 19 October 19 Fighting Budgets a Thousand Times Ours
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18 October 19
Garrison Keillor | The Days Pass, and Now and Then One Stands Out
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "My father, John, would've been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal."
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Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "My father, John, would've been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal."
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Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash in Austria's Supreme Court in Vienna on June 25. (photo: Herbert Neubauer/Getty)
Is a Ukrainian Oligarch Helping Trump Smear Biden to Evade US Corruption Charges?
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "The conspiracy to reelect the president by misleading the American people about Joe Biden's work in Ukraine continues, despite the impeachment inquiry triggered by revelations that Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried to coerce Ukraine's government into investigating the former vice president."
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "The conspiracy to reelect the president by misleading the American people about Joe Biden's work in Ukraine continues, despite the impeachment inquiry triggered by revelations that Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, tried to coerce Ukraine's government into investigating the former vice president."
EXCERPT:
Firtash has been stranded in the Austrian capital, Vienna, since 2014, when federal prosecutors in Chicago unsealed an indictment charging him with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law that makes it a crime for corporations and their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials.
The Ukrainian billionaire was accused of “an alleged international racketeering conspiracy involving bribes of state and central government officials in India to allow the mining of titanium minerals” to supply Boeing, the Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer, in 2007. Firtash denies that he paid or recommended any bribes, and claims that his arrest, in the immediate aftermath of the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Yanukovych, was a politically motivated effort by the Obama administration to block him from influencing the direction of Ukrainian politics.
Firtash, a backer of Yanukovych, is also a former business partner of the deposed president’s American political consultant, Paul Manafort. In 2008, Firtash and Manafort planned an $850 million real estate project with the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan and convert it into a luxury property.
On September 20, a Reuters reporter photographed them having lunch in the hotel with a woman who looked like Toensing.
@AramRoston Was that Victoria Toensing sitting across from Giuliani, reflected in the mirror in your photograph?
Energy Secretary Rick Perry. (photo: Petras Malukas/Getty)
Energy Secretary Rick Perry Is Quitting After Being Subpoenaed in the Impeachment Probe
Nicholas Wu, USA TODAY
Wu writes: "Energy Secretary Rick Perry faces a subpoena deadline Friday to turn over documents relating to House Democrats' impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, a day after he offered his resignation."
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Nicholas Wu, USA TODAY
Wu writes: "Energy Secretary Rick Perry faces a subpoena deadline Friday to turn over documents relating to House Democrats' impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, a day after he offered his resignation."
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Ray Quinlan, CEO of Sallie Mae, told NBC News the trip was in part to celebrate a record year of billion in sales. (photo: NBC News)
Student Loan Company Flies Employees to Maui to Celebrate Record Profits as Millions of Borrowers Struggle With Payments
Catie Beck, Jackeline Pou and Ben Kesslen, NBC News
Excerpt: "As 1 in 5 American adults wonder how to pay off their combined $1.6 trillion in student debt, Sallie Mae executives and sales team members wrestled with a different question: Between meetings, how should they spend their time on their five-day paid trip to the luxury Fairmont resort on Wailea beach in Maui?"
Catie Beck, Jackeline Pou and Ben Kesslen, NBC News
Excerpt: "As 1 in 5 American adults wonder how to pay off their combined $1.6 trillion in student debt, Sallie Mae executives and sales team members wrestled with a different question: Between meetings, how should they spend their time on their five-day paid trip to the luxury Fairmont resort on Wailea beach in Maui?"
EXCERPT:
Paige McDaniel, 39, took out a federal Sallie Mae student loan to pay for her undergraduate degree 20 years ago. Six years later, before the Sallie Mae split with Navient, she took out a private loan with the company to pay for her grad school.
“I thought they were the same kind of loans,” McDaniel, of the Denver suburb Elizabeth, said. A mother of two, she borrowed $120,000 for her tuition at Lakeland College for a master's in business administration, to help with the cost of living as she worked through school.
The agreement, which included a warning to read it before signing, said the interest rate was variable, but she says she doesn't remember being told the rate was much higher on the private loan.
After graduation, Sallie Mae expected McDaniel to pay “well over $1,500 a month,” she said.
“When I told them that, you know, I couldn't afford that, could we make some payment arrangements, they essentially said, 'So sorry, we'll put a lien on your house and garnish your wages if you don't make those payments,'” McDaniel said.
Now, McDaniel owes $304,000, even though she declared bankruptcy to protect her house after being unable to make her payments. She’s hired an attorney to sue Navient, arguing that bankruptcy should have cleared her debt because it was a private loan.
“There’s no way anybody can ever dig themselves out from underneath that,” McDaniel said. "They just don't see that there are families on the other side of this. It's not just my generation cause I have the loans, it affects my children. How am I going to send them to college?"
McDaniel's experience isn’t an outlier.
The attorney general of Illinois sued Navient and Sallie Mae in 2017, accusing the company of deceptive subprime lending, a failure to offer proper repayment options, and faulty collection practices.
“We worry about private student loans,” said Ashley Harrington, senior policy counsel on student debt at the nonpartisan Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). “They don’t have the same protections for borrowers” that federal loans have, she said.
ICE officer. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
A Mexican Immigrant in ICE Custody Died After Officials Waited More Than Seven Hours to Transfer Him to a Hospital
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "A detention center holding immigrant detainees waited more than seven hours to transfer an ailing 37-year-old Mexican man to a hospital, where he died from bleeding in his brain, according to internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News that reveal previously undisclosed details about the death and raise new questions about the man's treatment."
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Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "A detention center holding immigrant detainees waited more than seven hours to transfer an ailing 37-year-old Mexican man to a hospital, where he died from bleeding in his brain, according to internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News that reveal previously undisclosed details about the death and raise new questions about the man's treatment."
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Young demonstrators gather following a week of protests over the jail sentences given to separatist politicians by Spain's Supreme Court, on October 18, 2019, in Barcelona, Spain. (photo: Sandra Montanez/Getty)
Catalunya's Revolt Will Shake Spain Again
Simon Vazquez, Jacobin
Vazquez writes: "After the victorious mobilizations in Ecuador and the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, Catalunya could prove to be a fresh focus of conflict."
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Simon Vazquez, Jacobin
Vazquez writes: "After the victorious mobilizations in Ecuador and the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, Catalunya could prove to be a fresh focus of conflict."
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Bottlenose dolphin washed ashore in the Gulf of Mexico. (photo: AP)
300 Bottlenose Dolphin Have Washed Up Dead on Shores of Gulf of Mexico. NOAA Not Sure What's Causing It.
Rachel Anderson, ABC News
Anderson writes: "Now, NOAA said dolphins are dying, but they don't know why. More than 300 bottlenose dolphin have washed ashore on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico since February. It has prompted NOAA to issue an 'Unusual Mortality Event.'"
Rachel Anderson, ABC News
Anderson writes: "Now, NOAA said dolphins are dying, but they don't know why. More than 300 bottlenose dolphin have washed ashore on the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico since February. It has prompted NOAA to issue an 'Unusual Mortality Event.'"
CAUTION:
Although the two dolphin mortality events are unrelated, NOAA said it's important for people to know what to do if they come in contact with a stranded dolphin.
Don't push it back to sea. It could be injured or sick. If it dies far from shore, it may take weeks for scientists to find it and impossible to determine what caused it to get sick.
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