Comcast Doesn't Give A Fuck

Stop the Comcast takeover.

It's almost this bad. Already.

Watch this video. If this is how you feel about Comcast right now, just remember one thing: after the Time Warner Cable takeover, it will only get worse.

Cornel West arrested at Ferguson, MO protest

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/13/us/ferguson-protests/index.html

Podcast 077 – Walker Won’t Answer the Questions

On Monday’s Podcast Ed Schultz is joined by Wisconsin State Sen. Lena Taylor to discuss Scott Walker defending voter ID laws and not having an answer when it comes to minimum wage in Wisconsin.

We are also joined by Scott Brennan, Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, to discuss the Senatorial race between Joni Ernst and Rep. Bruce Braley.

Crack, the CIA, and the Contras

Posted by naju

In 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News exposed a shocking series of facts: that the CIA and the Reagan administration were covertly funding the Contras in Nicaragua by aiding and abetting the flow of crack cocaine to America, particularly inflicting terrible damage on inner-city black communities. 

In response, the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all began vicious campaigns to attack and discredit Webb. 

Although Webb was later vindicated by a CIA Inspector General report among other things, the damage was done, and the story still has an air of obfuscation and confusion around it. 

Along with the release of a new documentary, Freeway: Crack in the System, as well as a feature film starring Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger, key figures in the CIA-crack cocaine scandal are beginning to come forward. 

Could this be the start of a renewed exploration of the government's complicity in the rise of crack in America?

Pastor's Wife Tried To Kill Daughters After Getting 'End of the World' Messages from Estranged Husband

Woman stabs daughters after telling them she wanted them to "meet Jesus Christ."

By Tom Boggioni


A Montgomery, Illinois, woman who attempted to kill her three daughters told police that she wanted them to “meet Jesus Christ,” after receiving messages from her estranged pastor husband telling her the world was coming to an end, according to the  Chicago Sun-Times.














Police arrived at the door of Pamela J. Christensen, 47, on Sept. 25 following two 9/11 hang-up calls to discover the woman covered in blood.

According to court documents, Christensen dropped to her knees and confessed that she had tried to kill her daughters.

Two of the girls were stabbed, suffering minor injuries. Christensen had also stabbed herself in the chest and abdomen and was treated at a local hospital.The three girls, ages 12, 16 and 19, told police that their mother had dressed them all in white and had held a knife to them, asking them if they accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.

According to police, Christensen had initially tried to poison her daughters with a concoction made up of household cleaners in the hope that they would doze off and she could stab them in their sleep.

The daughters reportedly refused to drink the poison.

According to the police report, Christensen told officers she that she was sending the girls home to “meet Jesus Christ,” following messages left on her phone from her husband, Vaughn Christensen, stating that the world was ending and that she needed to prepare the family to meet Jesus.

Vaughn Christensen is a former pastor at a Sugar Grove church.

A month prior to the stabbings, Christensen had served her husband with a restraining order, stating that the two were going through a divorce, and that her husband had become increasingly violent toward her and the children.

The order, filed on Aug. 29, stated Vaughn Christensen had become “increasingly erratic” and that he had threatened to harm himself and the children. He mentioned wanting to die on several occasions, Christensen wrote.

Police confirmed they had responded to the home several times over suicide threats.

Christensen now faces three counts each of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery and aggravated unlawful restraint.

Her bail was set at $1 million on Thursday and she is expected back in court on Oct. 16.

Validating Marriott's low wage exploitation

Posted by Jim Hightower

Listen to this Commentary

 

As an old popular song asks, what do you get if you "work your fingers right down to the bone?"

Boney fingers.

As housekeepers in the sprawling Marriott chain of hotels know, that's more than a cute lyric, it's the truth. These "room attendants," as they're called, are paid barely $8 an hour to perform a very hard, physical job, suffering the highest injury rate in the so-called "hospitality" industry. Some two-thirds of them take pain medication just to get through their day of heaving 100-pound mattresses, stooping to clean floors, and twisting to readjust furniture in 15 to 20 rooms per shift.

Yet, Marriott's CEO publicly hails the very women he exploits as "the heart of the house," saying his chain likes to express its appreciation to them with "special recognition events" during International Housekeepers Week. Yes, exploited room attendants are not rewarded with a living wage, but with a congratulatory week – how great is that?

This year, housekeeper week came with "a new tipping initiative" – a scheme created by multimillionaire Maria Shriver, urging Marriott's customers "to express their gratitude by leaving tips and notes of thanks for hotel room attendants." Shriver says she hopes the voluntary tips "will make these women feel validated." Is that sweet or what?

Does she at least urge that this tip be the standard 15-20 percent we give at restaurants? No, one-to-five bucks per night's stay is recommended. Let's see, at about $250 a day for a Marriott room, even $5 is a sad two percent expression of "gratitude." As for customers leaving a little thank-you note, imagine trying to buy a baloney sandwich with that.

How about this:  

Instead of paying $9 million a year to Marriott's CEO, make him rely on customer tips – and see how validated he feels.

"House Keeping Can Be Dangerous Work," Unite Here.

"Compensation up for Marriott, Hilton CEOs," www.bizjournal.com, April 8, 2014.

"Marriott: Company Information," www.news.marriott.com, September 1, 2014.

"Marriott's New Envelope For Room Tips Stirs Debate," www.npr.org, September 16, 2014.

"Hotel Chain Will Leave Envelopes In Rooms To Encourage Guests To Tip Housekeepers," www.thinkprogress.org

Elizabeth Warren on Barack Obama: “They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. And it happened over and over and over”

"There has not been nearly enough change," she tells Salon, taking on Obama failures, lobbyists, tuition. So 2016?

By Thomas Frank
 

Elizabeth Warren (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Senator Elizabeth Warren scarcely requires an introduction. She is the single most exciting Democrat currently on the national stage.

Her differences from the rest of the political profession is stark and obvious. It extends from her straightforward clarity on economic issues to the energetic way she talks. I met her several years ago when she was taking time out from her job teaching at Harvard to run the Congressional Oversight Panel, which was charged with supervising how the bank bailout money was spent. I discovered on that occasion not only that we agreed on many points of policy, but that she came originally from Oklahoma, the state immediately south of the one where I grew up, and also that high school debate had been as important for her as it had been for me.

In the years since then, Professor Warren helped to launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which will probably be remembered as one of the few lasting achievements of the Obama Administration); she wrote a memoir, A Fighting Chance; and she was elected to the United States Senate from Massachusetts.

This interview was condensed and lightly edited.

I want to start by talking about a line that you’re famous for, from your speech at the Democratic National Convention two years ago: “The system is rigged.” You said exactly what was on millions of people’s minds. I wonder, now that you’re in D.C. and you’re in the Senate, and you have a chance to see things close up, do you still feel that way? And: Is there a way to fix the system without getting the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United or some huge structural change like that? How can we fix it?

That’s the question that lies at the heart of whether our democracy will survive. The system is rigged. And now that I’ve been in Washington and seen it up close and personal, I just see new ways in which that happens. But we have to stop and back up, and you have to kind of get the right diagnosis of the problem, to see how it is that—it goes well beyond campaign contributions. That’s a huge part of it. But it’s more than that. It’s the armies of lobbyists and lawyers who are always at the table, who are always there to make sure that in every decision that gets made, their clients’ tender fannies are well protected. And when that happens — not just once, not just twice, but thousands of times a week — the system just gradually tilts further and further. There is no one at the table…I shouldn’t say there’s no one. I don’t want to overstate. You don’t have to go into hyperbole. But there are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people.

---

---

They need to get a lobbyist. Why haven’t they got on that yet?

Yeah. Why aren’t they out there spending? In the context when people talk about “get a lobbyist,” the big financial institutions spent more than a million dollars a day for more than a year during the financial reform debates. And my understanding is, their spending has ratcheted up again. My insight about that, about exactly that point, [is] in the book [A Fighting Chance], in the second chapter, which is when my eyes first get opened to the political system. Here I am, I’m studying what’s happening to the American family, and just year by year by year, I’m watching America’s middle class get hammered. They just keep sliding further down. The data get worse every year that I keep pulling this data. Bankruptcy is the last hope to right their lives for those who have been hit by serious medical problems, job losses, a divorce, a death in the family — that accounts for about 90 percent of the people who file for bankruptcy. Those four causes, or those three if you combine divorce and death. So, how could America, how could Congress adopt a bankruptcy bill that lets credit card companies squeeze those families harder?

What year was that?

When they finally adopted it was 2005. But the point was, it started back in — actually it started in 1995, the effort [to change the bankruptcy laws]. And that’s when I got involved with the Bankruptcy Commission. When, first, [commission chairman] Mike Synar came to me, and then Mike Synar died. It was just awful. And Brady Williamson [the replacement chairman] came to me. But what I saw during that process is, this was not an independent panel that could kind of sit and think through the [problem]: “Let’s take a look at what the numbers show about what’s happening to the families. Let’s take some testimony, get some people in here who have been through bankruptcy, and some creditors who have lost money in bankruptcy, and let’s figure out some places where we could make some sensible recommendations to Congress.” That wasn’t what it turned out to be at all.
It turned out that it was all about paid lobbyists . . .

And what they wanted.

And what they wanted. I tried as hard as I could, and there were almost no bankrupt families who were ever even heard from. And you stop and think about it — why would that be so? Well, first of all, to show up to something like that, you’ve got to know about it and you’ve got to take a day off from work. Who’s going to do that? These are families who are under enormous stress and deeply humiliated about what had happened to them. They had to make a public declaration that they were losers in the great American economic game.

I know exactly the kind of people you’re talking about. I wanted to ask you, not specifically about people declaring bankruptcy, but about the broader working people of this country. You’re from Oklahoma. I’m from Kansas. You’ve seen what’s happened in those places. There are lots and lots of working people in those places and a lot of other places…

Hardworking people. People who work hard. That’s what you want to remember. Not just people who kind of occasionally show up.

Yeah. The blue collar backbone of this country. And in places like I’m describing, it gets worse every year—well, I shouldn’t say worse, because it’s their choice, but a lot of them choose Republicans. I was looking at Oklahoma, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, I’m pretty sure you are, 16 percent of the vote went for Eugene Debs in 1912 and today it’s going in the other direction as fast as it can. How is this ever going to change?

I have at least two thoughts around that and we should explore both of them. One of them is that we need to do a better job of talking about issues. And I know that sounds boring and dull as dishwater, but it’s true. The differences between voting for two candidates should be really clear to every voter and it should be clear in terms of, who votes to raise the minimum wage and who doesn’t. Who votes to lower the interest rate on student loans and who doesn’t. Who votes to make sure women can’t get fired for asking how much a guy is making for doing the same job, and who doesn’t. There are these core differences that are about equality and opportunity. It can’t be that we don’t make a clear distinction. If we fail to make that distinction, then shame on us. That is my bottom line on this.

You know, during the Senate race that I was in — I mean, I was a first-time candidate, I’d never done this before — the thing that scared me the most was that the race wouldn’t be about the core differences between my opponent and me. I wanted people to understand where I stood on investments in the future, investments in education and research that help us build a future. Where I stood on the minimum wage and equal pay. And where he stood on the other side. The point was not to blur the differences and to run to some mythical middle where we agreed with each other. The point was to say that, here are really big differences between the two of us. Voters have a chance to make a choice.

In some ways that’s exactly the problem. When I talk to people, they often say Democrats aren’t the party of working people at all. And they talk about NAFTA and deregulating Wall Street, and they say, look at these guys, they won’t prosecute the financial industry. They say, Democrats talk a good game, but they’re always on the side of the elite at the end of the day. What do you say to these people?

We’re the only ones fighting back. Right now, on financial reform, the Republicans are trying to roll back the financial reforms of Dodd-Frank. In fact, Mitch McConnell has announced that if he gets the majority in the Senate, his first objective is to repeal healthcare and his second is to roll back the financial reforms, and in particular to target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the one agency that’s out there for American families, the one that has returned more than four billion dollars to families who got cheated by big financial institutions. That’s in just three years.

So, Democrats have not done all that they should, but at least we’re out there fighting for the right things. We’re fighting and I think trying to pull in the right direction. So if the question is, hold us to a higher standard, man, I’m there. You’re right. [If] you want to criticize and say, “you should do more!,” the answer is: Yes, we should! You bet! We should be stronger. We should be tougher. But understand the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party right now. It’s pulling as hard and fast as it can in the opposite direction.

No doubt about that. I should ask you about — and we’re talking about the financial crisis and the failure to prosecute anyone, and the…I’m sorry, I’m going to get the name confused, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

That’s okay. It was named by Republicans to be as confusing a name as possible. (laughs) I used to think of it as the four random initials. (laughs) I just call it my consumer agency. So that’s it, just the consumer agency.

So here’s another aspect of this: Eric Holder is stepping down as attorney general, and you in the Senate are going to have to confirm a successor. And one of the things, I don’t know if you’ve followed this or not, but one of the things the Department of Justice has been doing, if you look at the actual prosecutions they’ve been making, they essentially blame the financial crisis on little people. People who lied on their loan applications. And I wonder, are you going to demand something different out of his successor? You’re going to have a chance to confirm this guy and talk to this guy…

You bet I am. I want to be clear on this. It’s the Justice Department. But it’s also the banking regulators. And the SEC. So the most recent hearing we held that had them all in together — you know we get them in twice a year — and, boy, you want to ask me if I’m glad to be in the United States Senate? (laughs) I get to be on the Banking Committee, and twice a year we haul the banking regulators in front of us for supervision. For oversight I should say, not supervision. So we had them all in. . . . We had them all in, in July. And that was the question I asked: How many big bank executives have you referred to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution?

That’s a very good question. I was going to ask you that, too.

Exactly right. Because that’s the other half of how the game is rigged. You know, we think of it in terms of Congress, and we should, because it’s definitely rigged in Congress and this is a place where people can do something about it. But the wind always blows from the same direction through the agencies. Those agencies, the banking regulators, who do they hear from, day in and day out? Big banks. They don’t hear from people who got cheated on their mortgages, people who got tricked on their credit cards. They hear from the big financial institutions, day after day after day. That’s, in part, what this whole Fed — this latest scandal at the Fed — you know with Carmen Segarra who has the tapes. Part of what that shows, if you just back up and think about what you’re seeing there, it’s that the supervisors, or regulators as they’re called — everybody commonly calls them that — the regulators all meet with Goldman Sachs executives and employees day after day after day. They don’t see the people who get tricked, the people who get cheated, the people who get fooled by the products that Goldman turns out.

That’s right. Regulatory capture, this is an old problem. I was writing about it, obviously, in the Bush days. But President Obama had a golden opportunity when he came in to change the system and I just don’t feel like it has changed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aside. I mean, are the regulators now referring things to the Justice Department? Are the wheels turning again?

There has not been nearly enough change. Not nearly enough. The consumer agency — this is why I argued for it — the consumer agency is structural change. So basically, the premise behind it was that there were plenty of federal laws out there, but no agency would step up and enforce them. And the responsibilities of these laws were scattered among seven different agencies and not one of those agencies saw its principal job as looking out for American families. So the OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] was all about bank profitability, the Fed was all about monetary policy. Everybody had something that they were about, but consumer protection was everybody’s job and therefore nobody’s job. You know, it was down seventh, or tenth or hundredth on the list and they never got to it, even as the big financial institutions were selling mortgages that should have been described as grenades with the pins pulled out. Really! My whole thing about toasters—remember, that was based on fact. At the time I wrote that piece on it, that was before the crash, one in five mortgages that were being marketed by the biggest financial institutions were exploding and costing people their homes. No one would permit toasters to be sold when one in five exploded and burned down somebody’s house. But they were selling mortgages like that and every regulator knew about it.

And those people who had it blow up in their faces, those are the ones we’re prosecuting.

Oh God. So exactly right. Well, to the extent we do [prosecute] anyone. But that’s exactly right. And so the idea behind the consumer agency was to say: structural change. We need an agency that has one and only one goal, and that is to look out for American families. To level the playing field, to make sure that people are not getting tricked and trapped on these financial instruments. And so it was a big shift, and it’s a shift worth thinking about. We took away — Dodd-Frank took away — all this responsibility that had nominally been spread among the other agencies, concentrated it in one agency, and now holds that agency accountable. So you give the agency the tools and then hold them accountable. The reason I think that story is so important is because it is structural. It’s not just a question of, “Gee, get good people and somehow things will work better.” There are structural changes we have to make. . . . The idea, the question that haunted me at the agency was: How do we make sure the agency is true to its mission, not just today with the people that we hire in the first plume of excitement, but 30 years from now, 40 years from now, 50 years from now…

Yeah, that’s the problem, when President Huckabee has . . . [At this point Senator Warren conferred with an aide about her schedule.] Can I skip to another subject real quick?

You can.

Let’s get back to the mindset of a lot of people. They look at you and they say, Elizabeth Warren, she’s part of the elite too. She was a professor at Harvard. And people would also say, look at the student loan disaster which you talk a lot about these days, the root cause of it is college tuition, which has increased by a thousand percent in 30 years. You look at the advertised price at Harvard right now, I know that not everybody pays it, but the advertised price is sixty grand a year. If you have three kids and all of them have to pay that much for four years—you know what I’m talking about?

I do.

Nobody can afford that. Is it time to do something about college tuition?

Absolutely. Yes it is. But let’s get the right frame on this. Because I think this is really important, and it’s the right question to ask. But start with this: three out of four kids in college are in public universities. A generation ago, state support for public universities was strong enough that three out of four dollars to educate those kids came from taxpayers and the family had to make up the difference for the fourth dollar. Today, that has basically reversed itself. That is, that the states are putting up, just generally across the country, about one out of four dollars and the families have got to come up with the other three out of four dollars. This matters because it is the state universities that are the backbone of access to higher education for middle class families, and I think that’s the place you have to start the conversation. I’m not going to let anybody off the hook, but I think it’s the critical part of the conversation. And I say this — it’s like I talk about in the book — this is personal for me. I graduated from a commuter college that cost $50 a semester in Texas.

Those were the days.

That’s right. It opened a million doors for me. And that happened because I grew up in an America that was investing in its kids. That America is gone. We’re not doing that anymore. So I start there at the heart of it. . . . And then there’s a second piece that we’ve got to factor into the equation, and that is: one in 10 kids in college is in a for-profit university. Actually, here are three numbers. They’re not perfect, but they’re just about right: 10, 25, 50. Ten percent of our kids are in for-profit universities, colleges. Those for-profit universities are sucking down 25 percent of federal loan dollars, and they are responsible for 50 percent of all student loan defaults.

It’s an outrage.

So we are, the federal government is currently subsidizing a for-profit industry that is ripping off young people. Those young people are graduating — many of them are never graduating — and of those that are graduating, many of them have certificates that won’t get them jobs, that don’t produce the benefits of a state college education.

You know somebody to talk to sometime if you want to ever do a separate story on this is Marty Meehan [who] is the president of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. And what he talks about is, particularly, the young vets who come to UMass-Lowell already sixty or seventy thousand dollars in debt without a single college credit that will transfer to an accredited university. Now, think about that.

So who do you think gets targeted by these for-profit universities? It’s kids who are the first in their family to go to college. It’s not happening to the sons and daughters of graduates from elite schools. It’s happening to young people who are the first in their family to graduate from college. Many of them have come out of the military, they’ve gone into the military straight from high school. They’ve now completed their military service. These are strivers, boot-strappers, hard-working kids who are the very kids we most want to make sure the doors of opportunity are open for. You know who else goes [to these schools]? It’s young, single mothers who are trying to make something out of their lives, many of them are working two and even three jobs, who believe that if they can get a college education, their children will have opportunities that would otherwise be closed off, and yet that’s not what they’re getting. They’re getting preyed on by these schools. So I mention this only by way of saying, when we look at college — you’re not wrong — we have got to use the leverage of the federal government investment to bring down the cost of college across the board. But we’ve got particular problems to focus on, both in support for public universities and the resources that are being drained away by the for-profit schools.

Here’s the penultimate question: everything you’re saying are issues that have been important to me most of my adult life. In 2008, I thought I had a candidate who was going to address these things. Right? Barack Obama. Today, my friends and I are pretty disappointed with what he’s done. I wonder if you feel he has been forthright enough on these subjects. And I also wonder if you think that someone can take any of this stuff on without being president. You know, there are a lot of good politicians in America who have their heart in the right place. But they’re not the president. Well anyhow. You understand my frustration…

I understand your frustration, Tom and, actually, I talk about this in the book. When I think about the president, for me, it’s about both halves. If Barack Obama had not been president of the United States we would not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Period. I’m completely convinced of that. And I go through the details in the book, and I could tell them to you. But he was the one who refused to throw the agency under the bus and made sure that his team kept the agency alive and on the table. Now there was a lot of other stuff that also had to happen for it to happen. But if he hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have gotten the agency. At the same time, he picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street.

You might say, “always.” Just about every time they had to compromise, they compromised in the direction of Wall Street.

That’s right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over. So I see both of those things and they both matter.

Is there anything someone can do about all the things we’re describing, short of being president?

But we keep fighting back. The way to think about this is not…. Yes, we want the right person for president. You bet. But it’s all of us fighting back. . . . This is, and actually, this is where we almost started this conversation — how, as a people, we reclaim our government. How we, as a people, force Washington to work for us, not just for those with money and power. So I just gave a speech this morning. It’s interesting you would catch me on this particular day. I spoke to the New England Council so we had lots of CEOs and COOs — about 300 people — and I spoke on a not very sexy topic, on infrastructure and basic research. And I made the pitch about the importance of both of those. You know, gave some of the basic stats on why both are so important to building a future for this country. Then I did the basic stats on how we’re falling short. Where we’re cutting our investments — where we’ve been cutting our investments for 30 years. The Society of Civil Engineers says we’ve got $3.4 trillion in infrastructure underfunding — work that we need to do to bring our infrastructure up to current standards. So I talked about this and about the importance of it in building a future.

But the third part of the speech was the political part. It was the democracy part. I said, “So how could this happen in a country like America? I mean, I’m sitting here with you. You’re business leaders. Nobody would run a business like this. To under-invest in the key pieces to help build a future. So how does this happen?” It happens because there are a lot of people in Washington who say the answer to everything is, cut taxes. And when you’ve cut them as much as you can, cut them some more. And a lot of people have the corollary to that, and that is — cut spending. And it’s spending in all of the basics that help build a future: cut spending in education, in resource management, in infrastructure, in research, in core pieces we need to build a future.

“It’s there,” I said. “Look, get out there and fight back against this. I’m glad to do it. But I can’t do it alone. You have to get out there. You’re business leaders! You have to say ‘enough is enough.’ We have to build a future going forward.” And I said, “We need your voices. You have to be out there on the front lines. I’m glad to be out here. I’ll take the point. I’ll be in the leadership spot. I’ll talk about it, I’ll be loud, I’ll be blunt. But we need your voices in this. That’s the way we build a future.” And I feel like it’s all this series of issues we talked about, we have got to bring more people in.

You know, the other side has its advantage, and boy have they played it out for 30 years now — concentrated money and concentrated power. And you can do a lot with concentrated money and concentrated power. But our side—we have our voices and we have our votes. If people get engaged on the issues, the votes are on our side. Seventy-five percent of America wants to raise the minimum wage. That’s where we’ll head.

There’s a lot of issues like that.

But that’s the point. Look, there are two ways you can look at that. You can look at that and say, “Well, obviously, democracy doesn’t work.” Or the other way you can look at that is to say, “We have the opportunity. The moment is upon us.” We push back hard enough, we’re pushing for America’s agenda. Not an agenda to help a small group of people, an agenda to build a future for this country. And I believe we win. I believe it.

Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include "What's The Matter With Kansas," "Pity the Billionaire" and "One Market Under God." He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.

Wells Fargo Employee Emails CEO Asking For a Raise—Copies 200,000 Other Employees

By Joanna Rothkopf


Tyrel Oates, a 30-year-old Portland, Oregon-based employee of Wells Fargo, shot to Internet fame after emailing the company’s CEO John Stumpf (and cc’ing 200,000 other employees) to ask for a $10,000 raise… for everyone at the company.

The Charlotte Observer reports:

Oates proposed that Wells Fargo give each of its roughly 263,500 employees a $10,000 raise. That, he wrote, would “show the rest of the United States, if not the world, that, yes, big corporations can have a heart other than philanthropic endeavors.”

In an interview Tuesday, Oates…said he has no regrets and that he has received many thank-yous from co-workers who told him they shared his views.

And, at least as of Tuesday afternoon, he said he’s still employed by the company, where he processes requests from Wells Fargo customers seeking to stop debt-collection calls.
“I’m not worried about losing my job over this,” Oates said.

Oates has been working at the company for almost seven years and makes slightly more than $15 per hour, working 40 hours per week excluding mandatory overtime. “Just knowing the unease of my fellow team members as far as pay goes and how horrible our pay increases have been over the seven years… I just decided to send a letter to John Stumpf,” he said.

The full letter was posted on Reddit. Here it is:

Mr. Stumpf,

With the increasing focus on income inequality in the United States. Wells Fargo has an opportunity to be at the forefront of helping to reduce this by setting the bar, leading by example, and showing the other large corporations that it is very possible to maintain a profitable company that not only looks out for its consumers and shareholders, but its employees as well.

This year Wells Fargo in its second quarter alone had a net income of $5.7 billion, and total revenue of $21.1 billion. These are very impressive numbers, and is obvious evidence that Wells Fargo is one of, if not the most profitable company in the nation right now. So, why not take some of this and distribute it to the rest of the employees.

Sure, the company provides while not great, some pretty good benefits, as well as discretionary profit sharing for those who partake in our 401k program. While the benefits are nice, the profit sharing through the 401k only goes to make the company itself and its shareholders more profitable, and not really boost the income of the thousands of us here every day making this company the prestigious power house that it is.

Last year, you had pulled in over $19 million, more than most of the employees will see in our lifetimes. It is understood that your position carries a lot of weight and responsibility; however, with a base salary of $2.8 million and bonuses equating to $4 million, is alone one of the main arguments of income inequality. Where the vast majority, the undeniable profit drivers, with the exception of upper management positions barely make enough to live comfortably on their own, the distribution of income in this company is no better than that of the other big players in the corporate world.

My estimate is that Wells Fargo has roughly around 300,000 employees. My proposal is take $3 billion dollars, just a small fraction of what Wells Fargo pulls in annually, and raise every employees annual salary by $10,000 dollars. This equates to an hourly raise about $4.71 per hour. Think, as well, of the positive publicity in a time of extreme consumer skepticism towards banks. By doing this, Wells Fargo will not only help to make its people, its family, more happy, productive, and financially stable, it will also show the rest of the United States, if not the world that, yes big corporations can have a heart other than philanthropic endeavors.

P.S. – To all of my fellow team members who receive a copy of this email. Though Wells Fargo does not allow the formation of unions, this does not mean we cannot stand united. Each and every one of us plays an integral part in the success of this company. It is time that we ask, no, it is time that we demand to be rightfully compensated for the hard work that we accomplish, and for the great part we all have played in the success of this company.

There are many of us out there who come to work every day and give it our all, yet, we struggle to make ends meet while our peers in upper management and company executives reap the majority of the rewards. One of our lowest scored TMCS questions is that our opinions matter. Well they do!

This email has been sent to hundreds of thousands Wells Fargo employees, (as many as I could cc from the outlook global address book). And while the voice of one person in a world as large as ours may seem only like a whisper, the combined voices of each and all of us can move mountains!

With the warmest of regards,

          Tyrel Oates

Big Brother is so much bigger than the NSA

By David Sirota

Why did Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba fail to record a tip when they paid their cabbies during New York City taxi rides back in 2013? Why was Cooper near a Mediterranean restaurant in Greenwich Village? Why was Alba at a ritzy hotel in Soho?

We don’t know the answers, but we do know exactly when and where the movie stars were going, and we also know there’s no record of them forking over any gratuity. What’s worrisome, say privacy experts, is that we know all of this not from some special government sting operation but from publicly available data about millions of people’s movements throughout New York City.

That information, released in an open records request, validates the concerns of those who argue that while consumers’ digital metadata may seem to be anonymous, it actually isn’t. It takes just one or two other pieces of information to turn seemingly anonymous tranches of metadata into specific information about individuals — and not just those who are famous.

“The more computing power and publicly available data, the easier it becomes to identify individuals in the data,” says Utrecht University’s Stefan Kulk. “In a time when even government institutions upload large online data sets for the sake of open-data policies, the scale of the problem of de-anonymized data providing insights into everyone’s day-to-day life will only increase.”

In the case of the taxi info, data analyst Christopher Whong filed an open records request in March 2014 for New York’s database of cab fare, tip and location information after seeing a tweet from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. Though that database of 174 million cab rides in 2013 includes no passenger names, software engineer Vijay Pandurangan was able to link the data to other publicly available information about license plates, cab driver identities and taxi companies’ medallion numbers.

Then, to show the individualized surveillance power of the seemingly anonymous data, Anthony Tockar of Neustar Research cross-referenced the information with publicly available photos of celebrities getting into cabs with identifiable license plates. That allowed Tockar to declare that Cooper’s “cab took him to Greenwich Village, possibly to have dinner at Melibea, and that he paid $10.50, with no recorded tip.” He also revealed that “Alba got into her taxi outside her hotel, the Trump SoHo, and somewhat surprisingly also did not add a tip to her $9 fare.” (If Cooper or Alba tipped with cash, then that might not show up on the records.)

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To dispel any notions that such information could be used only to track celebrities, Tockar showed how the same data could be employed to pinpoint the home addresses — and possible identities — of frequent visitors to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club.

News of taxi metadata being turned into individual-specific information follows similar stories that emerged in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency vacuuming up metadata.

Last year, for example, Stanford University researchers showed how medical, financial and other personal information could be disclosed just by cross-referencing phone metadata with publicly available databases. Similarly, Susan Landau, former Sun Microsystems engineer and author of the book “Surveillance or Security?” told the New Yorker that metadata can reveal details about everything from upcoming corporate transactions to journalists’ sources to political negotiations.

To illustrate that, Duke University associate professor Kieran Healy published a now-legendary essay, explaining how British forces could have come to target Paul Revere — and potentially snuff out the American Revolution — if they had access to the same kind of metadata the NSA collects.

But, then, it’s not just the NSA that’s vacuuming up data — it can also be local governments and corporations.

Of course, they may not all have nefarious motives for collecting data. The problem, though, is that the data itself can be used in nefarious ways.

David Sirota is a senior writer for the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

More David Sirota.

Rush Limbaugh's Desperation Is Showing

By Anonymous

October 9, 2014

Matt Osborne
Posted with permission from Breitbart Unmasked

Rush Limbaugh is a millstone around the neck of the talk radio format.

The nation's largest radio broadcasting company, Clear Channel, has been shedding jobs for a while now. Despite rebranding itself as  iHeart Communications, the company remains mired deeply in debt thanks to a 2008 private-equity deal with Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.

Facing a negative cash flow, iHeart Communications is moving into digital radio because broadcast revenue is expected to be flat until 2018. Their junk bonds are among the riskiest on Wall Street, rated CCC, which means "currently vulnerable to nonpayment," "substantial risk" and "extremely speculative."

Rather than pay off their debts, iHeart Communications is finding creative ways to delay the inevitable - and offering higher interest to attract capital to their very risky terms.

Clear Channel has never been profitable since the Bain deal, but the fiscal year ending in June 2013 saw the company's first cash-flow deficit in four years. So what happened in 2012? StopRush is what happened. Limbaugh's disgusting three-day tirade of misogyny against Sandra Fluke spawned a huge reaction in social media and blogs, leading thousands of volunteers to start a divestment effort aimed at convincing sponsors to pull their ads from his program.

When iHeart Media Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman recently told Bloomberg about his company's positives, he listed Ryan Seacrest - but not Rush Limbaugh. In fact, the talk format is fading from the FM band as Limbaugh keeps losing stations and declining in the ratings. In May 2013, Lew Dickey, the CEO of America's 2nd largest broadcaster, Cumulus Media, specifically blamed Rush Limbaugh's toxic brand for low revenues, while Radio Ink reported that 48 of the top 50 network advertisers had excluded Rush from their ad orders.

Since that time, Limbaugh's show has featured so few real commercial breaks that StopRush activists have been reduced to asking nonprofits to pull their PSA's. Volunteers have found ourselves contacting smaller and smaller businesses because almost all the big corporate sponsors have pulled their advertising. The resulting cash crunch has been so bad that FreedomWorks has started subsidizing Limbaugh's salary.

While there are surely some people who love Limbaugh, his brand is absolutely toxic outside that fan base. His show long ago passed outside the bounds of respectable office listening, for example. With such a narrow audience, he just keeps getting worse: in the weeks since Limbaugh's comment belittling sexual consent, "no means yes if you know how to spot it," a petition posted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to his advertisers has gotten nearly 350,000 signatures. Rush Limbaugh is surely popular, but he is also incredibly unpopular.

So what's an overpaid, underperforming, bigoted misogynist to do in these circumstances? Hire a hitman, of course!

Meet reputational hit-man Brian Glicklich

His arms are crossed to let you know he's very serious

One year before Limbaugh's tirade galvanized the nascent Limbaugh divestment movement, Brian Glicklich's website advertised his experience helping "high profile individuals and organizations achieve tactical and strategic goals through the highly leveraged use of the Internet." His clients, including broadcasters, paid top dollar for his assistance in overcoming organized opposition and boycotts - like, say, StopRush.

Glicklich currently works for Sitrick and Company as Chairman of the firm's "digital practice" doing "reputation management." Glicklich is a professional driver of fake ‘grassroots,' or astroturf, causes. He owns more than three dozen unused URLs for National Football League team fansites, for example.

But he also has deep and abiding ties with Limbaugh. Glicklich's company profile brags of creating and leading the digital division of Premiere Radio Networks as its senior vice president. He also owns Limbaugh-related domains such as rushbabesforamerica.net, nationalorganizationforrushbabes.com, and rushfacts.com - all URLs associated with his failed efforts to repair Limbaugh's image. On his profile at the Huffington Post, where he has written a screed attacking Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, Glicklich lists himself as "the Spokesperson for The Rush Limbaugh Show" - not just one of Limbaugh's spokesmen, but The Spokesman.

Glenn Beck is another longtime client of Glicklich, who owns Beck-related domains such as theblazetv.com. Beck, who was the subject of a successful divestment effort by Color of Change that killed his advertising and led to Fox News cancelling his show, is now a webcasting millionaire and defamation defendant. Glicklich's goal is to prevent that fate from happening to another right wing hate radio client.

Like Mercury Radio Arts President and COO Chris Balfe, Glicklich uses Austin-based security guru Spencer Coursen to do his threat assessments. A consultant for the film Zero Dark Thirty, Coursen was arrested in May after his client, the widow of "American Sniper" Chris Kyle, found that he had improperly charged her credit card for thousands of dollars in car rentals.

Glicklich's boss is Michael Sitrick, who proudly admits to being a professional spinmeister. In his press coverage, Sitrick compares himself to ‘The Wolf,' the mob fixer character in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction.

The firm's clients have included Michael Vick, the NFL star convicted of taking part in an illegal dog-fighting ring; the Church of Scientology; and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which needed help during the pedophile priest scandal of 2002.

One of Sitrick's biggest brags is that he got news outlets to change or delete their coverage of Papa Johns pizza magnate John Schnatter after the CEO told an investor conference call in 2012 that Obamacare would ‘force' him to jack up the price of his pies - rather than, say, foregoing a new addition to his underground 22-car garage.

Toadying to the rich and infamous is apparently very rewarding work: Glicklich lives in a $1.8 million home in Agoura Hills, California with his wife and three children because Sitrick reportedly charges these clients $900 an hour. But whatever Rush pays them, it's far too much money for what he's getting.

Spreading a kooky conspiracy theory through right wing tabloids

In the wake of the DCCC petition, Limbaugh seems to have panicked over his continued toxicity. But instead of cleaning up his act, the bloviator decided to send his personal goon squad after the activists who have given him such tremendous butthurt.

Suddenly, Glicklich appeared in the Twitter streams of #stoprush activists, accusing them of a ridiculous conspiracy theory drawn from the fringe-addled depths of his imagination. He has pushed this narrative through right wing outlets like WorldNetDaily, the original birther website; CNS News, whose reporter, Michael Chapman, immediately confused me with actor David Boreanaz; and Breitbart.com, where anti-masturbation crusader and professional bully Ben Shapiro works.

In terms of facts, Glicklich has merely published a few names and email addresses of StopRush volunteers who tweet. Presenting absolutely no proof that any of them has any relationship whatsoever with Media Matters For America, Glicklich maintains that this tiny group of random activists (that he has selected) are the only actual StopRush activists in the world - and that they are doing something illegal, or at least immoral, on behalf of MMFA founder David Brock.

Just to give you an idea how silly this is, the FlushRush Facebook group has more more than 20,000 members. No more than about 10% of StopRush activism has ever taken place on Twitter at any time in the last two years. Yet Glicklich encourages Rush Limbaugh's fans to send people disgusting emails on this misbegotten basis, and keeps tweeting his nonsense in the vain hope that enough false headlines and intimidation will magically disappear more than 300,000 petition signatures, restore thousands of lost advertisers, and convince the world that only a few malcontents dislike the Dear and Widely Beloved Leader Kim Jong Un Rush Limbaugh.

Glicklich also noticed that some (though by no means all) of those #stoprush tweeters had a Unite Blue twibbon on their accounts, so he accused the creator of that group of participating in his imaginary Twitter conspiracy. Glicklich has tried projecting some really absurd powers on Mr. Zach Green, a Twitter API developer who has worked in the past with Herman Cain and other tea party candidates.

In Glicklich's bizarre narrative, StopRush Twitter users are all somehow violating the social media network's rules with as-yet unnamed, magical software tools that do not actually exist anywhere on the internet. That ought to put his credibility somewhere between the chupacabra and fake moon landings, but of course it's also why he shopped the story to a birther website.

Smears will not slow down StopRush. Quite the opposite, really

With first-stringers like Glicklich, it's no wonder Rush Limbaugh is losing the war against his critics. In fact, the movement hasn't been this energized since 2012; Glicklich's smears have had the opposite effect from the one he intended. Sure, he's managed to get some fringe right wing sites to repeat them credulously, but no major media outfit is going to touch his story because it's quite obviously bunk - and his client actually is toxic.

Indeed, Glicklich seems to imagine that he can make StopRush activists so hated that Americans will somehow forget how much they dislike Limbaugh. But that is not going to work because they are not on the air every weekday making bigoted remarks like he is. Furthermore, the radio industry is changing in ways that reduce his audience and influence even without the help of divestment activists. The huge price tag of his show is no longer justified by the revenue he brings in.
It's just a matter of time before gravity - or an investors' conference call - brings reality crashing down on the soft protective bubble around Rush Limbaugh.

Year of Republican failure on health care

October 1st marks the day the Republicans shut down the government, and initial roll out of the now very successful Affordable Health Care Act sign ups. Ed Schultz, Wendell Potter and Leo Gerard discuss.

8 Shocking Things the Kochs Have Done to Amass Their Fortune

By Terrell Jermaine Starr

 

September 29, 2014 

 

According to a recent Rolling Stone report, the Koch brothers control one of the world's largest fortunes. Unsurprisingly, they are not eager to share how they acquired their billions of dollars. The report outlines not only the brothers' business trajectory over the years, it also delves into their family lineage, revealing how their father was something of a pioneer in shady business practices. It's a comprehensive outline of their most vile business and political doings. Here are eight details.

1. Stealing oil from Native Americans. In 1989, investigators told a congressional panel that Koch Industries regularly ended its year with far more barrels of oil than it had paid for. The oil was stolen from Indian lands. All in all, the Kochs made out with a total of $31 million worth of oil that wasn't paid for over three years, according to the Associated Press. The Kochs would eventually pay the U.S. government $25 million to settle the case in 2001.

2. Covering up faulty pipelines. In 1994, a pipeline in South Texas built in the 1940's exploded, spewing more than 90,000 gallons of crude oil into Gum Hollow Creek. Employees had warned Koch Industries that the pipeline had serious issues but to no avail. The spill would eventually reach six states. Koch Industries was sued for violating the Clean Water Act and forced to pay a $30 million civil penalty, at the time the biggest in the history of U.S. environmental law. Carol Browner, the former EPA administrator, said of Koch Industries, "They simply did not believe the law applied to them."

3. Treating the Mississippi River like a toilet. Koch's Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota spilled some 600,000 gallons of jet fuel into wetlands near the Mississippi River through much of the 1990s. It even increased its discharges over the weekends, as it knew it wasn't being monitored. Koch Petroleum Group pleaded guilty to "negligent discharge of a harmful quantity of oil." It also admitted to violating the Clean Water Act and was ordered to pay a $6 million fine and $2 million in remediation costs.

4. Treating the air we breath like an ashtray. Koch was accused of violating the Clean Air Act in 2000, when the feds hit the company with a 97-count indictment for "venting massive quantities of benzene at a refinery in Corpus Christi" and then attempting to cover it up. At first, Koch claimed it released 0.61 metric tons of benzene for 1995, just one 10th of what was allowed under the law. But the feds argued that Koch was told of its true emissions that year: 91 metric tons, or 15 times the legal limit. The Koch brothers worked their magic, pleaded guilty to a single felony count and avoided criminal prosecution. Koch also paid $20 million in fines and reparations.

5.  Profits over public safety. On Aug. 24, 1996, near Lively, Texas, Danielle Smalley and her friend Jason Stone were burned to death after a decrepit Koch pipeline exploded after the teens started the ignition of their truck. The feds documented "severe corrosion" and "mechanical damage" in the pipeline. Koch Pipeline Company LP failed to "adequately protect its pipeline from corrosion," a National Transportation Safety Board report would state. After a lengthy trial, Koch Industries was ordered to pay the Smalley family $296 million, then the largest wrongful-death judgment in American legal history. The family would later settle with Koch for an undisclosed sum.

6. Pulling strings in the White House. George W. Bush's campaign benefitted handsomely from Koch money and he repaid the brothers by appointing Susan Dudley, an anti-regulatory academic who hailed from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as its head regulatory official. Of course, Koch became the second coming of Sierra Club--according to them. Koch points to awards it has received for "safety and environmental excellence." "Koch companies have a strong record of compliance," Koch's top lawyer told Rolling Stone. "In the distant past, when we failed to meet these standards, we took steps to ensure that we were building a culture of 10,000 percent compliance, with 100 percent of our employees complying 100 percent." 

7. Doing business with Iran when U.S. companies weren't supposed to. American companies aren't supposed to do business with the Ayatollahs, but Koch Industries took advantage of a loophole in the 1996 sanctions. Basically, the loophole made it possible for foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies to do a certain amount of business with Iran.
And the rest is history:

In the ensuing years, according to Bloomberg Markets, the German and Italian arms of Koch-Glitsch, a Koch subsidiary that makes equipment for oil fields and refineries, won lucrative contracts to supply Iran's Zagros plant, the largest methanol plant in the world.

And thanks in part to Koch, methanol is now one of Iran's leading non-oil exports.

"Every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else, they did," said Koch whistle-blower George Bentu. Having signed on to work for a company that lists "integrity" as its top value, Bentu added, "You feel totally betrayed. Everything Koch stood for was a lie."

Koch reportedly kept trading with Tehran until 2007 – after the regime was exposed for supplying IEDs to Iraqi insurgents killing U.S. troops. According to lawyer Holden, Koch has since "decided that none of its subsidiaries would engage in trade involving Iran, even where such trade is permissible under U.S. law."

8. Their father did business with Stalin. Fred Koch, father of David and Charles, partnered with engineer Lewis Winkler to form Winkler-Koch Engineering Co. One of its major contracts was with the USSR, where Joseph Stalin was starving a large portion of his population. Their competitors were reluctant to do business with the tyrant, but Winkler-Koch Engineering Co. lacked any such qualms. 

Between 1929 and 1931, Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units for the Soviets. Although Stalin's evil was no secret, it wasn't until Fred visited the Soviet Union, that these dealings seemed to affect his conscience. "I went to the USSR in 1930 and found it a land of hunger, misery and terror," he would later write. Even so, he agreed to give the Soviets the engineering know-how they would need to keep building more.

There is more to the Koch brothers' shady, destructive business practices. Check out the Rolling Stone feature.

Terrell Jermaine Starr is a senior editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter @Russian_Starr.

Climate of terror by Tom Tomorrow

World Wide Web inventor: ‘I want a web where I’m not spied on, where there’s no censorship’

By Agence France-Presse

Tim Berners-Lee gives a speech on April 18, 2012 at the World Wide Web international conference (AFP)

The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.

Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users’ privacy.

“If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life,” Berners-Lee said at the London “Web We Want” festival on the future of the internet.

“If a Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition’s political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power.”

“Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies.”

Berners-Lee, 59, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body which develops guidelines for the development of the internet.

He called for an internet version of the “Magna Carta”, the 13th century English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms.

Concerns over privacy and freedom on the internet have increased in the wake of the revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity following leaks by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

A ruling by the European Union to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to remove links to information about them, called the “right to be forgotten”, has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship.

“There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is about saying…I want a web where I’m not spied on, where there’s no censorship,” Berners-Lee said.

The scientist added that in order to be a “neutral medium”, the internet had to reflect all of humanity, including “some ghastly stuff”.

“Now some things are of course just illegal, child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank, that’s illegal before the web and it’s illegal after the web,” Berners-Lee added.

Eric Holder's Failure to Prosecute Wall Street in One Graph

By Zaid Jilani, AlterNet

Is there any reason to think his successor do any better?

 

This week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he would be stepping down, which set off speculation about who President Obama would appoint to replace him.

Holder's legacy is being appraised in many areas, from drug policy reform to civil rights to accountability for war crimes by the previous administration.

But one of the Holder's most glaring failures was little-discussed: his Department of Justice's  failure to prosecute financial fraud by Wall Street.

From the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, here's a graph showing prosecutions for financial fraud from October 2003 to April 2014 – notice the downward trend that continued under Holder despite the financial crisis and the fraud that accompanied it:

Under Holder, a long line of Justice Department officials (and those at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission) have left their jobs in the government to join the finance industry or law firms that specialize in defending it.

This poses a pair of questions for the Obama administration: Who will replace Eric Holder, and will Holder soon leverage his weak oversight of Wall Street for a much more lucrative job?

Why does anyone still listen to Dick Cheney?

Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia and Republican strategist John Feehery join Chris Matthews to discuss what explains Dick Cheney’s severe criticism of the president on his ISIS strategy.

Liberians Explain Why the Ebola Crisis Is Way Worse Than You Think

By Alex Park

Health workers in Liberia haul away the body of a person suspected of dying of Ebola Abbas Dulleh/AP

As of this week, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is known to have infected more than 5,700 people and taken more than 2,700 lives. Yet those figures could be dwarfed in the coming months if the virus is left unchecked. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the total number of infections could reach 1.4 million in Liberia and Sierra Leone by January 2015. Though cases have been reported in five countries, nowhere has been harder hit than Liberia, where more than half of the Ebola-related deaths have occurred.

More MoJo coverage of the Ebola crisis.

• These Maps Show How Ebola Spread In Liberia
• Even Liberia's Legislature Can't Escape the Ravages of Ebola
• Listen to Some of Liberia's Top Artists Sing about Ebola
• Why the World Health Organization Doesn't Have Enough Funds to Fight Ebola
• New Drugs and Vaccines Can't Stop This Ebola Outbreak
• We Are Making Ebola Outbreaks Worse by Cutting Down Forests

The outbreak has crippled Liberia's economy. Its neighbors have sealed their borders and shipping has all but ceased, causing food and gas prices to skyrocket. Schools and businesses have closed down, and the country's already meager health care system has been taxed to the breaking point.

Meanwhile, as panic grips the country, crime has risen steadily and some reports suggest that Liberia's security forces are among the perpetrators. To get a picture of how dire the situation is on the ground, we got in touch with Abel Welwean, a journalist and researcher who lives outside of Monrovia. He conducted a handful of interviews with Liberians in his neighborhood in the second week of September and also provided his own harrowing story of what life is like in the country.

The outbreak has forced many Liberians to stay indoors and avoid interacting with other people. Since the virus can be caught merely by touching the sweat of an infected person, once-common forms of physical contact, like handshakes, have become rarer.

Frances (a university student): Football has been suspended in our country. We are sitting at home just doing nothing—all in the name of protecting ourselves. It is hurting us, but we have to play the safe rules, because we value our own lives.

Abel: I don't wear short sleeve shirts to step outside my house. I keep my children in my yard throughout the day. I make sure we wash our hands periodically. We do not shake hands with anybody outside of our house. We do not entertain visitors in our house… These behaviors are very strange amongst Liberians… Shaking hands is our one of the cultural values that we have. Liberia may be poor and not willing to be developed, but we are friendly people who believe in shaking hands in a special way, and eating together from the same bowl.

Frances: Schools are closed for time indefinite. We don't know when schools will open. We are sitting at home, watching and praying that school will open sooner. Rumors are coming that schools will open next year— we don't know. What I think the youth can do now is to get on our feet and educate the common man, those that are still in the denial stage, to sensitize them, give them the actual information about this Ebola virus, let the youth get on their feet from house to house, door to door, and try to inform the populace about the deadly Ebola virus, and how it can be prevented.

Abel: I worry a lot about the future of our children's education. I was at the verge of paying my children's tuition when the government announced the closure of all schools in the country. For now, I am my children's tutor at home.

 

"We are urging the international community to come to our rescue, for the downtrodden, because pretty soon there will be another war, and that will be the hunger war."

When the epidemic struck Liberia, a number of hospitals closed, often because their staffs had fled in fear. Adding to the problem, Ebola's symptoms mimic other, still common diseases, but treating anything that resembles Ebola necessitates protective gear that's not always available outside the quarantine centers. That means that many people who are suffering non-Ebola illnesses are going untreated.

Esther (a nurse and midwife): Before, August, September were months we had diarrhea cases in Liberia. But right now, the symptoms of Ebola and malaria are all the same. It's very, very difficult to know an Ebola patient from malaria, so it's very, very difficult to treat any patient in that direction.

Frances: Many were afraid that if you have malaria, you have common cold, you have fever, you go to the hospital, they would diagnose you as an Ebola patient... I even got sick during the outbreak. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I had to do my own medication, but God looked out for me. I'm well. But these were the messages that were going around, that once you have this, they will confine you to a place, they will quarantine you for 21 days, they will inject you. So many Liberians were afraid to go to hospitals. But now the message has spread out. We now know people are surviving of Ebola. Even if it is not Ebola, you just have malaria, you go there, you are treated. They get you tested; they release you on time.

Brooks (an American who was working at the Accountability Lab, an anti-corruption NGO, in Monrovia and has since left the country): Even in July, you heard stories of pregnant women going into labor, bleeding profusely, and not being tended do because people were afraid of Ebola.

Esther: As a midwife, most of the time I have to do deliveries. But right now, as we sit here, this clinic is closed. These are cases that could be treated, but since we don't have the proper equipment, the proper outfits to wear and treat our patients and do tests [for Ebola], we decided to stay away from treating patients, because you don't know who you are touching. Obviously, it's a kind of embarrassment, but we have to go through with it for now.

Before it spread to Monrovia, Ebola struck in Lofa County, Liberia's rice-producing center. Many farmers avoided their fields, severely hurting domestic food production. Food imports (the country imports about two-thirds of its grain supply) have also been hampered because of the crisis. Borders with neighboring countries have been closed, and shipping companies have avoided the nation's ports. All of that has led to the biggest increases in food prices since the nation's civil war, which ended in 2003. In a country where 84 percent of everyone lived on less than $1.25 per day in 2011, this shock has become its own crisis.

Esther: There were times, we were paying, for a 25-kilo [55 pound] bag of rice, we were paying something like 1,150-1,250 [Liberian dollars, or $14 to $15], but right now it's like 1,500 [$18].

John (a Liberian employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross): I see so many people, sometimes they are walking to town [about six miles]. Even if they have money, they prefer walking a distance and saving the money to buy food so they will eat for the day. We tend to be afraid to assist someone from the vehicle, even to tell them the distance they are going, because we don't know who is carrying the virus.

Lawrence (the Liberia country director for Accountability Lab): Hunger is really hitting the country… If the ships are not coming, [farmers] are not making rice, the stockpiles are depleted…the animals are eating the crops, what happens then? The production will decrease, the price will increase, and if you don't have money, what is going to happen? Hunger is going to strike… This is a serious war, without bullets.

It's not just a rise in food prices that Liberians are struggling with; transit costs have increased as well, partly because the government has forbidden commercial vehicles from carrying large numbers of people. Markets have been shut down; NGOs and companies are asking employees to stay at home; schools are closed so teachers are not working. On September 17, the World Bank warned that Ebola could cut Liberia's GDP by 3.4 percentage points, costing $228 million by 2015.

Esther: In my own clinic, I have a staff of twelve. But right now, everybody has to be home until otherwise. Since we don't have protective gear, we don't have anything to work with, we cannot risk our own lives, because if you are not able to protect yourself, you will not able to work with other people. It will be difficult for their families.

Frances: It is better for us to stay at home, but we need, also, to have our daily bread. The international community, international donors, need to come to our rescue, because hunger is taking over Liberia, gradually.

Abel: I have gone out of job because of the Ebola outbreak. Before the outbreak, I had contracts with Princeton, PBS Frontline, Nursing For All, and the Gender Ministry. All of my contracts are on hold until the crisis is over.

The statistics are unreliable, but many report that violent crime is rising since the outbreak began. Even more troubling: some of these crimes have reportedly been at the hands of police and soldiers in uniform. Some Liberian's blame the government's curfew for the problem.

John: Armed robbery is increasing because the government placed this curfew from 9 [p.m.] to 6 AM. Before, there used to be community watch teams. At that time, there was no curfew.

Abel: Our lives were relatively peaceful before the deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus. We could go out any hour and return any hour. There were robberies once in a while, but not compared to the recent ones… I do not know if the proliferation of robberies was political or some criminals just decided to take advantage of the situation.

There have been numerous cases of armed robberies since the curfew was announced… There was one in my community and my neighbors were badly affected. I was really afraid that night when I heard the bullet sound. At that time my family and I were watching movie in the living room. We got scared so much that we couldn't continue the movie. We turned the video off, turned all the lights in the rooms off and went to bed. Fortunately for me, those police officers that came to rescue my neighbors were my friends. They came to my house that night to see how my family and I were doing. [Later, I learned] the robbers wore police uniforms and were fully armed.

Esther: I was a victim about four days ago. I just left my back door open to hang clothes in the front. By the time I was back in, someone had snuck in and took the two phones I had charging. Because the children are not in school, most of the young ones are turning to crime—and not just the young ones, even people who were working and they are not able to work now, some of them are thinking, how do they maintain their families? They are collaborating with some of these criminals to get their way through.

Frances: Liberia is declining, the economy is declining, and things are just getting difficult on a daily basis. We are not free to move around, we are not free in our own country because of this deadly Ebola virus. We are urging the international community to come to our rescue, for the downtrodden, because pretty soon there will be another war, and that will be the hunger war.