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I put my picture on wearethe99percent.tumblr.com … because I feel like a refugee from a pocket third-world country in the US, created by the 1% and the government's insane/corrupt need to please them.  And I'm very aware, every day, what a lucky one of the 99% I am.  The luck is nice, but it's incredibly tough to be lucky when everyone you left at ( Read more... )

Just stumbled on Andrew Moore's excellent photos of Detroit…these are a great example of how photos of real places in crisis can be artistic without being exploitative.  Kudos to Andrew for finding the beauty here without covering up the grotesque, and for facing the grotesque without letting it tell the whole story.

Or maybe I just like them ( Read more... )

Farming Detroit


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Health insurance mandate upheld : SCOTUSblog.

A federal judge in Detroit, in a broad ruling upholding Congress’s power to require all Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, decided Thursday that the mandate is necessary to prevent the “extinction” of the nation’s entire health care insurance market. U.S. District Judge George Caram ( Read more... )

Maybe Homeowners Wouldn't Strategically Default If Lenders Cooperated

Will a Human at B of A Please Modify My $160,000-Underwater Mortgage


Blatantly Racist Subprime Loans


Slothful Loan Modifiers Earn More Money When You're Delinquent


Bank Told Homeowner to Skip Payments, Then Foreclosed


Asymmetrical Norms: Why Homeowners Aren't Walking Away
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Martin Luther King Day was first proposed by Michigan Representative John Conyers in 1979.  It failed in Congress by five votes, and a huge petition was begun, which finally got the holiday approved in Congress in 1983.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Detroit used to be Twelfth Street, until that's where the riots were in 1967.  "Twelfth Street ( Read more... )

Two things that make me angry:

One, prosecutorial immunity.  I mean, yes, I understand the point of protecting professional public adversaries from punishment for doing their jobs; but when we’re seriously asking "Should prosecutors be allowed to knowingly frame people for murder and get away with it?" - something’s effing broken.

And two, people ( Read more... )

Maybe it’s the philosopher in me, but I don’t see how any argument against racism that depends on color to make its point is valuable in the long run.  If the goal is to end racism, which I hope it is, then shouldn’t we be engaged in activities and rhetoric that de-emphasize skin color (etc.) as a valid reason to make political (and by extension ( Read more... )

Welcome to a Massive Dump of The Interesting, wherein I finally close some of the browser-windows.  (Yes, this is what you get when I go out of town for a few days.  Just roll with it.)

“Were a lot of people reckless and stupid? Of course! But that cannot explain why the whole system crashed, since a lot of people are always reckless and stupid.”

- ( Read more... )