This link provides access to an exclusive ABC report with video evidence of one of the 22 royal sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates, the powerful brothers who are currently funding the building and managing of NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, taking part in torture with the help of uniformed UAE police officers.

Sheik Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, the brother of the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, Prince Mohammed, does not play an active part in the UAE government but receives many benefits, including government access, police escorts, monetary support, and the privilege of having a brother as the Minister of the Interior and a brother as the leader of the nation.  His actions shown in the video, known to the UAE government, have been reviewed and no action has been taken against him.

The UAE government said in a statement that “all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department.”

In the video, Issa is seen torturing a grain merchant whom he felt had cheated him over about $5,000 worth of grain.

The event took place at Issa’s royal ranch, miles outside of the UAE’s capital city of Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is also the location of NYU Abu Dhabi, the school’s soon-to-be opened Middle Eastern campus.

“Get closer, get closer, let his suffering show!” Issa yells to the camera man, who is videotaping the event on Issa’s orders so that he may watch it later.

The action in the video is intense:

The man is bound at the ankles and wrists and sand is shoved into his mouth. A gun is fired near his face.  The merchant is struck with a cattle prod against his testicles, and it is then inserted into his anus.  The man’s testicles are then lit on fire with lighter fluid.  He is then beaten with a wooden board with a single protruding nail until the board splits in half.  Then, salt is poured into his wounds. The victim is semi-conscious as the Sheikh drives over him in his Mercedes SUV. The man survived, but was taken to a hospital for severe internal organ damage.

Bas Maroosi, a Houston businessman, smuggled the video from the country. About the events in the video, he says, “The whole government is all brothers – what can you do.”

Josh Taylor, the Senior Director for International Communications for NYU Abu Dhabi, speaking on behalf of the administration, has issued the following statement:

“While we’re not at all familiar with the details of the incident, I can say that we, like anyone watching that video, were horrified by the abhorrent acts depicted in it.

We clearly condemn the actions, and have made our Abu Dhabi counterparts aware of our concerns.”

Nonetheless, the event was worthwhile: Bloomberg bashing, anecdote telling and blatant stump speeching.To a crowd of about 20, mostly older adults not even associated with NYU, Avella was humble and offered a good pitch, even though he looked and sounded just like Republican geezer Fred Thompson.

Born and raised in Queens, the Hunter College grad explained that he wasn’t the “most conscientious student” in college and was never involved in any activities, which means there is at least some hope in my future. He also proclaimed that he “loves public service, but hates politics” (he rejected a 25% Council pay raise two years ago). The reformist pledged to actively involve local communities in his policymaking as mayor.

When Bloomberg’s name came up, he then spent a good 15 minutes criticizing Hizzoner on his reliance on his “inner circle.” The first thing he would upon entering office? Fire Dept. of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, Bloomberg’s henchman on education reform. Ouch. And after I asked about the city buying out companies in Willets Point, Queens (the moderator shoved the mic in my face once I said I was a blogger), Avella got particularly red in the face discussing the current mayor. He closed by promising his scant audience that, if elected, “you will see change.” Hm, sound familiar?

The next conversation is next Thursday (4/16) with Rev. Billy Talen, a Green Party candidate and head of the Church of Stop Shopping. Expect a comedy show.

Photo via the Village Voice

It is hard not to know something, if anything, about the financial crisis hitting Wall Street, U.S. politics, and your parents wallets recently. Yet, as undergraduate students trying to juggle our academic, social, and budding professional lives, it is understandable that most of us, and the American public, remain relatively uninformed on the nature of the crisis. There are, of course, different perspectives as to what caused the crisis and what should be done about it, but most, if not all, will look towards the sub-prime lending and adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) “meltdown” when discussing the recent collapse of some the world’s largest financial giants.

The ARM crisis traces back to the end of the Clinton presidency and the early years of the 21st Century. To describe the origins of this hot topic I’ll use my hometown as a very imperfect example. A couple who wanted to buy a home in Wellesley, MA two decades ago would have gone to Wellesley Cooperative Bank, a small local bank with just two branches, both in the town. There, the couple would meet with a representative who would take a look at their credit history, job history, and current financial situation. The bank representative would help the couple understand their finances and ultimately decide whether or not he thought the couple could afford the house and pay the monthly principal and interest on the mortgage. Once the couple obtained the mortgage from the bank, they could buy the house and begin paying off their 30-year loan in monthly amounts to Wellesley Cooperative Bank (which would profit from the interest).

This process changed around the turn of the century. Wellesley Cooperative Bank was then approached by larger financial entities like Fannie Mae, who would buy that couple’s entire mortgage for a lump sum of money. Wellesley Co-op would turn and use that money to finance another mortgage to a different couple, and turn around and sell that to Fannie Mae as well. Now the original couple is sending their monthly payments to Fannie Mae; it is the exact same mortgage, just now owned by a huge national banking institution. Fannie Mae effectively enabled the local bank to finance countless extra loans by giving a percentage of that 30 year profit immediately, leading to better profits for everyone and more loans for the American people.

So what was so bad about all this? It certainly seemed great at the time, and since everyone from Fannie Mae to the small-town folk were either getting lots of easy money or reaping huge profits, no one questioned the system. But Wellesley Cooperative was faced with a slightly different problem. The extra money from selling mortgages to Fannie Mae needed to be invested or lent to more couples wanting to buy a house, but selling mortgages was an easier investment tool compared to buying stocks. But the larger institutions were competing for the wealthy borrowers, with great jobs and credit histories. Wellesley Co-op had to lower its credit standards in order to find more borrowers. This is where the sub-prime lending crisis began. Before, the local bank would only lend money to people they thought were able to pay the loan back. But since Fannie Mae was buying up all these mortgages, Wellesley Co-op faced no risk because they could sell the sub-prime mortgage off to the big national banks. A sub-prime mortgage describes a “risky loan” on the part of the bank to someone who doesn’t meet normal lending standards. To compensate the bank for taking that risk, sub-prime mortgages are characterized by high interest rates and lots of profit for the bank if the mortgage is successfully paid off.

But Americans are no less greedy than bankers or Wall Street and no one wants to hear that they will have to pay exorbitant interest rates on their loan if they want to buy a house. Thus began adjustable-rate mortgages and the beginning of the end for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These types of mortgages would allow for a relatively low interest rate and small monthly bill for Americans who wanted to buy a house. The catch was that it was only appealing for the first four or five years of the mortgage. After that, interest rates would skyrocket and instead of paying $2,000 a month, the couple would get nailed with a bill hundreds of dollars more per month.

“But don’t worry about it!” the Wellesley Co-op representative would say, “because that $80,000 house you are buying is going to be worth $150,000 in five years!” When that happens all the couple would have to do is re-mortgage the house, giving them free money, five more years of breathing room, and the bank would get a new loan to collect from.

It turned out that the future was twice as good as anyone had previously thought. Americans found themselves sitting on houses worth half a million, or even a million dollars; ten times what they had originally paid for. So we kept refinancing those loans, banks kept rubber-stamping sub-prime mortgages and selling them off to the huge national banks who didn’t seem to know any better. Everyone was wealthy, and everyone was buying a house, until 2006 when the the value of houses stopped going up. Suddenly, people couldn’t refinance their troubles away. They soon entered the later stages of their mortgage agreement and payments began to rise. Houses foreclosed and since no one wants to live in neighborhoods with foreclosed houses, the values of surrounding houses dropped as well, leading to more foreclosures. The housing bubble had popped.

Meanwhile, Fannie Mae looked real good on paper. They owned lots of mortgages that they would be collecting on for years to come, but all the wealth was just paper. It was all imaginary. Just as the value of those houses was imaginary, the entire system was based upon the unfounded, yet a common belief that some random house was worth a lot of money. When the capacity of our imagination for greed was reached, the delusion of the housing market became all too clear. No one wanted to buy houses for that much money anymore. The people who bought those absurdly expensive houses were now getting them appraised for less than what they bought them for. When mainstream Wall Street and analysts came to their senses and realized these huge lending institutions were not actually as sound as they appeared on paper, stocks plummeted, rumors spread, and Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed. A combination of fear and financial problems soon led to the insolvency of the Lehman Brothers. Merrill Lynch, plagued with similar problems, some real and others imaginary quickly sought a buyout deal with Bank of America. AIG, believed to be on the brink of collapse, was “saved” by the Federal Reserve who bought 80% of the company’s stock and will oversee the dismantling of the corporation. And most recently, the second-largest remaining investment bank, Morgan Stanley, has been searching for a buyer amid declining stock and mounting fears.

Little doubt remains of how corruptly everyone from the largest Wall Street financial institutions to the small local banks has been behaving. While a specific sort of blame should fall on the CEOs who knew better, we must also recognize that everyone who profited from the easy money and imaginary wealth of the past two decades chose not to question, or even to inspect, the practices that were creating so much wealth and opportunity for all us. The crisis was predicted. There have been analysts and politicians warning about the problems that are now coming to fruition since the turn of the century. But no one cared to listen, nor do they now give these men their due recognition. The greatest problem we now face is allowing ourselves to believe that this problem is only a result of a few corrupt financial institutions. It is a symptom of the failure of our monetary system, which has been taken over by a group of unelected private officials in the Federal Reserve and supported by those the system benefits; namely, the CEOs of Wall Street. These are the individuals who have created the mess, and now with the help of Congress these are the same people who will continue to live a life of luxury at the expense of the American taxpayers.

Yet the problem has many faces. Too many to discuss in just one article, so I will break my opinion piece on the situation in two. This first one, to familiarize you with the side of the issue most discussed: the sub-prime mortgage “meltdown.” In the second, I will try to grasp the role of the Federal Reserve and our government throughout the past 30 years, and how Obama and McCain are reacting.

Photo by Flickr user Financial Aid Podcast used under a Creative Commons license.

Remember when Brad Pitt said that he and Angelina Jolie would “consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able”? Yeah, that was super sweet. Well, the square-jawed sex-symbol has done it again! On Wednesday Pitt announced that he would be donating $100,000 to fight Proposition 8, an option on the ballot in California in November that could ban the rights of same-sex couples to marry. Says Pitt, “Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8.” Brad, you’re a doll. Next time you come to New York let me take you out to dinner to show how much I appreciate this. No, really. I want to.

LA Times via Towleroad

Photo by Flickr user wvs used under a Creative Commons license.

After touting the “strong” fundamentals of the economy on Monday (and later backtracking, claiming he meant the American workers were strong *snicker*), he dug himself deeper into a hole Tuesday when he rejected the notion of bailing out AIG. Then, after the Fed bailed out AIG, he backtracked again, arguing that the government was “forced” to save the reeling insurance giant because of “failed regulation.”

Wait, wait, wait. What? Regulation, you say? Didn’t you just say six months ago that “our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital?” (emphasis mine)

McCain has been a vocal proponent of deregulation for years. In fact, he said just last year, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, that he was “the greatest deregulator you will ever interview.” It’s hard to run from a statement like that. And let’s not forget that one of McCain’s economic gurus, Phil Gramm, authored and sneakily helped pass a number of key deregulatory laws that opened the door to the subprime mortgage crisis rocking the financial world today.

The Obama campaign has done a great job in the last week of slamming McCain with his gaffes, lies, and unpopular ideas. (Check this speech out.) It’s about time. In a new New York Times poll, 48% of respondants said that the economy was the most important voting issue for them. Uh-oh, John. What now? Sarah’s gleam is wearing off and Barack’s back ahead in the polls. I guess you could say some bat-shit crazy stuff about our NATO allies.

Take a listen (starting at 2:58).

It’s a really bizarre exchange. And the conclusion that Josh Marshall reaches is too unsettling to contemplate:

John McCain either doesn’t know who the Prime Minister of Spain is, thinks Spain is a country in Latin America, or possibly both.

To be honest though, I’d actually be more comfortable with the next president of the United States being that clueless than the alternative. McCain foreign policy adviser and lunatic superhawk Randy Scheunemann is now claiming that McCain was fully aware of what the interviewer was talking about and declined to commit to meeting with the Spanish prime minister anyway.

In other words, the McCain campaign wants us to believe that they’re so paranoid and isolationist that McCain might actually refuse to meet with another member of NATO.

And to make things worse, in the official statement, Scheunemann refers to PM Zapatero as President Zapatero. That’s not an interview gaffe. That’s a prepared statement.

Maybe I’ve been too hard on Sarah Palin. I’m starting to suspect that she and McCain have comparable foreign policy expertise after all.

Last week, this post on the Journalism department by Alana Taylor caused a little bit of a buzz – you may recognize it from my post on a similar theme the next day.

In fact, Alana’s post turns out to have caused enough of a buzz that the teacher whose class she wrote about read it – and wasn’t too pleased.

The whole post is worth reading closely. My impression is that there’s a legitimate debate to be had over the ethics of what Alana did – quoting a lecture at a private university without first letting the lecturer know that she was on the record – but on the whole, it doesn’t seem like she did anything wrong.

The professor’s response, on the other hand, appears to have been pretty unambiguously bad.

Not surprisingly, Quigley was not happy with the story and was upset that Taylor had not sought permission to write her first-person report about the class, and told Taylor it was an invasion of privacy to other students in the class. By Taylor’s account, Quigley had a one-on-one meeting with Taylor to discuss the article, and Quigley made it clear that Taylor was not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again.

I’m not quite sure I understand the rationale there. How does this intrude on the privacy of the other students? None of them are mentioned by name, quoted, or even physically described. And if Professor Quigley wants to spare her students embarrassment, she certainly has a funny way of showing it.

“She told the class to read the article,” Taylor said. “Then she asked, ‘You all read Alana’s article, what did you think about it?’ There was silence for a good 30 or 45 seconds, and it was awkward and weird. And she said, ‘OK, we can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class.’ It was weird. It seemed like the students were scared to say anything.”

That’s not exactly encouraging the free exchange of ideas. It sounds to me more like bullying.

The sad thing is that Alana’s original post raises a lot of the thorny questions that would make for great discussion in a journalism class. As opposed to, say, 30-45 seconds of silence followed by a blanket ban on followup pieces.

Photo Credit: Dean Stattman

I’m always a little skeptical of posts like Mike’s, which decry the horrible, elitist treatment that Sarah Palin has received. Where are these snide, condescending liberals hiding? I haven’t seen any on television, in the newspapers, or any other news outlet – nor have I seen any polling data indicating the presence of this phantom menace.

Besides, elitism is sort of beside the point. There are plenty of reasons to be uneasy with the prospect of a Palin vice presidency that have nothing to do with mooseburgers. Like, for example, her constant pathological lying. Or her ignorance of foreign policy. Or the fact that she’s the subject of a corruption probe which she openly refuses to cooperate with.

I don’t think it’s elitist to suggest that someone who may very well be president in the next few years should be qualified for the job. And if the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that focus group-friendly folksiness isn’t a very good metric for determining who should be leader of the free world.

I don’t agree with a lot of what Palin supporter Keith Olsen wrote on Monday, but he was spot on when he said that we should “talk about the real issues.” Absolutely! Let’s talk about, for example, Palin’s real record on earmarks. Or better yet, let’s talk about whether or not sexual assault victims should be charged for their rape kits.

And let’s be clear: for all this talk about liberal elitism and Palin’s blue collar appeal, these are not substantive issues. They’re a smoke screen to avoid the last subject that Palin wants to discuss: her actual positions and qualifications.

Photo by Flickr user NewsHour used under a Creative Commons license.

Or maybe they’re all just freegans?

A study of 6500 traveling business executives just released by Sheraton hotels says that 35 percent would choose their PDA over their spouse.

Who are these people? I mean, I can understand choosing coffee over your spouse, but your BlackBerry? That’s just ridiculous.

Photo by Flickr user SheepGuardingLlama used under a Creative Commons license.