#when a felons not engaged in his employment

[dickensianenglishbulldog]

Pros: I can now sing (badly) every word of a total of twenty two Gilbert and Sullivan songs.

Cons: no one cares.

[anextrapart]

Usually seeking and maintaining employment is a big part of parole conditions. This is complicated by the fact that lots of places won’t hire ex-felons. Where does Jimmy find work, what does he think of it, and what’s Kim’s opinion of it?

(So because he's serving federal I don't think parole is an option, but supervised release is by my understanding something that imposes similar rules/restrictions so let's assume that's the case.)

I have a few ideas on this, actually! I've seen some people kick around the idea that he works in a bakery, which is an idea I really like and he obviously has actual experience for. Whether he would be able to get hired as a felon though would probably depend largely on the people hiring. Jimmy is very charming and I think would make a good first impression, but once he was required to disclose that info I think it's very possible that he wouldn't be hired.

Another thought is that he gets involved wherever Kim is working, even if just in the short term right when he gets out. I'm leaning heavily toward the idea of Kim retaking the bar and being a lawyer again, and then working for (or starting her own) small setup like what she'd wanted in Albuquerque- providing excellent and affordable legal services for the people who most need them. Jimmy obviously is not going to be a lawyer or be allowed to have anything to do with cases in an official capacity, but there's always office work. It would be a steady job and would allow he and Kim to be near each other. Plus, she can vouch for him if she isn't the one running the show and he needs to get beyond the hiring hurdle. Though I do think there's some possibility with that scenario that Kim would actually not want him there. Or rather, not not want him there, but have concerns over the impression it might give? Because on the one hand as a business it would be so important to be above reproach and Jimmy obviously has a very public history as a troublemaker, but on the other hand how better to show your commitment to helping people convicted of crimes than by hiring a felon?

And my other idea is actually that he gets himself into a creative field, which is honestly where I think he should have been all along. Marketing, advertising, and design can all be largely self-taught and he clearly already has a knack for it. He'd have a lot to learn in terms of technology and software, but freelancing in those areas would probably suit him quite well once he was up to speed. He'd have a creative outlet and be his own boss regarding working hours and whatnot.

Honestly he might just do all of the above. Get a job at a bakery (let's assume best case scenario because why not?) right when he gets out because he needs a job. Over time he goes to visit Kim at the office a lot and people get to know and like him because of course they do, so eventually he starts volunteering some extra time there and that turns into a job. He wasn't planning it and neither was Kim, but somebody else raises the idea first. Once they talk it through and he sees that Kim is on board, Jimmy is all about it. He gets to be with her almost all day! Gets to see her doing the thing she's best at and loves the most!

And in the meantime maybe he picks up a laptop and downloads some creative software, starts messing around with it. Eventually he gets a few freelance gigs. Maybe it isn't enough to pay the bills, but it's fun and engaging and his clients really seem to like his work, so he cuts back a little bit at the office so he has more time to devote to that.

Kim's just happy if he's happy, I think. She doesn't want to see him discouraged or bored, so as long as he's doing something on the up and up (and there's no chance anymore that he won't), she'll support him.

-

send me mcwexler ideas or prompts for after jimmy gets out of jail and I’ll try to write headcanon/fic stuff!

[lol-jackles]

im gonna ask you the same thing as after every thursday night, so i hope it doesnt bother you because i like your insight. If you watched the latest episode of Walker (1.11) what did you think of it ?

It was done very well because "Freedom" was about the heart but disguised as an action episode: a ranger with a conflicted heart, a misdemeanant with a foolish heart, an escaped felon with a misplaced paternal heart, and 3 generations of Walkers’ first loves that ended differently.  And then there is a police case as complicated as the relationships brought on by these various hearts.

The day Hoyt is released from prison is the same day Clint escaped from prison.  Cordell welcomes Hoyt home before leaving to track down Clint using the knowledge from his undercover days that put Clint away in the first place.  Cordell visits Twyla Jean in prison to gain further information on Clint's whereabouts.  Their reunion is awkward as one can expect.  She asked if they were real, Cordell said she was the right woman at the time.

Emily was Cordell’s first love and it was implied they met when they were barely adults.  Since Emily’s death, Cordell’s inexperience with the dating scene and women in general resulted in two inappropriate relationships, one with a bank robber while undercover and a kiss between him and Geri when she was still seeing Hoyt in prison.  

Hoyt and Trevor's hearts have foolish romantic expectations with their respective girlfriends, and even more unrealistic notions about making a living to support their girlfriends.  They act as if they're in Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" song where living in crippling poverty is okay as long as you have loooooove.  Every suburban mothers I know with teenage daughters loathes that song even though they loved it when they were teenagers themselves.

Trevor burning his father's cache of stolen money was peak romantic gesture to Stella and across the platforms you can hear wails from adult viewers as they went

Hoyt's dim employment prospects is maybe why Abilene wanted Geri to marry him.  Geri at least was a successful business owner and can provide for Hoyt.  Abilene gives Hoyt a diamond ring to give to Geri, the ring came from Abilene's presumingly first love until she met Bonham and immediately broke off her engagement.  Abilene's former fiance didn't care enough that she choose Bonham over him to ask for the ring back. Hoyt didn't care enough that Geri and Cordell kissed that he didn’t break off relationship with either of them.

"Freedom" wraps up with father and daughter trying to reconcile, again.  Like in the second episode when Cordell texted Stella in the same room, he talked to Stella on her level by knowing what first love is lke.  I thought Cordell was going to tell Stella that she's too young to know what love is and I'm glad he didn't even though it is true; it's just too cliche of a line used too many times to prolong unnecessary drama in most fictions.  In-verse Cordell probably couldn't use that line because he was not that much older than Stella when he met and then married his first love, Stella's mother.  Cordell tried to understand that Trevor could be to Stella as Emily was to him.  Most times first love does not last, it didn't for Abilene and it may not for Hoyt.  

Finally, I'm glad to see Liam get some undivided attention from Abilene and Bonham in the last two episodes.  He has put his family ahead of himself and his relationship for nearly two years and it’s about time he was acknowledged for it.  

[naconaphoenix]

* Among the 5 million formerly incarcerated people living in the United States, finding that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.

* While we found that 203 out of every 10,000 formerly incarcerated people were homeless, nearly three times as many - 570 out of every 10,000 - were housing insecure.

* We find that rates of homelessness are especially high among specific demographics:

People who have been incarcerated more than once

People recently released from prison

People of color and women

*Decent and stable housing is essential for human survival and dignity, a principle affirmed both in U.S. policy and international human rights law.The United States provides federally subsidized housing to millions of low-income people who could not otherwise afford homes on their own.U.S. policies, however, exclude countless needy people with criminal records, condemning them to homelessness or transient living.

In addition to the explicit goal of protecting tenant safety, there seem to be at least two other reasons for criminal record exclusions in public housing.The first is a widespread belief in the United States that people who have broken the law do not deserve a second chance and are the legitimate target of policies that are little more than expressions of disdain and hostility.Such a punitive view ignores the right of all people to a life with dignity and should have no place in housing policy.

The second reason is that the demand for public housing far exceeds the supply.Neither the federal nor state governments have taken upon themselves the goal of dramatically increasing the availability of affordable housing. Instead, by requiring strict admissions policies, the federal government has tacitly adopted a method of "triage" to whittle down the numbers of qualified applicants. Excluding those with criminal records has proven to be a politically cost-free way to entirely cut out a large group of people from the pool of those seeking housing assistance.

Decent and stable housing is essential for human survival and dignity, a principle affirmed both in U.S. policy and international human rights law.The United States provides federally subsidized housing to millions of low-income people who could not otherwise afford homes on their own.U.S. policies, however, exclude countless needy people with criminal records, condemning them to homelessness or transient living.

Exclusions based on criminal records ostensibly protect existing tenants.There is no doubt that some prior offenders still pose a risk and may be unsuitable neighbors in many of the presently-available public housing facilities.But U.S. housing policies are so arbitrary, overbroad, and unnecessarily harsh that they exclude even people who have turned their lives around and remain law-abiding, as well as others who may never have presented any risk in the first place.

There is no national data on the number of people excluded from public housing because of criminal records, or even the number of people with criminal records who would be ineligible if they applied.But we know that there are several million ex-felons in the United States; under current housing policies, everyone convicted of a felony is automatically ineligible for a minimum of five years.We also know that there are tens of millions of Americans who have been convicted of misdemeanors, or merely arrested but never convicted of any offense, and they too can be and often are excluded from public housing on the basis of their criminal records.

Under existing policies, criminal records will shadow people for the rest of their lives.Even an arrest that is not followed by conviction can have a lifelong impact.Whether the offense is a violent crime or a low-level drug or property offense-and even most felonies do not involve violence against persons-a criminal record can be a barrier to employment, education, the right to vote, and certain public benefits, including public housing.

The tenuous relationship between public housing restrictions and legitimate safety goals is exemplified by policies that, for example, automatically deny housing to a person convicted of a single shoplifting offense four years earlier, or to someone convicted of simple possession of marijuana ten years earlier.Denying these people a home does little to promote the welfare of existing tenants.But it can cause homelessness or transient living for those excluded-and it can be counterproductive for community safety, as it is difficult to be law-abiding while living on the streets.

In addition to the explicit goal of protecting tenant safety, there seem to be at least two other reasons for criminal record exclusions in public housing.The first is a widespread belief in the United States that people who have broken the law do not deserve a second chance and are the legitimate target of policies that are little more than expressions of disdain and hostility.Such a punitive view ignores the right of all people to a life with dignity and should have no place in housing policy.

The second reason is that the demand for public housing far exceeds the supply.Neither the federal nor state governments have taken upon themselves the goal of dramatically increasing the availability of affordable housing. Instead, by requiring strict admissions policies, the federal government has tacitly adopted a method of "triage" to whittle down the numbers of qualified applicants. Excluding those with criminal records has proven to be a politically cost-free way to entirely cut out a large group of people from the pool of those seeking housing assistance.

Exclusions from public housing are among the harshest of a range of punitive laws that burden people with criminal records.Nevertheless, to date they have received scant attention from policymakers, elected officials, advocates for the poor, and the public at large.

There is, however, growing recognition nationwide of the wisdom of providing transitional services and assistance to help over half a million men and women who leave prison each year.Indeed, as President Bush pointed out in his 2004 State of the Union address, such services are crucial if these former prisoners are to successfully navigate their reentry to life outside prison walls.An overwhelming majority of those who are incarcerated were poor when they were arrested, and they will return to their communities with fewer resources and more needs than when they left.

The Bush administration and Congress have endorsed the concept of providing transitional housing to at least some former prisoners, but transitional housing is, by definition, temporary.Policymakers to date have failed to recognize the devastating impact of public housing exclusionary policies that outlast the transition period.

As long as those policies remain unchanged, former prisoners, as well as people with criminal records who were never sent to prison, will find themselves condemned to living on the streets, in overcrowded shelters, in squalid transient motels, or crowded into in the homes of friends and relatives.

* * *

The exclusion of people with criminal records from public housing is often referred to as the "one strike" policy.This policy developed in the 1990s as an attempt to address drug trafficking, violent crime, and disorder in public housing, especially urban high-rise developments.In 1996, President Bill Clinton declared: "The rule in public housing should be one strike and you're out."[1]That is, commission of one offense suffices to render a person ineligible to be admitted to or remain in public housing.Congress subsequently incorporated the "one strike" policy into federal housing law.Today, federal law requires public housing authorities (PHAs), the agencies that administer housing assistance and manage public housing property, to exclude people with certain types of criminal records and gives them broad discretion to deny admission to others.

Federal law bans outright three categories of people from admission to public housing: those who have been convicted of methamphetamine production on the premises of federally funded housing, who are banned for life; those subject to lifetime registration requirements under state sex offender registration programs; and people who are currently using illegal drugs, regardless of whether they have been convicted of any drug-related offense.

PHAs have the discretion to deny admission to three additional categories of applicants: (1) those who have been evicted from public housing because of drug-related criminal activity for a period of three years following eviction; (2) those who have in the past engaged in a pattern of disruptive alcohol consumption or illegal drug use, regardless of how long ago such conduct occurred; and, (3) the catch-all category of those who have engaged in any drug-related criminal activity, any violent criminal activity, or any other criminal activity, if the PHA deems them a safety risk.Our research indicates that, in practice, these discretionary categories are used to exclude a wide swath of people with criminal records without any reasonable basis to believe they may actually pose a risk.

Federal regulations advise PHAs to take into consideration in their admissions decisions the nature and remoteness of applicants' offenses, as well as mitigating factors and evidence of rehabilitation.But they do not require PHAs to do any individualized evaluations of whether or not a specific applicant is likely to pose a risk to the safety of existing public housing residents-and few of them provide a meaningful evaluation before issuing a rejection.Nor does the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-the federal agency that administers housing programs-review admissions criteria established by the PHAs to determine if, on their face, they are consistent with federal housing policy and goals.

Most PHAs automatically deny eligibility to an applicant with a criminal record without considering rehabilitation or mitigation.Consideration of those factors typically occurs only if and when an applicant for housing seeks administrative review of a denial of eligibility.Those who have lawyers often win such appeals.But many applicants for public housing are unable to secure representation, and are therefore unable to successfully challenge denials.

In a country with the wealth of the United States, the fundamental human right to housing is surely not satisfied when an estimated 3 million people are homeless in any given year, including many who have been excluded from federally subsidized housing.

Waiting lists maintained by individual PHAs show hundreds of thousands of people seeking housing assistance. According to HUD, applicants wait an average of one to two years, and often much longer, for access to conventional public housing and the voucher program. Despite its commitment to "End Homelessness in 10 Years" and its subsequent call for increased appropriations for homeless services (which include such things as nightly shelter beds and social services), the federal government has not met increases in homelessness and poverty with an increase in the development of new units of subsidized housing

The latest census figures show that 35.9 million people, or 12.5 percent of the American population, live at or below the official poverty level.[26]According to a 2003 National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) report, families with extremely low incomes are unable to afford housing at fair market rates in almost every U.S. jurisdiction.[27]But it is not just the impoverished who cannot afford housing in the private market; even the working poor are unable to pay for adequate housing on their own. As one analyst has noted, "the working poor have been left practically helpless, unable to get into the market and unserved by underfunded federal and state housing programs

In summary, in this country, it is only the virtious who are currently allowed to own a home, in almost all cases. Those women deemed "less than", who are felons, ex addicts or current addicts are systemstically denied the chance to own a home and in most cases sre unable to rent. Many are homeless or forced to live in shelters or with friends. The higher classes of Americans feel justified in denying this basic humsn right, and i ask you, is this right? Is this what America was built for?

But Restricting public benefits for the virtuous has obvious public appeal. But human rights are not a privilege of the deserving.

Thats why we are driven to start change! Our mission is to give these women and men a chance to buy a tiny home, on installments with low interest. Each home is set up on lot in the tiny home park. Once the home us paid for, the owner is free to move ot to their own land or to continue to rent. Our goal is help every homeless or near homeless woman or man in Phoenix who wants to own a home to do so.

[rotationalsymmetry]

I might regret speaking up on this.

I support sex workers.

My current understanding is that sex workers are generally in favor of sex work being legalized. So, as long as that understanding holds, I am for legalization of sex work.

Being opposed to work (being opposed to having to work to survive) in general has no bearing on this. Because outlawing work is not how you go about getting rid of people having to work to survive, obviously.

People who are against sex work and work in general, seem to be in favor of throwing sex workers in jail without actually addressing the reasons people (not exclusively women) turn to sex work, which is not good for people. Or in favor of throwing their clients in jail, which also makes conditions more dangerous for the sex workers themselves. Being against sex work as work means treating it the exact same way as other forms of work. Not keeping sex work uniquely criminalized as a form of work, or increasing penalties or enforcement, just because that’s more achievable than your other goals.

I am opposed to human trafficking (which includes sex trafficking but is not limited to or primarily sex trafficking.) (In concept. I admit I haven’t really been *doing* things about it, and I’m not even all that informed about it. But yeah, no one is going to say they’re for trafficking.) There absolutely is an issue where it can be hard to tell who’s being trafficked.

(There is also a wide gray zone that isn’t being trafficked as such, but is people engaging in sex work because they don’t want to live in abject poverty, because they don’t want to string together three part time jobs and still not have health insurance, etc. And situations that aren’t technically being paid for sex but are “I can’t afford to break up with my boyfriend” kinda situations. Which, btw, I can’t imagine that anti sex work laws ever catch that kind of thing, and would it actually help anyone if they did?)

I’m not sure what the answer is, but consider. Violent crime rates in the US went down when...people stopped using lead paint. Often the main effects on crime (including the more horrifying types of crime, like trafficking) are more about what conditions support those forms of crime, than about the strength of law enforcement and being “tough on crime.” I don’t know what groups working against trafficking have to say on this. But I’d imagine at least some are focused on conditions that make it easier or harder for trafficking to happen, and/or supporting people who have been trafficked, rather than assuming law enforcement is the best and only approach.

(In particular: I have to imagine that the whole thing in the US of “oh, you got sent to prison and served your time? No public housing for you, no food stamps for you and your kids, you’ll have to tell employers that you’re a former felon for the rest of your life, and your friends and relatives in public housing could be prosecuted for letting you crash on their couch” has *got* to make sex work seem like an increasingly viable/necessary option for a lot of former prisoners?* How about if we’re concerned about people being forced into sex work, we start with recognizing how severely the prison industrial complex and “tough on crime” restrictions on former prisoners, limit people’s options.**)

*”prison inmates” don’t care, gonna call it like I see it

**going out on a limb a bit, it’s possible this is actually not a bug but a feature for people passing “tough on crime” laws. I wouldn’t be surprised if an awful lot of high status politicians see sex workers on the regular and want to make sure the supply/demand ratio is in their favor. While of course being publically opposed to sex work. (It’s not any more hypocritical than That Guy (has he officially been defeated yet, I haven’t checked the news this morning) running on an anti-immigration platform and also using undocumented immigrants’ labor in his businesses — because hey, if they can be easily deported they’re so much easier to exploit. Feature, not bug.)

[sataniccapitalist]

Yesterday CNBC reported that Citigroup is one of the banks selected by the Small Business Administration to handle billions of dollars earmarked in last week’s stimulus bill to help small businesses get back on their feet and keep their employees paid during the coronavirus crisis. Citigroup’s Citicorp subsidiary was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, a criminal felony count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice on May 20, 2015 for its role in rigging foreign currency trading. Its rap sheet for a long series of abuses to its customers and investors since 2008 is nothing short of breathtaking. (See its rap sheet at the end of this article.)

During the financial crash of 2007 to 2010, Citigroup received the largest bailout in global banking history after its former top executives had walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars that they cashed out of stock options. Citigroup received over $2.5 trillion in secret Federal Reserve loans; $45 billion in capital infusions from the U.S. Treasury; a government guarantee of over $300 billion on its dubious “assets”; a government guarantee of $5.75 billion on its senior unsecured debt and $26 billion on its commercial paper and interbank deposits by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Sandy Weill was the Chairman and CEO of Citigroup as it built up its toxic footprint and off-balance-sheet vehicles that blew up the bank. Weill was also the man who engineered the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression-era legislation that had safeguarded the U.S. banking system for 66 years before its repeal in 1999. Weill needed the Glass-Steagall legislation to vanish so that he could merge his hodgepodge of Wall Street trading firms (Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney, et al) with a federally-insured bank full of deposits. Weill told his merger partner, John Reed of Citibank, that his motivation for the deal was: “We could be so rich,” according to Reed in an interview with Bill Moyers.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall meant that the casino-style investment banks and trading houses across Wall Street could now own federally-insured commercial banks and use those mom and pop deposits in a heads we win, tails you lose strategy. Every major Wall Street trading house either bought a federally-insured bank or created one. (See the co-author of this article testifying before the Federal Reserve on June 26, 1998 against the Citigroup merger and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in this video.)

What Weill meant by “We could be so rich” was this: If the trading bets won big, the CEOs became obscenely rich on stock-option-based performance pay. When the bets lost big, the government would be forced to do a bailout rather than allow a giant federally-insured bank to fail. This is why the Federal Reserve had to secretly plow $29 trillion into Wall Street banks and their foreign derivatives counterparties between 2007 and 2011 and why the Fed had to open its money spigot again on September 17 of last year – months before there were any reports of coronavirus COVID-19 cases anywhere in the world.

Sandy Weill became a billionaire at the merged Wall Street bank, known as Citigroup, through a technique that compensation expert Graef “Bud” Crystal called the Count Dracula stock option plan – you simply could not kill it; not even with a silver bullet. Nor could you prosecute it, because Citigroup’s crony Board of Directors rubber-stamped it. The plan worked like this: every time Weill exercised one set of stock options, he got a reload of approximately the same amount of options, regardless of how many frauds the bank had been charged with during the year. (And there were plenty. See rap sheet below.)

Writing at Bloomberg News, Crystal explained that between 1988 and 2002, Weill “received 96 different option grants” on an aggregate of $3 billion of stock. Crystal says “It’s a wonder that Weill had time to run the business, what with all his option grants and exercises. In the years 1996, 1997, 1998 and 2000, Weill exercised, and then received new option grants, a total of, respectively, 14, 20, 13 and 19 times.”

When Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003, he had amassed over $1 billion in compensation, the bulk of it coming from his reloading stock options. (He remained as Chairman of Citigroup until 2006.) Just one day after stepping down as CEO, Citigroup’s Board of Directors allowed Weill to sell back to the corporation 5.6 million shares of his stock for $264 million. This eliminated Weill’s risk that his big share sale would drive down his own share prices as he was selling. The Board negotiated the price at $47.14 for all of Weill’s shares.

On May 9, 2011 Citigroup did a 1 for 10 reverse stock split, meaning if you previously owned 100 shares of Citigroup, you now owned just 10 and the price was adjusted upward accordingly. At yesterday’s closing price of $38.51 (actually $3.85 if adjusted for the reverse stock split), Citigroup’s long-term shareholders are still down 92 percent from where Weill bailed out of the stock in 2003.

Another man that became obscenely rich from Citigroup was Robert Rubin, the Treasury Secretary under the Bill Clinton administration who helped Citigroup advocate for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Without any meaningful cooling-off period, Rubin went straight from his government post to serve on the Board of Citigroup. Rubin received more than $120 million in compensation over the next eight years for his non-management job.

John Reed had a falling out with Weill and retired from Citigroup in April 2000. In Monica Langley’s book, Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World. . .and Then Nearly Lost It All, the author reports that Reed owned 4.7 million shares of Citigroup on the date of his retirement. Langley also writes that “Reed immediately began selling his Citigroup shares and laid plans with his second wife to buy a house on an island off the coast of France.”

If Reed sold all of his Citigroup shares over the next three months after his retirement at an average price at the time of $62, he would have realized $291 million in proceeds. According to SEC filings (see here and here) Reed also received a $5 million retirement bonus and a retirement pension of at least $2,019,528 annually.

According to the SEC filings, Reed was also to receive the following: lawsuit indemnifications arising from company employment; an office at Citigroup, secretarial support and access to a car and driver for as long as Reed deemed it “useful.” If Reed decided he needed an office outside of New York City, that would be provided with secretarial support until age 75.

When Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003, he put his General Counsel and personal friend, Chuck Prince, in charge as CEO. Prince took the fall when the company imploded in 2008. For being a good foot soldier to Weill, Prince got an exit package of $68 million.

And then there was Vikram Pandit, a hedge fund manager whom Robert Rubin selected to run the sprawling Citigroup. The Wall Street Journal reported that Pandit took home $221.5 million during his five years at Citigroup.

Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that guaranteed Citigroup’s debt during the financial crisis, wrote this about Pandit’s persona at a meeting with other bankers in her book “Bull by the Horns”:

“Pandit looked nervous, and no wonder. More than any other institution represented in that room, his bank was in trouble. Frankly, I doubted that he was up to the job. He had been brought in to clean up the mess at Citi. He had gotten the job with the support of Robert Rubin, the former secretary of the Treasury who now served as Citi’s titular head. I thought Pandit had been a poor choice. He was a hedge fund manager by occupation and one with a mixed record at that. He had no experience as a commercial banker; yet now he was heading one of the biggest commercial banks in the country.”

When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded its findings into what led to the financial crash of Wall Street in 2008, resulting in millions of job losses and foreclosures across America, it made numerous referrals for potential criminal prosecutions to the Justice Department. Three of Citigroup’s executives were among those referrals: Robert Rubin, Chuck Prince and former CFO Gary Crittenden. Nothing ever became of those referrals.

In 2012 the law firm Kirby McInerney agreed to settle a lawsuit against Citigroup on behalf of shareholders for $590 million. The lawsuit charged that Citigroup had lied to shareholders about its financial condition, including its losses from off-balance-sheet accounting tricks. The plaintiffs wrote this about Citigroup’s Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs), which were loans to lower credit-rated companies that were then pooled together:

“After purchasing insurance on a CLO tranche, Citigroup would book the difference in the cost of the insurance and the payments of the loan for the entire life of the loan immediately as if the loan had been sold…Additionally, Citigroup engaged in negative basis trades with the billions of dollars of CLO exposure remaining on the Company’s balance sheet. These trades allowed Citigroup to book immediate gain for the entire term of loans by purchasing insurance on their default and, thereby, treat the purchase of insurance as a sale of the loans when, in fact, those loans (or rather, those CLO tranches) never left Citigroup’s books…In addition to the high fees for CLO creation, the ability to create instant gain through these trades was a powerful incentive for Citigroup to issue ever riskier leveraged loans. While revenue from fees and negative-basis trades inflated Citigroup’s earnings on leveraged loans and CLOs, Citigroup kept its shareholders unaware of the artificial source of the gains or the inherent risks in continuing to operate its ephemeral money-making machine.”

After Citigroup’s massive bailout by taxpayers and the Federal Reserve, its crime spree continued. This is just a sampling of charges brought against Citigroup and its affiliates since December 2008:

Citigroup’s Rap Sheet:

December 11, 2008: SEC forces Citigroup and UBS to buy back $30 billion in auction rate securities that were improperly sold to investors through misleading information.

July 29, 2010: SEC settles with Citigroup for $75 million over its misleading statements to investors that it had reduced its exposure to subprime mortgages to $13 billion when in fact the exposure was over $50 billion.

October 19, 2011: SEC agrees to settle with Citigroup for $285 million over claims it misled investors in a $1 billion financial product.  Citigroup had selected approximately half the assets and was betting they would decline in value.

February 9, 2012: Citigroup agrees to pay $2.2 billion as its portion of the nationwide settlement of bank foreclosure fraud.

August 29, 2012: Citigroup agrees to settle a class action lawsuit for $590 million over claims it withheld from shareholders’ knowledge that it had far greater exposure to subprime debt than it was reporting.

July 1, 2013: Citigroup agrees to pay Fannie Mae $968 million for selling it toxic mortgage loans.

September 25, 2013: Citigroup agrees to pay Freddie Mac $395 million to settle claims it sold it toxic mortgages.

December 4, 2013: Citigroup admits to participating in the Yen Libor financial derivatives cartel to the European Commission and accepts a fine of $95 million.

July 14, 2014: The U.S. Department of Justice announces a $7 billion settlement with Citigroup for selling toxic mortgages to investors. Attorney General Eric Holder called the bank’s conduct “egregious,” adding, “As a result of their assurances that toxic financial products were sound, Citigroup was able to expand its market share and increase profits.”

November 2014: Citigroup pays more than $1 billion to settle civil allegations with regulators that it manipulated foreign currency markets. Other global banks settled at the same time.

May 20, 2015: Citicorp, a unit of Citigroup becomes an admitted felon by pleading guilty to a felony charge in the matter of rigging foreign currency trading, paying a fine of $925 million to the Justice Department and $342 million to the Federal Reserve for a total of $1.267 billion. The prior November it paid U.S. and U.K. regulators an additional $1.02 billion.

May 25, 2016: Citigroup agrees to pay $425 million to resolve claims brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it had rigged interest-rate benchmarks, including ISDAfix, from 2007 to 2012.

July 12, 2016: The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Citigroup Global Markets Inc. $7 million for failure to provide accurate trading records over a period of 15 years. According to the SEC: “CGMI failed to produce records for 26,810 securities transactions comprising over 291 million shares of stock and options in response to 2,382 EBS requests made by Commission staff, between May 1999 and April 2014, due to an error in the computer code for CGMI’s EBS response software. Despite discovering the error in late April 2014, CGMI did not report the issue to Commission staff or take steps to produce the omitted data until nine months later on January 27, 2015. CGMI’s failure to discover the coding error and to produce the missing data for many years potentially impacted numerous Commission investigations.”

June 15, 2018: Citigroup agrees to settle with states for $100 million over charges that it rigged the Libor interest rate benchmark.

June 29, 2018: Citigroup’s Citibank settles with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for $335 million in restitution to credit card customers over charges that it violated the Truth in Lending Act.

August 16, 2018: Citigroup settles with SEC for $10.5 million over inadequate controls, mismarking of illiquid positions and unauthorized proprietary trading.

September 14, 2018: Citigroup settles with SEC for $13 million over charges it improperly operated its Dark Pool – an internal stock exchange where it is allowed to trade its own stock.

May 22, 2019: Citigroup settles a money laundering case with the U.S. Department of Justice for $97.44 million.

November 26, 2019: Citigroup settles with the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulatory Authority for $57 million over charges that it incorrectly reported the bank’s capital and liquidity levels.

.

[ademocrat]

A judge refused to recognize pro-trans law in a hate crime case. That’s judicial misconduct.

On July 23, 2018, Kimura Steuball went to a Mobil station on Seven Mile Road in Detroit. Upon arrival, she saw Deonton Rogers inside the station with a woman. When Steuball got in line to make a purchase, Rogers began talking to her using derogatory, transphobic language.

Rogers then began asking about her sex organs – specifically whether he could see “it.” Steuball tried to ignore him, but he persisted in calling her a man. Then he got violent.

Related: Utah just upgraded their ‘worthless’ hate crimes law, while Indiana passed a worthless one

He pulled out a gun and threatened to kill her. The woman with Rogers told him to leave Steuball alone and leave. It was at this time that a child who had been in Rogers’ car entered the station. As Rogers began moving toward the exit, gun in hand, he walked threateningly close to Steuball, who reacted by grabbing at the gun to get it away from him.

A struggle ensued. The gun discharged.

Steuball was hit in the left shoulder. Still, she did manage to grab the gun, after which Rogers’ companion took it – only to give it back to him as she, Rogers, and the child scurried away.

As for Steuball?

Her shoulder was shattered and she spent several days in the hospital.

Rogers was eventually apprehended and charged with being a habitual offender, discharging a firearm in a building causing physical injury and serious impairment, felonious assault, possessing a gun during a felony, felon firearm possession, and fourth degree child abuse.

And also ethnic intimidation.

At a preliminary hearing, Rogers objected to the firearm discharge charges, claiming a lack of intent. Notably, at the same hearing, the court found that “gender,” in the ethnic intimidation statute, included “transgender.”

At the next court level up, Rogers again sought to dismiss the building-firearm charges – as well as the ethnic intimidation charge, arguing not only that the prosecution had failed to demonstrate that he’d committed a malicious physical act accompanied by a specific intent to harass Steuball because of her gender but also that the Ethnic Intimidation Act – the state’s hate crime law – did not apply to trans people at all.

The judge there blamed the victim for initiating the physical contact that led to the firearm discharge and agreed with Rogers that trans people were strangers to Michigan’s ethnic intimidation statute.

The prosecution appealed this decision up to a panel of the Court of Appeals, which split 2-1 with the majority opinion being authored by Mike Gadola, a product of Republican former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration (though, sickeningly, he was unopposed when he ran for a full term in 2016) and a member of the advisory board of the Michigan chapter of the Federalist Society.

21st century Republicans are well-professed law-and-order conservatives – but they have a tendency to stop caring about law and order whenever the order of the law stands poised either to hold Donald Trump and his henchmen accountable or to merely respect LGBTQ existence.

Gadola accurately pointed out that the Ethnic Intimidation Act, enacted in 1988, had no internal definition of “gender,” a fact which gave him permission to consult dictionaries.

You know what comes next.

I know what comes next.

Everyone knows what comes next.

“Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, published in 1990, gives a one-word definition of the word gender, as follows: ‘SEX,’” Gadola wrote, noting that the same dictionary defined “sex” as being “either of two divisions of organisms distinguished respectively as male or female.” He then concluded that “the term ‘gender’ was synonymous with sex, being the biological roles of male and female.”

But no radical conservative judge engaging in judicial legislation ever stops with the rote, binary definitions of “sex” and “gender.”

Gadola didn’t disappoint. He cited to a 1993 opinion rejecting a “sexual orientation” claim under the state’s anti-discrimination law. “Plaintiff has failed to meet the requirement that the harassment be gender-based,” that appellate panel had opined.

Anyone who has ever dealt with transgender law in any way knows the words “sexual orientation” would never be interpreted to include transgender people.

But not only did that 1993 opinion make no reference to anti-trans discrimination but the same opinion actually did rule partially in favor of the plaintiff regarding “alleged specific homosexual advances directed to him by his supervisor. These actions were directly related to plaintiff’s status as a male, and thus render the act applicable.”

Gadola didn’t mention that part.

Instead, he said the 1993 opinion “suggests that gender, at least through the early 1990s, held the same meaning as sex, which has long been understood to denote biological sex (i.e., male or female)” and he went on to declare “There is simply no indication that the term gender would have been understood to encompass one who is a transgender person when this statute was enacted in 1988.”

Would have been understood by who?

Now, it was fair of him to point out that the term “transgender” was not in common use at that point. But he set out a definition of “transsexual” which he asserted “would then have been understood to mean someone who had physically transitioned from one sex to the other.”

There isn’t a source – from 1988 or three decades either side of it – which holds that the term “transsexual,” vintage word that it may be, can only apply to someone who has fully transitioned.

But if you think his leaning upon dictionaries is problematic, it only got worse when he delved into what he asserted is legislative history.

The bill that became the 1988 law at one point had included the category “sexual orientation.” But that was supplanted in favor of “gender.”

Therefore, according to Gadola, “To conclude that the term ‘gender,’ adopted in 1988 in place of the term ‘sexual orientation,’ included the modern-day understanding of what it is to be a transgender person, strains credulity.”

Perhaps at Federalist Society cocktail parties, but not in the outside world.

What will strain credulity is any inevitable claim by Gadola that he is not a partisan political hack whose opinion in People v. Rogers conclusively demonstrates judicial misconduct (either via incompetence, bias or perhaps a mix of the two) warranting his removal from the bench.

For he, too, blames the victim for how she identified herself. Rogers’ actions, according to Gadola, “were not motivated by Steuball’s biological gender, but rather resulted from the fact that Steuball identified herself as a transgender person.”

Think about how likely it would be that Gadola would have ruled that Rogers experienced sex discrimination had the matter been an anti-discrimination case in which Steuball “identified herself” to a prospective employer as the biological sex designation chiseled onto her original birth certificate and she sued after that employer said, ‘I don’t care, but you’re transgender and that’s not covered under state civil rights law. I’m not hiring you.’”

You know how he would rule.

I know how he would rule.

Everyone knows how he would rule.

And everyone by now should be able to guess that nowhere in Gadola’s opinion is there any mention of the fact that ten years prior to enacting the Ethnic Intimidation Act the Michigan legislature had enacted a transgender birth certificate statute.

A statute that changed “sex” in Michigan.

Gadola concluded his opinion by asserting, “Our judicial oath simply does not empower us to amend the criminal law.”

That includes amending it by refusing to acknowledge a prior legislative enactment that can only logically be interpreted to impact the word “sex” throughout the state’s body of law (particularly when claiming that “sex” is the applicable definition of “gender”).

Judges can no longer be allowed escape sanction for refusing to acknowledge that the legislative bodies whose laws they claim to faithfully interpret have included recognition of the reality of transition among those laws.

Now, to be fair, this would also result in sanctioning the dissenting judge, Deborah Servitto. She too felt no need to reference the 1978 trans birth certificate statute, though she nevertheless came to the proper conclusion.

She laid waste to the notion of using vintage dictionaries as interpretive guides as having legitimacy, pointing out what should be obvious: “[W]hen the Legislature does not designate a particular dictionary that it referenced in crafting a particular statute, it cannot be said that one dictionary is the best, let alone conclusive, determiner of legislative intent.”

And, as to the actual issue that was before the court, she also honed in in what should have been the only thing any court to hear the matter needed to say. “[A]pplying the term ‘gender’ in any sense, whether it is interpreted as equating with ‘sex’ or has a broader meaning, defendant engaged in harassment and intimidation of Steuball based on her gender. It is only when one wanders beyond the specific language in the statute that the opposite result can be reached. Very simply put, would this incident have occurred had the victim not been biologically assigned male? Undoubtedly not.”

Yes, Servitto should have mentioned the legislature’s recognition of the reality of transition, which necessarily includes the process of transition and not merely the completion thereof. But she reached the proper conclusion, so only a minor reprimand is warranted.

No rational observer can conclude that Gadola approached this case with any intent other than to effectuate raw, naked 21st century Republican erasure of trans legal existence while masking it with the party’s patented veneer of faux compassion. A few throwaway assertions that Rogers’ actions were “abhorrent” and “reprehensible” ring as hollow and deceitful as a pronouncement of innocence following a body of water not rejecting an alleged witch.

Michigan’s conservative legislature is unlikely to take any action against Gadola (hell, if it weren’t for his age, I’d assume he was on Trump’s federal judiciary short-list), but perhaps the Judicial Tenure Commission or the State Bar of Michigan will.

They certainly should.

[h0n3yk1tt3n]

Pirates of Penzance: Badly Explained By Yours Truly (Aka “What Do You Mean ‘These Aren’t the Real Names of the Songs?’”)

Act One

Overture: Dancing to “Cat-Like Tread” Backstage

Pour Oh King the Pirate Sherry: Our Little Boy’s All Grown Up! I’ll Congratulate You When I’m Not Seasick!

When Fredric Was a Little Lad: Ruth Done Hecked Up

Oh, Far Better to Live and Die: I Kill More People Than a Normal King, But I’m a Pirate King!

Oh, False One, You Have Decieved Me: Heckin’ Bamboozled

Climbing Over Rocky Mountains: Don’t Know What This Song’s About But The Pirates Are Backstage Doing the Choreography and Pretending Their Swords Are Parasols

Oh Is There Not One Maiden Breast: I’ll Love You Even If You’re Ugly! :D

Poor Wondering One: Take Any Heart But Mine, So Take Mabel’s!

What Ought We To Do: We Should Leave Them Alone... But Eavesdropping Sounds More Fun

How Beautifully Blue the Sky: Ultimate Third Wheel Anthem

Stay, We Must Not Lose Our Senses: Hide Yo Daughters, Pirates Comin’a Marry ‘Em

I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General: I Have No Idea What You’re Singing But I’m Gonna Dance Anyway!

Act One Finale: The General’s An Orphan? Poor Fellow! Let’s Marry His Daughters!

Act Two

Oh, Dry the Glistening Tear: Eggs Sing About Their Sad Father

When the Foeman Bares His Steel: Hey, Police! Go Die For Us! (Also Dancing Backstage and Saying “Tarantara” Repeatedly)

Now For the Pirates’ Liar: Surprise, Motherhecker

When You Had Left Our Pirate Fold: You Are a Little Boy of Five!!

Away! Away! My Heart’s On Fire: Major General Heckin’ Bamboozled Us, LET’S KILL HIM!

Stay, Fredric, Stay: Love Ya, Mabel, But We Can’t Date Until I Turn Twenty-One In 1940... Wait For Me?

No, I Am Brave: We’re Only Helping You Cuz We Have To

When a Felon’s Not Engaged in His Employment: We Didn’t Think Through Our Career Choice

A Rollicking Band of Pirates We: Michael Makes An Entrance!

With Cat-Like Tread: Best Song In the Show, Fight Us (Plus a Kick Line!)

Hush, Hush, Not a Word: HIDE! Mother-In-Law Coming!

Sighing Softly to the River: Major General’s Drug Trip

Act Two Finale: Nearly All Nobelmen? Marry My Daughters! Never Mind You Tried to Kill Me Five Minutes Ago, You’re All Worthy Suitors!

@hyperactive-lectiophile

[masterweaverx]

With Catlike Tread

Page the Third: When a Felon’s Not Engaged in His Employment

“You don’t know how to pick a lock?” Oscar asked, his eyes wide.

“I was a bandit before I came to Beacon. Our lockpicking method was to break the door down.” Qrow shrugged. “And after, well, I figured... birds don’t need to pick locks, right?”

Blake dragged a paw down her face. “Rrrrrrrmmmmmmmm...”

“Oh, give it here.” Ozpin took the small bits of metal, wrapping his hands around the bars and working them through the keyhole.

“Wait, what?”

“I’ve lived a fairly long time. Some of my previous hosts had more respect for people than the law.” With a click, the door swung open. “Most of them, actually, but a few were more proactive about it.”

“Right.” Qrow shook his head as he stepped out. “Let’s focus on what we need to do. Get your cane, my sword, and the relic, and get out of here.”

Oscar nodded. “Right. Blake, can you tell us if team RWBY’s got anything planned?”

Blake leveled a flat stare at him.

“...Oh. Yes. You’ve been... I mean, cats can make a lot of noises,” Oscar pointed out. “We had a cat back on the farm, she was talkative...”

He trailed off at her unchanging expression.

“Okay, let me take over.” Qrow pushed him aside. “Do the girls know you’re a cat?”

“Mrow,” Blake confirmed with a nod.

“Do you know where the relic is?”

Blake held up a paw and waggled it around chest height. “Mrrrmr...?”

Qrow sighed. “Is it at least in the building?”

“Mrow.”

“That’s some good news... What about the girls, are they nearby?”

Blake rolled her eyes. “Mrow.”

“Probably waiting for us to get out,” Ozpin mused.

“Mrow.” Blake flicked her tail, glancing toward the door. “Mrrrruu?”

“Right, yes, we don’t have much time.” Ozpin turned to the other man. “Qrow, can you transform right now?”

“Ugh... yes, but I don’t know how much help that will be.”

“Oscar is fairly small, so we should be able to sneak around easily enough. Miss Belladonna would be better but as she is, doors might be a bit of a hindrance.”

“Mrow,” Blake grumbled.

“You can stick close to her and switch back to human to handle that sort of issue if it arises. A raven and a cat might attract more attention together than alone, but they’d be harder to spot in the first place. If we split up, we should be able to locate our weapons and the relic that much faster.”

Qrow nodded. “Alright, fine. But if you’re spotted, break out--we’ll make sure to get everything you didn’t pick up.”

“...Right.” Oscar nodded. “We’ll do that.”

He strode toward the door, putting an ear against it for a few seconds. Qrow shrunk down with a beleaguered floorf, joining Blake at the boy’s feet. Carefully, a gloved hand reached for the knob; Oscar peered through the crack, sliding through as Qrow and Blake jumped out, and shut the door behind him.

“Alright. You go that way, I’ll go this way. Keep your eyes out, and on each other.”

“Mror.”

“Raawk.”

Oscar stared at them for a second. “...I’m sorry, I just had one of those ‘this is actually happening’ moments. Anyway, good luck.”

The trio split up, one sneaking down a hallway while the other moved swiftly toward the stairs. Blake rushed past doors, her eyes on the signs next to them, before she skidded to a stop at a set of stairs. “Mrrwrr!”

“Rrrk?” Qrow flapped his wings, turning in midair as the feline started bounding up two steps at a time.

“Mwrrrr--” Blake rolled her eyes, gesturing up with a paw. “Muow.”

The bird fluttered to a stop on the railing. “Raark.”

“Mrooow!”

“Rrrarrrak?”

The two of them stared at each other for a brief moment.

Blake let out a huff, turning away and continuing up the stairs. Her ear twitched at a brief flutter, and she glanced up to see Qrow gliding after her. There was an odd crook to his beak, something that might have been called a smile on a more human face. Or perhaps a smirk. She turned away as they came to the top of the stairs, having no difficulty keeping her own expression stoic.

On soft wings and soft paws did the pair travel through the halls, their eyes darting across the signs on every door as they passed. Every once in a while, Qrow would shift back to his human form and open a door quickly; Blake darted between his feet and searched high and low while he listened for footsteps coming down the hall. A few times they stayed in a room for minutes at a time, her ears twitching as he leaned against the wood; once he had quickly signaled her behind the door, shifting back into a bird just as it swung open, the both of them only just escaping the notice of the officer bringing in a large stack of paperwork.

Blake’s tail twitched as they came to a turn in the hall, eyes shifting around carefully. “Mrrr....”

“Rwwwwak,” Qrow agreed.

“Oh for the love of all things legal!”

Avian and feline eyes snapped to a pair of shadows on the wall, before Blake and Qrow darted apart. The raven roosted atop a hanging light while the cat pressed herself against a door, just managing to stay out of sight as two officers turned the corner.

“I know, right? I mean, sure, the original graffiti was... hilariously over the top, but whoever this new guy is has a strange sense of humor.”

“‘Weiss Schnee approves of this message--’ yeah, right, like she would ever be anywhere near here.”

“Yeah... a random village in Anima? We’re not exactly high priority.”

“She’s probably still up in Atlas, cavorting with the harem of musclebound huntsmen her father bought her.”

Blake managed to contain her outburst, just barely. It helped that the other officer had released a disbelieving laugh.

“Right. Forgot who I was talking to for a moment.”

“Look, I know there are rumors, but all I’m saying is that Weiss is straight. Now her little sister, she’s the gay one--”

The officer cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Look, Thanh, as... elucidating as your conspiracy theories are, I’m kind of worn out at the moment. All I need is a little help in the contraband room, alright? Then you can go back to... what were you assigned today?”

“Prisoner duty,” grumbled the man.

“Right, watching the farmboy and his uncle.”

“They're hobos.”

“Of course they are. Come on, those confiscated weapons aren’t going to shine themselves.”

The pair of policemen continued down the hall, entirely unaware of the cat and the raven following after them. Blake caught sight of a nearby clock--two and a half hours left. Hopefully, things would go off without a hitch.

Hopefully.

[onlyhopc]

tagged by: @impossiiblegiirl ( i’m sorry everyone, my taste in music is awful! )

rules: we’re snooping through your playlist. put your entire music library on shuffle and list the first ten songs, then tag ten people!

Imagine - Pentatonix

Once Upon a December - Anastasia (Original Broadway Cast)

Plo Koon - Kevin Kiner

They’re Alive! - Randy Newman

Washington On Your Side - Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast)

When a Felon’s Not Engaged in his Employment - Pirates of Penzance (The D’Oyly Carte Opera Co.)

Thomas O’Malley Cat - Phil Harris

Motherfucker - Robbie Williams

It’s Possible - Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella (Original Broadway Cast)

What’s Left of the Flag - Flogging Molly

Just because I can tell you’re all loving my horrible taste in music you’re getting some extras. I just wanna see what else this spits out. I’m shocked not to have had any John Williams so far:

Bim Bam Boum - Mozart l’Opera Rock

52 Chachki Pickup - Michael Giacchino

Rock and Scissors - Michael Schulte

Tangled Up Kites - Lauren O'Connell

Come Crashing - Digital Daggers

tagging: Steal it!

[40millionyears]

why is everybody sleeping on the only version of Pirates of Penzance that matters? let jon english and his commitment to baring his chest into your life. (other numbers from this production: oh better far to live and die  //  paradox / away away  //  when a felon’s not engaged in his employment  //  the very model of a modern major general )

[ask-melchior-gabor]

1-44

1. Any scars?: Yes. I have a scar on the back of my calf.

2. Self harmed?: Not in a physical sense, but I’ve definitely engaged in behavior that was hurtful to myself intentionally.

3. Crush?: I suppose I technically have crush on my boyfriend.

4. Kissed anyone?: Ever? Yes.

5. Coke or Pepsi?: I have no preference.

6. Someone you hate?: Herr Sonnenstich.

7. Best Friends?: Moritz, Ilse, Max, Hanschen, and the list goes on. I suppose having so many defeats the purpose of a ‘best’ friend.

8. Have you ever done alcohol or drugs?: Yes.

9. What’s your dream job?: I’d like to be a journalist or perhaps a professor.

10. Ever been in love?: I am right now.

11. Last time you cried?: Over the weekend.

12. Favorite color?: I don’t have one; blue, green, gray, brown.

13. Height?: Around 5′9″, if you must know. It’s been a few months since I measured, though.

14. Birthday?: November 12.

15. Eye color?: Somewhat gray.

16. Hair color?: Brown.

17. What do you love?: Reading, inquiry, going on adventures of both the traditional and intellectual variety.

18. Obsession?: I wouldn’t say I have any.

19. If you had one wish, what would it be?: I’d wish to have a better memory; I think that could be useful.

20. Do you love someone?: Yes. A few people, actually.

21. Kiss or hug?: It depends on how I’m feeling, but I rather like kisses.

22. Nicknames people call you?: Melchi, Chior, and a variety of plays on the word ‘milk’ or on my last name.

23. Favorite song?: I don’t have one specifically; today I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for The Pirates of Penzance, and my favorite song off of that is ‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment’.

24. Favorite band?: Again, it varies; I’ve been listening to the Beastie Boys as well.

25. Worst thing that has ever happened to you?: I was born.

26. Best thing that has ever happened to you?: I suppose the same thing. My birth set into motion both every joy and every moment of suffering in my life.

27. Something you would change about yourself?: I couldn’t think of that; I try not to.

28. Ever dated someone?: I am currently dating someone.

29. Worst mistake?: I don’t know whether to call it a mistake, as it was intentional at the time and calling it a mistake diminishes the active role I had in making it happen. I don’t know.

30. Watch the movie or read the book?: Read the book.

31. Ever had a heartbreak?: Not so dramatically.

32. Favorite show?: Hamlet.

33. Best day of your life?: Probably some day in my youth while I was blissfully unaware of the evils of the world.

34. Any talents?: I have quite a few, I suppose. For example, I have very good balance.

35. Do you wish you could ever start over?: No; I’ve made so much progress already.

36. Any bad habits?: No doubt, but that begs the question of what ‘bad’ is.

37. Ever had a near death experience?: Once or twice probably, but nothing so dramatic that I thought I was near death at the time.

38. Someone I can tell anything to?: I technically can tell anyone anything. The question is whether I’d want to.

39. Ever lost a loved one?: Not in the sense of death.

40. Do you believe in love?: I suppose I do.

41. Someone you hate/Dislike?: I think this question was already asked? I dislike the clergy.

42. Are you okay?: At the moment, I’ll say yes.

43. Relationship status?: Dating.

44. Selfie?: If this is yes or no, then my answer is no.

[naconaphoenix]

Among the 5 million formerly incarcerated people living in the United States, finding that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public.

While we found that 203 out of every 10,000 formerly incarcerated people were homeless, nearly three times as many - 570 out of every 10,000 - were housing insecure.

We find that rates of homelessness are especially high among specific demographics:

People who have been incarcerated more than once

People recently released from prison

People of color and women



*Decent and stable housing is essential for human survival and dignity, a principle affirmed both in U.S. policy and international human rights law.The United States provides federally subsidized housing to millions of low-income people who could not otherwise afford homes on their own.U.S. policies, however, exclude countless needy people with criminal records, condemning them to homelessness or transient living.



In addition to the explicit goal of protecting tenant safety, there seem to be at least two other reasons for criminal record exclusions in public housing.The first is a widespread belief in the United States that people who have broken the law do not deserve a second chance and are the legitimate target of policies that are little more than expressions of disdain and hostility.Such a punitive view ignores the right of all people to a life with dignity and should have no place in housing policy.

The second reason is that the demand for public housing far exceeds the supply.Neither the federal nor state governments have taken upon themselves the goal of dramatically increasing the availability of affordable housing. Instead, by requiring strict admissions policies, the federal government has tacitly adopted a method of "triage" to whittle down the numbers of qualified applicants. Excluding those with criminal records has proven to be a politically cost-free way to entirely cut out a large group of people from the pool of those seeking housing assistance.



Decent and stable housing is essential for human survival and dignity, a principle affirmed both in U.S. policy and international human rights law.The United States provides federally subsidized housing to millions of low-income people who could not otherwise afford homes on their own.U.S. policies, however, exclude countless needy people with criminal records, condemning them to homelessness or transient living. 



Exclusions based on criminal records ostensibly protect existing tenants.There is no doubt that some prior offenders still pose a risk and may be unsuitable neighbors in many of the presently-available public housing facilities.But U.S. housing policies are so arbitrary, overbroad, and unnecessarily harsh that they exclude even people who have turned their lives around and remain law-abiding, as well as others who may never have presented any risk in the first place.

There is no national data on the number of people excluded from public housing because of criminal records, or even the number of people with criminal records who would be ineligible if they applied.But we know that there are several million ex-felons in the United States; under current housing policies, everyone convicted of a felony is automatically ineligible for a minimum of five years.We also know that there are tens of millions of Americans who have been convicted of misdemeanors, or merely arrested but never convicted of any offense, and they too can be and often are excluded from public housing on the basis of their criminal records.

Under existing policies, criminal records will shadow people for the rest of their lives.Even an arrest that is not followed by conviction can have a lifelong impact.Whether the offense is a violent crime or a low-level drug or property offense-and even most felonies do not involve violence against persons-a criminal record can be a barrier to employment, education, the right to vote, and certain public benefits, including public housing.

The tenuous relationship between public housing restrictions and legitimate safety goals is exemplified by policies that, for example, automatically deny housing to a person convicted of a single shoplifting offense four years earlier, or to someone convicted of simple possession of marijuana ten years earlier.Denying these people a home does little to promote the welfare of existing tenants.But it can cause homelessness or transient living for those excluded-and it can be counterproductive for community safety, as it is difficult to be law-abiding while living on the streets.



In addition to the explicit goal of protecting tenant safety, there seem to be at least two other reasons for criminal record exclusions in public housing.The first is a widespread belief in the United States that people who have broken the law do not deserve a second chance and are the legitimate target of policies that are little more than expressions of disdain and hostility.Such a punitive view ignores the right of all people to a life with dignity and should have no place in housing policy.



The second reason is that the demand for public housing far exceeds the supply.Neither the federal nor state governments have taken upon themselves the goal of dramatically increasing the availability of affordable housing. Instead, by requiring strict admissions policies, the federal government has tacitly adopted a method of "triage" to whittle down the numbers of qualified applicants. Excluding those with criminal records has proven to be a politically cost-free way to entirely cut out a large group of people from the pool of those seeking housing assistance.

Exclusions from public housing are among the harshest of a range of punitive laws that burden people with criminal records.Nevertheless, to date they have received scant attention from policymakers, elected officials, advocates for the poor, and the public at large.

There is, however, growing recognition nationwide of the wisdom of providing transitional services and assistance to help over half a million men and women who leave prison each year.Indeed, as President Bush pointed out in his 2004 State of the Union address, such services are crucial if these former prisoners are to successfully navigate their reentry to life outside prison walls.An overwhelming majority of those who are incarcerated were poor when they were arrested, and they will return to their communities with fewer resources and more needs than when they left.

The Bush administration and Congress have endorsed the concept of providing transitional housing to at least some former prisoners, but transitional housing is, by definition, temporary.Policymakers to date have failed to recognize the devastating impact of public housing exclusionary policies that outlast the transition period.

As long as those policies remain unchanged, former prisoners, as well as people with criminal records who were never sent to prison, will find themselves condemned to living on the streets, in overcrowded shelters, in squalid transient motels, or crowded into in the homes of friends and relatives.

* * *

The exclusion of people with criminal records from public housing is often referred to as the "one strike" policy.This policy developed in the 1990s as an attempt to address drug trafficking, violent crime, and disorder in public housing, especially urban high-rise developments.In 1996, President Bill Clinton declared: "The rule in public housing should be one strike and you're out."[1]That is, commission of one offense suffices to render a person ineligible to be admitted to or remain in public housing.Congress subsequently incorporated the "one strike" policy into federal housing law.Today, federal law requires public housing authorities (PHAs), the agencies that administer housing assistance and manage public housing property, to exclude people with certain types of criminal records and gives them broad discretion to deny admission to others.

Federal law bans outright three categories of people from admission to public housing: those who have been convicted of methamphetamine production on the premises of federally funded housing, who are banned for life; those subject to lifetime registration requirements under state sex offender registration programs; and people who are currently using illegal drugs, regardless of whether they have been convicted of any drug-related offense.

PHAs have the discretion to deny admission to three additional categories of applicants: (1) those who have been evicted from public housing because of drug-related criminal activity for a period of three years following eviction; (2) those who have in the past engaged in a pattern of disruptive alcohol consumption or illegal drug use, regardless of how long ago such conduct occurred; and, (3) the catch-all category of those who have engaged in any drug-related criminal activity, any violent criminal activity, or any other criminal activity, if the PHA deems them a safety risk.Our research indicates that, in practice, these discretionary categories are used to exclude a wide swath of people with criminal records without any reasonable basis to believe they may actually pose a risk.

Federal regulations advise PHAs to take into consideration in their admissions decisions the nature and remoteness of applicants' offenses, as well as mitigating factors and evidence of rehabilitation.But they do not require PHAs to do any individualized evaluations of whether or not a specific applicant is likely to pose a risk to the safety of existing public housing residents-and few of them provide a meaningful evaluation before issuing a rejection.Nor does the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-the federal agency that administers housing programs-review admissions criteria established by the PHAs to determine if, on their face, they are consistent with federal housing policy and goals.



Most PHAs automatically deny eligibility to an applicant with a criminal record without considering rehabilitation or mitigation.Consideration of those factors typically occurs only if and when an applicant for housing seeks administrative review of a denial of eligibility.Those who have lawyers often win such appeals.But many applicants for public housing are unable to secure representation, and are therefore unable to successfully challenge denials.

In a country with the wealth of the United States, the fundamental human right to housing is surely not satisfied when an estimated 3 million people are homeless in any given year, including many who have been excluded from federally subsidized housing.

Waiting lists maintained by individual PHAs show hundreds of thousands of people seeking housing assistance. According to HUD, applicants wait an average of one to two years, and often much longer, for access to conventional public housing and the voucher program. Despite its commitment to "End Homelessness in 10 Years" and its subsequent call for increased appropriations for homeless services (which include such things as nightly shelter beds and social services), the federal government has not met increases in homelessness and poverty with an increase in the development of new units of subsidized housing



The latest census figures show that 35.9 million people, or 12.5 percent of the American population, live at or below the official poverty level.[26]According to a 2003 National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) report, families with extremely low incomes are unable to afford housing at fair market rates in almost every U.S. jurisdiction.[27]But it is not just the impoverished who cannot afford housing in the private market; even the working poor are unable to pay for adequate housing on their own. As one analyst has noted, "the working poor have been left practically helpless, unable to get into the market and unserved by underfunded federal and state housing programs

In summary, in this country, it is only the virtious who are currently allowed to own a home, in almost all cases. Those women deemed "less than", who are felons, ex addicts or current addicts are systemstically denied the chance to own a home and in most cases sre unable to rent. Many are homeless or forced to live in shelters or with friends. The higher classes of Americans feel justified in denying this basic humsn right, and i ask you, is this right? Is this what America was built for?

But Restricting public benefits for the virtuous has obvious public appeal. But human rights are not a privilege of the deserving.

Thats why we are driven to start change! Our mission is to give these women and men a chance to buy a tiny home, on installments with low interest. Each home is set up on lot in the tiny home park. Once the home us paid for, the owner is free to move ot to their own land or to continue to rent. Our goal is help every homeless or near homeless woman or man  in Phoenix who wants to own a home to do so. 



[featuresofinterest]

as far as i’m concerned holmes absolutely sings “when a felon’s not engaged in his employment” from pirates of penzance in front of lestrade to annoy him

[opedguy]

Biden Blames New York Post Story on Disinformation

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com),k Oct. 15, 2020.--When the bombshell New York Post relased its story Oct. 14 about new emails found between 50-year-old Hunter Biden and Ukrainian Bursima Holdings businessman Vadym Posharski, proving that 77-year-old former Vice President Joe Biden arranged Hunter’s Burisma job, the media gasped.  Threatening to bring down Biden’s campaign, Facebook and Google censored the story, making it more difficult for millions of voters to see what happened.  Joe’s campaign manage Jen O’Malley Dillon said “Hunter did nothing wrong,” something repeated often in the Democrat-friendly press.  What’s different about the Post story is that it exposes the underlying evidence, namely, a hard drive from Hunter’s computer.  Biden’s campaign immediately dismissed the story as Russian disinformation, essentially saying the entire story was bogus.

Unlike many unsourced or anonymously sources stories about 74-year-old President Donald Trump’s ties to the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times and Washington Post are doubling down on discrediting the Post’s story.  Much was already known about Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine through his convicted felon business partner Devon Archer, convicted of defrauding the Sioux Tribe, selling bonds and using the funds for his own piggy bank.  Every time there are stories like the one in the New York Post that reflect negatively on Biden, the media attributes it to Russian disinformation.  But when the New York Times, Washington Post and most broadcast stations printed anonymously sources stories about Trump alleged ties to Russia, it was never questioned as Russian or Democrat disinformation.

Hunter’s story in Ukaine has been widely reported not just in the New York Post but in numerous print and broadcast outlets.  While it’s true the press shows bias against Trump, it’s also true they’re giving Biden a pass on his alleged corruption in Ukraine.  It wasn’t that long ago that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) filed articles of impeachment against Trump because of an alleged attempt to solicit information about Biden and his son from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Pelosi and House Democrats impeached Trump over a possible quid pro quo with Zelensky.  But when there was an actual quid pro q;uo with Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the media turned a blind eye.  Joe was recorded Jan. 23, 2018 telling the Council on Foreign Relations about his quid pro quo with Poroshenko.

Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations that he threatened to withhold $1 billion dollars in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine unless Poroshenko fired former state prosecutor Viktor Shokin who was looking into corruption at Burisma Holdings, where Joe’s son and his business partner took exorbitant salaries on the board.  Now that the Post story broke, Facebook and Google censor the story, realizing it could upend Biden’s campaign. “It’s unclear if the story or the emails are authenticated much of the information provided in the New York Post’s account was widely criticized as being misleading,” said the New York Times.  Can you imagine the New York Times asking about “authentication” when they published untold numbers of unsourced or anonymously sources stories about Trump’s alleged Russian collusion?

New York Times demands “authentication” after publishing untold numbers of unsourced or anonymously sourced stories about Trump’s alleged Russian collusion.  You’d think the New York Times would have tried to verify the fake Steele Dossier used by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to discredit Trump in the 201y6 election.  But no the Times accepted the bogus Steele Dossier as facts in evidence to writes the most defamatory stories possible about Trump for four years.  Even after Special Counsel Fobert Mueller cleared Trump of collusion after a 33-mont, $40 million investigation March 23, 2019, the Times continued to spread disinformation.  How the Times can sit in judgment of the New York Post is anyone’s guess.  They’ve been guilty of more fake news than any other U..S. newspaper.

Protecting Biden at all costs between now the Nov. 3 presidential election, the U.S. media, Facebook and Google are all in doing everything possible to prevent voters from seeing egregious corruption Joe and his son Hunter engaged in Ukraine.  Making the Joe-Hunter Ukraine scandal about Trump’s personal attorney former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the media has doubled down covering up Joe’s corruption.  But regardless of whether you question the New York Post’s story offering email proof of Joe’s involvement with a Burisma official, the public needs only focus on Joe’s recorded statements Jan. 23, 2018 to the Council of Foreign Relations where he blackmailed Porshenko into firing Shokin for investigating Hunter’s employer, Burisma Holdings.  Calling New York Post’s story Russian disinformation is the real disinformation.

About the Author  

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’d editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma. Reply  Reply All  Forward 

[aporeticelenchus]

Taking a break from essay writing to glance at an annotated Gilbert and Sullivan. I'm so happy to have learned about Latin "When A Felon's Not Engaged In His Employment"