According to an article by the Associated Press this week, mortgage fraud remains widespread in the depressed housing market, with perpetrators motivated by high profits and little risk of getting caught, the FBI said Friday.

According to the AP, the weak economy is hitting Americans where they spend a lot of their free time: in front of the TV set. They’re cancelling cable and satellite TV subscriptions in record numbers.  I personally have downgraded my satellite plan, and know many who have done the same.  Motivation may be financial for some, having less desire to sit on the couch also leads to a more healthy, active lifestyle.  The last thing many people want to do once the nice weather arrives, is to spend significant amounts of time indoors, on the couch or easy chair.

In a tally conducted by The Associated Press, eight of the nine largest pay-TV providers in the U.S., which serve about 70 percent of households, lost 195,700 subscribers in the April-to-June quarter. That’s the first quarterly loss for the group.

Wider industry measures showed a loss of subscribers for the first time in last year’s second quarter. This year, they’re leaving faster.

The chief cause appears to be persistently high unemployment and a housing market that has many people living with their parents. But there are hints that some people are cancelling cable in favor of cheap Internet video.  Would it not be wonderful to finally turn the corner on being a TV culture, and see an up-tick in things like book reading, attendance at live performances and cultural events, support of the arts, and more community offerings?

What do you think?

Professor Jason A. Gillmer, the John J. Hemmingson Chair in Civil Liberties at Gonzaga University School of Law, writes in the Spokane Review, about a recent ruling in Washington State which stuck a blow to tired old arguments by racist prosecutors:

On June 9, the Washington state Supreme Court issued an important decision involving race and the criminal justice system. The case, State v. Monday, involved a prosecutor’s attempt to undermine the credibility of witnesses by appealing to unfounded racial assumptions about African-Americans.

The prosecutor got what he wanted: the jury convicted Kevin Monday of first-degree murder. But, in a holding that sends a powerful message about the importance of a fair trial, the court reversed Monday’s conviction and sent the case back to be retried.

The prosecutor’s case against Monday stemmed from a shooting in Pioneer Square in Seattle. During the trial, the prosecutor found himself facing witnesses who refused, for whatever reason, to provide the type of testimony he hoped to have. He therefore went after them using the oldest trick in the book, insisting they couldn’t be trusted because of their race.

He told the jury that the witnesses were adhering to a “code” which holds that “black folk don’t testify against black folk,” as if this “code” was an inherent racial trait unique to people of color. He also accounted for the failure for any to come forward by insisting that blacks “don’t snitch to the police.” That this “no snitching” rule is broad-based and has nothing to do with race was of little moment. His message was clear: These witnesses, like black people in general, were not credible.

Sadly, prosecutors engaging in cheap racial tricks is nothing new. In 1935, a prosecutor banked on unfounded racial assumptions in a case against a Chinese-American named Charles Sang, who was accused of lying about his role in a gambling operation. In his closing arguments, like here, the prosecutor spoke to the credibility of the witnesses: “But I do say this: you can take into consideration the Chinese traits. The Chinese are natural gamblers; no question about that. It is a trait.” Also like here, the court saw through the prosecutor’s antics and reversed the conviction.

What makes Monday’s case remarkable, however, is the force behind the court’s condemnation of the prosecutor’s actions. In an opinion by Justice Tom Chambers, the court rejected the traditional “harmless error” standard for reviewing misconduct and replaced it with a much more rigorous one. As the court put it, “resorting to racist arguments is so fundamentally opposed to our founding principles, values, and fabric of our justice system” that such action demands reversal unless the state can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt that the misconduct did not affect the jury’s verdict.”

Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, in a concurring opinion, would have gone further. She wrote that “the injection of insidious discrimination … is so repugnant to the core principles of integrity and justness upon which a fundamentally fair criminal justice system must rest that only a new trial will remove its taint.”

Undoubtedly, some objected in Sang’s case, as they will today, that reversing the conviction because of misconduct benefits the defendant at the expense of the victim. But such complaints miss the mark. The decision in Monday’s case is not about coddling criminals; it is about ensuring that people are treated fairly in our criminal justice system – something that, unfortunately, has not always been the case for racial minorities.

Indeed, through a broad coalition, the Washington Task Force on Race and the Criminal Justice System has begun to study the role of bias in our justice system. And what the task force has found has been eye-opening: Blacks in particular are six-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be in our prisons.

Confronted with such numbers, the ill-informed often resort to the tactics the prosecutor did in Monday’s case, relying on racist stereotypes to insist that there is something innate that causes people of color to commit crimes. But the task force has found differently, concluding that there are institutional arrangements that disadvantage minorities at every stage of the criminal justice system, including decisions about what crimes to target and what sentences to impose. These decisions may not result from a conscious decision to discriminate; nonetheless, they unfairly affect minorities for reasons unrelated to public safety.

Eradicating racial bias in our criminal justice system is not going to be easy and will not happen overnight. But the court’s decision in State v. Monday is a courageous step in the right direction.

In its recent decision, the U.S. Supreme has struck a blow against the American consumer.  The plaintiffs in the case had sued for AT&T Mobility, LLC for fraud, alleging that AT&T’s advertising of “free” telephones was false, wherein fact taxes were charged to the consumer on the “free” telephone.

The Court reversed a Ninth Circuit ruling which had held that arbitration clauses and waivers of class actions inserted in lengthy consumer contracts (for cellular telephone services) were unconscionable.

With AT&T’s recent purchase of T-Mobile, the number of cellular service providers is dwindling.  With the Court’s ruling, you can bet all cellular service contracts will soon contain waivers of traditional consumer rights, and the American consumer will be in a worse position.

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., M.D. write in the Huffington Post that our change of eating habits from plant-based to meat and processed foods has caused a myriad of problems in this country of serious concern.

“For more than 2,800 years, the concept of eating plants in their whole-food form has struggled to be heard and adopted as a way of life. However, recent evidence shows that more than ever a plant-based diet is not something to be ignored. In fact, eating a plant-based diet has become an urgent matter from several perspectives. Not only will it improve your health — and the evidence behind this claim is now overwhelming — but it will also dramatically reduce health care costs, as well as reduce violence to our environment and to other sentient beings.”

“The fact is our nation’s economic stability, already crumbling due to the repeated bursting of bubbles such as technology and housing, has been hard hit by spiraling health costs that seem to have no end in sight. Despite this, as a nation, we are sicker and fatter than we have ever been. The epidemic of obesity and diabetes, especially in the young, forecasts an economically unsustainable public health challenge with the gloomy prophecy that today’s children may not outlive their parents.

“Who will protect the public? Not our government: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition pyramid (recently updated)  is laden with food that will guarantee millions will suffer ill health. Not the American Dietetic Association, which is controlled by food corporations. Not the insurance industry, which profits by selling plans to the sick. Not the pharmaceutical industry, which pockets billions from chronic illnesses. And not the medical profession, in which doctors and nurses receive virtually no training in nutrition or behavioral modification, and are handsomely rewarded for administrating drugs and employing technical expertise.

“What can save America is a plant-based diet, which will help individuals recover their good health, and which in turn will set our health care system right (as well as our economy). However, for this plant-based diet to take hold, the public must be endowed with nutritional literacy, the kind of knowledge that is portrayed in the new documentary, “Forks Over Knives.”

“Forks Over Knives” focuses not just on the research that both of us have been engaged in over the last four decades, whether in China and Cornell or at the Cleveland Clinic; it also traces the journey of several Americans as they move from a lifetime of eating mostly animal-based and processed foods to a whole food plant-based diet, and the extraordinary medical results that follow. It is educational, entertaining, and literally life-saving.”

“Forks Over Knives” may just start the revolution in health care this country so badly needs.