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STORIES:
Elegy
For Gary, Indiana - (www.kunstler.com)
A few weeks
ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the
tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the
northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of
Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like
nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it
all had been. Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of
marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge
lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running
railroad track, and before long much of the heavy industry that epitomized the
modern interval opened for business there, downwind from the pulsating new
organism called Chicago. The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the
numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if
at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of
highways.
Police
use tear gas and batons against protesters in Oakland, CA - (www.rt.com) Deservedly
so!!! Now they need to start using baseball bats and bullets.
Around 400 protesters have been confronted by
police who used tear gas, causing hundreds to scatter on May 1. Some activists
blocked streets throughout the day and vandalized two banks, a news van and
police vehicle. Nine people were taken into custody in Oakland, California,
after hundreds of people took to the streets. Police reportedly used Taser
against at least one of them. Officers ordered protesters out of the street
after firing the tear gas and “flash-bang” grenades. Some demonstrators tried
to force businesses to shut down for not observing calls for a “general
strike.” Earlier, protesters planned to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, but
the plan was abandoned. San Francisco Gate news outlet quotes police
spokeswoman Johanna Watson as saying, “When our patrol wagon came to make
arrests, they were surrounded.”
How
U.S. Students Can Work Off Their Trillion-Dollar Debt - (www.bloomberg.com) If your child is one of the 1.5 million high
school students eagerly awaiting acceptance letters from colleges this month,
he or she is probably entertaining dreams of high scholarship, intellectual
ferment, new friends, raging keggers. You probably have a few other things on
your mind. For starters, you may be thinking that the average annual cost of a
four-year institution now exceeds $20,000. Or that
outstanding student-loan debt surpasses
$1 trillion. Or that defaults are rising, economic growth is
sluggish, and unemployment for those ages 20 to 24 is about 13 percent. And your
little one, bless her heart, wants to major in peace-and-justice studies.
Real
Estate Investor to Plead Guilty to Bid Rigging at Foreclosure Auctions - (www.loansafe.org) An Alabama
real estate investor has agreed to plead guilty and to serve one year in prison
for his role in conspiracies to rig bids and commit mail fraud at public real
estate foreclosure auctions in southern Alabama, the Department of Justice
announced today. To date, as a result of the ongoing investigation, four
individuals and one company have pleaded guilty. Charges were filed yesterday
in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama in Mobile,
Alabama against Steven J. Cox of Mobile. Cox was charged with one count of bid
rigging and one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. According to the plea
agreement, which is subject to court approval, Cox has agreed to serve one year
in prison, to pay a $10,000 criminal fine, and to cooperate with the
department’s ongoing investigation.
Scott
Brown Is Destroying Elizabeth Warren, And She's Getting Blasted For Claiming
Native American Blood – (www.businessinsider.com)
It has been a
pretty bad week for Elizabeth Warren, the feisty class warrior and conservative
bogeywoman who is locked in a tight race to replace Republican Scott Brown in the
Massachusetts Senate seat once held by the late Ted Kennedy. Warren's
troubles have centered around a Boston Herald report that
revealed that now-famous Harvard law professor used to identify herself as a
"minority" in law school directories, based on a far-back (and
unconfirmed) Native American ancestry.
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