I worked in a non union shop also we kept it clean because t hey made us and paid us to clean every day.

I also got reprimanded for using the closest fire extinguisher when an untrained maint man left a gas valve open to a draw furnace and he was down there and I saw flames shooting up through the grating. I grabbed the closest one a big cherry bomb and blasted the lower level through the grade, keep in mind that the sub floor was used for access to the gas lines and was a dirty oil soaked area with one way out.

They were mad it cost 200.00 to recharge and a smaller one would have only been fifty bucks.

People steal all the time CEO's do it too politicians and Priests, so who gets all the bad press in our corporate media?

Again a good union shop is a safe shop no one in their right mind can deny this.

Oh please your asking for far to much.

Say what you wish, these horrible events never would have happened in a Union shop.

I am impressed a man of your advanced years is so up to date on these cutting edge type websites. Good for you Mr Conrad.

News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is a common thread of greed – and a common need for unionized resistance.

“It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” said the mayor as a mushroom cloud soared above his tiny Texas town. The explosion “ripped through three feet of concrete floor slab and then tore apart 10 additional feet of earth,” scattering the wreckage more than 1,000 feet and leaving a blast crater 93 feet wide.

This was the second mushroom cloud to be seen over Texas in recent years. The first was also a workplace explosion, at an oil refinery.

Bystanders weren’t safe in Bangladesh, either. The Savar building collapsed during rush hour, hurling debris through the air while crushing and killing hundreds of the workers inside.

The Whole Story

News reports offer information, but don’t tell the whole story. There’s an underlying theme behind the barrage of words and images from the fertilizer plant explosion and the collapse of a textile factory, and it’s this: When one worker is unsafe anywhere, we’re all unsafe everywhere.

One word that’s conspicuously absent from these news account is “union.” Without it this story of death and disaster will be repeated, again and again and again.

These aren’t just stories about strangers. The Texas plant endangered us all with lax security which failed to safeguard highly explosive materials used by terrorists like Tim McVeigh, and permitted the repeated theft of chemicals used to make methamphetamines.

The Texas plant was surrounded by a school, a retirement home, and private residences. The explosion ripped the roofs from some of those homes and the elementary school, and lawsuits are already being filed by the plant’s newly-homeless neighbors.

And the Savar story is as close to us as the clothes on our backs. The factory manufactured clothing for American distributors that included Benetton, Joe Fresh, The Children’s Place, Primark, Monsoon, and DressBarn.

Godless

The Texas Attorney General’s Office brags about its “Right to Work” laws, which became “Right to Die” laws last week. Union membership in Texas is roughly half the national average, and the national figure has been declining precipitously for far too long.

Trade union activity in Bangladesh was suspended for two years in 2006 when the government declared a “state of emergency,” and its unions are frequently cozy with political parties. They possess neither the strength nor the independence to fight for workplace wages and safety.

The workers in Savar weren’t just endangered. They were underpaid, working 14 or more hours a day and yet still living in deprivation. As “War On Want” documents, 3.5 million garment workers in Bangladesh subsist on poverty wages while laboring in 4,825 factories. More than 85 percent of them are women.

Pope Francis correctly described their condition as “slavery,” adding that their employer’s behavior “goes against God.”

A Pattern of Death

Their deaths weren’t random or unpredictable, no matter what the politicians want you to believe.

Texas Governor Rick Perry denied that lax oversight caused the West explosion, while the Bangladeshi Finance Minister who outraged the world by saying the accident “wasn’t really serious” added that “These are individual cases of … accidents. It happens everywhere.”

That’s a lie. It’s the lie they tell to hide the underlying pattern behind these deaths – a pattern of under-represented workers and unrestrained greed.

And they endanger us all. As the AFL-CIO notes, the West plant hadn’t been inspected by OSHA for twenty-eight years. The plant did not report the fact that it was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate to the Department of Homeland Security as required by law, even though that’s more than 200 times the amount Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. We’re expected to suspend our civil liberties in the name of national security, but businesses aren’t even being asked to follow safety regulations.

And, absurdly, the deficit debate in Washington is still centered around how much to cut from vital regulatory agencies, rather than on how much to should increase to their budgets.

A Story That Changed the World

There was a time when such a tragedy changed the world.

Like that workplace in Savar, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory primarily employed women. And like their Bangladeshi counterparts, those women worked seven days a week for at least 13 hours each day. In 1911, 146 garment workers burned to death in that factory during a half-hour of horror. Their deaths led to a public outcry, gave new momentum to the union movement, and triggered a wave of new worker safety laws.

Their deaths weren’t unexpected. Union organizers had been fighting for better working conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory for years. The 1909 Shirtwaist Strike, also called “the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand,” led to marginal improvements in hours and pay. But even after a 1910 factory fire killed 25 people in nearby Hackensack, New Jersey, it took the Triangle tragedy to galvanize a movement.

A documentary called “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl” tells the story of the 1909 strike. But heaven alone couldn’t protect the working girls at the Triangle factory, any more than it can protect workers in Savar or Texas.

Sometimes heaven needs human help.
Read the rest at
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/04-6

Richard Dolan is very good on that site, sticks to things that are documented and true avoids speculations. Read a couple of his books.

There is no decency in using 9/11 and going to war on a lie, based on a false case made to the Congress and the American people, which claimed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and sullied the dignity of our country.

There is no decency in giving the order to commit torture and violate human rights, which should have made George W. Bush and Richard Cheney both eligible to be tried for war crimes.

There is no morality in beginning the indecent procedure of housing uncharged and untried suspects in a prison offshore, leaving them in limbo for their entire lives.

There is no decency in ignoring warnings of Al Qaeda before 9/11, demoting the first counterterroism czar, then banishing him to the wilderness until after 9/11, while ignoring warnings and preferring to stay on vacation clearing brush.

There is no decency in donning a flight suit and landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim “Mission Accomplished,” when that was well away from the truth.

There is no decency… Oh, forget it. I’ve done this all before.

I don’t blame any person, including a journalist, for standing when the president comes into the room. That’s hardly the issue. But swooning because you get sent a note? Equating a written missive with decency when the policies of the man were abhorrent and sent this country into a nosedive reveals our media to their core. Most are just not up to the job anymore.

A leader’s decency must be judged through his actions while in office, which have nothing to do with being polite to journalists.

George W. Bush is opening a library, so amnesia is the mindset of the week
(sweet)

http://www.taylormarsh.com/blog/2013/04/george-w-bush-library-opens-amnesia-ensues/

Has anyone heard of KGRA radio? it covers allot of unusual topics its an internet radio here is the link.
http://www.kgraradio.com/

Now that a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel has reached the conclusion that President George W. Bush and his top advisers bear “ultimate responsibility” for authorizing torture in violation of domestic and international law, the question becomes what should the American people and their government do.

The logical answer would seem to be: prosecute Bush and his cronies (or turn them over to an international tribunal if the U.S. legal system can’t do the job). After all, everyone, including President Barack Obama and possibly even Bush himself, would agree with the principle that “no man is above the law.”

At least that is what they profess in public, but they then apply this principle selectively, proving that they don’t really mean it at all. The real-world standard seems to be: you are above the law if you have the political or economic clout to make prosecution difficult or painful. Then, more flexible rules apply.

For instance, we’re told that Pvt. Bradley Manning may have had good intentions in exposing U.S. government wrongdoing to WikiLeaks, but he still must be punished for taking the law into his own hands. The only question seems to be whether he should be imprisoned for 20 years or life.

Even the U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison who imitated the abusive techniques that Bush and his advisers authorized in more limited situations had to face justice. Eleven were convicted at court martial, and two enlisted personnel – Charles Graner and Lynndie England – were sentenced to ten and three years in prison, respectively. A few higher-level officers had their military careers derailed.

But the buck pretty much stopped there. It surely didn’t extend up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Dick Cheney and President Bush. They simply engaged in a game of circular excuse-making, claiming that they had relied on Justice Department legal guidance and thus their own criminal actions really weren’t criminal at all.

Yet, along with its judgments about torture, the 577-page report from the Constitution Project obliterated that line of defense by detailing how the Bush administration’s lawyers offered up “acrobatic” legal opinions to justify the brutal interrogations, which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress position, forced nudity and other acts constituting torture.

Lawyers from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, particularly John Yoo and Jay Bybee, collaborated closely with senior administration officials in choreographing these legal gymnastics. Then, when other government lawyers later challenged the Yoo-Bybee rationalizations, those lawyers faced career reprisals from the White House. They were essentially forced out of government, the report found.

In other words, Bush’s team had arranged its own legal opinions that empowered the President do whatever he wanted. Indeed, the Yoo-Bybee legal opinions gave the President carte blanche by citing his supposed “plenary powers,” meaning that he could do literally anything he wished during “wartime,” even a war as nebulously defined as the “war on terror.”

Establishment Blessing

While the new torture report mostly covers old ground about how the Bush administration moved into the “dark side,” the report’s primary significance is that its 11-member panel represents a bipartisan mix of Establishment figures.

The task force was headed by two former members of Congress who have worked in the Executive Branch – James R. Jones, D-Oklahoma, an ex-ambassador to Mexico, and Asa Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, who served as an under-secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush administration. Other members were prominent Americans from the fields of military, academia, law, ethics and diplomacy – including former FBI Director William Sessions and longtime senior diplomat Thomas Pickering.

The report didn’t mince words in its principal conclusions: “Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture. This finding, offered without reservation, is not based on any impressionistic approach to the issue. …

“Instead, this conclusion is grounded in a thorough and detailed examination of what constitutes torture in many contexts, notably historical and legal [including] instances in which the United States has leveled the charge of torture against other governments. The United States may not declare a nation guilty of engaging in torture and then exempt itself from being so labeled for similar if not identical conduct.”

The report also noted that the behavior of the Bush administration deviated from the most honorable traditions of U.S. history, dating back to the Revolutionary War and General George Washington’s instructions to his troops not to respond to British cruelty in kind but to treat prisoners of war humanely.

In contrast to those traditions, after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration approved specific techniques of torture while formulating legal rationalizations for these violations of law. Never before, the report found, had there been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

Beyond the illegality and immorality of torture, the report found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the harsh interrogations extracted information that could not have been obtained by legal means. The report also challenged the legality of “enforced disappearances,” renditions and secret detentions.

No Accountability

Yet, the panel demanded no meaningful accountability from Bush and his top aides, as former Ambassador Pickering made clear in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday.

In underscoring the report’s findings, Pickering lamented how the Bush administration’s use of torture had imperiled efforts to persuade other countries not to resort to cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners. “Democracy and torture cannot peacefully coexist in the same body politic,” Pickering wrote.

He proposed several steps “to mitigate the damage and set this country on a better course.” This list included finally confronting the harsh truth about torture; releasing relevant evidence that the Obama administration is still keeping secret; enacting new legislation to close “loopholes” that were exploited to justify torture; and insisting on verifiable protections of prisoners transferred to other countries (rather than relying on “diplomatic assurances”).

However, neither the report nor Pickering’s op-ed addressed the significant point that laws against torture and mistreatment of prisoners already existed and that Bush and his team simply had ignored or evaded them. If Bush and Yoo could concoct an excuse giving the President the “plenary” power to do whatever he wants in wartime, why couldn’t some future President and legal adviser do the same?

What good does it do to tighten “loopholes” if a President and his aides can flout the law and escape accountability? The only rational (and legal) response to Bush’s use of torture is to arrest him and his key advisers and put them on trial.

Yet, in this case, the rational and legal remedy is considered unthinkable. If President Obama’s Justice Department were to move against Bush and other ex-officials, the Washington Establishment – from the Republican Party to the mainstream news media to much of the Democratic Party – would react in apoplexy and outrage.

There would be fears about Washington’s intense partisanship growing even worse. There would be warnings about the terrible precedent being set that could mean that each time the White House changes hands the new administration would then “go after” the former occupants. There would howls about the United States taking on the appearance of a “banana republic.”

However, there also are profound dangers for a democratic Republic when it doesn’t hold public officials accountable for serious crimes, like torture and aggressive war. Indeed, one could argue that such a country is no longer a democratic Republic, if one person can operate with complete impunity amid declarations of “plenary powers” – which is what the Bush administration claimed in its memos justifying torture.

The report from the Constitution Project can declare that torture is incompatible with democracy, but it is equally true that if the President can torture anyone he chooses and then walk away – free to attend baseball games, celebrate his presidential library and pose for the cover of “Parade” magazine – then you are not living in a real democracy.
_______
About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/49187/what-to-do-with-g-w-bush

Not at all surprised you did not follow the link and watch the first person testimony of people who were actually inside the buildings, the first responders testimony or other expert witnesses, really the more one looks into the events of 911 one can actually see how absurd the official version is.

The following presentation on 911 truth is written in such a way that it will allow you to baby step those who remain unaware through the topic, and afterward, if they actually look at what is here, the light WILL be on.

There is a lot of hearsay and folklore surrounding this event which may or may not be true. So we're going to need to sift through some news-clips, firsthand testimony and whatever else that can provide credible information on this important topic. There comes a point that you learn too much and you can't revert back to ignorance. In a way it's very much like when you first realized that Santa Claus is really a fiction. At that point there is really no amount of logic that can resurrect your belief in Santa again. So when did you quit believing in Santa Claus?

As kids we believed in Santa Claus. Our parents were the gatekeepers of information and, though benign, our environment during that formative time was a controlled one. We were taught to believe in Santa Claus. Initially we accepted all the information that we received at face value. However, as time progressed, we gained bits and pieces of information that led to a cognitive dissonance which, in turn, led us to question our image of Santa Claus. These “bits and pieces” led to questions such as “How could Santa Claus fit through my chimney” or “How does Santa Claus leave gifts in millions of homes during a single night”? Armed with all these bits and pieces of information, we began to get a different picture that caused all the previous illogic that we had learned to come crashing down. This finally led to an epiphany that Santa Claus really isn’t anything like what we had first thought!

There are other things in life that we have always taken for granted as “fact” that later prove to be only an illusion as well. It’s only a matter of getting more information. As in the case of the Santa Claus myth, it is only a matter of time as new evidence unfolds that we are forced to rethink our view on what the truth is.

I WANT TO TRY AN EXPERIMENT HERE:

Please watch this first video linked here. It’s only one minute. You’ve read this far into my article so please take just one small minute and watch this first video. You’re going to be impressed. This is a local news video of a witness named Kenny Johannemann testifying to explosions that happened in the basement of one of the WTC towers. While he is testifying you still see both of the twin towers burning behind him in the background. This was live footage and it's only ONE minute long. Go ahead and watch this here:

The explosions in the basement were separate independent events which had nothing to do with where the airplanes hit some 80 to 100 floors above. Those explosions were from charges that were set up to weaken the structure preparatory to pulling the tower.

You say, “wait, this doesn’t fit anything I know, maybe there is some other explanation for those explosions in the basement.” True. This is just one piece of evidence, but it’s a piece of evidence that raises a lot of questions. You didn’t see this on TV either. Does that prick your interest?

The government has promoted a “theory” that maybe the fuel from the jet trickled down the elevator shafts into the basement and subsequently exploded. Could this be? Let’s continue and look at other evidence. Barry Jennings was another witness that got stuck in Building Seven during 9/11. Remember, Building Seven was NEVER hit by a jet. In Barry's case an explosion blew out a stair well below him leaving him hanging and stranded for hours until the fire department got him out. Both the twin towers went down during the time he was stranded. Building Seven, a tall building in it’s own right (47 stories tall), came down at around 5:20 (later that day). Fortunately, he was saved. Watch his account here:

Again, the explosions he talked about were from charges that were set up to weaken the structure preparatory to pulling down this building. You say, “Hold On! Building Seven housed the FBI and the CIA offices, so who would have access to set up explosives in there? There has got to be another explanation.” True, but realize that building seven was never hit by a jet. Still, this is just one more piece of evidence which raises even more questions. Again, you didn't see Barry’s testimony on TV.

William Rodriguez, head janitor at the towers, was meeting with some people in basement level #1 (the highest of several basement levels) when an explosion from below pushed everyone upwards, causing ceiling tiles to fall and walls to crack. Just as William started to express to others what he thought that explosion might be, an airplane hit and shook the building from above. His story begins at 9:31 here:

Now, let’s look for other different kinds of evidence. Steve Jones, a physicist, obtained WTC dust samples from the collapsed WTC towers from people who lived nearby. He analyzed it and found that the dust contained residues of explosives. Steve Jones first became famous when he became known as the “voice of reason” during the Pons / Fleischman "Cold Fusion" debacle of 1989, if you remember that. For a Nuclear Physicist, like Steve Jones, analyzing dust samples for explosive residues is a relatively simple task. It may be similar to asking a PhD mathematician to do arithmetic. He reported his detailed findings here in Boston:

In this lecture, you recall, he offered other scientists to take parts of his samples in order to analyze the "red chips" that he had recently discovered. That was December 2007. These specks have now, in fact, been confirmed to be unexploded “nanostructured super-thermite” particles. That confirmation is not just a smoking gun, it is the gun. See the article here:

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Scientists_find_active_superthermite_in_WTC_0404.html

The actual scientific paper in its entirety can be found here in PDF form. Be sure to click the “download” link here:

http://www.benthamscience.com/open/tocpj

If you get into the actual paper, you learn that the explosives may actually have been sprayed into position like paint or insulation!

Steve Jones’ findings may not fit the stories that you have heard in the news but it does lend support to what Johannemann, Jennings and Rodriguez testified that they saw. You say, “The news media isn’t going to shoot itself in the foot by making something up.” So how do we rectify all the contradictions that we were told in the news? Could Steve Jones and these witnesses be glory-seeking kooks trying to make a name for themselves?

Well, then take a look at this:

Here is a BBC report announcing the collapse of the Solomon Building (the official name for Building Seven). There is only one problem. The reporter standing at the scene and announcing this didn't realize that, in fact, you could still see Building Seven still standing off to the right. It actually collapsed within about 20 minutes after that live report. Watch it here:

How did the BBC know in advance that Building Seven would collapse? The fact that it was announced in advance is strong support that the flow of information on this tragedy was being controlled (but in a more sinister way than how information about Santa Claus was controlled in your life).

Were the people at the BBC the only people privy to this information? Probably not. Larry Silverstein was the leaseholder of Building Seven. In a 2002 PBS documentary he talked about how he discussed the Building Seven situation with the fire department and he suggested to the fire department that they pull it. He then stated that the fire department made that decision to "pull it" and then, as he put it, "we watched the building collapse". Well, there is one problem with his testimony that you may want to consider. It takes at least a week to rig a building like that with explosives before you pull it. So are buildings constructed with built-in explosives just in case they need to be blown up in a hurry? Building Seven went down that same day. Whoops! Watch Larry's testimony from the PBS documentary here in this short clip:

Incidentally, luckily for Larry, he insured his property in the nick of time just six months before September 11th! It was a sweet deal. So who orchestrated this terrorist event anyway? They had to get past the FBI and CIA and prepare at least three buildings for demolition as well as direct the activities of men with box cutters (if they even existed). It’s clear from the evidence presented here so far that at least some of the media was in on this. What else could explain the BBC blunder? They had to control the information to those of us who might not like the idea that a few thousand people had to be killed in order to fulfill some kind of agenda. So what’s in it for these people that were “in the know?”

Aaron Russo was a famous movie producer (Remember “The Rose” and "Trading Places" starring Eddie Murphy?) who became best friends with one of the Rockefeller family members. This is the same Rockefeller family that is a large shareholder of the Federal Reserve Bank -- a private company that loans money to our government and contributes to our huge national debt. You see the name “Federal Reserve” at the top the dollar bill. Yes, we're talking about that Bank! Anyway, the upshot of this friendship was that in the year 2000 (11 months before 9/11) Aaron Russo learned from his Rockefeller buddy that there was going to be an "event". He was told that out of this event the U.S. would go into Afghanistan and look for Bin Laden in Caves and then the U.S. would go into Iraq. His fascinating testimony about this "event" and how it fits into their agenda starts at 26:45 here in this interview (If you have the time watch the whole thing - chances are you have never seen an interview quite like this one):

Another thing. In February 2009 a 44 story Chinese skyscraper caught fire and thoroughly burned into a crinkling cinder. However it did not collapse. By comparison WTC Building Seven had a few small fires and was never hit by a plane. It did collapse. See that article here:

fire-consumes-wtc-7-size-skyscraper-building-does-not-collapse

Now see this:

Amazingly, all this evidence is only the tip of the iceberg. Each of these are separate independent pieces of evidence from unconnected sources. When taken together they paint a clear picture.

You are a juror in a court of law. What would be your verdict? Remember, the word “conspiracy” is not in the dictionary to describe a fiction.
Follow the link for first person witness videos
https://therebel.org/violence/604453-it-s-time-to-put-this-9-11-conspiracy-thing-to-rest-once-and-for-all

"I had heard a distant boom boom boom, sounded like three explosions. I don't know what it was. At the time, I would have said they sounded like bombs, but it was boom boom boom and then the lights all go out." [Keith Murphy -- (F.D.N.Y.)]
"We were standing underneath and Captain Stone was speaking again. We heard -- I heard 3 loud explosions. I look up and the north tower is coming down now, 1 World Trade Center." [Greg Brady -- E.M.T.]
"That's when [the North Tower] went. I looked back. You see three explosions and then the whole thing coming down." [Frank Campagna -- Firefighter]
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/911_wtc_implosion.html

Some protesters have vowed to pelt the coffin with eggs, while others have hinted at hurling coal — a reminder of the bitter 1984-1985 miners’ strike which Thatcher crushed, leading to the closure of dozens of mines and tens of thousands of job losses.

“Please remember your coal to throw at the cortege, it’s what she would have wanted,” one Twitter user posted.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/16/thatcher-protesters-vow-to-pelt-her-coffin-with-eggs-coal-or-milk-as-london-police-brace-for-wednesdays-funeral/

Pretty much the same reason Building 7 shouldnt have collapsed.

LMAO It takes a "certain type of individual" to defend the banks.

Rest In Shame

In death as in life: Margaret Thatcher's funeral drew tight security, furious protests, enduring animosity and celebrations by students, miners, activists and others who suffered at her hands chanting "Ding Dong" and "This Lady's Not Returning," and a guest list of people who deserve each other: Kissinger, Cheney, Gingrich, Bachmann, Blair, de Klerk. From one protester: "We've been waiting 30 years for this."http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/17-1

One in ten Americans take such antidepressants as Prozac and Paxil. Among those in their 40s and 50s, it’s 23%. Maybe that’s why we’re so passive.

Like the blissed-out soma-sucking drones of Huxley’s “Brave New World,” we must be too drugged to feel, much less express, rage. How else to explain that furious mobs haven’t burned the banks to the ground?

Last week, as the media ginned up empty speculation about Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects, and wallowed in nuclear cognitive dissonance — Iran, which doesn’t have nukes and says it doesn’t want them, is repeatedly called a grave threat worth going to war over, while North Korea, which does have them and won’t stop threatening to turn the West Coast of the U.S. into a “sea of fire,” is dismissed as empty bluster, nothing to worry about — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve released the details of the settlement between the Obama Administration and the big banks over the illegal foreclosure scandal.

Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other major home mortgage lenders foreclosed upon and evicted millions of homeowners between the start of the housing collapse in 2007 and 2011. Millions of families became homeless, including 2.3 million children. The vast majority of these Americans are still struggling; many fell into poverty from which they will never escape.

Disgusting, amazing, yet true: the banks had no legal right to evict these people. In many cases, the banks didn’t have basic paperwork, like the original deed to the house. They resorted to “robo-signing” boiler room operations to churn out falsified and forged eviction papers. In others cases, people could have kept their homes if they’d been allowed to refinance — their right under federal law — but the banks illegally refused, giving them the runaround, repeatedly asking for the same paperwork they’d already sent in. Soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, protected from foreclosure under U.S. law, came home to find their homes resold at auction. In other cases, banks even repossessed homes where the homeowner had never missed a mortgage payment.

The foreclosure scandal helped spark the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Promising justice and compensation for the victims, President Obama’s Justice Department joined lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of several states.

Last year, Obama announced that the government had concluded a “landmark settlement” with the banks that would “deliver some measure of justice for those families that have been victims of their abusive practices.” The Politico newspaper called the $26 billion deal “a big win for the White House.” $26 billion. Sounds impressive, right?

So…the envelope, please.

How much will the banks have to pay? What will people whose homes were stolen — there is no other word — receive? Now we know the details.

Remember what we’re talking about. Your house is your biggest asset. You own tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. One morning the sheriff comes. He throws you and your family out on the street. Your possessions are dumped on the lawn. You have nowhere to go. Your kids are crying. If you were struggling before, now you’re completely screwed. And the bank that did it had no legal basis whatsoever to do what they did.

They took your house, sold it, and pocketed the profits.

What would happen to you if you walked into Tiffany’s and stole a $200,000 necklace?

The details:

Even though they qualified for federal loan modifications, the banks seized 1.1 million homes, making 1.1 million families homeless after they were approved for refinancing. Since the average foreclosed home was worth $191,000, the banks stole $210 billion in homes. Under the “landmark settlement,” these wrongfully evicted Americans will receive $300 or $500 each, the value of a modest night out at a nice restaurant in Manhattan (two tenths of one percent of their loss).
900,000 borrowers who were entitled under Obama’s Make Home Affordable program to refinancing were denied help and lost their homes. They get $300 or $600.
420,000 homeowners who lost their homes while the banks intentionally dithered and “lost” their paperwork get $400 or $800.
28,000 families who were entitled to protection against foreclosure under federal bankruptcy law, but got thrown out of their homes anyway, get $3,750 to $62,500.
1,100 soldiers entitled to protection against foreclosure because of their military status get $125,000.
53 families who weren’t late on their mortgages, never missed a payment, but got thrown out anyway, get $125,000.

So we’ve got more than 2.4 million families — that’s 5 million people — whose homes got bogarted by scumbag banksters. They’re getting a thousand bucks each on average. A thousand bucks for a two hundred thousand dollar theft! Not to mention the heartbreak and stress they suffered.

Why aren’t those five million people stringing up bank execs from telephone poles? It’s gotta be the Paxil.

But what really gets me is the 53 families who are getting $125,000 payouts for losing homes they were 100% up to date on.

Even if you’re a heartless right-winger, you’ve got to have a problem with a bank taking your house when you never missed a payment. Sorry, but these are multinational, multibillion dollar banks. They should pay these families tens of millions of dollars each.

Those 53 families should own Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Some perspective:

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit received $260 million in pay between 2007 and 2012, the height of the foreclosure scandal.

In 2011 alone, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was given $23 million. In 2012, the company’s board of directors “punished” him for a $6 billion loss in derivatives trading by paying him “merely” $18.7 million.

In 2012 alone, Bank of America paid CEO Brian Moynihan $12 million; Wells Fargo paid $23 million to CEO John Stumpf.

Not bad for some of the worst criminals in history.

That’s how things work in the United States: the criminals get the big payouts. The people whose lives they destroy get $300.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
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