February 8, 2015

My bank erased my $60,000 student loan

THIS WAS UNDER OLD RULES--NO DOUBT THEY HAVE STOPPED THAT LOOPHOLE SINCE BANNING BANKRUPTCY RELIEF FOR STUDENT LOAN DEBT.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/29/my-bank-erased-my-60000-student-loan?CMP=ema_565



There aren’t many people in my situation in the United States. In fact, I’ve never met anyone else who can say this: even though I was over $60,000 in debt, the bank forgave my student loans. Until it happened, I was like most other people my age in America, who owe the bulk of $1tn in student loans: throwing away sealed envelopes, ignoring calls from unknown numbers, considering grad school. Wondering when your life will begin – your real life, the one where you can afford to travel home for the holidays or take a vacation. Debt means regularly fantasizing about floods, explosions, and comets – anything that will wipe your slate clean.

It didn’t start out like that. Sure, I graduated from college in 2008 with $90,000 of debt, which included that $60,000 bank loan along with $30,000 in government loans, but I was determined to find work. For three months, I interviewed, temped, and worked part time before landing a “full-time” job at a salon (I made $10 an hour and had no benefits or sick days). My bachelor’s degree and I swept hair, scrubbed heads, and dropped off towels at the laundromat 45 hours a week. It was the same job I had in high school and throughout college. Two weeks into my new position, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the market crashed. Three months after that, I began receiving bills in the mail.

I had two kinds of loans: one bad, one good. My government loans had decent payment plans, low interest rates, and forbearance options. My private loans were accompanied by angry calls and ever-climbing minimum payments. I didn’t have the income to pay the bank what it insisted on. Paying any bill beyond my federal loan would have left me immobilized: unable to save, take risks or survive an emergency. So I paid the government loan and ignored the private one. Six years later, the government loan was paid off. The bank loan took a different route.

Shortly after graduating, I heard somewhere that your debt disappears once the statute of limitations on it runs out. Your credit score would be nil, but you wouldn’t have debt any more. For a long time, I held this thought. It sustained me through spells of under- and unemployment. I don’t know if I actually believed I would be absolved of my debt if I were patient – but after the bank threatened that I either pay $60,000 in full immediately or be sent to collections, my desperation compelled me to find out. I took stock of the situation: since I’d used plastic to purchase clothes for jobs I never landed, my credit score was already in shambles by the age of 21. (Side note: “Dress for the job you want” is stupid advice if you’re broke.) There was also the threat that I’d be sued. I had zero assets and was making less than $25,000 a year, so that didn’t bother me either. Instead of haggling with the bank, I continued to work, advance my career, and dream of collections agencies bursting into flames. By 2013, I was making enough money to start saving. I could have begun paying the loan, but whichever collection agency owned it had lost track of me years ago. I wasn’t exactly on the hunt for them, either.

Then my debt caught up with me, but not in the way I expected. In 2014, I received a letter informing me that the bank was writing off my student loan. Wiping it out. I didn’t owe it any more. $60,000 in debt, gone.

MORE AT LINK

February 8, 2015

The “Putin has Asperger’s” story highlights the stupidity of psychological diagnosis from a distance

Pete Etchells http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/feb/07/putin-aspergers-story-stupidity-of-psychological-diagnosis-from-a-distance

Late on Wednesday, USA Today reported that a 2008 study by the Pentagon concluded that Vladimir Putin has Asperger’s syndrome. Brenda Connors, the lead researcher based at the US Naval War College, appears to have come to this conclusion based on ‘movement pattern analysis’ – essentially, watching videos of the Russian president, and making some sort of link between the way that he moves, and his state of mind. I’ve not seen the original study, but the contents reported in the news bear similarities to a 2005 patent from Connors. You can see the patent for yourself here. The swamp-like prose makes for difficult reading, but the basic idea goes like this: first, get a video of the person in question. Next, strip out the audio, and ‘examine’ the video to establish ‘a baseline pattern’ of the speaker’s movements. In case you’re wondering, here’s the definition of baseline:

Good, that’s cleared that up then. So once you’ve established this baseline, you examine the video again – this time with the audio back in – and decode “said person’s emotional, cognitive and performance processes”. Finally, you need to get hold of other videos of the speaker, to see whether the patterns you’ve established crop up repeatedly. This isn’t an analysis method specifically designed to test for Asperger’s syndrome – much the opposite, in fact. It’s so generic as to be meaningless. This all sounds like a bit of a mess, really. Trying to figure out someone’s state of mind based solely on how they move is a hugely subjective endeavour, easily prone to misinterpretation. Now, we know that people are pretty good at figuring out certain basic bits of information from body movements – for instance, we can tell whether someone is happy or sad just by the way they walk. But there’s a huge jump from simplistic judgements about basic emotions, to claiming that you can infer someone’s state of mind – let alone whether they might have a neurodevelopmental disorder.

Therein lies the more serious issue. According to USA Today, the “researchers can’t prove their theory about Putin and Asperger’s… because they were not able to perform a brain scan on the Russian president”. This assertion appears to have come not from the newspaper, but from Connors herself, which is bizarre and frustrating for two reasons. First, because diagnosing autistic spectrum disorder is a complex process and should only be done by people with an appropriate clinical qualification. Second, because very simply you can’t diagnose autistic spectrum disorders with brain scans. For crying out loud...I spoke to Professor Dorothy Bishop, who is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at Oxford University. “When it comes to diagnosing autistic spectrum disorder, you’re supposed to show impairments in three domains. One of them is communication, one is social interaction, and one is repetitive and restricted interest and behaviours,” she says. “In autism there may be a failure to match bodily movements to emotions, but it is only a small part of the picture, and it is also something that can occur for all sorts of reasons other than autism. You wouldn’t base a diagnosis on it.” Putting all of this together, it seems like another frustrating case of psychological diagnosis from a distance, causing all sorts of problems and solving none. We’ve seen this before, for example when psychologists were asked to comment on the mindset of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza, despite never even having met him. In these sorts of cases, we’re just being given pure conjecture, dressed up as convincing scientific knowledge. This sort of practice doesn’t offer any useful scientific insight into, well, anything, and it misrepresents how science works, and what good quality scientific research looks like.

In the “Putin has Asperger’s case”, there’s an additional problem – it plays into stigmatising myths about the disorder. Prof. Bishop points out “it seems like a clumsy attempt to discredit Putin, so that people don’t take him seriously. But in doing so it manages to upset people who genuinely have got Asperger’s and autism. People in these communities get very upset about this sort of stigma. It’s become almost a term of abuse to say that someone’s got Asperger’s” she adds. In short, I can’t possibly see how anything good could come out of this story. It plays into tiresome and misinformed stereotypes about autistic spectrum disorder, and paints a farcical picture of the way that psychological research is conducted. Thankfully, a Pentagon spokesperson told the Guardian that the reports “have not informed any policy decisions by the Department of Defence.” Great, but why on earth was this nonsense commissioned in the first place?

February 7, 2015

Weekend Economists Split for Havana February 6-8, 2015

When the going gets tough, the tough get out of town and head for warmer, friendlier climes.

This is the best explanation I have of why Obama is courting the Cubans. Having made a complete hash of Afghanistan, Iraq, most of the Middle East, South and Central America, Mexico and the Eurozone/Ukraine....he decided to try something simpler, closer to home. Canada rebuffed him, something about a pipeline, so lucky, lucky Cuba rose to the top of the To Do List. The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba has been the apple of the American eye since forever.


LARGER MAP BELOW LINK
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/caribb/lgcolor/cucolor.htm

Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean Sea. Cuba has an official area ( land area ) of 109,884 km2 (42,426 sq mi). Its area is 110,860 km2 (42,800 sq mi) including coastal and territorial waters. The main island (Cuba) has 5,746 km (3,570 mi) of coastline and 29 km (18 mi) of land borders — all figures including the United States territory at Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. Navy's Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is located.

Cuba lies west of the North Atlantic Ocean, east of the Gulf of Mexico, south of the Straits of Florida, northwest of the Windward Passage, and northeast of the Yucatan Channel. The main island (Cuba) makes up most of the land area 104,556 km2 (40,369 sq mi).

The island is 1,250 km (780 mi) long and 191 km (119 mi) across its widest points and 31 km (19 mi) across its narrowest points. The largest island outside the main island is the Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth) in the southwest, with an area of 2,200 km2 (850 sq mi).

Cuba is located 77 km (48 mi) west of Haiti across the Windward Passage, 21 km (13 mi) south of the Bahamas, 145 km (90 mi) south of Florida, 210 km (130 mi) east of Mexico, and 140 km (87 mi) north of Jamaica.

Cuba is the largest country by land area in the Caribbean. Its main island is the seventeenth-largest island in the world by land area. The island rises between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. It is bordered on the north by the Straits of Florida, on the northeast by Nicholas Channel and the Old Bahamas Channel. The southern part is bounded by the Windward Passage and the Cayman Trench, while the southwest lies in the Caribbean Sea. To the west, it reaches to the Yucatan Channel, and the northwest is open to the Gulf of Mexico.

More than 4,000 islands and cays are found in the surrounding sea and bays. The southern coast includes such archipelagos as Jardines de la Reina and the Canarreos. The northeastern shore is lined by the Sabana-Camagüey Archipelago, which includes Jardines del Rey and is composed of approximately 2,517 cays and islands.[ The Colorados Archipelago is developed on the north-western coast.


Cuba’s Varadero Beach

WEE will take the complete tour...and touch on a few other subjects, too!

February 5, 2015

How Nebraska Took Its Energy Out of Corporate Hands and Made It Affordable for Everyone

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-nebraska-took-its-energy-out-corporate-hands-and-made-it-affordable-everyone?akid=12756.227380.R-1v3U&rd=1&src=newsletter1031379&t=22

Publicly owned utilities provide electricity to all 1.8 million people in this red state.

In the United States, there is one state, and only one state, where every single resident and business receives electricity from a community-owned institution rather than a for-profit corporation. It is not a famously liberal state like Vermont or Massachusetts. Rather, it is conservative Nebraska, with its two Republican Senators and two (out of three) Republican members of Congress, that has embraced the complete socialization of energy distribution. In Nebraska, 121 publicly owned utilities, ten cooperatives, and 30 public power districts provide electricity to a population of around 1.8 million people. Public and cooperative ownership keeps costs low for the state’s consumers. Nebraskans pay one of the lowest rates for electricity in the nation and revenues are reinvested in infrastructure to ensure reliable and cheap service for years to come.

“There are no stockholders, and thus no profit motive,” the Nebraska Power Association proudly proclaims. “Our electric prices do not include a profit. That means Nebraska’s utilities can focus exclusively on keeping electric rates low and customer service high. Our customers, not big investors in New York and Chicago, own Nebraska’s utilities.”



Payments (in lieu of taxes) from the state’s publicly owned utilities exceed $30 million a year and support a variety of social services throughout the state—including the public education system.

How the state went public

Nebraska has a long history of publicly owned power systems dating back to the beginnings of electrification in the late 1800s. Initially, these co-existed with small private utilities. However, in the post-World War I era, large corporate electric holding companies backed by Wall Street banks entered the market and began taking over smaller private and municipal systems. Using their financial and political power, these corporations dramatically consolidated the power industry in Nebraska and attempted to stop new cooperatives and publicly owned utilities from forming. During this time more than one-third of the state’s municipal utilities were sold to private corporations. Tired of abusive corporate practices, in 1930 residents and advocates of publicly owned utilities took a revenue bond financing proposal straight to the voters, bypassing the corporate-influenced legislature which had previously failed to pass similar legislation. It was approved overwhelmingly—signaling both popular support for publicly owned utilities in the state and also the beginnings of their resurgence. Led by powerful Nebraska Senator George W. Norris—the driving force behind the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority—a series of state and federal laws were passed including: the state’s Enabling Act (1933), which allowed 15 percent of eligible voters in an area to petition for a decision on a publicly owned utility; the Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935), which forced the breakup and restructuring of corporate electricity monopolies; and the Rural Electrification Act (1936), which provided financing for rural electricity projects. By 1949, Nebraska had solidified its status as the first and only all-public power state.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S EVEN MORE GOOD NEWS!

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO SUCH THINGS ONLY WHEN THE STATE HAS A SMALL, HOMOGENEOUS POPULATION. BECAUSE THEN, EVERYBODY CONSIDERS HIS NEIGHBORS EQUAL TO HIM, AND DOESN'T BELIEVE THAT SOME PEOPLE DESERVE LESS BECAUSE OF THEIR MORAL OR GENETIC FAILINGS (OR DIFFERENCES)....DEMETER

February 5, 2015

How Nebraska Took Its Energy Out of Corporate Hands and Made It Affordable for Everyone

http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-nebraska-took-its-energy-out-corporate-hands-and-made-it-affordable-everyone?akid=12756.227380.R-1v3U&rd=1&src=newsletter1031379&t=22

Publicly owned utilities provide electricity to all 1.8 million people in this red state.

In the United States, there is one state, and only one state, where every single resident and business receives electricity from a community-owned institution rather than a for-profit corporation. It is not a famously liberal state like Vermont or Massachusetts. Rather, it is conservative Nebraska, with its two Republican Senators and two (out of three) Republican members of Congress, that has embraced the complete socialization of energy distribution. In Nebraska, 121 publicly owned utilities, ten cooperatives, and 30 public power districts provide electricity to a population of around 1.8 million people. Public and cooperative ownership keeps costs low for the state’s consumers. Nebraskans pay one of the lowest rates for electricity in the nation and revenues are reinvested in infrastructure to ensure reliable and cheap service for years to come.

“There are no stockholders, and thus no profit motive,” the Nebraska Power Association proudly proclaims. “Our electric prices do not include a profit. That means Nebraska’s utilities can focus exclusively on keeping electric rates low and customer service high. Our customers, not big investors in New York and Chicago, own Nebraska’s utilities.”

Payments (in lieu of taxes) from the state’s publicly owned utilities exceed $30 million a year and support a variety of social services throughout the state—including the public education system.

How the state went public

Nebraska has a long history of publicly owned power systems dating back to the beginnings of electrification in the late 1800s. Initially, these co-existed with small private utilities. However, in the post-World War I era, large corporate electric holding companies backed by Wall Street banks entered the market and began taking over smaller private and municipal systems. Using their financial and political power, these corporations dramatically consolidated the power industry in Nebraska and attempted to stop new cooperatives and publicly owned utilities from forming. During this time more than one-third of the state’s municipal utilities were sold to private corporations. Tired of abusive corporate practices, in 1930 residents and advocates of publicly owned utilities took a revenue bond financing proposal straight to the voters, bypassing the corporate-influenced legislature which had previously failed to pass similar legislation. It was approved overwhelmingly—signaling both popular support for publicly owned utilities in the state and also the beginnings of their resurgence. Led by powerful Nebraska Senator George W. Norris—the driving force behind the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority—a series of state and federal laws were passed including: the state’s Enabling Act (1933), which allowed 15 percent of eligible voters in an area to petition for a decision on a publicly owned utility; the Public Utility Holding Company Act (1935), which forced the breakup and restructuring of corporate electricity monopolies; and the Rural Electrification Act (1936), which provided financing for rural electricity projects. By 1949, Nebraska had solidified its status as the first and only all-public power state.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S EVEN MORE GOOD NEWS!

I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO SUCH THINGS ONLY WHEN THE STATE HAS A SMALL, HOMOGENEOUS POPULATION. BECAUSE THEN, EVERYBODY CONSIDERS HIS NEIGHBORS EQUAL TO HIM, AND DOESN'T BELIEVE THAT SOME PEOPLE DESERVE LESS BECAUSE OF THEIR MORAL OR GENETIC FAILINGS (OR DIFFERENCES)....DEMETER

February 3, 2015

The Greek People Have Punctured the Smugness of the “Moneymen” by Adnan Al-Daini

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/01/the-greek-people-have-punctured-the-smugness-of-the-moneymen/

Congratulations to the Greek people for democratically puncturing the smugness of the “moneymen”. For far too long politicians have been paralysed by the dogma imposed by the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission, that the only way out of the economic mess we are in is austerity that hurts those most vulnerable, while the elite continue to accumulate wealth at an accelerating rate. The lack of imagination to think outside the straightjacket imposed on politicians by the “moneymen” is staggering. The humiliation of Greece by foreign politicians and unelected bodies, dictating what Greece must do regardless of what harm it causes its people, must be too much to bear in a country that gave the world the concept of democracy.

Greece has said enough is enough. With the election of Syriza, austerity belongs to the past and hope is replacing despair. Austerity caused the Greek economy to shrink by 25%, unemployment to rise to 26% and to over 50% for the young. It is blindly obvious all this was immoral, stupid and counterproductive. Going down that route, Greece would never have been able to pay off the debt plus interest imposed on it. It would have meant the enslavement of the Greek people into the foreseeable future.

Successive governments in Greece and elsewhere in Europe have abdicated their responsibility to serve the ordinary people. Instead they have faithfully served the moneyed super-rich. Contrast that with the actions of Syriza with barely 48 hours in power. Helena Smith in an article in the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/28/alexis-tsipras-athens-lightning-speed-anti-austerity-policies summarizes thus:



This is true democracy in action, promises made and delivered in the first two days of being in power. Syriza has been elected and now Europe and particularly Germany have a duty to listen respectfully. Thus far Greece has been treated shabbily with hardly a thought for the extreme hardship and suffering inflicted on its people. It is instructive to remember that half of Germany’s post WWII debt was written off in the London conference of 1953. This led to a sharp increase in Germany’s economic growth. Why not do the same for Greece, asks Syriza?

The Greek people have seen through the fog generated by the elite and the “moneymen”. They have seen austerity for what it is – a con-trick to transfer more wealth from the 99% to the already bloated 1%.

Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Read other articles by Adnan.

February 3, 2015

Croatia just canceled the debts of its poorest citizens

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/01/31/croatia-just-canceled-the-debts-of-its-poorest-citizens/

Starting Monday, thousands of Croatia's poorest citizens will benefit from an unusual gift: They will have their debts wiped out. Named "fresh start," the government scheme aims to help some of the 317,000 Croatians whose bank accounts have been blocked due to their debts. Given that Croatia is a relatively small Mediterranean country of only 4.4 million inhabitants, the number of indebted citizens is significant and has become a major economic burden for the country. After six years of recession, growth predictions for Croatia's economy remain low for this year. "We assess that this measure will be applicable to some 60,000 citizens," Deputy Prime Minister Milanka Opacic was quoted as saying by Reuters. "Thus they will be given a chance for a new start without a burden of debt," Opacic said earlier this month. To be eligible, Croats need to fulfill certain criteria: Their debt must be lower than 35,000 kuna ($5,100), and their monthly income should not be higher than 1,250 kuna ($138). Those applying for the scheme are not allowed to own any property or have any savings.

Among economists, the scheme is regarded as unprecedented and exceptional. "I can't think of anything comparable," Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Washington Post.

Although the program is expected to cost between 210 million and 2.1 billion Croatian kuna ($31 million and $300 million), according to conflicting reports by Austrian press agency APA and Reuters, the Croatian government expects economic long-term benefits that will outweigh the short-term investment. Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic has convinced multiple cities, public and private companies, the country's major telecommunications providers, as well as nine banks to clear some of their citizens of their debt. The government will not refund the companies for their losses. Overall, the debt of all Croats amounts to $4.11 billion -- and the debt that is about to be wiped out accounts for about 1 to 7 percent of that. However, for those who are eligible the agreement will make a significant difference by enabling them to gain access to their bank accounts. By reducing debt by less than 10 percent, Croatia frees nearly 20 percent of the country's debtors from their obligations.

Some economists, among them Baker, are skeptical whether the scheme will succeed: "I am not sure that this is the best way to help low-income people. If lenders think this can happen again they will charge very high interest rates to low-income borrowers," Baker said.

February 1, 2015

We Have a Yellow Snow Condition!

I just got this email from the Alert System:

EVERYBODY KNOWS...YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE YELLOW SNOW!

February 1, 2015

Psychology: the man who studies everyday evil

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150130-the-man-who-studies-evil

If you had the opportunity to feed harmless bugs into a coffee grinder, would you enjoy the experience? Even if the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells painfully crunching? And would you take a perverse pleasure from blasting an innocent bystander with an excruciating noise?

These are just some of the tests that Delroy Paulhus uses to understand the “dark personalities” around us. Essentially, he wants to answer a question we all may have asked: why do some people take pleasure in cruelty? Not just psychopaths and murderers – but school bullies, internet trolls and even apparently upstanding members of society such as politicians and policemen.

It is easy, he says, to make quick and simplistic assumptions about these people. “We have a tendency to use the halo or devil framing of individuals we meet – we want to simplify our world into good or bad people,” says Paulhus, who is based at the University of British Columbia in Canada. But while Paulhus doesn’t excuse cruelty, his approach has been more detached, like a zoologist studying poisonous insects – allowing him to build a “taxonomy”, as he calls it, of the different flavours of everyday evil.

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