy straight out of Bananas, a 1971 Woody Allen film in which the famed writer-actor accidentally takes over a South American dictatorship, Sec. Napolitano told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday “this new tactic will absolutely foil anyone from using their own underwear as a terrorist weapon.”

Admitting that some passengers may not wear any underwear at all, Sec. Napolitano insists DHS is prepared.

“Part of the new regulations requires airlines to carry spare underwear on all planes,” she says, “so everyone will be subjected to the same rigorous inspection requirements.”

On Wall St., news of the enhanced security procedures sent stock prices of apparel manufacturers Hanes and Jockey soaring in heavy trading Monday afternoon.