Some good news

From Thom Hartmann, t/o:

The Occupy Movement is tackling the nation’s debt problem. Though the physical occupations have disappeared, the movement is busy helping Americans avoid foreclosure and providing disaster relief post-Hurricane Sandy. Now they’ve unveiled a new initiative they’re calling the “Rolling Jubilee.” The movement is raising money to buy debt from financial firms at pennies on the dollar. Then, rather than hounding struggling homeowners and students whose debt they just acquired, Occupy is completely forgiving it. As one organizer explained it, “OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT.” Since Wall Street got bailed out and Main Street got sold out, average Americans are drowning in enormous debt. Good on Occupy for doing something about it.

This is what community based organizing can do and, for those who have read this blog over the years, it’s essentially [1] what I said the government should do long before the mortgage crisis turned into a financial meltdown. If they had done, there would not have been a financial crisis.

Thank God for Occupy. They seem to be the only people with any sense.
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1. My solution was actually to force the borrower to reduce the mortgage to the level that it was payable by having the pain shared equally between the bank, the borrower, and the government. What that amounts to is having the government buy the mortgage at a discount, then re-issue it at a lower rate, thereby canceling a portion of the debt. So what OWS did was even better, though I’m sure that the debt they purchased at 4 cents on the dollar was absolutely unpayable.

My suspicion is…

My suspicion is that Paula Broadwell, David Petraeus’ ex-lover, is an updated version of Lucianne Goldberg.

Mitt Romney did only one truly exceptional thing this campaign: Slightly two hours after the first report of firing on the consulate and well before the facts were established, he broke an embargo on the 9/11 commemoration in order to blame Barack Obama over the attack on the Benghazi consulate, falsely accusing him of “sympathiz[ing] with those who waged the attacks”.

Now, what happened in Benghazi is still unclear. Was it being used to hold and perhaps torture militia members? Was the anti-Muslim film a factor in the attack? Was there a demonstration before the attack, or did it begin with an attack? Why was there no effective response to defend the ambassador? But what happened politically in the US in the aftermath of the attack– about that there is no doubt. The entire Republican machine, led by Mitt Romney, rose up to condemn Barack Obama well before the facts were in. When the primary attack theme of a campaign is put forth so early and with the support of the entire GOP, there’s reason to wonder whether they didn’t have someone on the inside feeding them information.

And now we learn that Paula Broadwell, in October, claimed that there were holding cells in the consulate, something that if true she could only have learned from classified information and therefore presumably committed a criminal act. Not only that, since she is a former military intelligence officer, this would have been a conscious crime. We know that Darrell Issa released classified cables, endangering Libyans who were working with the US. What did Broadwell discuss with congressional Republicans?

Obviously, it’s early. But my suspicion is that in leaking [potentially]classified [and in any case damaging] information, Paula Broadwell was primarily serving a power hostile to this nation’s interest: the GOP. This is one of those situations where it really would be irresponsible not to speculate.
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Update: Lawrence O’Donnell says (based on WSJ) that the FBI agent who initiated the investigation that exposed Broadwell as the source of e-mails to Jill Kelley (a) had political leanings of a definite nature, and (b) sent shirtless photos of himself to Kelley(not that there’s anything inherently suspicious or wrong about that, but it does suggest that their friendship was closer than the hi-how-are-you variety).

The agent went to Cong. David Reichert, which would be really bad if this were actually a national security investigation. Reichert is not on the intelligence committees, and it’s very doubtful that he has a security clearance sufficient to cover a case like that. Broadwell did have classified information on her computer, but it didn’t come from Petraeus. The intelligence committee heads/ranking members were not briefed, so they are ticked off.