By: Michael Rivera
New media and voting on elections were hot topics at the “A Revelation In Politics and Media?” Forum on March 8th, 2012. There was a very diverse amount of opinions that ended up debating very well and respectful. Time seemed to fly by, as we hashed out the future of our country, social media, and the 1st amendment. A paneled lecture, followed by question forum, was led by three well-educated men:
Rob Sahr, professor of Political Science at Oregon State University, talked about a site called “American Elect” where you could see all candidates running for the presidential election. He encouraged students to become proactive in voter information and exactly how to find information on candidates. He also spent a great deal of time explaining super pacs,organizations that advertise against political candidates, legislator and social issues. They were created to exercise the freedom of speech in order to persuade others. In my opinion, they are political advertisers.
Rob Priewe, professor of Journalism/Mass Communications at Linn-Benton Community College, shed great light on our 1st amendment rights and how new media has influenced the the last election. I really liked how he delved into President Obama’s campaign, using social media as a way of advertising. Social media is changing the scope of our society and how information is being spread on a fast, wide-scaled forum. This allows not only Obama to become proactive, but for his followers to become involved.
I liked how Priewe gave us no delusion about money in politics: “Lobbying is nothing more than legalized bribery. As long as their is full disclosure, I’m okay with it. There has always been money in politics.” I agree with this statement because it is the simple fact; how do you argue that? Our country stands on the fact that we are able to make money and our government thrives on it. So what if super pacs want to raise a bunch of money and spend it on worthless campaigns? “As long as it isn’t not our money, it doesn’t effect us. I’d rather live in a country of super pacs than a country that tramples on our 1st amendment rights,” says Priewe. This is our freedom and it is one of the few reasons that I am still proud to be an American.
Hasso Hering was, by far, and interesting speaker. Working for the Albany Democrat-Herald, Hering pointed out that people don’t really care about politics today. An interesting quote to ponder: “I, actually, encourage people not to vote unless it effects them,” said Hering. He delved into super pacs as being pointless; saying their money is not doing any good. I found this astonishing since super pacs are very large and have created a large following. In the end, my deal breaker was his comments that social media doesn’t do anything for journalism today. I, strongly, disagree with a lot of what Hering had to say. Journalism is all about updated information, thanks to social media. How would anyone have know about the Haiti incident? Modern journalism is focused around new media!
I remember working for KOBI NBC 5 News in Medford, Oregon. Reporters in the field were able to post on their Twitter and Facebook accounts about breaking news events, with information that mattered. Distinctly, I remembered a wildfire that sparked up on I-5, right around Ashland. I remember the reporter on scene updating every ten minutes of how many houses were catching on fire, alerting people in the area to get out as soon as possible. People even used their Twitter accounts to receive help as flames were creeping up on their houses. Thankfully, no one was injured or died in the incident and social media played a huge role. This is in our state, which validates that claim.
In conclusion, I found them forum very interesting and educational about how our society is vastly changing. I feel more apt to learn about issues, candidates and the use of media after this forum. Politics and campaigning will greatly change in years to come as technology becomes more available. It’s up to us to keep up and be part of that change. We have to power of our right of speech; let’s not waste it, but use it to our advantage.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Rebelution Rocks Reggae in Hollywood
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| February 17th, 2012: Rebelution @ The Hollywood Palladium |
Rebelution brought a fresh plate of reggae rhythms and rhymes, as they rocked the warm winter night on 6215 Sunset Blvd. From the second their music hit the air, they proved why their album is at the top of the Reggae Billboards. As four thousands strong waited anxiously for the doors of the Hollywood Palladuim to open, people were gathered around with shared excitement.
This was a pivotal concert in Rebelution's debut of their new album “Peace of Mind”, in the Los Angeles area. This three month tour that started in New York, was the first concert closest to their starting point as a band.Together, they’ve manage to gain popularity through iTunes and touring, Rebelution was here to show Hollywood that they are a true player in the reggae world.
This reggae-rock band, out of Isla Vista, California, met as average college students. Eric Rachmany, lead guitarist/vocals, is the keystone to the band's message. Marley D. Williams, bassist, keeps the focus and allows Rachmany the freedom to relax and belt out improved lyrics. Dallas Westly Finley, drums, keeps the reggae beat as Rory Carey soothes the sound on the keyboard. This is will be known as one of the best artistic collaborations of all-time.
Eager fans awaited, standing in the middle of a line that wraps around three city blocks. Four distinct towers that stood like giants around as cars zoomed down the strip, hot dog vendors, club promoters and general admission. The culture was rich with different people of all kinds. Why? It didn’t matter. Everyone was their to put the daily grind off to the side. Tonight was a night of what Rebelution sings “Good Vibes”.
As the doors open, people are smiling cheer as they pass through security. As you walk in you are greeted by vendors, bartenders, and club promoters. As you file through the controlled chaos, you get through the hall that breaks into the biggest room I’ve ever been in. You’d be surprised to see a 11,000+ sq. ft. dance floor was close to its capacity. You can see the thirty foot tapestry with the jagged-white words: Rebelution. The sold out venue was proof of their legitimate success in the reggae community.
All the sudden, the DJ cuts the music and the lights die down. People snap out of their causal tones to ecstatic screams. The crowd was ready to rock! From the right side of the stage comes out the rapper known as Pep Love enters. Hey give a warm greeting to the crowd introducing what he can do. Debuting his new albums, “Hieroglyphics Imperium”, Pep Love kept the the crowd happily entertained for a fourty-five minute an left us wanting more.
The reggae began to flow as The Green took stage. The crowd's mood picked up as they served a fresh hot plate of Hawaiian reggae mixture that set a calming feeling over all in attendance. They ended their set with fans off their seats and dancing when they sang their hit, “Love and Affection”.
Then the atmosphere drastically changed. Red, green, and yellow laser lights penetrate a cloud of smoke that engulfs the stage. Then, outcomes Rebelution and the crowd goes insane. People start jumping, clapping, smoking, and laughing. Rebelution opens up their show with the very popular “Attention Span”, speeding up and slowing down the song to a very nice mixture. They follow that with the “Sky is the Limit”, the headline song to their new album. After these songs, Eric Rachmany (lead guitar/vocals) mix the new songs with their older music to form a beautiful, congruent set of songs that filled the air. David Meigs, a fan in the crowd, tells the experience:
“I can’t believe how much fun this event is. Listening to these guys (Rebelution) on a iPod has nothing on the way they play live. The message, the vibe if feel, is life changing. You look at the people and they are all gathered here for the same thing. Everyone is united.”
For two straight hours, Rebelution throws down songs like “Good Vibes”, “Safe and Sound”, “Meant to Be”, “So High”, and my favorite “Closer I Get”. As soon as the band exited the stage, fans began to chant their names over and over again: “RE-BEL-U-TION! RE-BEL-U-TION! RE-BEL-U-TION.” No more than 2 minutes of chanting, Rebelution runs back out, happy to appease the crowd with more music. They break down the songs “Feeling Alright”, “Bump”, and end on “Bright Side of Life”. Rebelution rocked Hollywood until 1:00 a.m.
Zigabid gives a simple, yet wonderfully articulated description of the concert as, "the reggae dub vibes, the smoke filling the air and an audience that hangs on every note. Nothing has changed over the course of the last five years, except the crowd size. The first time I met Marley, the bass player, he embraced me and thanked me for my continued support and love".
Kristofer Althaus, who had never seen Rebelution live, describes the atmosphere as inviting and refreshing. Primarily a hip-hop/rap listener, Althaus had a change of mind about the reggae scene:
“Man, I never really got into reggae until you showed me. I been to big concerts in Portland, but nothing can touch this. The whole venue is packed full, but people are nice to you. No one is trying to fight you, but they definitely wanna smoke down.”
My dad, Michael Rivera Sr., is the biggest Rebelution fan I’ve ever encountered. It was him who originally introduced me to the band. It was nice to find something in common with my old man. He describes the concert as another great success of the band.
“You know I proud of these guys; they worked hard to get to where they are. I’ve seen about five Rebelution concerts, but nothing beats seeing them in the Hollywood Palladium. This is a venue where the greats played. Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, Richard Pryor and so many more. They will make will continue to make their mark; just wait.
To me, the wait is over. Rebelution’s positive message breaks through the clutter of an industry controlled by corporations. They have manage to open their own record label, 87 Music, which allows them to control the way they send their own music. They have invested heavily into their future as band and the “Peace of Mind” tour has proved to be worth it.
Monday, March 5, 2012
American Nightmare: Sub-Prime Lending and the Institutions that wanted More
We all want to achieve that “American Dream” of owning our own homes. Home represents more than just a place of shelter, but a means of comfort, safety, and pride. However, not everyone has the credit to do so. In 2011, Karla Bowsher reports for Money Talk News.com that “the average American debt is more that $10,000”. Take into account student loans with that debt. Oh, it doesn't stop there; how about that nice new car you just bought yourself? No wonder it would be hard to find someone to lend you more cash for a house.
It's plain and simple: these private lenders and government-sponsored enterprises need to answer for the damage they've done to our American Dream. Due to their poor decisions, young people getting out of college will have to fight an up-hill battle in order to qualify for these home loans. This goes beyond the surface of just the housing market; this influences college students everywhere trying to get loans. It will be up to us, the freshly educated, to put back the pieces and be the one's responsible for rebuilding this torn apart market.
Sub-prime lending is one of the riskiest types of lending out there. It takes a people who don’t have the credit score and (for a higher interest rate) lend you money for a home. These sub prime loans do not fall under the category of mortgage-backed securities, so the lender takes all the risk.
Carter Briscoe, an accountant for Georgia-Pacific's Wauna Plant (one of Oregon's biggest timber mills), a business analyst well-versed in housing market and recent graduate of Oregon State, talked about his own research and studies of the mortgage market. He gave good background on sub-prime lending and how it actually made a more profitable market during its boom.
“It started with a financial instrument called a mortgage-backed security. What happens here is mortgage-owning banks will pool mortgages together, split them into even portions, and sell them as bonds to other financial institutions and investors. So when people owing those mortgages make their payments to the bank, the bank is considered a "pass through" entity because it will essentially be paying that money to the investors it sold the mortgage backed securities to," said Briscoe.
Mortgage-backed securities date back as far as the Great Depression in 1934. Part of the New Deal, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the creation of a government-controlled enterprise (commonly know as Freddie Mac) that insured people could pay their mortgages to the lender.
In 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson privatized Freddie Mac in order to ease fiscal pressures during the Vietnam War. In the process, Freddie Mac was split in two entities in order to prevent a monopoly of the secondary mortgage market. This second company is commonly know as Fannie Mae. Yet, the government still maintained a part of this company. This allowed the companies to direct access to funds from the U.S. Treasury.
So that brief history brings us the the nuts and bolts of why these institutions gave some many loans away. Once these companies realized how much money they could make on sub prime loans on securities, the banks went on a hay day of loan giving. Yet, as Briscoe explains, the repercussions were drastic:
“The mortgage backed securities were selling so fast that banks decided to increase their sub-prime lending, offering loans to individuals often without doing their due diligence to understand the true credit risk of the individual, just so they could cut them up into more securities. Then, bubble broke. People started to default on their loans, which in turn created a large inventory on the banks' books of houses,” says Briscoe.
Even so, there is are reason that sub-prime lending was because of government demands. Alan Fudge, Instructor of Business Management at LBCC, talked to me briefly about the government’s role in the lending market.
“What many people don’t know is that what happens in the lending market is dictated by congressional action. Before the Great Recession, the industry was told by Congress to give out more loans to people; this lessened restrictions on who received loans,” says Fudge.
“Eventually, after many foreclosures, the government stepped in to try and fix the situation. One of the reason the Obama Administration is doing well right now is that he is holding the interest rate to the lowest ever in U.S. History,” says Fudge.
How do we change the market today? With so many of our mistakes coming from bad loans, is there a form of oversight that we continue when the nation gets back on its feet?
“The answer is a huge possibly. If we look at what got us into the mess, a lot of it had to do with the credit agencies rating highly risky investments as low risk,” says Briscoe.
Ten years ago, you'd have contractor's build houses just to put them on the market and sell. This allowed many construction workers to capitalize and live in a higher middle-class lifestyle. The government was pushing banks to lend more money and the institutions got greedy. They realized that with these sub-prime loans, they could manipulate the numbers just enough to categorize them as low-risk assets. Then, the government comes along and buys these loans, without even realizing what has happened to them. As time continues and the default rate rises higher and higher, the metaphorical weight of lies and fraud break through the roof of one of our most established markets.
In today's market, we are experiencing dramatically low housing prices. This is all great and attractive to the home buyer, but there is a catch. Wendy Krislen-Adams, an Accounting Instructor at both Linn-Benton Community College and Western Oregon University, gives incite to the how the market has changed today, due to the collapse of the housing market.
"Now, you're seeing higher restrictions for people being able to buy houses. You have to fit a very specific profile today in order to buy one of these house. These companies can't just loan out money anymore because they need guaranteed returns. So as before where loans were relatively easy to get with bad credit, that is almost never happening now," says Krislen-Adams.
"So with the collapse of people wanting to buy houses, the demand for building is sparse. This puts a lot of pressure on those who built spec houses to be sold on completion and are now sitting empty. This influences the small business man as far as he owe for these houses and for larger corporations since they cannot continue to pull large loans from banks. Overall, the complete recovery of our market will be a very long and grueling process that will take years or decades to fix the mess that has been made," says Krislen-Adams.
With so many people finally recovering from the economic downturn, how do we go forward? A wise man once told me that you never repeat the same mistake twice. These institutions should have to answer for the lies that have been made and as we see in the news now, many are already being sued and taken to court over claims of bad lending. So as the saga continues, think about how that sweet American Dream is turning into an American Nightmare.
Sources:
Rob Alford - <http://hnn.us/articles/1849.html >
Karla Bowsher - <http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2011/02/10/average-american-debt/? Carter Briscoe - Business Analyst
Wendy Krisen-Adams - Instuctor of Business Accounting, Linn-Benton Community College & Western Oregon University
Alan Fudge - Instructor of Business Management, Linn-Benton Community College
It's plain and simple: these private lenders and government-sponsored enterprises need to answer for the damage they've done to our American Dream. Due to their poor decisions, young people getting out of college will have to fight an up-hill battle in order to qualify for these home loans. This goes beyond the surface of just the housing market; this influences college students everywhere trying to get loans. It will be up to us, the freshly educated, to put back the pieces and be the one's responsible for rebuilding this torn apart market.
Sub-prime lending is one of the riskiest types of lending out there. It takes a people who don’t have the credit score and (for a higher interest rate) lend you money for a home. These sub prime loans do not fall under the category of mortgage-backed securities, so the lender takes all the risk.
Carter Briscoe, an accountant for Georgia-Pacific's Wauna Plant (one of Oregon's biggest timber mills), a business analyst well-versed in housing market and recent graduate of Oregon State, talked about his own research and studies of the mortgage market. He gave good background on sub-prime lending and how it actually made a more profitable market during its boom.
“It started with a financial instrument called a mortgage-backed security. What happens here is mortgage-owning banks will pool mortgages together, split them into even portions, and sell them as bonds to other financial institutions and investors. So when people owing those mortgages make their payments to the bank, the bank is considered a "pass through" entity because it will essentially be paying that money to the investors it sold the mortgage backed securities to," said Briscoe.
Mortgage-backed securities date back as far as the Great Depression in 1934. Part of the New Deal, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the creation of a government-controlled enterprise (commonly know as Freddie Mac) that insured people could pay their mortgages to the lender.
In 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson privatized Freddie Mac in order to ease fiscal pressures during the Vietnam War. In the process, Freddie Mac was split in two entities in order to prevent a monopoly of the secondary mortgage market. This second company is commonly know as Fannie Mae. Yet, the government still maintained a part of this company. This allowed the companies to direct access to funds from the U.S. Treasury.
So that brief history brings us the the nuts and bolts of why these institutions gave some many loans away. Once these companies realized how much money they could make on sub prime loans on securities, the banks went on a hay day of loan giving. Yet, as Briscoe explains, the repercussions were drastic:
“The mortgage backed securities were selling so fast that banks decided to increase their sub-prime lending, offering loans to individuals often without doing their due diligence to understand the true credit risk of the individual, just so they could cut them up into more securities. Then, bubble broke. People started to default on their loans, which in turn created a large inventory on the banks' books of houses,” says Briscoe.
Even so, there is are reason that sub-prime lending was because of government demands. Alan Fudge, Instructor of Business Management at LBCC, talked to me briefly about the government’s role in the lending market.
“What many people don’t know is that what happens in the lending market is dictated by congressional action. Before the Great Recession, the industry was told by Congress to give out more loans to people; this lessened restrictions on who received loans,” says Fudge.
“Eventually, after many foreclosures, the government stepped in to try and fix the situation. One of the reason the Obama Administration is doing well right now is that he is holding the interest rate to the lowest ever in U.S. History,” says Fudge.
How do we change the market today? With so many of our mistakes coming from bad loans, is there a form of oversight that we continue when the nation gets back on its feet?
“The answer is a huge possibly. If we look at what got us into the mess, a lot of it had to do with the credit agencies rating highly risky investments as low risk,” says Briscoe.
Ten years ago, you'd have contractor's build houses just to put them on the market and sell. This allowed many construction workers to capitalize and live in a higher middle-class lifestyle. The government was pushing banks to lend more money and the institutions got greedy. They realized that with these sub-prime loans, they could manipulate the numbers just enough to categorize them as low-risk assets. Then, the government comes along and buys these loans, without even realizing what has happened to them. As time continues and the default rate rises higher and higher, the metaphorical weight of lies and fraud break through the roof of one of our most established markets.
In today's market, we are experiencing dramatically low housing prices. This is all great and attractive to the home buyer, but there is a catch. Wendy Krislen-Adams, an Accounting Instructor at both Linn-Benton Community College and Western Oregon University, gives incite to the how the market has changed today, due to the collapse of the housing market.
"Now, you're seeing higher restrictions for people being able to buy houses. You have to fit a very specific profile today in order to buy one of these house. These companies can't just loan out money anymore because they need guaranteed returns. So as before where loans were relatively easy to get with bad credit, that is almost never happening now," says Krislen-Adams.
"So with the collapse of people wanting to buy houses, the demand for building is sparse. This puts a lot of pressure on those who built spec houses to be sold on completion and are now sitting empty. This influences the small business man as far as he owe for these houses and for larger corporations since they cannot continue to pull large loans from banks. Overall, the complete recovery of our market will be a very long and grueling process that will take years or decades to fix the mess that has been made," says Krislen-Adams.
With so many people finally recovering from the economic downturn, how do we go forward? A wise man once told me that you never repeat the same mistake twice. These institutions should have to answer for the lies that have been made and as we see in the news now, many are already being sued and taken to court over claims of bad lending. So as the saga continues, think about how that sweet American Dream is turning into an American Nightmare.
Sources:
Rob Alford - <http://hnn.us/articles/1849.html >
Karla Bowsher - <http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2011/02/10/average-american-debt/? Carter Briscoe - Business Analyst
Wendy Krisen-Adams - Instuctor of Business Accounting, Linn-Benton Community College & Western Oregon University
Alan Fudge - Instructor of Business Management, Linn-Benton Community College
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