KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday November 27 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

Even the men who created the internet are beginning to fear its power to destroy freedom - (www.dailymail.co.uk) Fast-forward 40 years. It is November 2049 and privacy is a distant memory. Every telephone call you make, every text you send on your mobile phone, every email and videocall, every financial transaction is recorded, stored, analysed and can potentially be used against you. Each waking hour you are also deluged with marketing calls and sales pitches - which pop up on your mobile, your hand-held computer and even in your car. You walk into a shop and not only do the salesmen know who you are, they know what you want - before you even open your mouth. This is a world in which you are constantly worried about who is reading your emails and analysing your phone calls. Come election time, you are bombarded with video texts of the party leaders addressing your concerns. The powers that be know how much tax you pay, what you spend your money on, how many children you have and who your friends are. It is a Britain, indeed a world, where the private individual has ceased to exist, and one in which an unholy alliance of the state and Mammon rules our lives with powers that would have made Stalin sick with envy. This dystopian nightmare is a distinct possibility thanks to what is probably the most significant invention of the 20th century - the internet. And although this nightmare is set in the future, much of it is starting to happen. The net, which turned 40 years old last week, is often touted as the ultimate tool of freedom and knowledge. The computer from which 40 years ago the first message was sent over the internet, between the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University But in another 40 years' time, will we still be celebrating this extraordinary electronic marvel - or rueing the creation of a monster? That is the troubling question being asked not just by technological luddites, but by the founders of the internet itself. Although most people became aware of the net only in the early Nineties, the global 'network of networks' has a history stretching back to the earliest days of computing. The first network connection was made on October 29, 1969, when an undergraduate called Charley Kline attempted to make a computer in Los Angeles communicate with another computer at Stanford up the coast. The first word communicated on the net was 'Lo' - Kline was attempting to type the word 'Login' when the system crashed. They got it working again and, for nearly three decades, what became known as the 'internet' (the actual term was first used in 1974) remained mostly a tool of academia and the military, gradually spreading its tentacles across the globe. But then came the invention of the world wide web - the means by which anyone, anywhere could easily access this brave new online world. This was the creation of British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, his Belgian colleague at the CERN nuclear research institute in 1989. Thanks to them, we are now in an age when it is almost impossible to imagine life without the net. With every passing year, its power and importance increases. And herein lie the doubts of its founders. For while the net has been championed as the ultimate expression of 'people power', there is a more sinister possibility. Its dominance in our lives has led its architects to fear it could be used as a weapon of intrusion, suppression and exploitation. Already, anti-democratic regimes are increasingly subverting the openness of the net and using it as a weapon against their enemies. Take China, which went online in 1993 and now has the greatest number of internet users of any nation - about a third of a billion.

Pentagon: Most of US Youth Too Fat, Dumb, Sickly or Drugged Out to Serve – (www.usatoday.com) More than a third of American youth of military age are unfit for service, mainly because they are too fat or sickly, the Army Times reports, quoting the latest Pentagon figures. Most of the rest are too dumb or have used too many drugs to qualify, the study shows. The report says 35% of the 31 million Americans aged 17 to 24 are unqualified because of physical and medical issues. "The major component of this is obesity," Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, tells the Times. "We have an obesity crisis in the country. There's no question about it." He also said young people, by and large, can't do push-ups. "And they can't do pull-ups," Gilroy says. " And they can't run."

The Times says the Pentagon gets its data from the Centers for Disease Control, which has found that the percentage of youth 18 to 34 who are considered obese has jumped from 6% in 1987 to 23% now. Here's the Pentagon's breakdown of the ineligible population, according to the Times:

· Medical/physical problems, 35%.

· Illegal drug use, 18%.

· Mental Category V (the lowest 10% of the population), 9%.

· Too many dependents under age 18, 6%.

· Criminal record, 5%.

Message from the Midway Gyre (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch) - (www.chrisjoran.com) These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Lobbyists Defeat America: Homedebtor Tax Credit Extension - (www.housingwire.com) The Senate voted today to pass an extension of the first-time homebuyer tax credit until April 2010. In all, 98 Senators voted in favor of H.R. 3548, with zero votes against (two Senators did not vote). H.R. 3548 is a bill is primarily purposed with extending unemployment benefits. The bill is currently amended to include the extension of an $8,000 tax credit for those buying their first homes as well as an $6,500 tax credit for some borrowers buying a home for a second time. The move comes as no surprise, as HousingWire reported last week. The bill now requires President Obama’s signature into law. Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies, with nearly $6trn in annual revenues and more than 12m employees, commended the vote in a statement. “This critical program has already enabled hundreds of thousands of Americans to become first-time homebuyers,” they report. “Encouraging additional home purchases will create a cascade effect, not only boosting the housing sector, but also creating jobs and hastening broad recovery of the U.S. economy – more than 20 percent of which is tied to residential real estate and housing-related industries.” Passed as an amendment, the tax credit can still be removed from the final wording of the bill, if placed under further review. However given recent lobbying efforts in the industry and a feeling of presidential support, this remains unlikely.

L.A.-area agents holding open mansions - (www.latimes.com) For Florence Mattar, each open house has a routine. She drives around the neighborhood placing signs, brings in fresh flowers, stocks the refrigerator with bottled water and sets out a sign-in sheet.
Similar scenes play out across Southern California every weekend, with one expensive exception. The Tuscan-style house she is "sitting," to use the industry term, is listed at $21.9 million. And anyone is welcome to see it. All 9,691 square feet of it. Whether spurred by the down housing market, the opportunity to promote themselves or a determination to make a sale, a select group of area real estate agents has raised the bar on public open houses above $10 million -- to $12.9 million in Beverly Hills, Malibu and Brentwood Park, $18.9 million in Pacific Palisades and even higher in the "bird streets" area of the Hollywood Hills, where Mattar's reclaimed stone, brick and wood listing sits serenely at the end of a cypress-lined driveway. "You get more people because they are curious," the Coldwell Banker agent said. "They've never stepped in a house that price." Through bubbles and busts, the open house has remained a key tool for buyers and sellers, at least for properties with price tags that are less than gold-plated. Nearly half of recent buyers used open houses for information during their home search, according to the National Assn. of Realtors, and 15% found a home through an open house, a number that has held fairly steady since 2001.

Top Bailout Recipients Spent $71 Million Lobbying Since Bailout - (www.huffingtonpost.com) Twenty-five top recipients of government bailout funds spent more than $71 million on lobbying in the year since they were rescued, an extensive review of federal lobbying records by the Huffington Post reveals. A year after taxpayers forked over $700 billion to help rescue the biggest names in banking, insurance and the automotive industry, those same institutions are using portions of the cash to influence legislation with a direct impact on taxpayers. In all, during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three quarters of 2009, those 25 institutions spent $71,199,000 on lobbying. The list includes General Motors ($11.95 million), Citigroup ($8.915 million), Bank of America ($6.427 million), J.P. Morgan Chase ($7.735 million), Goldman Sachs ($4.38 million) and AIG ($3.47 million). Some of these companies have paid federal money back. Not all of the top bailout recipients, meanwhile, spent money on lobbying. The amount that was spent, however, is nearly identical to the lobbying expenditures these same companies made during the year preceding the federal bailout. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, bailout recipients paid approximately $76.7 million for the services of lobbyists in 2008. All of which has sparked angry pushback from good government groups and lawmakers on the Hill, who ask whether the expenditures are appropriate after these institutions took the nation's economy to the brink of collapse.

OTHER STORIES:

Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’ - (www.rawstory.com)
Huge Bonuses at Investment Banks Set to Rise Further! - (www.marketwatch.com)
Four Reasons Hyperinflation Hasn't Hit - Yet - (www.minyanville.com)
You don’t eat the hamburger at McDonalds because it’s a dollar: It’s a dollar to get you to eat it. - (www.dissidentvoice.org)
Get Serious About Selling Your House: Lower The Price - (www.nytimes.com)