The Gainful Employment Regulation: Limiting Job Growth And Student Choice (Part 2 of ...
The Useful Employment Regulation: Limiting Job Evolvement And Student Choice (Part 2 of 2) - House Superintendence - 2011-07-08 - House Committee on ...
Citigroup, MF Global, JPMorgan, Merck, BofA in Court News
(Updates with Citigroup in Top portion and Transatlantic in New Suits.)
Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc., whose $285 million defrayal with U.S. regulators over a collapsed collateralized debt obligation was faulted by a federal appraise as too lenient, may have to pay more money to avoid admitting it did anything wrong, said lawyers following the cover.
Citigroup, the third-biggest U.S. lender, agreed last month to settle a claim by the Securities and Quid pro quo Commission that it misled investors in a $1 billion CDO linked to subprime residential mortgage securities. Investors wasted about $700 million, according to the agency.
The case is the latest in which U.S. District Adjudicator Jed Rakoff, who must approve the agreement for it to take effect, has criticized the SEC’s practice of letting defendants tranquillize enforcement suits without admitting or denying fault. While he may not be able to compel New York-based Citigroup to answer it did what the SEC claims, he may push the SEC and the bank to renegotiate a costlier deal.
“He can’t very force two parties who want to settle to go to trial,” said J. Robert Brown Jr., who teaches corporate governance at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. “If he rejects it, the only class I see any latitude to change the settlement is the money.”
Rakoff, who in 2009 rejected a $33 million great amount between the SEC and Bank of America Corp., has said his role is to determine whether the Citigroup arrangement is “fair, adequate and reasonable” and in the public interest. He’s small to approving or disapproving the settlement and can’t rewrite it to impose terms the parties don’t neediness, said James Kwak, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford.
Rakoff, 68, hasn’t said when he will dismiss. SEC spokesman John Nester and Citigroup spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos declined to footnote on the approval process.
The case is U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Citigroup Pandemic Markets Inc., 11-cv-7387, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
For more, click here.
New Suits
Retail Groups Sue Fed Over New Debit Playing-card Rules for Banks
The Federal Reserve was sued by retailer groups over new regulations governing so-called swipe fees over claims the Fed disregarded the law when deciding how much banks can load merchants for debit-card transactions.
The groups, in a lawsuit filed yesterday in U.S. Section Court in Washington, said retail merchants will be “substantially harmed” by the fees the Fed set under the Durbin Alteration compensate, a provision of the Dodd-Frank legislation passed last year. The rule went into achieve on Oct. 1.
“The Board’s final rule permits banks to get significantly more costs than permitted by the plain language of the Durbin Amendment and deprives plaintiffs of the benefits of the statute’s anti-exclusivity provisions,” the retailers argued in their beef.
The case was filed by the National Retail Federation, the Food Marketing Society and NACS, formerly the National Association of Convenience Stores. Oil Miller Co., a residential heating and air flock based in Norfolk, Virginia, and Boscov’s Department Store LLC, based in Reading, Pennsylvania, also joined the grievance.
Susan Stawick, a spokeswoman for the Fed, declined to comment on the suit.
“Retailers won’t verily be happy until they pay zero to accept cards,” said Trish Wexler, spokeswoman for the Electronic Payments Coalition, a buying group representing payment networks like Visa and MasterCard and banks including JPMorgan Hunt & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.
The debit-card trade in is massive -- more than 38 billion transactions took place in 2009 -- and its participants allow for grocery and electronics stores, gas stations and large retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and End Corp., all of whom lobbied for limits on the power of banks and payment networks to place fees.
In June, TCF Financial Corp. failed to persuade a U.S. appeals court in St. Louis to hindrance the Fed rule. The court found TCF was unlikely to prevail on a claim that the cap is unconstitutional.
The case is NACS v. On of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 11-02075, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
For more, click here.
Jon Corzine Sued by MF Universal Customer Over Client Assets
An MF Global Holdings Ltd. customer yesterday filed a proposed caste-action lawsuit against the bankrupt firm and its former head, Jon Corzine.
Davide Accomazzo, managing administrator of Cervino Capital Management LLC, a Topanga, California-based commodity trading guide, claimed in the suit filed in federal court in Manhattan that his money and other assets relation to his clients were lost after MF Global commingled them with its own funds.
The suit claims that Corzine and other officers of the futures brokerage manipulator, including Bradley Abelow, president and chief operating officer, and Henri Steenkamp, the business’s chief financial officer, violated the Commodity Exchange Act and prohibitions against commingling clients’ mazuma.
MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31.
This lawsuit is one of several that have been previously filed in federal court in New York against MF Far-reaching, Corzine and company officials.
The case is Accomazzo v. Corzine, 11-CV-8467, U.S. Province Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
JPMorgan Sued by BayernLB Over Mortgage-Backed Securities
JPMorgan Track & Co., the biggest U.S. bank by assets, was sued for fraud by German lender Bayerische Landesbank over losses on about $2.1 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
BayernLB presumed in the suit, filed Monday in New York State Supreme Court, that JPMorgan units concealed the reality about the poor quality of the loans underlying the securities and knew that credit ratings misrepresented their gamble.
The lender said it believed the mortgage securities were safe investments based on representations about the calibre of loans and credit ratings when it invested almost $2.1 billion in 57 offerings from 2005 to 2007, according to the kick.
Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The circumstance is Bayerische Landesbank New York Branch v. Bear Stearns & Co., 653239/2011, New York Phase Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan).
Transatlantic Sued Over Trade to Sell Company to Alleghany
Transatlantic Holdings Inc. stockholders sued the reinsurer in New York over its unanimity to be bought by Alleghany Corp. for $3.4 billion in cash and stock.
Alleghany, an insurer based in New York, announced Nov. 21 that it had agreed to buy New York-based Transatlantic Holdings, capping months of takeover interest in the flock, a former American International Group Inc. unit that helps insurance companies stakes their biggest risks.
Shareholder Marilyn Clark filed the complaint against Transatlantic yesterday in New York Stately Supreme Court in Manhattan, saying the proposed acquisition came from an unfair modify and undervalues the company.
“This deep discount to the company’s order value is not a surprise given the company’s management’s rejection to undertake a full, fair and truthful sales process,” Clark said in the beef. “The inadequate process has led to the proposed acquisition which fails to maximize the Theatre troupe’s value.”
A spokesman for Transatlantic declined to immediately remark on on the lawsuit.
Clark seeks to have the transaction declared unlawful and unenforceable and to have the treaty rescinded.
The case is Clark v. Transatlantic Holdings Inc., 653256/2011, New York Have Supreme Court (Manhattan).
Harleysville Policyholder Sues Over ‘Self Dealing’ in Buyout
Harleysville Complementary Insurance Co. was sued by a customer contending that the company’s directors doubled their deprecating payout in a planned sale of the company by diverting a merger premium away from policyholders.
The directors of the chap-owned firm stand to get about $39 million from their personal holdings in a Nasdaq-listed subsidiary that is part of a planned selling to Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., according to a complaint filed by policyholder OCL Corp., a New Manor-house, Delaware-based trucking company.
The entire $435 million commingling premium is being paid to minority shareholders of the subsidiary, Harleysville Group Inc., while manhood owner Harleysville Mutual and its members get no payout, OCL said in the filing yesterday in grandeur court in Philadelphia. Those customers may be entitled to more than $275 million if the premium were divided pretty, OCL said.
The transaction “is fundamentally unfair to Harleysville Mutual’s policyholder-members and constitutes unambiguous self- dealing,” OCL said. The plaintiff is seeking to block the planned payout to minority shareholders and to picture other policyholders in a class-action, or group, suit.
Behind the Afghan Banking Crisis
The governor of the Afghan Dominant Bank, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, announced his resignation this June in a motel in the Washington suburbs, claiming he had fled to the United States in fear of his person. In April he had revealed to the Afghan parliament with names and figures to back his claim an unprecedented monetary scandal at the Kabul Bank, the country’s biggest private bank, which almost went bankrupt in August 2010.
According to the Leading Bank’s latest calculations, the directors of the Kabul Bank lent and dissolute deposits worth $579m in six years. Including interest and loans disguised as administrative costs, the sum rises to $914m. Interrelated to the size of the Afghan economy, whose real GDP, according to the IMF, will barely exceed $7bn in 2011, the climb of these losses is without precedent. They highlight the endemic corruption in Afghanistan and the inability of Hamid Karzai’s direction to tackle it. Three years from the scheduled withdrawal of US troops, every entrepreneur wants to profit from supranational aid while the tap is still running.
The story of the Kabul Bank “is all the sadder since the banking sector was considered until recently to be one of the very rare successes in the power’s reconstruction,” according to William Byrd, former director of the World Bank in Afghanistan. Among the beneficiaries of the Kabul Bank’s subsidy are Karzai’s brother, Mahmoud, and a brother of the vice-president, Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim. A Cardinal Bank inquiry found 207 recipients, including members of parliament, ministers, unsophisticated governors, artists, a football team and political campaign managers.
In the half-hour after the statement of Fitrat’s resignation, Hamid Karzai’s office called it “treason,” and a document for his arrest was sent to Interpol and the US embassy in Kabul: Fitrat’s name was top of a list of suspects which the function of the Afghan chief prosecutor has been sitting on for a year. The decision was also taken to remand Sherkhan Farnood, the bank’s founder, and its president, Khalilullah Ferozi, in Kabul. So far no hard times has begun.
According to various sources, the Afghan Monitoring and Evaluation Cabinet (MEC, formerly the High Office of Oversight and Anti Corruption) has however cleared the names of Mahmoud Karzai and Abdul Hassin Fahim, both shareholders in the bank, on persuade that they repay the sums officially considered as fraudulent loans: Karzai received $22m, and three companies in which Fahim was a shareholder benefitted from loans totalling $182m. Mahmoud Karzai called Farnood, his former associate, “a dip, a criminal who should have been judged long ago,” and said he was “sick and dead tired of the government’s delay” in launching a trial.
The Kabul Bank has become the rationale for a standoff between the Afghan government and the IMF. Since March the IMF has blocked the payment of international aid to the nation budget: It has asked the government to absorb the bank’s losses -- only $70m had been recovered by July -- and is exacting reform of the banking system and a proper trial. As Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan master at the US Institute of Peace, a research centre of the US Congress, points out, the Afghan command is in desperate need of that money so as not to be short of cash within a few months. In October the Afghan parliament assented to a refinancing devise for the Central Bank and accepted an initial payment of $51m. So the IMF may agree to restart its aid order of the day in November.
Farnood, Kabul Bank’s founder and the man who allowed the powerful to relieve themselves to the bank accounts of 1.3 million Afghans, started from nothing. Born into a below family in the north of the country, he became a poker player of international standing: The internet location, World Series of Poker Tour, credits him with winnings totalling practically $400,000 between 2005 and 2008. He dreamed of being the founder of an industrial and financial empire. He has dog-tired most of his adult life abroad: first in Moscow where in a student room in the 1980s he founded a scratch transfer company that capitalised on imports of Afghan fabric into Russia. According to a former NATO ceremonial in Afghanistan, in 15 years he succeeded in extending his network through Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran and China, and as far as Europe and California.
He became part of the standard Muslim hawala networks -- a money transfer, credit and the Board system outside the banking sector that leaves no paper trail behind. A Drug Enforcement Regulation investigator has alleged that in the 1990s Farnood, then based in Dubai, transferred loaded for legitimate businesses, but also laundered money for the Taliban, drug-dealers and al-Qaida.
After the drop of the Taliban regime in 2001, the United States encouraged the creation of banks. The territory had only two at the time, both nationalised and ailing. “The regulators were relieved to see real banks being set up in Kabul,” explained Byrd. “Exotic donors thought they would be subject to international regulation.” Sherkhan Farnood was the first to demand a licence. He got it in 2004.
This is a story of trust, “an act of faith” according to Noorullah Delawari, then crest of the Central Bank. To convince his fellow countrymen to take their savings from under their mattresses, Farnood displayed a bent for showmanship rare in finance: Two Indian actresses promoted his credit cards on TV and he organised gargantuan lotteries in marriage halls that he called Bakht (luck in Dari), undo to anyone who deposited $100 in a Kabul Bank account. “Farnood was giving away cars, apartments, money,” Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady said. Ahady is the current business curate and signed the licence for the Kabul Bank. “He knew how to draw distinction to himself: He was able to use techniques that he had seen elsewhere in the Middle East.”
In two years, his system caught on. Farnood recruited new subject partners, among them the country’s elite: He lent $6m to Mahmoud Karzai to acquire a 7% dividend in the bank. Coming from a poor family of Tajik and Uzbek descent, Farnood “didn’t have a proper place in to a tribe, he had no backing from anyone,” Delawari says. “By bringing Mahmoud Karzai on management, he thought he’d bought an insurance policy.”
This July the deputy chief prosecutor listed 413 deceitful loans made by the Kabul Bank, mainly to its own shareholders and often without interest or repayment schedules. Most were to front men, such as security guards, gardeners, household club. The bank was opening new branches, including in the Pashtun south where the Taliban had returned in persistence in 2005. The state was also using the Kabul Bank to pay civil servants’ salaries, including those of the army and policemen. Such contracts would become more numerous after the election of 2009, which returned Karzai to power. “They were very advantageous when they were chosen as a conduit for government salaries,” says Wilder. “They familiar the money creatively” by delaying paying civil service salaries so as to fringe benefits from the interest for longer, and reinvesting the money in diverse sectors.
The money may have been flowing into the coffers, but it did not reside there long. Farnood had an empire to build. He invested in cement with Mahmoud Karzai, in a goggle-box channel ($1.8m), petrol retailing ($21m) and Kabul real caste; and $98m went, between 2009 and 2010, into Pamir Airways, the airline with the watchword “Fly with confidence.”
Farnood could afford to swagger: When he flew to Dubai he took his own airline and sold seats at a drubbing to ruin the competition a ticket from Kabul to Dubai sold for $50. The exploit ended in May 2010 in the Hindu Kushwhen one of the company’s aged Antonov 24 planes crashed, genocide 44 passengers. It was said to have been flying with fake documentation.
On the day after the accident, Khalilullah Ferozi, a conductor of the bank since 2008, organised a press conference to present widows who had received compensation, and accused NATO air See trade controllers of being responsible for the deaths. Ferozi had also spent a long time in Russia, training at the policemen academy in Ufa (Bashkortostan), then working for Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Confederation, before joining the Kabul Bank as head of security.
This son of a poet with bleached plaits and a bodybuilder’s torso explained his unorthodox view of banking last year: “All trade is risky in Afghanistan. We don’t have a lot of time. Every day the balance of power changes,” adding that “when the Americans have gone, there’s flourishing to be a lot less money to do business with.”
After Ferozi stepped into the limelight, sightings of Farnood in Kabul became rare. He seemed to have reticent to Dubai. According to a former US NATO official: “Farnood lost lead of the bank for a couple of years. It had always worked as a Ponzi scheme, but Farnood tried to authority it by bringing in legitimate businesses simultaneously. Ferozi just took [net] out,” after he dealt with Karzai and Fahim to take control of the bank, the official says. In August 2010 the Inside Bank demanded their resignation, citing losses of $300m incurred on the Dubai peculiarity market. The prospect of bankruptcy caused a run on the Kabul Bank. The Central Bank was stilted to refinance it to the tune of $825m, in several installments, in September 2010.
According to the deputy chief prosecutor, the splendour is currently trying to sell off $300m worth of assets in the emirate that be a part of to the Kabul Bank. Ferozi has 35 luxury villas, costing $160m, in Palm Jumeirah. President Karzai freed Ferozi and Farnood last September after no more than two months in prison. They are supposed to be helping to locate
student loans bankruptcy act 2005 july 2009 - Bookshelf
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1069 pages |
Bankruptcy Code, Rules and Official Forms, Law School (a), is sample 1 of Act July 12, 1943, c. 215, 57 Stat. 422, which is classified to portion 204 of Title 7, Agriculture. The Bankruptcy Act, referred to in ... |
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288 pages |
How to Wipe Out Your Student Loans and Be Debt Free Fast, Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply In 2005, the US Bankruptcy maxims was amended to exclude “qualified information loans” from discharge during personal bankruptcy proceedings. ... |
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Consumer bankruptcy law and practice 43, 194 (2005).] § 525. Keeping against discriminatory treatment (a) Except ... includes the making of loans guaranteed or insured under a student credit ... |
Excess Insurer Has No Duty to Indemnify Where Excess Insurer Policy Incorporates Prior Knowledge Exclusion of Primary insurance Policy, and Insured Had Prior Knowledge of Potential Claim
, LLP, — N.E.2d —, 2009 WL 3347222 (N.Y. Oct. 20, 2009), the New York Supreme Court was asked to determine, under Pennsylvania law, whether excess insurers Executive Risk Indemnity Inc. and Twin City Fire Insurance Company, based upon their prior knowledge exclusions, were entitled to summary judgment declaring that they have no obligation to indemnify defendants Pepper Hamilton LLP and one of its members in actions asserted against them for professional malpractice.
The dispute centered on Pepper Hamilton’s representation of Student Finance Corporation (SFC) and its principal. SFC financed loans to students attending vocational schools and acquired student loans from other lenders. In March 2002, Pepper Hamilton learned that SFC had been involved in securities fraud in failing to disclose the forbearance payments. The firm terminated its representation of SFC one month later.
In July of 2002, Pepper Hamilton’s general counsel sent a memorandum to the attorneys regarding the firm’s insurance application and inquired whether any person was “aware of any fact or circumstance, act, error, omission or personal injury which might be expected to be the basis of the claim or suit for lawyers professional liability.” In August of 2002, the partner who was aware of the SFC fraud advised the firm, but the application submitted by the firm in September did not disclose any information concerning SFC, and in a letter to Twin City, dated October 25, 2002, Pepper Hamilton warranted that it had no material changes to its application.
Eventually, SFC was forced into bankruptcy. In April 2004, Pepper Hamilton was advised that valid claims and causes of action could be brought against Pepper Hamilton “on behalf of the estate and/or creditors of” SFC. Pepper Hamilton immediately contacted its primary insurer Westport and excess insurers Executive Risk, Twin City and Continental Casualty and informed them of the potential claims. Lawsuits were filed against the firm in early 2005 and the firm’s primary insurer, Westport, defended the claims. However, the excess insurers denied coverage.
Executive Risk commenced this action against the Pepper Hamilton and Westport, seeking a declaration that it had no obligation to indemnify defendants in the underlying actions. The law firm defendants counterclaimed for a declaration in their favor and brought third-party claims against Twin City and Continental Casualty. Executive Risk and Twin City relied upon Westport’s prior knowledge exclusion, expressly incorporated into their policies.
Under Pennsylvania law, a court must consider a two-pronged test when determining whether a prior knowledge exclusion applies. Specifically, it must be shown that the insured knew prior to effective date of the policy of certain facts that occurred prior to that effective date. Then, a court must determine that a reasonable attorney in possession of such facts would have a basis to believe that the insured might expect such facts to be the basis of a claim against the insured.
The New York Supreme Court evaluated the facts and found that the law firm defendants knew of SFC’s securities fraud months prior to the effective dates of the Executive Risk and Twin City policies and that they had sufficient knowledge that a claim could be brought against the law firm. As such, the court granted summary judgment in favor of the excess insurers and declared that based on the policies’ prior knowledge exclusions, Executive Risk and Twin City had no obligation to indemnify the law firm defendants in the underlying actions.
For more info on Tom Paschos, visit the International Society of Primerus Law Firms or paschoslaw.com .
Of Robber Barons And Bottomless Pits?
" By Azly Rahman is about the Biro Tata Negara being a tool for Malaysia's robber barons who wish to plunder the nation by silencing the masses and using the ideological state apparatuses at their disposal. The other, in the Asia Sentinel entitled, "Grand Theft Malaysia", which coincidentally relates to the point Azly Rahman alludes to. Both are must reads together. "In the 1960s, federal prosecutors in the United States who were attempting to jail the late labor boss Jimmy Hoffa for looting the Teamsters Pension Fund of millions of dollars with his cronies were puzzled by the fact that their revelations appeared to have little effect on the union's rank and file. It was because no matter how much money Hoffa and his cronies stole, there was always money left because the fund was so rich. That appears to be the case with Malaysia." I agree we must give credit to those working hard to "improve the psychological well-being of the Malays" and for that matter for any race to improve its mental wellness. This is important. This is a noble act. The question is: in doing so, do we want to plant the seeds of cooperation and trust-- or racial discrimination and deep hatred? Herein lies the difference between indoctrination and education. Herein lies what the work of Malaysia's Biro Tata Negara is about. These days, the idea of Ketuanan Melayu is going bankrupt, sinking with the bahtera merdeka. It works only for Malay robber barons who wish to plunder the nation by silencing the masses and using the ideological state apparatuses at their disposal. In the case of the BTN it is the work of controlling the minds of the youth. The work of BTN should be stopped and should not be allowed anymore in our educational institutions. It is time our universities especially are spared of counter-educational activities, especially when they yearned to be free from the shackles of domination. Look at what has happened and what is still happening to our institutions with the University and University Colleges Act and the Akujanji Pledge. Over decades, many millions of Malays and non-Malays have not been getting the right information on our nation's history, political-economy, and race relations. History that is being shoved to us or filter-funneled down the labyrinth of our consciousness is one that is already packaged, biased, and propagandized by our historians that became text-books writers. History need not be "Malay-centric". In this regard we can learn from the former British colony called America. Whatever the shortcomings may be, America is a land of immigrants and still evolving. Even a Black man or a woman can become president. This is what America conceives itself to be and this is what Malaysian can learn from. Can a non-Malay become a Prime Minster is he/she is the most ethical of all politicians in the country? No one particular race should stake claim to Malaysia. That is an idea from the old school of thought, fast being abandoned. Each citizen is born, bred, and brought to school to become a good law-abiding and productive Malaysian citizen is accorded the fullest rights and privileges and will carry his/her responsibility as a good citizen. That is what "surrendering one's natural rights to the State" means. One must read Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, and Jefferson to understand this philosophy. A bad government will not honor this -- and will fall, or will sink like the bahtera merdeka. The history of civilizations provides enough examples of devastation and genocide as a consequence of violent claims to the right of this or that land based upon some idea of "imagined communities." We must teach our children to make history -- a history of peace amongst nations. This must be made into a new school of thought: of "new Bumiputeraism" that encompasses all and do not alienate any -- because life is too brief for each generation to fight over greed. The eleventh hour of human existence and our emergence in this world has brought about destruction as a consequence of our inability to mediate differences based on race, color, creed, class, and national origin. Each ethnic group thinks that it is more socially-dominant than the other. Each does not know the basis of its "self". Each failed to realize its own DNA-make up or gene map. Life is an existential state of beingness, so must history be conceived as such. Nationalism can evolve into a dangerous concept-- that was what happened to Europe at the brink of the two World Wars. It happened in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Indonesia when Suharto fell. I argue that we must live evolvingly in the "historical presence of historical constructions". The past and the future is in the present. Courses devoid of critical treatment and sensibility and ones that retard student thinking -- such as "Kenegaraan" -- in our universities are designed to tell our mind to live in an imagined past. BTN is playing this dangerous game of blind nationalism still passing down packaged information that do not take into consideration the complexities of globalization and the promise of multiculturalism. We need to offer courses such as Multiethnic Malaysia that will have students aspire to think like multiculturalists and help this nation evolve better. The ministry of education higher education combined has hundreds of experts -- many overseas trained and have tasted the "spirit of multiculturalism” and the "beauty of intellectual freedom" in their classrooms abroad -- who ought to have engineered a paradigm shift to help dismantle indoctrination agencies such as Biro Tata Negara. But where are the voices in the wilderness of our public universities -- those who should be speaking up against 'Ketuanan Melayu or Ketuanan this or that race'? Why are many of these experts, instead of fighting for radical changes to affect radical-peaceful structural changes, are making big decisions to further advance the cause of racism? One-dimensional thinking prevails -- the thinking that does not allow diversity of ideas and failed to develop cross-cultural perspectives. Ideas move nations but indoctrinations remove intelligence. Political masters-- however corrupt to the core they are -- dictates the work of our academicians. What I want to see is a stop to the systematic and ongoing stupefication of the Malays and the non-Malays and to let them be free from being run-down emotionally by boot camp facilitators who make a living humiliating people. We have a new generation of best and brightest Malaysians to educate. As an educator I have worked with thousands of them. These are extremely creative individuals who enjoy being challenged at the most respectable and intellectual levels -- not through indoctrination methods such as those used in BTN camps. They want to be fed with more questions and not be shoved with BTN-type of answers. We cannot afford to turn term them into docile beings while at the same time we holler the slogan "human capital" or modal insan the world over. It will be a "modularly insane" human condition if we continue to capitalize on human docility. The Biro Tata Negara as an indoctrinating institution was conceived by "intellectuals" who themselves are trapped in their own cocoon or glass coconut shell of "wrongly-defined" Malay-ness and in a paradigm that teaches a poor understanding of Malaysian history. These intellectuals are running around in our public universities promoting a more sophisticated and pseudo-intellectual version of racism. Inciting racial sentiments in classroom and boot camps is big business nowadays -- profits made in the name of patriotism. But who's monitoring the trainers? Progressive parliamentarians must discuss this serious matter concerning the organization's deliberate attempt to promote disunity and to further fertilize the seeds of racism, at a time when we need to come together as Malaysians in order to face humanity's greater problem such as the food, oil, and water crisis that will plague us as human beings -- at a time when we must focus on constructing a new republic of virtue that will be founded on transcultural ethics, responsive and reflective politics, and a social-democratic-based economic system that do not tempt and feed human greed of the things they do not need. Our Asian despotic brand of capitalism continues to destroy the very foundation of our existence and our moral fibre. It is greed -- big time -- that brought down the National Front. The Port Klang Free Zone scandal may be big, but it is only the latest in a long line of Malaysian scandals going back to the early 1980s. Time Magazine quoted Daniel Lian, a Southeast Asia economist at Morgan Stanley in Singapore, saying that the country might have lost as much as U$100 billion since the early 1980s to corruption." In July of 1983, what was then the biggest banking scandal in world history erupted in Hong Kong, when it was discovered that Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF), a unit of Bank Bumiputra Malaysia Bhd, had lost as much as US$1 billion which had been siphoned off by prominent public figures into private bank accounts. The story involved murder, suicide and the involvement of officials at the very top of the Malaysian government. Ultimately it involved a bailout by the Malaysian government amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Mak Foon Tan, the murderer of Jalil Ibraim, a Bank Bumi assistant manager who was sent to Hong Kong to investigate the disappearance of the money, was given a death sentence, and Malaysian businessman George Tan who had participated in looting most of the funds, was jailed after his Carrian Group collapsed in what was then Hong Kong's biggest bankruptcy, and a handful of others were charged. No major politician was ever punished in Malaysia despite a white paper prepared by an independent commission that cited cabinet minutes of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad giving an okay to a request to throw more money into the scandal in an effort to contain it. That was just the first Bank Bumi scandal. The government-owned bank had to be rescued twice more with additional losses of nearly US$600 million in today's dollars. Ultimately government officials gave up and the bank was absorbed into CIMB Group, currently headed by Nazir Razak, the prime minister's brother. That scandal, which stretched over several years before its denouement in 1985, set the tone for 24 years of similar scandals related to top Malaysian officials and was the first to prove that in Malaysia, you can not only get away with murder, you can get away with looting the treasury as well. In the mid 1980s, the Co-operative Central Bank, a bank set up to aid the Indian smallholder community, had to be rescued by Bank Negara, the country's central bank, after hundreds of millions of ringgit in loans granted to a flock of United Malays National Organisation and Malaysian Indian Congress politicians became non-performing. Some had never been serviced at all. Although the chief executive and general manager were charged with criminal breach of trust, none of the politicians were ever charged. Before that, the Malaysian government was believed to have lost US$500 million in an attempt at Mahathir's urging to corner the London tin market through a company called Maminco, driving the world price of tin from US$4.50 per tonne to US$7.50. It then sought to cover up the loss by establishing a US$2 company called Mukawasa from which allocations of new share issues to the government's Employees Provident Funds' were diverted. Mukawasa expected to sell the shares at a windfall profit to hide the tin speculation. There have been many other political and financial scandals since. In 2005, Bank Islam Malaysia, the country's flagship Islamic bank, reported losses of RM457 million mainly due to provisioning totaling RM774 million as a result of bad loans and investments incurred by its Labuan branch. Cumulatively, Bank Islam ran up nonperforming loans of RM2.2 billion, partly from mismanagement and poor internal controls but also "years of regulatory indifference fueled by the misconceived notion of an untouchable Bank Islam because it was a favorite child of the Malaysian government, being the first and model Islamic bank in the country and region," according to a December 19, 2005 article in Arab News. " In 2007, in what was called Malaysia's Enron scandal, the publicly traded Transmile Group Bhd, whose chairman was former MCA President and Cabinet Minister Ling Liong Sik, was caught having overstated its revenue by RM530 million. A pretax profit from Rm207 million in 2006 was actually a loss of RM126 million, and a pretax profit of 120 million in 2005 was a loss of RM77 million, causing the government postal company Pos Malaysia & Services Holdings Bhd to warn that its earnings for the 2006 financial year might be affected by the reported overstatement, as the postal group owned 15.3 percent of Transmile. Over the years 2001 to 2006, the government had to spend billions to rescue seven privatized projects including Kuala Lumpur's two public transport systems, the perennially ailing Malaysia Airlines, the national sewage system and a variety of others that, in the words of one study, "had been privatized prematurely." The government also repeatedly bailed out highway construction concessionaires, all of them closely connected to Umno, to the tune of another RM38.5 billion. In 2008, it was revealed that Rafidah Aziz, who had served as trade and industry minister for 18 years, had been peddling approved permits for duty-free car sales and allegedly lining her pockets. Two companies which didn't even have showrooms – one of which belonged to the husband of Rafidah's niece – received scores of permits. Although Rafidah came in for heavy criticism from within Umno, she remained in office until she was defeated in party elections. In the 1960s, federal prosecutors in the United States who were attempting to jail the late labor boss Jimmy Hoffa for looting the Teamsters Pension Fund of millions of dollars with his cronies were puzzled by the fact that their revelations appeared to have little effect on the union's rank and file. It was because no matter how much money Hoffa and his cronies stole, there was always money left because the fund was so rich.
student loans bankruptcy act 2005 july 2009 - News
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$1000000000000: How Did We Get Here? Student loans have been around for over 50 years. In 1958, the Citizen Defense Education Act created federally-backed low-interest loans for students to on the rise participation in fields crucial for national security, in response to the pitch of the |
Students lament debts as loan battle gains steam in Congress
A lend with an interest rate currently capped at 3.4% but that rate will double unless Congress acts by July 1 to freeze-up it. - Students can borrow up to $3500 their first year, $4500 their newer year and $5500 their third year and beyond - up to a
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The New Politics of Student Debt
In January 2009, Applebaum, then a 35-year-old advocate with more than $80000 in student debt, created a petition calling for student loan allowance to stimulate the economy. It was greeted with a few weeks of buzz and plenty of mock at.
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