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Video of Police Beating [of 15-year-old girl in police custody]
Released in Washington State
By Robert Mackey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipb_PeXOdT4
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/video-of-police-beating-released-in-washington/
(See full article #8, below.)
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Mass outreach to build March 21 Demonstration--Saturday,
March 7 and March 14:
San Francisco: 12noon, meet at 2489 Mission St. #24 at 21st St.
East Bay: 10am, meet at MacArthur BART main entrance, Oakland
NEXT MARCH 21 COALITION PLANNING MEETING:
SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 4:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO
Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):
http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage
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Winter Soldier: Testimony from US veterans on their experiences in Iraq, women's experiences, being a Muslim in the US military, war resisters and more.
Wed., March 11, 6 - 9 PM
150 Goldman School of Public Policy on UC Berkeley campus
Free.
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March against the war on March 21
Dear friends,
During his presidential campaign, Obama's popularity surged with the promise that he would bring the troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But his recently announced plan would continue the illegal occupation indefinitely. It would leave up to 50,000 troops in that war-torn country for who knows how many years. And it would delay the withdrawal of the first batch of troops to 19 months.
"When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, 'get out,' and everyone's gone. But that is not going to happen," said a senior military officer.
This plan doesn't "leave Iraq to its people and responsibly end this war", as Obama claimed during his Congressional address of Feb. 24. Instead it entrenches the U.S. in a brutal counter-insurgency war that helped to bankrupt our country and sends an endless stream of Americans to continue dying and killing.
The U.S. government, the American people, and the Iraqi people need to hear our voices of opposition on March 21.
Last week, Sec. of Defense Gates and President Obama announced their plan to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan - that's a 50 percent increase - despite the fact that the Department of Defense has no exit strategy. And the U.S. is expanding the covert war run by the CIA inside neighboring Pakistan.
We cannot afford another quagmire.
Please join us in Washington, SF, and LA on March 21.
Go to www.pentagonmarch.org for more information
Meanwhile the U.S.-funded occupation and blockade of Gaza continues after an assault in which 100's of civilians were killed and even a United Nations school was not spared from the onslaught of human rights crimes and violations of international law.
The people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine are struggling to rid themselves of deadly, racist occupations. We need to unite in the realization that the movement in solidarity with the people of Palestine is the same as the movements in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us stand together with each other and with them, and say:
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, occupation is a crime!
The people of the world need to hear from Americans that we are against the racist U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. We have an historic responsibility to raise our voices and be heard, to march with our banners held high and be seen, demanding
Bring ALL the troops home NOW!
Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
End U.S. support for the occupation of Palestine!
No war on Iran or Pakistan!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations is joining with a broadening alliance of 100's of coalitions, organizations, and networks in a united MARCH 21 NATIONAL COALITION to mobilize people across the United States to take part in a March on the Pentagon on the sixth year of the military invasion and occupation of the Iraq War: Saturday, March 21.
Demonstrations will also be held on that date in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities across the U.S.
For updated information about buses and the national March 21 coalition, which includes labor unions, peace and anti-war groups, veterans and community groups and more, see: www.pentagonmarch.org
These actions will remind the nation and the world that the U.S. antiwar movement - marching behind a banner demanding "Out Now!' - will intensify its struggle to stop the wars.
The actions are needed to assure the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other countries threatened by Washington's expansionist policies that tens of millions of people in this country support their right to settle their own destinies without U.S. interventions, occupations and murderous wars. International law recognizes - and we demand - that the U.S. respect the right to self-determination. We reject any notion that the U.S. is the world's self-appointed cop.
The March 21 united mass actions are also needed at this time of economic meltdown to demand jobs for all; a moratorium on foreclosures; rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure; guaranteed, quality health care for all; an end to the ICE raids and deportations; and funding for sorely needed social programs. So long as trillions of dollars continue to be spent on wars, occupations, and bailouts to the banks and corporate elite, the domestic needs of the people of the U.S. can never be met.
For more information about the National Assembly please visit: www.natassembly.org
March 21, in D.C., will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins-representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed-will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.
From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).
A March 21 Labor Rally and contingent to March 21
will be held in the grassy area just South of Market
Street in Justin Herman Plaza
Saturday, March 21
Rally at 10:30 a.m. // Form contingent to march at 11:45 a.m.
http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=18479
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Donate to Courage to Resist
A message from Army Spc. Agustín Aguayo,
Iraq War veteran and war resister
Since the day I surrendered to military custody after refusing to return to Iraq, Courage to Resist has been there for me and my family as a constant fountain of support. This support has come in many forms, from a friendly call, to organizing a campaign to cover my legal expenses and basic needs. I believe only an organization with altruistic motives that truly cares would have done this. As someone who has felt the enormous relief of having a strong support group behind me, it is a privilege now as a member of Courage to Resist to help others as I have been helped.
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/26/
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Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.
http://www.wakeupfreakout.org/film/tipping.html
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
2) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
3) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
4) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
5) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
6) Forced From Executive Pay to Hourly Wage
By MICHAEL LUO
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01survival.html?hp
7) Guess What Got Lost in the Loan Pool?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01gret.html?ref=business
8) Video of Police Beating [of 15-year-old girl in police custody]
Released in Washington State
By Robert Mackey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipb_PeXOdT4
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/video-of-police-beating-released-in-washington/
9) Ukraine Teeters as Citizens Blame Banks and Government
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/europe/02ukraine.html?ref=world
10) U.S. Missiles Hit Militants in Pakistan, Killing Eight
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/asia/02pstan.html?ref=world
11) A.I.G. Reports Loss of $61.7 Billion as U.S. Gives More Aid
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
March 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03aig.html?ref=business
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1) New Owners to Reopen Window Plant, Site of a Sit-In in Chicago
By KAREN ANN CULLOTTA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27factory.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - The 250 workers who staged a December sit-in at a Chicago window factory to protest losing their jobs were celebrating Thursday, after another window manufacturer announced plans to reopen the plant and start hiring back the displaced workers within months.
The sale of what had been Republic Windows and Doors to a California company, Serious Materials, for $1.45 million, was completed in bankruptcy court this week, with company officials promising United Electrical Workers Local 1110 to rehire all the laid-off workers at their former rate of pay.
"We see this opportunity to expand our operations in direct relation to the stimulus package, which includes the greening of federal buildings and the weatherization assistance program," said Sandra Vaughan, the chief marketing officer for Serious Materials, which also manufactures energy-efficient windows and building products in Boulder, Colo., and Vandergrift, Pa.
Ms. Vaughan said it could take months to get the company's equipment up and running in Chicago, but to former Republic Windows workers like Armando Robles, a father of five who lost his health insurance in January, the prospect of the factory's reopening was "a dream come true."
"They are promising to hire all of us back sooner or later, but they will start with a small crew," said Mr. Robles, 39, who had been a maintenance technician. "Having another company reopen the factory was always our hope when we occupied the factory in December."
Serious Materials' acquisition of the 125,000-square-foot warehouse that housed Republic Windows comes just days after Republic Windows' former owner, Rich Gillman, ceased operations at his new window plant in Red Oak, Iowa. Mr. Gillman opened that factory late last year as a nonunion plant, after abruptly shuttering the one in Chicago.
"We are sad that the inability to make the company succeed represents a loss for more than 100 workers and their families, and investors who held great hope for this enterprise," Mr. Gillman said in a statement.
Melvin Maclin, 55, a former technician at Republic Windows, said his bitter emotions of the last few months turned to joy this week, after learning that he could soon be back at work, cutting designs into glass windows at the Chicago plant.
"When I got the phone call, I woke up my wife, and we did a little victory dance," Mr. Maclin said. "This is not only a victory for the Republic workers, but for laborers and unions everywhere."
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2) 70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
February 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html?ref=us
More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers.
The suit contends that before resigning last year, the judges "used kids as commodities that could be traded for cash," placing an "indelible stain" on the juvenile justice system of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.
The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Scranton by the Juvenile Law Center, seeks to have all profits that the detention centers earned from the scheme placed in a fund that would compensate the youths for their emotional distress.
In an earlier filing, the law center, based in Philadelphia, asked the State Supreme Court to clear the records of all juveniles who appeared before the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.
The suit brought Thursday is the third filed on behalf of juvenile offenders. The two others, one of which also seeks class-action status, were filed by private lawyers.
Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income-tax fraud for having taken more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two privately operated centers, run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
"Judge Ciavarella's placement of so many children in juvenile facilities without regard for their underlying charges suggests a Procrustean scheme that violated one of the core principles of the juvenile justice system - the right to individualized treatment and rehabilitation," Lourdes M. Rosado, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center, said in a statement.
Lawyers for the two former judges declined to comment on the suit.
As for the criminal investigation of court personnel, two additional people have already been charged, and federal officials say they may soon charge others involved in the scheme.
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3) As Livelihoods End, Bowed but Proud
By KEVIN COYNE
Jersey | Florence
February 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/nyregion/new-jersey/22colnj.html?ref=nyregion
Florence
ON his last day of work at the sprawling riverfront foundry here, Tom Darmo looked up from the stacks of pipes he was counting and decided that, after 22 years, the time had come for him to visit the one spot where he had never set foot before: the peak of the cupola, the five-story furnace where scrap metal was melted and transformed into something new.
The cupola is the highest point at Griffin Pipe, and on this last morning before the plant's closing it was probably the coldest, too. Winds were gusting near 50 miles an hour, whipping up whitecaps on the gray Delaware. Mr. Darmo, 42, tightened the band inside his hard hat and, with three colleagues from the quality control department, started climbing the narrow ladders toward the uppermost catwalk.
"It was like us going to Mount Everest," he said later, after he and roughly 200 other workers had left their old jobs for the last time. "I've looked at it from afar for many years, but I've never been up to the top. I will never forget that. It was a special time for us."
He could see everything from up on the cupola, more than 200 acres of a foundry whose roots were more than 200 years deep, a place most people around here presumed was too old and too big to ever close. "The First Company to Manufacture Cast Iron Pipe in the United States," the sign out front declares; before it was bought by Griffin Pipe in 1962, it was the R. D. Wood Company, which was founded in Millville in 1803 and took over an existing foundry here in 1867. If you live anywhere in the northeastern United States, you have almost certainly used water that has flowed through a pipe that was made here.
But those 200 years ended quietly on Lincoln's Birthday, while Congress was still debating an economic stimulus package that was arriving too late to save these jobs in this old river town just south of Trenton, where too many families already know what happens when a factory locks its gates.
"We were expecting a temporary layoff, maybe three months," said Mark Babula, 38, unit chairman of Local 2040B of the United Steelworkers, the union that represents 175 hourly employees at Griffin. But the economy was worse than anyone had ever imagined: Housing starts had plummeted, and so had the demand for water pipes. Just a year earlier, just three miles downriver in Burlington, another old foundry, U.S. Pipe, had closed.
The news arrived several weeks before Christmas: a complete shutdown of production. It was the same kind of hammer blow that hit Mr. Babula's father and grandfather in 1974, when the Roebling steel mill - the center of the meticulously planned industrial village just three miles north of Griffin, and the maker of the suspension cables that hold up most of the landmark American bridges of the 20th century - shut down, and tossed them out of work.
The final day at Griffin was marked by no ceremony. "Everybody just kind of drifted away," said Mr. Babula, whose father grew up in a house built by Roebling for its workers and who lives with his wife and their 2-year-old son in an R. D. Wood house, a seven-minute walk from the plant where he worked for 15 years. "But everybody went out proud."
Production had stopped almost a week earlier, so when paychecks were distributed at midmorning, most workers saw little point in sticking around till the end of the shift. One by one, they trickled out through the gate, carrying bags filled with dirty clothes from their lockers, some with several pairs of boots dangling like strings of bass.
By midafternoon a couple dozen of them had convened at a place called Wesley's up in Roebling, across the street from the mostly vacant parcel where the old mill had once stood. They traded stories about their lost world at the same long mahogany bar where the Roebling workers had once traded stories about their own.
There was some grumbling: about who got the few jobs that will remain as the plant becomes a distribution center for pipes made at Griffin's other locations, in Virginia and Iowa; about the recent ascendancy of managers unschooled in the ways of the old foundrymen; about what seemed a myopic strategy of shutting down, rather than riding through the rough times with a layoff; about the gyrations that R. D. Wood must be making in his grave.
But mostly there was sadness, and worry about the prospect of finding new jobs in an economy so bad that it killed a plant that had survived so many other downturns. "I went from making $48,000 a year to unemployment," said John Sheehan, who worked at the foundry for 22 years, and whose wife's father and grandfather had worked there before him. When his health coverage ends in four and half months, his insurance will become unaffordable: $1,000 a month, he said, half his unemployment check. "I have to start all over at 42 years old."
Hourly wages at Griffin ranged from $18 to $23, but in good years, when demand was high and overtime was plentiful, some workers made more than $60,000. "Everyone needs water and sewer lines," Mr. Sheehan said. "I never thought this would happen."
More workers arrived at Wesley's as the afternoon deepened, and they helped themselves to the spread of free food the owners had put out for them: pulled pork, Cajun wings, vodka rigatoni. A few had leads for new jobs, but more did not, and the chances of finding ones like the kind they had just left seemed to be growing dimmer each day.
"When you lose your manufacturing base, you're losing your backbone, you're losing your strength," Tom Darmo said. "Now we're enslaved to China and these underdeveloped countries where they treat the workers terribly and they don't have pollution controls."
Mr. Darmo had a new listener, and he was telling the story again of his ascent to the summit of the cupola, a perch from which he had seen not just the foundry that he was about to leave, but also all the way north to the memory of another plant from which an earlier generation of workers had once been expelled: the remnants of the Roebling mill just across the street.
"It was so windy it was scary," he said. He held on tight, though, braced against the wind that threatened to blow him away, but never quite managed to.
e-mail: jersey@nytimes.com
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4) Even Worse for Young Workers
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28herbert.html
The employment situation in the U.S. is, if anything, worse than most people realize. And huge numbers of young people, ages 16 to 30, are being beaten down in ways that could leave scars for a lifetime.
Much of the attention in this economic downturn has focused on the growing legions of men and women who are officially counted as unemployed. There are now more than 11 million of them.
But a better picture of the economic distress related to employment emerges when the number of jobless Americans is combined with two other categories of workers: the underemployed (those who are working part time, for example, because they can't find full-time work) and the so-called labor force reserve, workers who have abandoned their job searches but who would work if employment became available.
This total pool of underutilized labor has now risen above 24 million, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That total will only grow in the coming months.
The Obama administration has more than enough on its plate at the moment, but before long it will likely have to consider a range of additional strategies, beyond the recently passed stimulus package, for putting jobless Americans to work.
A comparison of the number of people being thrown out of work in this recession with that of the severe recession of 1981-82 will indicate why. The peak unemployment rate was higher in that earlier recession than today's 7.6 percent, largely because the last big wave of the baby-boom generation was entering the job market in the early '80s. Those boomers who couldn't find work were officially counted as unemployed.
What is different and more frightening about the current downturn is the number of people actually losing their jobs - being laid off or fired. That number is dramatically, dangerously higher.
The government uses two different surveys to gauge employment data. The household survey, based on telephone interviews, showed that job losses in the 13 months that followed the beginning of the 1981-82 recession reached 1.53 million. In the first 13 months of this recession, the number of jobs lost, according to the household survey, has been a staggering 4 million.
The payroll survey, which is based on employment records, showed job losses of 1.7 million in
the first 13 months of the earlier downturn compared with 3.5 million in the current recession.
Pick your poison. This is not the kind of downturn Americans are used to.
The ones who are being hit the hardest and will have the most difficult time recovering are America's young workers. Nearly 2.2 million young people, ages 16 through 29, have already lost their jobs in this recession. This follows an already steep decline in employment opportunities for young workers over the past several years.
Good jobs were hard to find for most categories of workers during that period. One of the results has been that older men and women have been taking and holding onto jobs that in prior eras would have gone to young people.
"What we've seen over the past eight years, for young people under 30, is the largest age reversal with regard to jobs that we've ever had in our history," said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies. "The younger you are, the more you got pushed out of this labor market."
There were not enough jobs to go around before the recession took hold. So the young, the poor and the poorly educated were already suffering. Now that pool of suffering is rapidly expanding.
This has ominous long-term implications for the country. The economy cannot perform well with such a large cohort of young people condemned to marginal economic status.
Young men and women who remain unemployed for substantial periods of time find it very difficult to make up that ground. They lose the experience and training they would have gained by working. Even if they eventually find employment, they tend to lag behind their peers when it comes to wages, promotions and job security.
Moreover, as the economy worsens, even the college educated are feeling the crunch.
According to a report by researchers working with Mr. Sum: "While young college graduates have fared the best in maintaining some type of employment, a growing fraction of them are becoming mal-employed, holding jobs in occupations that do not require much schooling beyond high school, often displacing their less-educated peers."
Employment problems have festered in the United States for decades. The economy will never be brought to a state of health until those problems are more thoughtfully and more directly engaged. This will become more and more clear with each passing month of this hideous recession.
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5) A Clean Fight
By TIMOTHY HSIA
Op-Ed Contributor
February 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/opinion/28hsia.html/
BEFORE my Stryker squadron deployed to Iraq from Germany, the 500 of us cleaned up after ourselves. We spent a day removing every environmental trace of our training activities in the Bavarian heartland. Plastic and paper were sorted to comply with German recycling policies. Soil and plants contaminated by fuel leaks were dug up and placed in sealed bags. Depleted batteries were collected for proper disposal. We left our training grounds pristine.
This was America's 21st-century military at work: soldiers are trained not only to battle insurgents but also to be good stewards of the environment. Sadly, during combat tours, we have forgotten the strict environmentally friendly procedures we practice in the United States or in host countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.
On military bases in Iraq, plastic, paper, aerosol cans, Styrofoam plates, food waste, batteries, digital equipment and hygiene products fall under one category: waste. It is simply dumped at the edge of the base, then burned at night, irritating soldiers' lungs. Untreated wastewater is also haphazardly disposed of and gradually finds its way into Iraq's waterways, which can pose health risks for Americans on the base and Iraqis who live nearby.
It would be convenient to blame the chaos of a war zone for the military's mismanagement of waste. But the issue is far more complex. Indeed, a major part of the problem is that the military has absolved itself of dealing with waste in Iraq and has contracted out the collection and disposal of it.
These companies - usually American firms that subcontract to foreign workers - operate free of regulation by either the Iraqi government or the United States military. Sometimes they simply remove waste to an abandoned field - out of sight, out of mind. Often, they use burn pits. Soldiers at a base in Balad have accused one contractor, KBR, of making them ill from burning toxic materials like aircraft fuel and arsenic, and medical waste, including amputated limbs. But in my experience Balad is not an isolated incident and waste mismanagement occurs on many bases.
All this trash has caught the eyes of enterprising Iraqis looking for scrap metal or reusable objects like discarded headphones and DVDs. When commodity prices increased, they resorted to picking up used ammunition brass as soon as soldiers left a practice firing range.
Although this inadvertent recycling might seem like a fine way to deal with trash, some of this material has gotten into the wrong hands and has been used to deadly effect against American and Iraqi soldiers. There have been accounts of insurgents dressing up in discarded uniforms and hiding explosive devices in abandoned equipment. Yet the Army's counterinsurgency manual still gives sparse attention to the proper disposal of equipment and supplies, as well as other environmental concerns.
Waste is an overarching problem: our counterinsurgency policy of securing the populace and providing access to essential services can't be separated from environmental considerations. It's vital that the people we live among are getting clean water, that farmers are able to grow their crops, that communities aren't buried under trash.
With President Obama's planned drawdown of our military forces in Iraq by mid-2010, we need to ensure that our environmental legacy there is a positive one. But the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad contains hardly any details about protecting the environment. The United States is committed only to respecting Iraqi laws - a low bar because Iraq's environmental agencies are still in their infancy. The United States military should take the lead by adopting - and requiring all contractors to adopt - American recycling practices.
In the last few years, the United States military has become a much more environmentally conscious organization. But these eco-friendly practices need to be applied every place where the military and civilian contractors operate, including Iraq. The military will not only protect the health and safety of American troops and local populations, but also leave behind a greener country.
Timothy Hsia is an Army infantry captain.
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6) Forced From Executive Pay to Hourly Wage
By MICHAEL LUO
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01survival.html?hp
TEMPE, Ariz. - Mark Cooper started his work day on a recent morning cleaning the door handles of an office building with a rag, vigorously shaking out a rug at a back entrance and pushing a dust mop down a long hallway.
Nine months ago he lost his job as the security manager for the western United States for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning about $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful for the $12 an hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a "survival job" at a friend's janitorial services company. But that does not make the work any easier.
"You're fighting despair, discouragement, depression every day," Mr. Cooper said.
Working five days a week, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mr. Cooper is not counted by traditional measures as among the recession's casualties at this point. But his tumble down the economic ladder is among the more disquieting and often hidden aspects of the downturn.
It is not clear how many professionals like Mr. Cooper have taken on these types of lower-paying jobs, which are themselves in short supply. Many are doing their best to hold out as long as possible on unemployment benefits and savings while still looking for work in their fields.
About 1.7 million people, however, were working part-time in January because they could not find full-time work, a 40 percent jump from December 2007, when the recession began, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And experts agree that as the economic downturn continues and as more people begin to exhaust their jobless benefits and other options, the situation Mr. Cooper is in will inevitably become more common.
Interviews with more than two dozen laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stop-gap jobs to help make ends meet, found that they were working for places like U.P.S., a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor store. For many of the workers, the psychological adjustment was just as difficult as the financial one, with their sense of identity and self-worth upended.
"It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion," said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position as a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executive jobs. "With every layer you peel back, you discover something else about yourself. You have to make an adjustment."
Some people had exhausted their jobless benefits, or were ineligible; others said it was impossible for them to live on their unemployment checks alone, or said it was a matter of pride, or sanity, that drove them to find a job, any job.
In just one illustration of the demand for low-wage work, a spokesman for U.P.S. said the company saw the number of applicants this last holiday season for jobs sorting and delivering packages almost triple to 1.4 million from the 500,000 it normally receives.
When Ms. Arlt applied for the job, she sent in a stripped-down résumé that hid her 20-year career at national media companies, during which she ascended to vice president of brand development at the On Command Video Corporation and was making $165,000 a year. She decided in 2001 to start her own business, opening an equestrian store and then founding a magazine devoted to the sport. But with the economy slowing, she was forced to shutter both businesses by June of last year.
After applying for more than 100 jobs, mostly director-level and above in marketing and branding, and getting just two interviews, Ms. Arlt said she realized last fall that she had to do something to "close the monthly financial hemorrhage."
Her new job at HometownQuotes pays $10 to $15 an hour and has mostly entailed data entry. But even though she has parted ways with some friends because she is no longer in their social stratum, Ms. Arlt said she was glad she was no longer sitting at home, "thinking, 'Who have I not heard from today?' "
Her new paycheck covers her mortgage but not her other living expenses. Recently, she cashed out what was left of her retirement portfolio, about $17,000.
"It has been the hardest thing in my life," she said. "It has been harder than my divorce from my husband. It has really been even worse than the death of my mother."
Nearly all of those interviewed said they considered their situations temporary and planned to resume their careers where they left off once the economy improves. But there are people like John Eller, 51, of Lee's Summit, Mo., who offer a glimpse of how difficult it can be to bounce back.
Mr. Eller had been a senior director at Sprint, earning as much as $150,000 a year and overseeing 7,000 employees at 13 call centers, before being laid off in 2002 amid the economic contraction after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A year later, he found another job, at roughly half the pay, managing a call center in New Jersey. After he lost that job two years later in a downsizing, Mr. Eller found himself out of work for another year before landing a contract position running two call centers in Kansas and Illinois, earning close to six figures.
But after that ended a year later, he was unable to find work for several months. In July 2007, he took what he thought would be a temporary job for $10 an hour as a baker in a grocery store. He was laid off again last October.
Mr. Eller quickly landed a new survival job, working as a supervisor on the overnight shift for a contractor processing immigration applications for the federal government at a salary of about $34,000 a year. But with eight children and a wife to support, Mr. Eller said he was still "below poverty level." The family has not been able to make mortgage payments in five months and has been on the brink of foreclosure.
"I'm still scratching and clawing and trying to work my way back," he said.
In Mr. Cooper's case, relying on unemployment checks was never a serious consideration. The maximum benefit that jobless people can collect in Arizona is $240 a week, among the lowest in the country - and much less than is required to cover the mortgage on the comfortable four-bedroom home in Glendale that he and his wife, Maggie Macias-Cooper, share.
Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who works as a personal trainer in a gym built in what used to be the couple's three-car garage, has seen her client base shrink to 10 from about 50 over the last year.
In addition to giving Mr. Cooper a job as a janitor, his friend agreed to pay for the couple's benefits through Cobra. Maintaining health care coverage was paramount for the family because Mrs. Macias-Cooper recently had breast cancer.
Some unemployed professionals said they decided not to seek even part-time work because it might interfere with their job searches. But Mr. Cooper rises every day at 4 a.m. and, after a time of prayer, devotes two hours to his job hunt on the computer. He prints out a detailed call list of prospective employers to take with him, squeezing in phone conversations during breaks throughout the day from his pickup truck, which he calls his "office."
"There were times I broke down," Mr. Cooper said. "I broke down thinking, 'This is what I've become.' "
But Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who admitted that she was initially embarrassed about her husband's new job, says she is now grateful.
"There is no shame," said Mrs. Macias-Cooper, who grew teary during an interview at their home. "I am very proud of my husband that he will go to any lengths, do whatever it takes, to keep his family afloat, if it means mopping floors, cleaning urinals."
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7) Guess What Got Lost in the Loan Pool?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Fair Game
March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01gret.html?ref=business
WE are all learning, to our deep distress, how the perpetual pursuit of profits drove so many of the bad decisions that financial institutions made during the mortgage mania.
But while investors tally the losses that were generated by loose lending so far, the impact of another lax practice is only beginning to be seen. That is the big banks' minimalist approach to meeting legal requirements - bookkeeping matters, really - when pooling thousands of loans into securitization trusts.
Stated simply, the notes that underlie mortgages placed in securitization trusts must be assigned to those trusts soon after the firms create them. And any transfers of these notes must also be recorded.
But this seems not to have been a priority with many big banks. The result is that bankruptcy judges are finding that institutions claiming to hold the notes that back specific mortgages often cannot prove it.
On Feb. 11, a circuit court judge in Miami-Dade County in Florida set aside a judgment against Ana L. Fernandez, a borrower whose home had been foreclosed and repurchased on Jan. 21 by Chevy Chase Bank, the institution claiming to hold the note. But the bank had been unable to produce evidence that the original lender had assigned the note, which was in the amount of $225,000, to Chevy Chase.
With the sale set aside, Ms. Fernandez remains in the home. "We believe this loan was never assigned," said Ray Garcia, the lawyer in Miami who represented the borrower. Now, he said, it is up to whoever can produce the underlying note to litigate the case. The statute of limitations on such a matter runs for five years, he said.
A spokeswoman for Capital One, which is in the process of acquiring Chevy Chase, did not return a phone call on Friday seeking comment.
Mr. Garcia has another case in which a borrower tried to sell his home but could not because the note underlying a $60,000 second mortgage cannot be found. The statute of limitations on the matter will expire in October, he said, and if the note holder has not come forward by then, the borrower will be free of his obligation on the second mortgage.
No one knows how many loans went into securitization trusts with defective documentation. But as messes go, this one has, ahem, potential. According to Inside Mortgage Finance, some eight million nonprime mortgages were put into securities pools in 2005 and 2006 and sold to investors. The value of these loans was $797 billion in 2005 and $815 billion in 2006.
If notes underlying even some of these mortgages were improperly assigned or lost, that will surely complicate pending legislation intended to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms for troubled borrowers. A so-called cram-down provision in the law would let judges reduce the size of a loan, forcing whoever holds the security interest in it to take a loss.
But if the holder of the note is in doubt, how can these loans be modified?
Bookkeeping is such a bore, especially when there are billions to be made shoveling loans into trusts like coal into the Titanic's boilers. You can imagine the thought process: Assigning notes takes time and costs money, why bother? Who's going to ask for proof of ownership of these notes anyhow?
But as the Fernandez case and others indicate, bankruptcy judges across the country are increasingly asking these pesky questions. Two judges in California - one in state court, another in federal court - issued temporary restraining orders last month stopping foreclosures because proper documentation was not produced by lenders or their representatives. And in another California case, a borrower's lawyer was awarded $8,800 in attorney's fees relating to costs spent litigating against a lender that could not prove it had the right to foreclose.
California cases are especially interesting because foreclosures in that state can be conducted without the oversight of a judge. Borrowers who do not have a lawyer representing them can be turned out of their homes in four months.
Samuel L. Bufford, a federal bankruptcy judge in Los Angeles since 1985, has overseen some 100,000 bankruptcy cases. He said that in previous years, he rarely asked for documentation in a foreclosure case but that problems encountered in mortgage securitizations have made him become more demanding.
In a recent case, Judge Bufford said, he asked a lender to produce the original of the note and it turned out to be different from the copy that had been previously submitted to the court. The original had been assigned to a bank that had then transferred it to Freddie Mac, the judge explained. "They had no clue what happened after that," he said. "Now somebody's got to go find that note."
"My guess is it's because in the secondary mortgage market they have been sloppy," Judge Bufford added. "The people who put the deals together get paid for the deals, but they don't get paid for the paperwork."
A small but spirited group of consumer lawyers has argued for years that the process of pooling residential mortgages into securities was so haphazard that proper documentation of the loans was never made in many cases. Leading the brigade is April Charney, a foreclosure lawyer at Jacksonville Legal Aid in Florida; she now trains consumer lawyers around the country to litigate these cases.
Depending on the documentation defect, lawyers say, investors in the trust could try to force the institution that sold the loan to the trust to buy it back. Many of these institutions would be unable to do so, however, because they are defunct. In the meantime, when judges are not persuaded that the documentation is proper, troubled borrowers can remain in their homes even if they are delinquent.
THE woes brought on by sloppy bookkeeping in securitizations will be on the agenda at the American Bankruptcy Institute's annual spring meeting on April 3. An article titled "Where's the Note, Who's the Holder," co-written by Judge Bufford and R. Glen Ayers, a former federal bankruptcy judge in Texas, will be the basis of a discussion at the meeting.
Mr. Ayers, who is a lawyer at Langley & Banack in San Antonio, said he expects that these documentation problems will halt a lot of foreclosures. That will mean pain for investors who hold the securities. The problem for those who expect to receive the benefit of the note, Mr. Ayers said, is that they "may not be able to show to the judge they have a right to foreclose."
"It's a huge problem," he added. "It's going to be expensive, I don't know how expensive, ultimately to the bondholders."
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8) Video of Police Beating [of 15-year-old girl in police custody]
Released in Washington State
By Robert Mackey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipb_PeXOdT4
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/video-of-police-beating-released-in-washington/
On Friday in Seattle, the King County Sheriff's Office released video showing a sheriff's deputy kicking and throwing punches at a 15-year-old girl in police custody, after the deputy was charged with fourth-degree assault in the case and pleaded not guilty.
In the video, taken by a camera in a cell in the SeaTac City Hall last November, the girl can be seen flipping her shoe at the deputy, Paul Schene, who responds by rushing at her, kicking her and forcing her to the floor, where he throws two punches as he kneels on the girl's back, and then lifts her to her feet by her hair.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that the video was released over the objections of Mr. Schene's lawyer, who claimed "it will inflame public opinion and will severely impact the deputy's right to a fair trial." But a judge in Seattle ruled that the recording was a public record and allowed the release. The Associated Press published this copy of the video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipb_PeXOdT4
The A.P. reports that the girl was arrested during an investigation of a stolen car. She later pleaded not guilty to a charge of taking a motor vehicle without permission.
KOMO television news in Seattle reported that the second deputy seen in the video, who helped handcuff the girl after Mr. Schene forced her to the floor of the holding cell, "was a trainee at the time and is not under investigation." According to KOMO:
The second deputy said the alleged victim was "real lippy," calling the deputies names and "basically trying to piss us off."
The Post-Intelligencer notes that the deputy who was charged in the beating, Mr. Schene, had "killed a mentally ill man" in 2006; the A.P. adds word of an earlier incident as well:
Schene was investigated previously for shooting two people - killing one - in the line of duty in 2002 and 2006. Both times his actions were found to be justified, said Ian Goodhew, prosecutor's deputy chief of staff.
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9) Ukraine Teeters as Citizens Blame Banks and Government
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/europe/02ukraine.html?ref=world
KIEV, Ukraine - Steel and chemical factories, once the muscle of Ukraine's economy, are dismissing thousands of workers. Cities have had days without heat or water because they cannot pay their bills, and Kiev's subway service is being threatened. Lines are sprouting at banks, the currency is wilting and even a government default seems possible.
Ukraine, once considered a worldwide symbol of an emerging, free-market democracy that had cast off authoritarianism, is teetering. And its predicament poses a real threat for other European economies and former Soviet republics.
The sudden, violent protests that have erupted elsewhere in Eastern Europe seem imminent here now, too. Across Kiev last week, people spoke of rising anger about the crisis and resentment toward a government that they said was more preoccupied with squabbling than with rallying the country.
The sign held by Vasily Kirilyuk, an unemployed plumber camped out with other antigovernment demonstrators here in the past week, summed up the pervasive frustration: "Get rid of them all," it said.
Mr. Kirilyuk did not hesitate to take that further. "There will be a revolt," he said. "And people will come because they are just fed up."
Mr. Kirilyuk, 29, was standing in the same central square where throngs in 2004 carried out the Orange Revolution, a seminal event that brought to power a pro-Western government in Ukraine. He said he was a fervent supporter then of the protesters, but now he and a few dozen others who have set up tents here are demanding that the heroes of that revolution step down.
It is not hard to understand why world leaders are increasingly worried about the discontent and the financial crisis in Ukraine, which has 46 million people and a highly strategic location. A small country like Latvia or Iceland is one thing, but a collapse in Ukraine could wreck what little investor confidence is left in Eastern Europe, whose formerly robust economies are being badly strained.
It could also cause neighboring Russia, which has close ethnic and linguistic ties to eastern and southern Ukraine, to try to inject itself into the country's affairs. What is more, the Kremlin would be able to hold up Ukraine as an example of what happens when former Soviet republics follow a Western model of free-market democracy.
"Ukraine is a linchpin for stability in Europe," said Olexiy Haran, a professor of comparative politics at Kiev Mohyla University. "It is a key player between the expanding European Union and Russia. To use an alarmist scenario, you could imagine a situation in Ukraine that Russia tried to exploit in order to dominate Ukraine. That would make for a very explosive situation on the border of the European Union."
That Ukraine can cause problems for Europe was highlighted in January when Ukraine engaged in a dispute with Russia over how much it would pay Russia for natural gas, as well as over gas transport to the rest of Europe. The Kremlin shut off the gas for several days, and some European countries went without heat. The Kremlin also shut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 in a pricing dispute.
While Ukraine's economy is dependent on exports of steel and chemicals, which have plummeted, the crisis has cut deeply because people are disillusioned with the government.
President Viktor A. Yushchenko, a leader of the Orange Revolution, who garnered attention around the world in 2004 when his face was scarred in a poisoning episode, is so widely scorned that a recent poll found that 57 percent of people wanted him to resign.
His rivals have also lost popularity, as the public has become exasperated by years of political bickering. In February, the International Monetary Fund refused to release the next installment of a $16.4 billion rescue loan to Ukraine because the government would not adhere to an earlier agreement to pare its budget.
Around the same time, Ukraine's finance minister resigned, saying that the job had been "hostage to politics."
On Friday, the monetary fund projected that Ukraine's economy would shrink by 6 percent this year, and said that it was continuing to work with the government to find a way to disburse the rest of the rescue loan.
A presidential election is coming, probably to be held next January, and this prospect is making politicians, especially Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, reluctant to adopt an austerity program that might alienate voters.
Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko were pro-Western allies during the Orange Revolution, but have bitterly feuded since then, and he fired her once. A third rival, Viktor F. Yanukovich, a former prime minister who heads an opposition party that favors closer ties with Russia, also wants to be president.
On Friday, Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko held a public meeting in an effort to demonstrate that they were working together. Mr. Yushchenko said he wanted "to show the readiness of all sides to take political responsibility for decisions which today are not easy."
Even so, the two did not announce further anticrisis measures.
All over Kiev have been signs that tensions are building.
On the city's outskirts, more than 200 tractor-trailer rigs were parked Thursday, their drivers threatening to block roads if the government did not help them with their debts, which they said were caused in part by the drop in the value of Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia.
The truckers dispersed Friday, only after the government said it would try to address their demands, but they said they would be back soon if they were ignored.
"The government is to blame for all this," said a trucker, Viktor V. Zarichnyuk, 26, who had been at the protest for 12 days. "We want the government and the national bank to agree that the money allocated by the International Monetary Fund, at least part of it, should go to regular people."
At a branch of the Rodovid Bank across town, a tense crowd gathered Friday morning. The bank, close to failing, was allowing withdrawals of only $35 a day. And so people, some of them pensioners fearful for their life savings, have been trooping each day, ever more aggravated, to try to get what they can.
"Every day we come here - it's insulting - in the cold and line up," said Alevtina A. Antonyuk, 58, an engineer. "They are nothing at this bank but a bunch of thieves."
Who is to blame, she was asked. Before she could answer, Dmitri I. Havrilkiv, 78, a retired crane operator, interrupted.
"The government has to be replaced," he shouted. "They just can't handle it!"
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10) U.S. Missiles Hit Militants in Pakistan, Killing Eight
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/world/asia/02pstan.html?ref=world
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Two missiles fired Sunday from American remotely piloted aircraft killed at least eight militants in a Taliban stronghold on the Afghan border, according to a local intelligence official and news reports.
The attack, in the Sora Rogha area of South Waziristan, a tribal region controlled by the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, hit a militant base, the official said. The dead included four Arab militants, the intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.
Last year, American and Pakistani officials accused Mr. Mehsud of plotting the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister and the wife of Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari.
The attack is the fifth in the area controlled by Mr. Mehsud since President Obama took office, continuing the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan.
More than a dozen young men from Sora Rogha have killed themselves in suicide attacks against targets inside Pakistan in the last two years, a local fighter said.
Separately, a senior law enforcement official, a commander of the Frontier Constabulary, was kidnapped Sunday by the Taliban in Swat, where the government announced a cease-fire with the militants last month.
An army official in Swat said the kidnapping broke the conditions of the cease-fire. The conditions were also tested by Sufi Mohammed, a militant leader in Swat, who said he was demanding the introduction of Islamic law by March 15. The introduction of a form of Islamic law was a demand of the Taliban when they agreed to the cease-fire.
Also Sunday, a suspected separatist group holding an American working for the United Nations in Pakistan said it would kill him in four days if the government did not release more than 1,000 imprisoned members of Baluchistan separatist groups, The Associated Press reported.
The American, John Solecki, was seized on Feb. 2 by gunmen who killed his driver in the southwestern city of Quetta in Baluchistan.
The previously unknown Baluchistan Liberation United Front set the deadline in a letter sent Sunday to the local news agency Online International News Network that was also read by an A.P. reporter.
A United Nations spokeswoman, Maki Shinohara, said the world organization was aware of the threat through the news reports and "took it seriously." The group issued a similar threat on Feb. 13, but did not carry it out.
Meanwhile, a security convoy carrying a sick soldier was attacked Sunday with small arms fire and roadside bombs in the Kabal area of Swat, according to a military statement that said two soldiers were wounded, The A.P. reported. The attack also violated the cease-fire.
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11) A.I.G. Reports Loss of $61.7 Billion as U.S. Gives More Aid
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
March 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/03aig.html?ref=business
The federal government agreed Monday morning to provide an additional $30 billion in taxpayer money to the American International Group and loosen the terms of its huge loan to the insurer, even as the insurance giant reported a$61.7 billion loss, the biggest quarterly loss in history.
The loss of $22.95 a share compared with a fourth-quarter loss in the period a year ago of $5.3 billion or $2.08 a share. For the year, A.I.G. lost $99.3 billion or $37.84 a share, compared with a profit of $6.2 billion or $2.39 a share for 2007.
In the quarter, A.I.G. took a $21 billion charge related to taxes and wrote down $25.9 billion in assets, including mortgage-back securities and credit-default swaps.
The company's general insurance business lost $2.8 billion compared with a profit of $2.1 billion in the quarter a year ago. Premiums dropped 16.3 percent to $9.2 billion and earnings from premiums fell 5.9 percent to $10.98 billion.
The government intervention would be the fourth time that the United States has had to step in to help A.I.G., the giant insurer, avert bankruptcy. The government already owns nearly 80 percent of the insurer's holding company as a result of the earlier interventions, which included a $60 billion loan, a $40 billion purchase of preferred shares and $50 billion to soak up the company's toxic assets.
In a conference call Monday, the chief executive, Edward Liddy, who joined A.I.G. in September, said the insurer had drawn down about $38 billion of the $60 billion credit line it received from the government last year.
Earlier, in an interview on the NBC News program "Today," Mr. Liddy said A.I.G. "was in much worse condition than I thought." In addition, he said: "The economy is worse. The financial markets are worse."
Although he avoided offering a forecast on the first quarter, Mr. Liddy said A.I.G.'s outlook was "very much going to be influenced by what happens to the condition of the economy and the financial marketplace around the globe."
But he tried to reassure policyholders, saying that insurance portion of the company was in good shape. "It's all of the other ancillary businesses that are causing this," Mr. Liddy said. "And it's the decline in asset values around the globe."
Federal officials, who worked feverishly over the weekend to complete the restructuring, said they thought they had no choice but to prop up A.I.G., because its business and trading activities are so intricately woven through the world's banking system.
But the deal also presents more financial risks to taxpayers at a time when the public and Congress have been sharply questioning the wisdom of risking federal money to bail out private enterprises.
The government's commitment to A.I.G. far eclipses its rescue of other financial companies, including Citigroup, which has received $50 billion in rescue financing, and Bank of America, with $45 billion.
Credit rating agencies like Moody's, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor's had been preparing to sharply downgrade A.I.G.'s credit ratings on Monday because of the record quarterly loss. That would have forced A.I.G. to default on its debt, threatening to set off shock waves throughout the financial system as banks holding A.I.G. derivatives contracts would probably demand cash collateral and other payments from A.I.G. during a time when it has little to spare.
The major credit-rating agencies were briefed on the pending deal between A.I.G. and the government, the people involved in the talks said, and they have committed not to downgrade the company's debt as a result.
"The steps announced today provide tangible evidence of the U.S. government's commitment to the orderly restructuring of A.I.G. over time in the face of continuing market dislocations and economic deterioration, the Treasury said in a statement.
Shortly after the announcement of the additional government assistance, the rating agency, Fitch, affirmed some A.I.G. ratings.
Under the deal, the government will commit $30 billion in cash to A.I.G. from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, should the company need it, the Treasury Department said in a statement. A.I.G. is not expected to draw down the money immediately, but the government's commitment was enough to satisfy the rating agencies.
Another part of the deal would allow A.I.G. to exchange
$40 billion in preferred nonvoting shares, which paid a 10 percent dividend, for new preferred shares that do not require a dividend. That would save A.I.G. $4 billion annually.
To further ease A.I.G.'s debt burden, instead of paying back $38 billion in cash with interest that it has used from a federal credit line, government will convert that into equity in two of the insurer's subsidiaries in Asia - American International Assurance and the American Life Insurance Company.
Both units are performing well. This would give the government direct ownership in those subsidiaries and provide saleable assets to American taxpayers even if the A.I.G. holding company were to default on its loans.
The government stake in American International Assurance will probably be controversial. The unit had been put up for sale recently, without success. That suggests that the government is giving A.I.G. better terms than private investors were willing to give, exposing the government to further accusations that it is providing a handout to A.I.G.
Also as part of the deal, the government would agree to lower the interest rate on all remaining A.I.G. debt to match the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. That would replace the previous rate, which was three percentage points higher than Libor. That move would save A.I.G. $1 billion in interest payments.
The new cash commitment reached on Sunday represented the fourth time since September that the federal government has taken steps to keep A.I.G. from collapsing. The previous rescues were intended to stabilize A.I.G. and buy it time to restructure. But the rescues were insufficient, in part because A.I.G. has either invested in or insured so many assets that keep losing value as the economy sours.
In September, the Federal Reserve lent A.I.G. $85 billion when the company suddenly found itself unable to meet a round of cash calls. To secure the emergency loan, A.I.G. issued the Fed warrants for slightly less than 80 percent of the company's shares.
Officials said at the time that they thought the loan would provide A.I.G. all the cash it could possibly need. The government brought in a Mr. Liddy to sell off some of A.I.G.'s operating units to raise money, since the rescue loan had to be paid back within two years. Mr. Liddy drew up a plan, saying he expected a smaller, well-capitalized version of A.I.G. to remain after the restructuring.
But in just weeks it became clear that A.I.G.'s problems were so grave the $85 billion would not be enough. It was using up that money alarmingly fast, thus burdening itself with higher than expected debt-servicing costs, because it had to pay the Fed a higher rate of interest on the part of the loan that it drew down.
In October, the government cut A.I.G. some slack by creating a new $38 billion facility to shore up its securities lending business, and gave the company access to a new commercial paper program, which had a much lower interest rate than the rescue loan.
But that was not enough either. In mid-November, the government restructured its loans to A.I.G., raising its total commitment to $150 billion. The new arrangement reduced the rescue loan to $60 billion and stretched out its term to five years instead of two.
At the same time, it injected $40 billion into A.I.G. in exchange for preferred shares. And it created two special-purpose entities to take the most toxic assets then plaguing A.I.G. out of play.
Those arrangements kept the government's stake in A.I.G. at 77.9 percent. The government has not wanted to go above 80 percent, because it would then have to consolidate all of A.I.G.'s assets and liabilities into its own finances, putting taxpayers on the hook for the claims of roughly 76 million insurance policyholders around the world.
While November's restructuring did buy A.I.G. more time, it was not able to sell the operating units that Mr. Liddy put up for sale - or, when assets were sold, the prices were shockingly low.
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