Recently in Politics Category

Let me introduce you to a lovely lady I met on October 7th at #OccupyLA. She was there simply to tell her story. Like many people in this economy, she had been finding it difficult to make ends meet, so when Obama's Loan Modification program began it seemed like a godsend. Little did she know, it would be the start rather than the end of her problems.

She duly completed all the paperwork her bank, Wells Fargo, asked her to, and was told what her reduced payments would be. She continued to pay her mortgage, but at the adjusted rate, as she'd been instructed to by Wells Fargo. She never missed a payment, and was not in arrears.

However, months later, out of the blue, she found out her application, for whatever reason, had been rejected. At this point, Wells Fargo treated her like she had been in arrears, because she'd been paying reduced payments on a mortgage that had failed to be modified. To add insult to injury, Wells Fargo then slapped her with a slew of interest charges and fees, because they in effect retroactively considered her account to be in default because of the Loan Modification decision.

Her bank then suggested she reapply, which she did - twice. Two more times, exactly the same thing happened. Following the third failed application, Wells Fargo began proceedings to repossess her home, even though she had made all her mortgage payments in exactly the way the bank had prescribed.

Turns out, the Loan Modification process is notoriously flawed and has been accused numerous times of causing foreclosures, as was the case here. Richard Gaudreau, an attorney, explains in an essay for Huffington Post exactly why the Loan Modification process fails to help troubled homeowners while lining the pockets of banks (surprise, surprise!):

The government pays mortgage servicers $1,000 for each "loan mod" application. Studies have shown though that mortgage servicers stand to make far more in fees from a foreclosure than they ever will from a loan modification request.

Obviously this kind of behavior is unconscionable. It's hard to comprehend that a "trusted name" like Wells Fargo would want to force a loyal customer and her family out onto the street in order to make a quick buck on a few fees. But this is happening to untold numbers of people all across our nation at the hands of nearly all the major banks.

My #OccupyLA friend had done everything required of her to meet her obligations, but somehow that wasn't enough -- is that remotely fair? But these days we don't seem to require fairness, never mind empathy and understanding, from the financial institutions in which we entrust our wealth, our security, and our futures. Clearly this was not an institution worthy of the trust this lady had been placed in it. Is it worthy of yours?

Take the power away from the big banks and move your money to a community institution or credit union. To find a credit union in your area visit: moveyourmoneyproject.org

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As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as advanced and sophisticated as a society. Yet, when it comes to issues of gender equality the numbers don't lie -- there's no escaping the fact that we're pretty damn backwards.

Women make up 51% of the US population, yet hold just 16.6% of the seats in Congress and 17% of those in the Senate. Indeed, we rank 90th in the world in terms of the proportion of women in national parliaments, below Afghanistan, Cuba, China, Ethiopia, Iraq, and the Sudan!

Furthermore, in America, just 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Similarly only 3% of positions of clout in the telecommunications, entertainment, publishing, and advertising industries are held by the fairer sex (pun intended). And this may be part of the problem, since those that are ultimately responsible for the aspirational messages we receive on a daily basis are predominantly male.

That's not to say that the innate sexism that's partly responsible for this power imbalance is necessarily malevolent or even intentional; the root of much of it is simply a lack of consciousness on all our parts. And to an extent, the state of play appears to be self-perpetuating, since a mere 16% of those responsible for Hollywood's mass market dream machine (writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, and editors) are women, which in turn perhaps explains a similar lack of female protagonists/role models in feature films.

A much talked about new documentary, Miss Representation, which recently debuted on the OWN Network, does a very comprehensive job of exploring the underlying reasons for this vast leadership gender gap. The film features many prominent leading ladies including Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Dianne Feinstein, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Geena Davis, Rachel Maddow, Lisa Ling, and Katie Couric, whose powerful voices add strength to the message -- which is that a woman's value is more than just the sum of her youth and beauty (as the mainstream media might have you believe).

SuicideGirls spoke with the driving force behind Miss Representation, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who wrote, directed, and produced the exceptional cinematic gender essay. As a Stanford graduate, environmental and gender activist, actress, and mother -- who also happens to be the wife of the former Mayor of San Francisco, and current Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsom -- she's had a front row seat watching what happens to women in power and how the media treats them, so perhaps has a greater understanding of the issues they face than most.

Read my exclusive interview with Jennifer Siebel Newsom on SuicideGirls.com.

By Nicole Powers

Harry Markopolos has a way with numbers. It's this innate ability that led him to uncover Bernie Madoff's epic Ponzi scheme almost a decade before market forces ultimately leveraged a confession out of the spectacularly crooked investment fund manager.

In 1999, while working as a portfolio manager at Rampart, a Boston based investment management company, Markopolos had been asked to reverse engineer a fund offered by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC so his firm could compete by offering a similar product. After studying Madoff's marketing material for a mere 5 minutes, Markopolos realized that the results the fund claimed to achieve were highly improbable, a further 4 hours of mathematical modeling proved the stated returns were categorically impossible by legal means.

Smelling a rat, Markopolos assembled an informal investigative team to probe Madoff's operation further. In May 2000, when Madoff's scheme was only a $3 to $7 billion fraud, they submitted their first whistleblowing report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It was summarily ignored. Frustrated but undeterred, Markopolos' tenacious group, dubbed The Foxhounds, submitted numerous subsequent memos (in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008) offering even more evidence, to no avail. A 2005 missive had what one might consider to be an attention-grabbing title -"The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is A Fraud" - but even this failed to get an appropriate response from those charged with policing Wall Street.

It was only following the crash of 2008, when Madoff's investors were clamoring to liquidate their assets and he was unable to meet their demands, that the man responsible for the largest act of financial fraud in world history was forced to fess up. By then, Madoff's "fund" had grown on paper to a value of $65 billion. In the following days, the complete and utter failure of the SEC came to light, as press outlets - who had also been alerted by Markopolos, but by and large had declined to report his findings before Madoff's arrest - competed to interview the "Madoff whistleblower." With egg on their faces, the government also sought out Markopolos' knowledge and expertise, and on February 4, 2009 he delivered some riveting televised testimony in front of the House of Representatives' Financial Services Subcommittee.

In March 2010, Markopolos published a book chronicling his investigations into Madoff and the utter incompetence he bore witness to during his dealings with the SEC. Called No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, it became a New York Times bestseller. A new film, Chasing Madoff, based on the book is currently in cinemas.

I caught up with Markopolos, who now works as a freelance investigative accountant exposing Fortune 500 wrongdoing, to talk about Madoff and the current state of play in our financial markets. We also asked him to focus his considerable financial acumen our nation's balance sheet and assess the future prospects of our economy. Given Markopolos' track record, his conclusions about America's should-be junk status are indeed cause for concern, if not outright alarm.

Read my exclusive interview with Harry Markopolos on SuicideGirls.com.

"This is really a civil rights issue."
- Kristin Canty

America devotes an inordinate amount of resources to its wars on controlled substances; namely its wars on drugs - and raw milk. Yep, you read that right. The prohibition of alcohol may have ended in the US in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment, but it's still alive and kicking when it comes to unpasteurized milk.

The retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal in the vast majority of states, and though some states do permit direct farm sales and/or herd shares, federal laws prohibit the sale and transport of raw milk across state lines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers unpasteurized milk or cream -- and any uncooked products made from it, such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream -- to be categorically unsafe. Their official line is that "raw milk can harbor dangerous microorganisms that can pose serious health risks to you and your family."

However, by their own figures, a mere "800 people in the United States have gotten sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk since 1998." When you compare those numbers to the statistics on alcohol and cigarettes - which can be bought legally in all 50 states - the government's position on the sale of raw milk appears to be inconsistent to say the very least. And the discrimination against raw dairy is even more profound when the health benefits are taken into consideration. But while the fight to decriminalize other controlled substances grabs headlines and galvanizes support, few are even aware of the prohibition against real milk. Kristin Canty, a small farm advocate from Massachusetts, hopes to change that with her compelling new documentary, Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms.

Canty didn't set out to make a film, merely to heal her son, who suffered from asthma and severe allergies. When traditional medicine failed to help, she embarked on a voyage of discovery that led her to raw milk. While fighting to heal her sick child, she also had to fight the seemingly unreasonable and intransigent attitude our government has towards healthy-minded boutique farmers who produce this hard to come by commodity in the face of much adversity. Frustrated and angered by reports of raids, and shocked at the increasing ferocity of the persecution of those who were doing nothing more than producing fresh food, Canty was compelled to expose the truth. For her, it wasn't just about the disparity in treatment between big agriculture (whose factory methods have actually been responsible for the majority of serious food scares in recent years) and the mom & pop organic and sustainable operations, but an issue of a mother's right to choose healthy food.

Read my exclusive interview with Kristin Canty on SuicideGirls.com.

They say the house always wins, but in the case of "Casino" Jack Abramoff it was the guy holding the keys to the front and back doors that made out like a bandit. Like thousands of other lobbyists (close to 14,000 individuals were registered as such in 2009 according to the Center for Responsive Politics) Abramoff peddled access to influence, which he bought with generous campaign "donations" and perks such as luxury "fact-finding" trips.

Abramoff wasn't too picky about who his clients were, had no problem representing more than one side, and, as a disciple of Ronald Reagan school of economics, had a innate disrespect for any rules and regulations that interfered with his ability to capitalize at the often excessive expense of his clients.

Having represented several Indian tribes with regards to their lucrative gaming rights, Abramoff (along with business partner Adam Kidan) utilized his gambling expertise and made a play to buy the SunCruz floating casino line. The deal hit headlines in 2005 when three men connected to the Gambino crime family were charged with the 2001 murder of SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Bouli, who had sold a majority interest in the company to Abramoff and his associates. By this time Abramoff was being investigated for bribery and corruption relating to his Indian gaming clients, who had collectively been charged an estimated $85 million in fees by Abramoff and cronies Ralph E. Reed, Jr., Grover Norquist and Michael Scanlon -- for the privilege of being played off against each other.

In truth, Abramoff's business practices probably had much in common with those of a large proportion of his contemporaries. His main crime in Washington's prevailing climate of corruption seemingly being that he got too cocky not to get caught. Ultimately Abramoff and an elite group of conspirators including Ohio's Republican Rep. Bob Ney, his former Chief of Staff, Neil Volz, and Michael Scanlon, who had served as Communications Director for disgraced Texan Rep. Tom DeLay (and had assisted Abramoff in the SunCruz purchase), paid -- albeit relatively lightly -- for their crimes, and Washington was able to breathe a collective sigh of relief that it had been seen to do something with actions that had minimal long-term impact on the status quo.

However, it's this status quo, the lobbying system and how its symbiotic with the way we finance the election of our leaders, that we should really take issue with since it has done more to pervert the course of democracy than any one individual. In 2009 a record $3.48 billion was spent on lobbying. And since a politician's primary objective once they get in power, by necessity, is to find the money to get reelected, it's easy to understand why our representatives in government are forced to serve the needs of those with fat checkbooks above those of the people.

With an eye on this bigger picture, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (whose previous credits include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) takes an in-depth look at the stranger-then-fiction Abramoff affair in his new film Casino Jack and The United States of Money. I caught up with Gibney to talk about the wholesale selling of America he investigated, and how, with a dearth of untarnished white knights, our future champions might just take the form of the likes of Eliot Spitzer (who's the subject of Gibney's next, as yet untitled, project).

Read my interview with Alex Gibney on SuicideGirls.com.