Homes facing foreclosure more than doubled in 1Q from 2007

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The number of U.S. homes heading toward foreclosure more than doubled in the first quarter from a year earlier, as weakening property values and tighter lending left many homeowners powerless to prevent homes from being auctioned to the highest bidder, a research firm said Monday.

Among the hardest hit states were Nevada, Florida and, in particular, California, where Stockton led the nation with a foreclosure rate that was 6.6 times the national average, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. said.

Nationwide, 649,917 homes received at least one foreclosure-related filing in the first three months of the year, up 112 percent from 306,722 during the same period last year, RealtyTrac said.

The latest tally also represents an increase of 23 percent from the fourth quarter of last year.

RealtyTrac monitors default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

All told, one in every 194 households received a foreclosure filing during the quarter. Foreclosure filings increased in all but four states.

The most recent quarter marked the seventh consecutive quarter of rising foreclosure activity, RealtyTrac noted.

"What would normally alleviate the foreclosure situation in a normal market is people starting to buy properties again," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president of marketing.

However, the unavailability of loans for people without perfect credit and a significant down payment is slowing the process, he said.

"It's a cycle that's going to be difficult to break, and we're certainly not at the breaking point just yet," Sharga added.

The surge in foreclosure filings also suggests that much-touted campaigns by lawmakers and the mortgage lending industry aimed at helping at-risk homeowners aren't paying off.

Hope Now, a Bush administration-organized mortgage industry group, said nearly 503,000 homeowners had received mortgage aid in the first quarter. Most of the aid was temporary, however.

Pennsylvania was a notable standout in the latest foreclosure data. The number of homes in the state to receive a foreclosure-related filing plunged 24.4 percent from a year earlier.

Sharga credited the decline to the state's foreclosure relief measures, noting that cities such as Philadelphia put in place a moratorium on all foreclosure auctions for April and implemented other measures aimed at helping slow foreclosures.

Nearly 157,000 properties were repossessed by lenders nationwide during the quarter, according to RealtyTrac.

The flood of foreclosed properties on the market has contributed to falling or stagnating home values, yet lenders have yet to implement heavy discounts on repossessed homes, Sharga said.

Nevada posted the worst foreclosure rate in the nation, with one in every 54 households receiving a foreclosure-related notice, nearly four times the national rate.

The number of properties with a filing increased 137 percent over the same quarter last year but only rose 3 percent from the fourth quarter.

California had the most properties facing foreclosure at 169,831, an increase of 213 percent from a year earlier. It also posted the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country, with one in every 78 households receiving a foreclosure-related notice.

California metro areas accounted for six of the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest foreclosure rates in the first quarter, RealtyTrac said.

Many of the areas — including Stockton, Riverside-San Bernardino, Fresno, Sacramento and Bakersfield — are located in inland areas of the state where many first-time buyers overextend themselves financially to buy properties that have plunged in value since the market peak.

"California still hasn't hit bottom," Sharga said. "We have a lot of California homes that are in early stages of default that may not be salvageable because either there's no market or financing available, or both."

Arizona had the third-highest foreclosure rate, with one in every 95 households reporting a foreclosure filing in the quarter. A total of 27,404 homes reported at least one filing, up nearly 245 percent from a year ago and up 45 percent from the last quarter of 2007.

Florida had 87,893 homes reporting at least one foreclosure filing, a 178 percent jump from the first quarter of last year and a 17 percent hike from the fourth quarter last year. That translates into a foreclosure rate of one in every 97 households.

The other states among the top 10 with the highest foreclosure rates were Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Stocks fall as investors wary of consumer data, Fed decision

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Wall Street pulled back Tuesday after a disappointing reading on consumer spending suggested that inflation is taking a toll on the U.S. economy.

The Conference Board said its April reading on consumer confidence fell for the fourth straight month because of heightened concerns about soaring inflation and the weakening job market.

Wall Street remains worried that inflation could accelerate and curtail consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy. That's also of paramount concern for the Federal Reserve, which begins a two-day policy meeting Tuesday afternoon.

The Fed is expected to cut interest rates by a quarter point on Wednesday, but then hold firm for the remainder of the year. The Fed is facing a difficult juggling act of trying to shore up the faltering economy without triggering inflation.

In midmorning trading, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 64.08, or 0.50 percent, to 12,807.67.

Broader markets also fell. The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 9.23, or 0.66 percent, to 1,387.14; and the Nasdaq composite index fell 10.52, or 0.43 percent, to 2,413.88.

Bond prices rose as investors remained hesitant about equities. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, fell to 3.79 percent from 3.82 percent late Monday.

Oil prices fell amid expectations that a supply disruption in Britain would soon be resolved and as the U.S. dollar strengthened further against the euro. Light, sweet crude for June delivery fell $1.78 to $116.97 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In corporate news, MasterCard Inc. spiked $21.47, or 8.8 percent, to $264.37 after the company reported profit more than doubled in the first quarter. The company said more customers overseas used their credit and debit cards for purchases, though spending within the U.S. rose at a moderate pace.

However, rival Visa Inc. fell 59 cents to $75.16 after it reported late Monday that first-quarter profit rose 28 percent. Investors are concerned that the world's biggest credit card processor will have a difficult time managing choppy U.S. economic conditions.

There was also further anxiety about the global credit crisis' impact on financial institutions. Deutsche Bank AG said Tuesday it wrote down $4.2 billion in leveraged loans, commercial real estate and mortgage-backed securities, during the first quarter, pushing Germany's biggest bank to its first quarterly loss since 2003 amid trading losses, lower revenue and global market jitters.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 6.49, or 0.89 percent, to 718.88.

Declining issues surpassed advancers by 4 to 3 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 171.2 million.

Overseas, Japan's Nikkei stock average rose 0.22 percent. In morning trading, Britain's FTSE 100 fell 0.7 percent, Germany's DAX index fell 0.47 percent, and France's CAC-40 shed 0.58 percent.

Some War Veterans Find GI Bill Falls Short

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By Susan Kinzie

Two years after a rocket-propelled grenade hit Nathan Toews during an ambush in southern Afghanistan, sending shrapnel shooting into his skull and spiderwebbing through his brain, he has recovered enough to ask: What now?

Like so many leaving the military, after years of taking orders, he's facing an almost infinite number of choices about his future.

Even now that he's picked a school he'd like to go to, there are plenty of unknowns: His admissions interview included questions about whether the 24-year-old veteran could share a dorm room with a teenager, whether his head injury might keep him from completing the foreign language requirement, and just what, exactly, the government would pay for.

Decades after the GI Bill transformed American society after World War II, another generation of veterans is returning home - more than 800,000 as of last summer. What they find is quite different from the comprehensive benefits that once covered all the costs of an education, from undergraduate straight through Harvard Law. The current GI benefit covers just half the national average cost for tuition, room and board, veterans' advocates say. "It falls dramatically short," said Eric Hilleman of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For those who, like Toews, were badly wounded, there are more benefits, so he expects his college costs to be covered. But it's not just the money - there are physical and emotional roadblocks, too. A recent survey found that nearly half of recent veterans are un- or underemployed, and advocates say education can be key to a successful reentry. So a patchwork of efforts, public and private, have sprung up.

"These are people ... who served the country at a time when very few people did," said Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), who is pushing a bill that would expand benefits for veterans, including active-duty guards and reservists, to cover the cost of the most expensive public universities and to match contributions from private schools with higher tuition, for four academic years. "We should give them the best shot at a good future."

An earlier version of the bill stalled in Congress; the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs opposed it as too expensive, too complex to administer and too likely to tempt troops to move back to civilian life. The bill, substantially revised, now has 58 co-sponsors, including both Democratic presidential candidates.

There are dozens of other bills, including one announced last week by senators including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), also a presidential candidate. Hundreds of supporters of Webb's bill plan to rally today on Capitol Hill.

Many people enlist to earn money for college, and almost everyone signs up for the education benefits - which, in the case of the main GI Bill, requires a service member to pay about $1,200 into the plan- but not everyone takes advantage of it. And that buy-in is not returned even if the benefits are unused.

About 70 percent use at least some part of it, said Keith Wilson, director of the education service, but the VA does not track how many earn degrees.

An independent study found that just over half use some part of the benefits, said Ray Kelley of AMVETS, a veterans support group, and only 8 percent use all. "Congress is realizing we're not giving them the benefits we say we're giving them," Kelley said. "They only have 36 months from the time they start using it to the time they finish." That means going to school full time, year-round.

Students apply for the flat-rate benefit monthly and get a check once it is confirmed that they are still enrolled. Luke Stalcup, 27, of Student Veterans of America, who served in Iraq and will attend Georgetown University for graduate study in the fall, said he paid his rent late every month after the GI bill check came in. Now he relies on loans and scholarships to cover the rest of the cost at Columbia University.

Some states, such as Maryland, supplement federal benefits with state aid. That helped Laurissa Flowers, who used to put her University of Maryland bill on her credit card, paying it down as she received each month's benefits. Flowers said other issues can be just as daunting as the money, so she started a veterans' group on campus.

Private donors are trying to help, too: B.G. and Charlotte Beck of Fairfax Station gave $1 million to Arkansas State University to provide training, rehabilitation, guidance and extensive support for veterans on campus.

In June, the American Council on Education will host a conference hoping to spur colleges to start or expand initiatives for veterans. Dartmouth College President James Wright said he realized after visiting wounded soldiers that most of them were eager to go to school but had no idea where to begin. He worked with the education council, raising money to pay for a counselor at four military hospitals.

So this past year, Heather Bernard, a former college counselor with a son serving in Iraq, has been working with wounded soldiers and Marines at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. She helps them plan ahead, choose schools, dig up old transcripts, prepare for standardized tests.

She found an evening art class for Calvin Linnette and Andre Knight, two soldiers who have to schedule around daytime medical appointments, at Montgomery College because it is close enough to Walter Reed that they can get there despite their injuries. The professor often helps them with a ride.

This month, Bernard was waiting nervously outside the admissions dean's office at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where Toews was interviewing.

High school was easy; Toews got good grades and SAT scores and was accepted into the engineering program at California Polytechnic State University. But his family couldn't afford tuition. About a year after Sept. 11, 2001, he enlisted.

He spent a year in Baghdad, then volunteered to serve in Afghanistan.

In 2006, he was a gunner for a small convoy, bringing supplies for an offensive when the trucks slowed down in rough terrain and "all hell broke loose," Toews said.

Two weeks later, he woke up in a hospital bed in Bethesda with no idea where he was or why. He spent the next couple of years getting surgeries and rehab.

As people at Walter Reed kept telling him how amazing his recovery has been, it hit him: He could work with brain-injured patients. "If I could somehow help one guy, encourage him or make things easier for him and his family, that I should do it," Toews said.

He still had a lot to figure out; that could mean studying neuroscience or social work or occupational therapy. And to write a college application essay? "It's been six years since I've done that kind of thing," he said.

Bernard coached him through it all, taking him to visit a big university and then to Dickinson. He talked with the admissions director about some of the challenges he might face, such as the phys ed requirement and a taking on a heavy course load after being out of school.

A freshman asked him what he had done in his time off since high school. "I joined the military," he said, skin grafts shining on his forearm, thick scars from a craniotomy tracing arcs on his skull, visible through his hair.

"Oh, that's cool," she said politely.

He and Bernard got lunch in the cafeteria, and he looked at the students swarming through. "They're all such ... little ... kids," he said.

Decision Is Likely to Spur Voter ID Laws in More States

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By Ian Urbina

Washington - Far from settling the debate over voter identification, the Supreme Court ruling on Monday upholding Indiana's voter ID law is likely to lead to more laws and litigation, voting experts said.

Lawmakers in at least four states may seek to pass stricter regulations in the next year or so, the experts said. In response, voting rights groups might sue on behalf of individuals or groups in an effort to exempt them.

"The court's opinion is likely to perform the same function for the photo ID debate as the Pennsylvania primary did for the Democratic presidential nomination - hardening positions while doing little if anything to illuminate a path to resolving the conflict," said Doug Chapin, director of the Pew Center on the States Web site, electionline.org.

Voting experts said the decision would have limited effects on voting in the primaries and presidential election because most state legislatures were not in session, could not call emergency sessions or did not have the makeup to pass ID bills.

Voting experts predict legislative movement this year or next, especially in states with Republican legislative majorities and Republican governors.

Some critics of the decision said they feared that it would add to confusion at the polls.

"Even before the verdict, we saw confusion surrounding voter ID laws, and now voters and poll workers are more likely to think the Supreme Court just approved some national voter ID law, which indeed they did not," said Jonah H. Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Mr. Goldman said that poll workers might ask for unrequired identification and that citizens might not vote because they mistakenly thought that they could not do so if they did not have certain forms of identification.

In the Indiana primary next Tuesday, little will change, because the ID law has been in force. Twenty-five states require identification at the polls for all voters, including seven that require or can request photo ID. This year, Texas and at least nine other states, including California, Illinois, New Mexico and Virginia, have considered photo ID measures.

The ruling is likely to set off fierce debates where illegal immigration is a hot issue, experts said. In Texas, debate over photo ID in 2007 paralyzed the State Senate for weeks before the bill was rejected. In response to the new ruling, the Republican-controlled Legislature will probably be recalled to work on a new ID measure, voting experts said.

In Oklahoma, an identification measure will be debated shortly, and in Kansas, voting experts predict that lawmakers may act because the governor vetoed an ID bill last year.

Missouri lawmakers, who are in session, are likely to be encouraged in an effort to put the question on the ballot. In 2006, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down an ID law.

Voting experts said a bill pending in Florida to make its ID law more restrictive was now more likely to pass.

Advocates for tighter laws called the decision a resounding affirmation.

"This decision not only confirms the validity of photo ID laws, but it completely vindicates the Bush Justice Department and refutes those critics who claimed that the department somehow acted improperly when it approved Georgia's photo ID law in 2005," said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department official.

Mr. von Spakovsky's confirmation to a regular term on the election panel has stalled in the Senate because of his support for voter ID laws.

Although voting experts said the decision supported the law that Georgia passed in 2005, it did not necessarily substantiate an ID law being challenged in Arizona.

"There is still a good chance that the Arizona law could be overturned in the courts because it has a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, and the Supreme Court decision did not weigh in on the proof-of-citizenship issue," said Mr. Goldman, whose group is involved in the Arizona case.

Wendy R. Weiser, a law professor at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said it was important to remember that the ruling did not give the states a blank check to pass restrictive ID laws.

"The court specifically left open the possibility of lawsuits against ID laws that burden specific groups of citizens like older voters, poor voters and students," Professor Weiser said, "and all the legislation we have seen to date do, in fact, burden those groups."

But, she added, in putting virtually all the burden of proof on plaintiffs seeking to argue that laws illegally restrict their voting rights, the decision makes it much tougher for voting rights groups to prevail in court.

Witness: Fundraiser Spoke of Plan to Fire US Attorney

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By Mike Robinson

Chicago - A government witness testified Monday that a prominent political fundraiser for the governor told him three years ago that Chicago's chief federal prosecutor would be fired and replaced by someone chosen by then-U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Restaurant owner Elie Maloof testified that Antoin "Tony" Rezko told him that the person picked to replace Patrick J. Fitzgerald as U.S. attorney in Chicago would end a federal investigation into corruption under Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

"The federal prosecutor would no longer be the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald would be eliminated," Maloof said at Rezko's fraud trial.

Prosecutors said last week that former Illinois Finance Authority executive director Ali Ata, who is set to take the witness stand as early as Thursday, will testify Rezko told him of a plan to replace Fitzgerald.

Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve that Ata would say he talked with Rezko about such efforts on the part of Springfield lobbyist Robert Kjellander and former presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Kjellander denied he had ever discussed such a thing. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said his client does not remember Kjellander ever talking to him about Fitzgerald and is certain he never spoke to anyone at the White House about removing Fitzgerald.

U.S. attorneys are nominated by the president but traditionally are chosen by the senior senator of the president's party.

Maloof's testimony Monday was the first time Hastert's name came up during Rezko's trial.

An aide to Hastert, Brad Hahn, said Hastert had never heard anything about a plan to dismiss Fitzgerald. He said the testimony was puzzling.

"We can't begin to speculate on where this comes from or what is being suggested," Hahn said.

Rezko, 52, is charged with scheming to split a $1.5 million bribe from a contractor who wanted state permission to build a hospital in the McHenry County suburb of Crystal Lake.

He is also charged with scheming to pressure kickbacks out of firms that sought to do business with a state teachers pension fund.

Rezko denies taking part in such a scheme.

Prosecutors say he raised enormous sums for Blagojevich's campaign and as a result gained the political clout to manipulate big-money decisions on hospital construction and which firms were allowed to do business with the pension fund. Blagojevich is not charged with wrongdoing.

The trial got under way March 3 and the prosecution case is now in its final stages. The court is giving the jury days off on Tuesday and Wednesday and the government tentative plans to rest early next week.

Since taking over as U.S. attorney in September 2001, Fitzgerald has launched a vigorous attack on corruption, sending former Gov. George Ryan and a number of other political insiders to federal prison.

Last year, the firings of several U.S. attorneys around the country provoked a backlash on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers questioned whether the moves were politically motivated. Alberto Gonzales later resigned as attorney general.

Truth or Neo-Consequences

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By Morgan Strong

An obscure academic dispute – over whether Israeli archeology sought to obscure the land’s last two millennia of history and promote a continual Jewish claim of ownership – has shown again how tensions in the Middle East can reverberate in unlikely ways in the United States.

The dispute centered on whether Barnard College should grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born scholar of anthropology who, in the 1990s, challenged the scientific integrity of what she saw as the Israeli use of archeology in a politically motivated way to justify Jewish settlements on territory that had belonged to Palestinians.

Although the controversy wasn’t new – it had been argued out within archeological circles in Israel for years – El-Haj became a lightning rod because she was the first academic of Palestinian descent to publicize the debate in a 2001 book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.

This academic debate boiled over the past two years when El-Haj – who had been a professor at Barnard College since 2002 – applied for tenure in 2006 and became a target of neoconservative attack groups determined to punish her for undermining Israel’s claims to the Holy Land.

On Aug. 7, 2007, a petition entitled “Deny Nadia Abu El-Haj Tenure” was posted on petitionline.com, describing her as a scholar of “demonstrably inferior caliber” who had unfairly assailed the methodology of Israeli archeological digs.

The petition – prepared by Paula Stern, a 1982 graduate of Barnard and a resident of the occupied West Bank – also accused El-Haj of calling the ancient Israelite kingdoms a “pure political fabrication” and of lacking basic skills to undertake her studies, including an ability to “speak or read Hebrew.” The petition said, “We fail to understand how a scholar can pretend to study the attitudes of a people whose language she does not know.”

The petition became a hot topic among American neoconservatives.

Campus Watch, a right-wing organization that monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern studies in the United States, joined in the attacks on El-Haj. Campus Watch was founded in 2002 by Daniel Pipes, a prominent neoconservative and son of Richard Pipes, a key figure in the Cold War-era Committee on the Present Danger.

A blog of pro-Israeli professors known as Scholars for Peace in the Middle East also joined in the anti-tenure campaign. Stern’s petition eventually attracted about 2,500 signatures including many alumni from Barnard and its affiliate, Columbia University in New York City.

Errors Admitted

However, two months after Stern posted the petition, she acknowledged to The Jewish Week that some of the petition’s criticisms of El-Haj and her book were inaccurate.

Stern “incorrectly quotes from Abu El-Haj’s book in charging she is grossly ignorant of Jerusalem geography,” according to The Jewish Week article by Larry Cohler-Esses. “Stern also conceded attributing to Abu El-Haj a viewpoint that Abu El-Haj does not voice as her own in her book. The petition does so by taking a quote fragment from a section in which Abu El-Haj describes others as having the opposite viewpoint.”

The article also noted that the petition ignored references in El-Haj’s book to Hebrew language sources and an acknowledgement to her Hebrew tutor. [The Jewish Week, Oct. 25, 2007]

Despite its inaccuracies, the petition – and the anti-tenure campaign – threatened to exact a price from Barnard and Columbia for granting tenure to El-Haj; the schools would stand to suffer financial harm from offended alumni withholding contributions.

This pattern of ugly controversies whenever a Muslim or an Arab-American criticizes Israel or is seen as promoting some Islamic agenda has become more and more common, with influential neoconservative groups now operating in a concerted way to destroy careers and livelihoods.

Often the strategy succeeds, as the New York Times reported on April 28 in connection with the forced resignation of Debbie Almontaser, the founder of New York’s Khalil Gibran International Academy, which had a goal of teaching Arabic to children of various ethnicities, including Arab-Americans.

Almontaser, who had a reputation as a Muslim moderate, stepped down after confronting a campaign that labeled her a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” The Times reported that the campaign was part of “a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life.”

Some of the leaders of the battle against Almontaser – such as Daniel Pipes – also participated in the anti-tenure campaign at Barnard against El-Haj, reflecting how these activists view the marginalizing of Muslims as a coordinated national struggle.

“It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” Pipes told the Times, claiming that this new enemy – “lawful Islamists” – must be stopped before they made enough inroads to enable them to impose sharia law from the Koran on Americans.

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system – the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like – you can promote radical Islam.” [NYT, April 28, 2008]

So, this strategy holds that Muslims and their non-Muslim allies especially in academia must be marginalized and denied legitimacy. To achieve these ends, neoconservatives and sympathetic media outlets often turn small issues into huge controversies that create enormous pressure on mainstream politicians to distance themselves from the targets.

That was the case with Almontaser when Rupert Murdoch’s neoconservative New York Post linked the school principal to a group that lent office space to an Arab-American organization that promoted t-shirts reading “Intifada NYC.” Amid the furor, the mayor’s office of New York City pushed Almontaser into resigning, although federal judges have since agreed that the Post “inaccurately reported” her words.

Barnard’s El-Haj tenure struggle followed a similar pattern, with key roles played by some of the same activists. In both cases, the battle involved neoconservatives who distorted the words of their targets in order to build a public hysteria strong enough to overwhelm the principle of academic freedom.

The Barnard Battle

El-Haj was born in New York, the daughter of a mother of French-Norwegian descent and a Palestinian father, who had received his Doctorate in Economics from Columbia in the late 1950s.

In 1975, her family lived in Teheran, where her father was employed by the United Nations and where she learned Farsi. A few years later, the family moved to Lebanon where she became fluent in Arabic. Her family frequently visited her father’s relatives in East Jerusalem.

In 1980, she undertook her undergraduate education at Bryn Mawr. In 1990, as a graduate student at Duke University, she decided on a project in epistemology, “to examine knowledge in a social context, connected to time, place, politics and identity.”

Wanting to find a place where that identity was in dispute, she chose Israel/Palestine. She then spent months in Israel learning Hebrew and examining Israeli archeology’s role in the creation of, and establishment of, the State of Israel.

Israeli archeology, from the founding of Israel in 1948, claimed to have uncovered evidence supporting an ancient and continuous Hebrew presence, which in turn provided legitimacy to Israeli government claims that Palestinian land should be part of the modern state of Israel.

After achieving her Doctorate in 1995, she adapted her doctoral thesis into a book, Facts on the Ground, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001.
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The book examined the role of Israeli archeology in what was essentially a political context. El-Haj traced the history of how archeological discoveries – pottery, ancient stones, even human remains – were used in a manipulative way to establish the legitimacy of Israeli claims to Palestinian land.

El-Haj questioned the veracity of some Israeli claims, saying the science of archeology had been exploited in the "formation and enactment of [Israel’s] colonial-national historical imagination and ... the substantiation of its territorial claims."

Her book cites the example of an archeological dig in Jezreel, in the Galilee region. El-Haj said British and Israeli archeologists used bulldozers “to get down to the earlier strata, which are saturated with national significance, as quickly as possible."

Bulldozing a site – or using large shovels – to a specific depth of an archaeological dig, where one could expect to find remnants of an ancient Hebrew settlement, or not excavating to lower levels eliminates the possibility of finding evidence that other civilizations preceded or followed the Hebrews.

Israeli archeologist David Ussiskin of the University of Tel Aviv denied that bulldozers at the site were used in the fashion alleged by El-Haj’s book or that evidence of more recent strata had been damaged.

Despite a spirited debate about her book, El-Haj’s academic career continued to advance. She taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Barnard College in 2002 and sought tenure in April 2006.

That’s when El-Haj was caught up in the surging neoconservative campaign to keep Islam – and criticism of Israel – as far out of mainstream American thought as possible.

In this case, however, the neocons did not prevail. El-Haj was awarded tenure on Nov. 1, 2007, representing at least one moment when free speech and academic freedom won out over the sophisticated political pressure that neoconservatives have made their hallmark.

[For more on the El-Haj controversy, see The New Yorker’s edition of April 14, 2008.]

U.S. Credit Card Debt Soars to Unprecedented Heights

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By Heide B. Malhotra

WASHINGTON—Studies indicate that credit card defaults and related write-offs increased drastically since 2006. Today, lenders write off 33 percent more in credit card debt than they did two years ago.

Statistics show that about 35 percent of all credit card holders are already exhibiting signs of possible default. Late credit card payments result in fees many consumers can’t afford.

Credit card debt accelerated to unprecedented heights since bank loans began to dry up due to mortgage defaults. Total U.S. credit card debt reached almost $800 billion in November 2007, up from around $680 billion in March of last year, according to the latest available government statistics.

In the aftermath of the U.S. mortgage crisis, the credit card bubble may be next to burst. In the past few years, banks have aggressively marketed credit card ownership and usage to consumers with limited income and low credit scores. Credit card standards remain lax, while loan standards have tightened to a degree.

More than 50 percent of senior loan officers said in a January 2008 Federal Reserve survey that they performed a more rigorous analysis before approving a mortgage or car loan over the prior three months. Only 14 percent said so in a mid-2007 survey of the same nature. Banks and lenders have tightened their lending standards following the collapse of the subprime market.

With borrowing venues drying up, American consumers may be drawn to credit card debt, creating defaults similar to those in the mortgage market. Credit card debt—much like mortgages—are bundled and sold by investment banks as asset-backed securities.

The Next Credit Crisis?

"Rising credit card debt since April 2006 amid the decrease in the mortgage expansion rate resulted in a substantial shift to credit card borrowing from mortgage debt," according to a recent report titled "House of Cards: Consumers Turn to Credit Cards Amid the Mortgage Crisis, Delaying Inevitable Defaults." The report was published by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based research institute.

The rules of the credit card game usually aren’t transparent and are difficult to follow even by many sophisticated consumers. Just take any credit card agreement: Caveats are written in difficult-to-understand "legalese." Words like "late fees, annual fees, over-limit fees, cash-advance fees, balance-transfer fees, annul fees, setup fees, fees to pay balance by telephone," and so on, are confusingly sprinkled throughout the contract.

"Credit card debt tends to carry substantially higher costs than other forms of credit, due to myriad fees in addition to high interest rates. The result is that many borrowers unwittingly slide deeper and deeper into debt as they fall prey to the lack of transparency in credit cards," said CAP staff.

"Double-cycling" billing is one of the most abused features by some credit card companies. For example, the cardholder charges $500 to the card, then repays $400 and leaves a $100 balance on the card. In "double-cycling" billing, the interest charge accrues not only on the $100 balance, but on the full $500 for the month. The terms are hidden somewhere in the initial credit agreement.

Students Most Vulnerable

University students are the most vulnerable victims of unscrupulous credit card tactics, according to a survey conducted between October 2007 and February 2008 by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a Boston, Mass.-based public interest advocate.

The study found that 66 percent of surveyed students have a credit card, 55 percent rely on credit cards for their daily needs and school supplies, and 30 percent have their charges paid for by their parents.

About 74 percent of surveyed students want credit card companies to curtail their marketing practices and establish monthly limits on how much the students can charge. They also would like universities to stop providing personal information—such as home address, e-mail address, and phone numbers—to credit card companies.

Credit card companies also offer student event funding and other "freebies" to campus associations and students.

Students are beginning to fight back and file complaints through legal and other venues because of "cards with unfair terms or ’tricks and traps’ that result in massive penalty fees and the imposition of punitive interest rates at APRs [annual percentage rates] as high as 36 percent or more," according to the PIRG report.

The report included a solicitation letter from a credit card company to The University of Iowa Alumni Association playing on the emotional side of the student in the first sentence: "Imagine the convenience of being able to purchase supplies for your classes, without worrying about carrying a lot of cash."

The University of Iowa alumni leaders told PIRG that they earned around $1 million annually from Bank of America in credit card purchases by their members. They turn over $200,000 to the university; however, "some of the money given to the school is payment for $145,600 worth of football tickets used by Bank of America Representatives and others."

Taking Action Against Predatory Marketing

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) initiated legislation in March 2008 called "The Credit Card Reform Act of 2008" that aims to stop predatory credit card marketing. So far, 11 consumer groups and unions have co-signed a letter in support of this legislation.

"We cannot allow predatory and deceptive practices in the credit card industry to continue as we did in the subprime mortgage market. We cannot allow the credit card problem to become the next foreclosure crisis," said Menendez in a press release.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced H.R. 5244, the "Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights" in February 2008.

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo charged First Premier Bank, based in South Dakota, with credit card fraud and fined the bank $105,000 in penalties last year. This bank also must make $4.5 million in restitution payments to customers it defrauded through its credit card program.

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann went after Potbelly Sandwich Works, Citigroup, Inc., and Elite Marketing Group, Inc. for deceptive credit card practices on college campuses.

As Election Nears, Supreme Court Upholds Repressive Voter ID Law

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By Brennan

Today the Brennan Center for Justice criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Indiana’s voter identification law -- the strictest in the country -- but noted that the decision did not give other states a blank check to block eligible voters. The Brennan Center called on lawmakers across the country to reject similar laws and to pass affirmative legislation protecting the right to vote.

"This year, millions of new voters are surging into the political process. Lawmakers should be encouraging full participation by eligible citizens, not erecting new barriers to voting. This is precisely the wrong message for the Supreme Court to send in this critical year. We shouldn’t give partisans an excuse to find ways to keep people from voting," said Michael Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Executive Director.

The Court’s 6–3 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, widely considered the most important voting rights case since Bush v. Gore, recognized that ID laws may have negative impact, even when there is not sufficient evidence to find them unconstitutional. As six Justices agreed, Indiana’s law places a heavier burden on some eligible citizens, particularly elderly and low-income persons who could be blocked from voting without the proper documentation. The Brennan Center urged lawmakers to heed the disenfranchising impacts of ID laws acknowledged in today’s decision.

"Today’s decision is not the end of the story on voter ID. Although the Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, it did not say that states must or even should pass restrictive ID laws. Now it’s up to legislators and courts in states like Texas, Missouri, and Florida to decide if they are going to follow Indiana’s lead and disenfranchise American citizens, or if they’re going to protect the right to vote for all Americans as we head into a critical national election," stated Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "In doing so, they should keep in mind that the Court left open the possibility of future lawsuits against restrictive ID laws that prevent people from voting.

Under Indiana’s law, voters must present a government-issued photo ID with an expiration date that has not elapsed. The law does not accept Veterans’ IDs, Congressional IDs, student IDs, or work IDs.

Many citizens -- disproportionately low-income, minorities, students and seniors -- do not have the identification required by Indiana’s law.

"In the three years since this case was brought, reliable studies have shown that 10-12% of eligible voting-age Americans do not have voter government-issued photo identification, particularly low-income, minority, senior, and student voters. Unfortunately, some will ignore these facts, and seek to use this ruling to manipulate the rules of the game and block these eligible voters from the ballot box," stated Justin Levitt, counsel at the Brennan Center.

In rejecting the challenge to the law on facial grounds, the Court today ruled that future challenges to voter laws must be filed with respect to the application of a specific law -- after its controversial mandates are already applied in an election.

"With this decision, the Court has seriously watered down protections to the franchise by insisting that the rights of voters can be protected only after their rights have been abused," stated Renée Paradis, counsel at the Brennan Center. "State and federal lawmakers must be ready to reject laws like Indiana’s and ensure that the rights of voters prevails," she stated.

In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court last November, and cited repeatedly by several Justices today, the Brennan Center demonstrated that each instance of purported voter fraud used to justify Indiana’s law was discredited or could not have been prevented by voter ID.

"Supporters of Indiana’s law seek to stop an imaginary epidemic of voter fraud, even at the expense of preventing real, eligible citizens from voting," stated Justin Levitt, author of The Truth About Voter Fraud. "They did not provide the Court a single substantiated case of voter impersonation in the history of the state, yet the Court allowed the state’s purported concern with stopping this fraud to outweigh the very real burden Indiana is placing on its citizens," he continued.

"As Justice Breyer recognized, Indiana’s system puts the cart before the horse, demanding ID of voters before ensuring that voters actually have them. We have to fix our ID system to make sure that people who don’t have IDs can get them -- free of charge and without hassle or delay. With unprecedented interest in elections across the country this year, we need to make sure that laws like Indiana’s don’t dampen turnout and enthusiasm," he stated.

Only one other state -- Georgia -- has voter identification requirements similar to Indiana’s. All other states allow voters a wide variety of different means to confirm their identity before voting. Though legislatures in other states have proposed legislation similar to Indiana’s restrictive law, such bills have been met with opposition across the country.

Additionally, there is growing support for affirmative legislation like Election Day Registration and Universal Registration on the state and federal levels that will expand the franchise and make voting easier for eligible citizens.

"It will be increasingly up to state and federal legislatures across the country to reject the restrictive policy the Court approved today and make affirmative measures like universal- and election-day voter registration integral to the fairness and security of our elections. There’s real enthusiasm at all levels of the country to make it easier for eligible citizens to vote and have their vote counted. Today’s decision only affirms the need to make that happen," said Weiser.

An Activist Uncovers the Pentagon's Alternate Universe

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By Penny Coleman

The silverbacks are grooming and posturing at the microphones.

Cammo and khaki, wall to wall. Bob Ireland, an Air Force psychiatrist and consultant to the Air Force Surgeon General, welcomes the audience to the Department of Defense’s sixth annual Suicide Prevention Conference and makes jokes about how suicide prevention has been the DoD’s bastard child, homeless and parentless.

In January 2008, the child nobody wanted finally managed to find a home. The Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury assumed responsibility for an issue and an injury that the military has hidden and denied for generations.

It’s been left up to Lt. Col. Steven Pflanz, the senior psychiatry policy analyst for the Air Force surgeon general, to report on the mental healthcare practices that have been developed for those on active duty. Kerry Knox, director of the VA’s Center for Excellence on Suicide Prevention, was scheduled to share with him these introductory remarks, but is not in attendance. Apologies are made, but no one mentions how obviously difficult it would be for her to get into the self-congratulatory HOOAH! spirit of this conference when her boss just got busted big time for hiding VA suicide statistics, not just to the media but to Congress as well.

"Shh!" Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, coyly began an email to the agency’s chief communications director -- and inconveniently made public just this week. "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"

Ach, Katz, you little schemer.

In another email, he acknowledged that an average of 18 war veterans manage to kill themselves each day -- five of whom were under VA care at the time.

OK, Katz is toast. Democrats are already calling for him to resign, which seems rather mild considering how many lives were damaged by his attempts at damage control. But do the math: That’s 12,000 veterans a year -- VA patients -- trying to kill themselves. On top of that, of the 6,570 who on average succeed each year, 1,825 of them are also patients at the VA. How is possible not to mention that kind of news at a conference on military suicides?

This must have been a challenging week for the conference organizers. How to deal with the Katz e-mails and the new RAND Corporation report, which is devastating in its description of DoD and VA failures. And the RAND report can’t be blown off as the ravings of a bunch of leftists with an anti war agenda; RAND conducts research and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the Navy, and the U.S. intelligence community.

The report revealed that nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan -- that’s 300,000 men and women -- have symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression. Of those, only slightly more than half have sought VA treatment. Soldiers say that hesitation to seek help arises from fear that it will harm their careers.

But word gets around. Even among those who do seek help, RAND estimates that only about half receive treatment their researchers consider "minimally adequate." So why bother.

The study also estimates that about 320,000 service members may have experienced a traumatic brain injury during deployment, but that just 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for that injury, despite DoD’s policy that every soldier returning from Iraq be screened.

I would, of course, be very interested in DoD’s response to all of these accusations. At the risk of oversimplification, whatever it is they are doing isn’t working. This would be an obvious moment for a little humility and perhaps even an ideal audience to petition for new ideas.

Instead, Pflanz insists: "DoD has been living suicide prevention for a decade ... After bombs-on-target, the next most important thing is suicide prevention. I overuse that phrase," he admits, "but I think it drives home the point that we really do live and breathe suicide prevention."

I am taping this drivel, only listening with half an ear, and I’m reading about the trial that began Monday in San Francisco: Veterans’ groups are asking U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti, a World War II U.S. Army veteran, to order the VA to start providing immediate treatment for suicidal veterans and prompt care for those suffering from post-traumatic stress. Government lawyers argue that the courts don’t have the authority to tell VA how it should operate. That too would seem pertinent at a conference like this, but the trial hasn’t been mentioned either.

What brings my attention back to the room is a question from a man sitting at the end of my row of seats. In response to some of Pflanz’ brightly colored pie charts indicating what percentage of what demographic of soldiers are killing themselves, this man has asked whether or not those pie wedges take into account multiple deployments. "That information is redacted," says Pflanz definitively. What!?! The questioner smiles ruefully. He’s not surprised. I sense a friendly and move over to sit next to him.

James Conover is a three-tour Vietnam vet, a behavioral health specialist who has worked with veterans for 30 years. After he got out of the service, his life fell apart, and he admits that before he got it back together he seriously contemplated throwing himself off the seventh floor balcony of his building. James takes all this very personally.

Emboldened by my new ally, I ask if any of the services take into account what happens to their members after they come home. Are they counting their veteran suicides? "We have no information on that," he answers and refers me to Kerry Knox, who, as I mentioned before, is not present.

And as today’s news also includes a story about the administration’s decision to renege on their promise to end stop-loss, I ask if their studies take that into account. "There’s no easy access to that information."

It’s utterly fantastic -- all this stuff happening at the same time, all of it intimately related to the purported subject of this conference -- and all of it completely invisible.

Pflanz moves on to leadership. "The greatest impact on preventing suicide in the military is by, whenever they have a commander’s call, talking about healthy behavior, encouraging healthy behavior -- and coming across as if they really mean it."

James snorts. "Leaders. In Iraq, they call the behavioral health center ’the pink house.’ Commanders tell soldiers to get on down to the pink house."

So far, presenters from each service branch have included overcoming the stigma of accessing mental health services on their list of things that need to be improved. And so far, no one has said anything about how they propose to do that, but surely calling mental health services "pink" isn’t a positive contribution.

On a break in the presentations, I asked a senior chaplain if it might not be an effective leadership move for some of the senior command to set an example for their troops by admitting that they, like everyone else, have moments of weakness -- and that they have found it useful to reach out for help in those moments. He looked astonished and then amused by my innocence, and pronounced, "He’d never make flag."

(Steven Colbert would be glad to know that the background of choice for all the multicolored pies and mind-numbing numbers is a tight headshot of a beady-eyed eagle backed by a waving flag, an eagle I can’t look at anymore without thinking of his son, Steagle. )

Walter Morales is the Army’s suicide prevention manager. The suicide statistics in the Army are the most disturbing. At the end of 2007, the rate for completed suicides was 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate, which by the way does not reflect a population that is both young and screened for health, was 11 per 100,000, according to the latest figures from the CDC. And new Army figures show that 2,100 active-duty soldiers, Army alone, tried to commit suicide in 2007. That’s about six a day. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

Morales presents the Army’s new initiatives. First there is ACE. ACE is a playing card, the ace of hearts to be exact. Printed on the back of the card is Ask your buddy. Care for your buddy. Escort your buddy. This card is used "Armywide," Morales boasts. "It plays a big role." But the cards are no longer in inventory. Maybe four weeks from now.

Commanders, who will be responsible for the Suicide Prevention Task Force, will soon be supplied with a "tool kit." This is a slightly larger card, but not so large, Morales points out, that it won’t fit in a hat band. It is printed with a checklist of warning signs and risk factors. Exposure to combat is not listed. And unfortunately, these cards are only available on line at the moment. In the meantime, Walter has received 48 entries in a suicide awareness poster contest.

There is one truth everyone here agrees on: The No. 1 stressor for soldiers of all stripes is failed relationships. Job-related problems, legal problems, financial problems each get a small slice of the colored pies, but the real culprits are us: the wives and husbands, the girlfriends and boyfriends, and of course the families. Exposure to combat? Not there.

A question: In the absence of combat trauma, how many broken hearts end in suicide?

This is not the first conference I have attended where what was happening in the halls was far more informative than the official fare. I’ll bet that some of the topics I missed hearing about were being run through the rumor mills around the refreshment tables, and that, as an obvious outsider, I was excluded. But this was a conference that was supposed to be addressing the tragic number of American soldiers and veterans who were ostensibly screened before they were allowed to enlist, and who, having been trained and used and dismissed by the various branches of the military, cannot find ways to live with what they have learned about themselves and their country.

Instead, a monstrous wrong is being done to our soldiers and veterans. The complete failure of any and all policies -- not to mention poster contests -- to put an end to this epidemic of death went entirely unacknowledged.

According to the RAND report, the new Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury and the new VA Center for Excellence on Suicide Prevention enter could provide "a historic opportunity to change the culture of psychological health within the military." But, warned Terri Tanielian, one of the lead researchers on the project, "(i)t’s going to take system-level changes -- not a series of small band-aids -- to improve treatments for these illnesses."

What was truly heartbreaking and frightening about this conference was that everything I saw presented looked like a band-aid, a mere cover-up for a wound that desperately needs serious attention. Either they don’t know that, or they don’t care -- or they were saving the good stuff for another audience.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her website is Flashback.

Carter: Israel rejected Hamas truce offer

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By Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON – Blaming Israel, again: Former US President Jimmy Carter says that following his meetings with Hamas leaders the group offered a truce in Gaza but Israel rejected the offer. During an interview with NBC, Carter also blamed for denying the citizens of Gaza basic supplies such as water and food.

"I think it was productive, because all the things that we asked Hamas to do, they basically agreed to do," Carter said, referring to his recent trip. "One was to have a total ceasefire just in Gaza alone, where before they had said it must be Gaza and the West Bank as well. So they preferred to have a ceasefire, and announced it publicly after we left. Israel unfortunately rejected the ceasefire from Hamas. "There’s no way to have peace in the Middle East without bringing the Palestinians back together if Hamas represents at least half of the Palestinian people," Carter added, citing the 2006 elections the United States insisted be held. "Hamas won the election fair and square. They got a majority of seats in the Parliament."

"But then the United States and Israel declared that there wouldn’t be a Palestinian united government, so they declared that Hamas was a terrorist organization. They refused to negotiate with them. They refused to give food and water and electricity and other supplies to people under Hamas’ leadership in Gaza, and that broke the whole situation down," he said.

’Assad hopeful’

Carter also criticized the US, which he said was preventing the renewal of the peace process between Israel and Syria. Carter said he met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the latter told him that he had been distanced from peace talks by the US Government, but was now hopeful talks would be resumed.

In an article published by the New York Times, Carter said that Hamas would accept any truce agreed upon by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, on the condition that it had been approved by the elected parliament. Carter also said Hamas would disarm its military wing in Gaza if a non-political security force was established in the Strip.

Referring to kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, Carter said that if Israel were to agree to the list of prisoners that the Palestinians demanded be released, and freed the first batch, Shalit would be transferred to Egypt until the other prisoners were released.

Fed criticized at hearing on Bank of America takeover of Countrywide

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By E. Scott Reckard

The central bank needs to atone for failing to rein in loose credit policies, Rep. Maxine Waters and others say.

The Federal Reserve held an unusual hearing Monday in Los Angeles on Bank of America Corp.'s proposed $4-billion takeover of troubled Calabasas mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. But it was the Fed itself that came in for some of the harshest criticism.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and others said the Fed needed to atone for failing to rein in the loose credit policies that brought down scores of lenders, took No. 1 mortgage maker Countrywide to the brink of collapse and knocked the economy for a loop.

Given "so troubling a history," Waters said, "the Federal Reserve bears a heavy responsibility to prove its commitment and competence in the review of the Bank of America-Countrywide transaction."

Acquiring Countrywide would give Bank of America, the nation's largest retail bank, 25% of the mortgage market and an easy shot at growing larger as rivals constrict to deal with foreclosures, said Robert Gnaizda, policy director of the Greenlining Institute, a consumer advocacy group. He said he believed that Bank of America could capture 40% of the market within a few years.

Speakers at the hearing said the Fed shouldn't approve the takeover without requiring industry-leading efforts to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. Several also urged the Fed not to approve the takeover until Bank of America provided more details of a foreclosure-relief plan.

"The outcome of this merger will not only impact working families and neighborhoods, but also the strength of the national economy," said Kevin Stein, associate director of the San Francisco-based California Reinvestment Coalition.

Waters was among several participants who took aim at the hefty compensation of Countrywide co-founder and Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo, who cashed in $450 million in stock options before Countrywide hit the skids and its share price tumbled.

Orson Aguilar, executive director of the Greenlining Institute, suggested that Bank of America or Mozilo donate half of the $450 million -- $225 million -- to foreclosure-relief efforts.

Bank of America declined to comment on the suggestion, and a Countrywide spokesman did not respond to an inquiry.

Battered by $1.6 billion in losses in the second half of last year, Countrywide agreed in January to sell itself to Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America for $4 billion in stock.

Bank of America would base the combined mortgage business in Calabasas if the deal were approved by the Fed, which reviews bank takeovers to determine whether they are in the public interest.

Participants at the hearing lauded Bank of America for its promises to the Fed to refinance or modify $40 billion in mortgages to help 265,000 homeowners over two years, to double its community development lending and to increase its charitable giving by 33%.

Housing and community groups that have worked with the bank also praised its follow-through on past commitments to community development.

Bank of America's Community Reinvestment Act rating, a regulatory gauge of its service in low-income neighborhoods, has been "outstanding" for six years in a row.

But participants said there was a lot to make up for at Countrywide, including complaints of promoting risky adjustable-rate loans, steering people with good credit into expensive sub-prime loans and botching loan collection and foreclosure proceedings so that struggling borrowers were frustrated, not assisted.

A Countrywide spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Liam McGee, Bank of America's head of consumer and small-business lending, said the bank had been working with congressional Democrats on a plan to provide more Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to borrowers. The banks would first have to write down the value of the loans, restoring the homeowners' equity.

McGee said the bank would offer tenants in foreclosed properties a choice: stay two months in the home after foreclosure or be paid $2,000 if they leave within a month.

Bank of America's president for California, Janet Lamkin, said the bank was working on a comprehensive approach to addressing problems in areas where foreclosures are rampant, such as the Inland Empire.

In those areas, Bank of America might try to help nonprofits convert seized houses to uses that benefit the community, McGee said in an interview.

The hearing continues for a second and final day today at the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 950 S. Grand Ave. in downtown Los Angeles.

Black Hole in Bush's Brain

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By Peter Chamberlin

Judging from the campaign rhetoric coming out of both camps, whoever wins the Oval Office will be inclined to continue the failed military policies in Iraq and to pursue a confrontation with Iran. Apparently it does not matter to either party what will follow those actions, or what these disastrous policies have produced as they played-out in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not matter who gets elected, whether it is "bomb, bomb Iran" McCain, or "obliterate/massive retaliation" Clinton, nothing will change.

American researcher Suzanne Maloney spells out the results of the "successfully" surging American war on Iraq:

"Of the many American illusions and delusions surrounding this war, the Administration's calculations with respect to Iran were among the most wildly off base. Instead of generating a liberal, secular democracy whose reverberations would drive out Iran's clerical oligarchs, the disastrous Bush policies fostered a sectarian Iraq that has helped empower Iranian hardliners. Rather than serving as an anchor for a new era of stability and American preeminence in the Persian Gulf, the new Iraq represents a strategic black hole, bleeding Washington of military resources and political influence while extending Iran's primacy among its neighbors." http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0321_iraq_maloney.aspx

In spite of the problems these policies have created for us and the world (including the deadly fuel inflation ignited by the chaos), and the devastating human toll taken so far, the Cheney wing of the co-presidency continues to pursue every possible avenue for expanding the failed war into a regional conflagration, which could only be settled with nuclear weapons. The bulldog drive to crush all opposition that has characterized every move of the Bush White House, is once again ignoring reality to envision a new America-dominated world order that can only be built upon the ruins of the demolished old order. If only some situation could be created which would provide the perfect pretext that would justify pushing the button on Iran. Would we be correct in judging Cheney to be a super-patriot, or is he really a secret neo-communist, hoping to forcefully overthrow the world order and enthrone his elitist neocon proletariat and their corporate state as a world dictatorship?

It is no coincidence that the nations that have been targeted are all enemies of Israel. Neither is it a coincidence that Israel has been the source of the "evidence" (much of it fabricated) that has been used, and is still being used, to authorize the war resolutions. For those who charge that it is "anti-Semitic" to maintain that Israel or its Jewish-American supporters have hijacked the "war on terror," serving as prime motivators for the war in Iraq and the coming conflict with Iran and Syria, the primary "evidence" that has been used by the Israel lobby to sell these wars was clearly "made in Israel." It is not anti-Semitic to point-out that no one wants these criminal wars to escalate except Israel and the war criminal Cheney faction, who are now looking to cover their own asses for what they have done. The only voices demanding the destruction of Iran are Jewish voices and their Zionist neocon supporters.

Ariel Sharon's Israeli branch of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans produced the trumped-up "evidence" that was used to start the aggression on Iraq. The only "proof" that Iran is building a nuke came from the Mossad, even though it was alleged to have come through the MEK terrorist group. The only evidence introduced in the recent CIA hearings on the Syrian attack were three still photos, courtesy of the Mossad. Any real evidence backing-up Israeli claims was destroyed in Israel's arrogant self-defeating attack.

The Israeli attack on Syria last September was another attempt to jumpstart the highly anticipated regional war, but it was also the product of a joint American/Israeli conspiracy intended to undermine international treaties and to destroy the progress made by peace-making institutions in eliminating war. This violent assault on the arms control regime is meant to continue the privileged status for Israel that has been carved-out for it, a rogue nuclear-armed nation which refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Syria was invaded to maintain Israel's nuclear monopoly, even though Syria has signed the NPT and it has received past US support for nuclear research under the Atoms for Peace Program. Israel makes the Muslim nations pariahs in the world community, even though it has created the illegal Dimona nuclear facility, which has never been inspected, not even by the US. The double standard established by America for its outlaw ally is at the root of the Middle East's security problems.

Like the evidence on Iran's nuclear intentions, the Israeli-supplied "documentation" on an alleged Syrian reactor is not only another photoshop fraud, it is the only evidence to prove that there ever was a reactor. We are asked to believe Israel, whose nuclear policy has always been one of strategic deception, that Syria violated the laws that Israel refuses to even acknowledge. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, condemned the attack for its corrosive impact on non-proliferation issues and for the Israeli flaunting of international law in the destruction of any real evidence.

"'The director general deplores the fact that this information was not provided to the agency in a timely manner, in accordance with the agency's responsibilities under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to enable it to verify its veracity and establish the facts,' ElBaradei said in a statement today.

He was critical of Israel's bombing of the site of the alleged reactor. 'The director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime,' the statement said." a href="http://uruknet.info/?p=m43423&hd=&size=1&l=e" target="_blank">http://uruknet.info/?p=m43423&hd=&size=1&l=e

Israel's nuclear program has always operated outside the law, without any international oversight, for one purpose – to produce as many nuclear weapons as possible for it to use to threaten its neighbors and anyone else who stands in their way. It was built with an oversized cooling capacity, to allow for its planned future expansion into a medium-sized bomb factory. Playing to international sympathy, following a duplicitous path of deception, Zionist Israel hid its violent secret plans for illegal expansions that were to be carried-out under the thinly veiled threats of nuclear destruction. Its secret nuclear weapons program made no pretense whatsoever of being based on a legitimate nuclear power program. Israel has no nuclear power plants and Dimona is too small for power generation.

Since its inception in the minds of militant Zionists, Israeli expansion and territorial grabs have always been necessary components of the plan for ethnic cleansing in Palestine and other select areas of the Middle East that Zionist colonizers refer to as "Greater Israel" (just as they refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria," as they pretend to negotiate over Palestinian rights to this land).

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar.

The steady acquisition of Western technology, especially nuclear technology has been the key to implementing the planned colonization of Arab lands. Tensions with targeted neighbors have risen and fallen as needed to create the palpable threat to Israel that would warrant the massive transfer of military technology to Israel.

"Barak gives the go-ahead for a silly and dangerous assassination attempt in tranquil Bethlehem; just to rekindle the fire, lest there be a lull...If there's a lull in Qassams fired, then Barak does everything he can to ensure their renewal to justify the 'large-scale op' in Gaza he intends to make." http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/964489.html

Part of the ongoing escalation is due to Israeli designs upon new advanced American fighters. Israel's use of deception as a tool of diplomacy, as well as a military strategy, has allowed Israel to stage terrorist attacks intended to implicate its enemies and provide cover for incursions into Arab territory. The ongoing "settlement" policy and partitioning of Palestine are justified as defensive measures, although the Palestinians are clearly the ones defending themselves against the occupation and invasion of their homeland.

America's Israel-centric foreign policy is focused upon making the Palestinians invisible, to hide the crimes being committed against them, as their human rights are stolen and they are swept from their ancestor's land. America is the classic "enabler" for the dysfunctional Jewish state, forcing the world to accept double standards for Israelis and Palestinians, making it possible to take away the guaranteed human rights of the native inhabitants of the land, in order to give special rights to the colonizers who had previously sworn to defend native rights. American leaders are doing everything possible to hide the suffering of the Palestinians and to twist the facts about the campaign to drive them from the land, in an effort to make it appear that all Israeli attacks are self-defense. Zionist Israel cannot continue its ambitious expansionist plans without harming its status in the world without this cloak to hide its murderous actions.

This war is driven by multiple delusions, the main error being that it can eventually be won by the application of greater and greater amounts of force. Advocates of this strategy ignore the basic immorality of the argument, that victory at any price is an acceptable cost. If the American people remember their power and are given time to think about the direction of the war, they will realize how wrong these policies are. Considering that Bush is following a policy that generates more enemies than can be killed without the use of nuclear weapons and he shares Cheney's obsession with finding an excuse to nuke Iran, it becomes apparent that America's leaders are working against the people's interests.

Any leader who does not support instantly stopping the prosecution of this conflict is supporting the continuation of this black hole. The only solution to the chaos in Iraq is a complete turnaround of policy, centered upon undoing the damage done by Bush's plan, which consisted of beating the Iraqi people senseless, until they submitted to all of his demands. If there is no candidate for president who advocates such a total reversal of American foreign policy, then there is not candidate worth voting for. It does not matter whether these policies have been an unending series of mistakes or if the chaotic storm that is Iraq today is the product of a cynical heartless plan, Bush or whoever succeeds him (if he allows a successor) must not be allowed to expand this failed military strategy.

Talk - Dissent: Voices of Conscience

Talk by Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience - Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq" given April 18, 2008 at University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle.