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Government Prepared to Lend $7.4 Trillion

Bloomberg News, November 24, 2008

The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago. The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program TARP). Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Federal Reserve (Fed) Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it is lending or spending, it is tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we do not know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”

Bloomberg News tabulated data from the Fed, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and interviewed regulatory officials, economists and academic researchers to gauge the full extent of the government’s rescue effort. The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.

William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the two programs are unlikely to lose money. The bigger risk comes from rescuing companies perceived as “too big to fail,” he said.

The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer. Yesterday, Citigroup Inc. received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week. “No question there is some credit risk there,” Poole said.

Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said risk is lurking in the programs that Poole thinks are safe.

“The thing that people do not understand is it is not how likely that the exposure becomes a reality, but what if it does?” Issa said. “There is no transparency to it so who is to say they are right?”

The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average through Friday is down 38 percent since the beginning of the year and 43 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 fell 45 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 49 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The Nikkei 225 Index has fallen 46 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 57 percent from its most recent peak of 18,261.98 on July 9, 2007. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is down 78 percent, to $53.31, on Friday from its peak of $247.92 on Oct. 31, 2007, and 75 percent this year.

Regulators hope the rescue will contain the damage and keep banks providing the credit that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. Most of the spending programs are run out of the New York Fed, whose president, Timothy Geithner, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Treasury Secretary.

The money that has been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It is nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There is a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it is all going to fall on the taxpayer.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.

The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. and a former economist at the New York Fed. U.S. financial firms have taken writedowns and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to Bloomberg data. “This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”

Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank November 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral. Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment is not made.

“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said November18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that is counterproductive.”

The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Co. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. “There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.

Bernanke’s Fed is responsible for $4.4 trillion of pledges, or 60 percent of the total commitment of $7.4 trillion, based on data compiled by Bloomberg concerning U.S. bailout steps started a year ago. “Too often the public is focused on the wrong piece of that number, the $700 billion that Congress approved,” said J.D. Foster, a former staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The other areas are quite a bit larger.”

The Fed’s rescue attempts began last December with the creation of the Term Auction Facility to allow lending to dealers for collateral. After Bear Stearns’s collapse in March, the central bank started making direct loans to securities firms at the same discount rate it charges commercial banks, which take customer deposits. In the three years before the crisis, such average weekly borrowing by banks was $48 million, according to the central bank. Last week it was $91.5 billion.

The failure of a second securities firm, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., in September, led to the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, or MMIFF. The two programs, which have pledged $2.3 trillion, are designed to restore calm in the money markets, which deal in certificates of deposit, commercial paper and Treasury bills.

“Money markets seized up after Lehman failed,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York and a former aide to Fed chief Paul Volcker. “Lehman failing made a lot of subsequent actions necessary.”

The FDIC, chaired by Sheila Bair, is contributing 20 percent of total rescue commitments. The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year, because borrowers will pay a lower interest rate than they would on the open market, according to Raghu Sundurum and Viral Acharya of New York University and the London Business School. Congress and the Treasury have ponied up $892 billion in TARP and other funding, or 12 percent.

The Federal Housing Administration, overseen by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston, was given the authority to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages, or about 4 percent of the total commitment, with its Hope for Homeowners program, designed to keep distressed borrowers from foreclosure.

Most of the federal guarantees reduce interest rates on loans to banks and securities firms, which would create a subsidy of at least $6.6 billion annually for the financial industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg comparing rates charged by the Fed against market interest currently paid by banks.

Not included in the calculation of pledged funds is an FDIC proposal to prevent foreclosures by guaranteeing modifications on $444 billion in mortgages at an expected cost of $24.4 billion to be paid from the TARP, according to FDIC spokesman David Barr. The Treasury Department has not approved the program.

Bernanke and Paulson, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, have also promised as much as $200 billion to shore up nationalized mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The FDIC arranged for $139 billion in loan guarantees for General Electric Co.’s finance unit.

The tally does not include money to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. Obama has said he favors financial assistance to keep them from collapse.

Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee November 18 that the $250 billion already allocated to banks through the TARP is an investment, not an expenditure. “I think it would be extraordinarily unusual if the government did not get that money back and more,” Paulson said.

In his November 18 testimony, Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank would not lose money. “We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,” he said. A haircut refers to the practice of lending less money than the collateral’s current market value.

Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC. “If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.” “Mark to market” means adjusting the value of an asset, such as a mortgage-backed security, to reflect current prices.

Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.

Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said. “The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said. The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he was angry that banks used the money for acquisitions.

“The only purpose for this money is to lend,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “It is not for dividends, it is not for purchases of new banks, it is not for bonuses. There better be a showing of increased lending roughly in the amount of the capital infusions” or Congress may not approve the second half of the TARP money.

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Trend of Rich Getting Richer and Poor Poorer Intensifying

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD, the trend of the existing economic system where rich get richer and fewer and the poor get poorer and more numerous is intensifying. The study examined the group of developed nations, including the U.S., Canada, Western Europe and Japan. The report said, “Rich households in America have been leaving both middle and poorer income groups behind. This has happened in many countries but nowhere has this trend been so stark as in the United States.” In the U.S., the wealthiest 10 percent was the richest in the entire OECD; and our poorest 10 percent was the poorest.

Several cities in the U.S. have reached levels of inequality comparable to those of the less developed and poorest countries. Cities of great wealth, like New York and Washington, DC, approach Buenos Aires and Nairobi in their lopsided income distributions. In particular, New York City was part of the top ten list of the world’s most unequal cities.

A recent study of American tax data over the twentieth century concludes that the share of total U.S. income going to the top 10 percent of American households has gone from about a third in the 1970s, to half of pre-tax income today. And from 1993 to 2006, the income of the top 1 percent of households increased by an annual rate of 5.7 percent, while the income of the lower 99 percent grew by only 1.1 percent over the same period.

Out of the world’s population of about 6.6 billion people an estimated ten million people on the planet have financial assets worth more than $1 million. The “ultra rich” among these ten million, with more than $30 million to invest, grew by 4.5 percent.

August of 2008 was “the 10th consecutive month that the weekly average salary had failed to keep pace with inflation” according to the Labor Department. Since about 1973 inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated or risen very slightly and very slowly. The large majority of Americans have been working more hours and borrowing more money over recent decades just to maintain the same purchasing power.

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Ohio School District Seeks $100 Million Federal Bailout

Joe Milicia, December 3, 2008, Associated Press

A financially ailing Ohio school district has joined the ranks of banks and automakers clamoring for a portion of the $700 billion economic bailout package. Olmsted Falls Superintendent Todd Hoadley said Tuesday that if automakers and big U.S. cities can ask for federal bailout money, schools should be able to follow suit. “I feel a moral obligation to our taxpayers to make this attempt,” said Hoadley, who requested $100 million from the Treasury Department last week. “This is a legitimate request. I’ll be frankly disappointed if something positive doesn’t come out of this.”

Hoadley said rising enrollment and strained finances have forced the suburban Cleveland district to take measures such as converting maintenance closets into classrooms. The district submitted the request to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Paulson has said the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, was meant to stabilize financial institutions, and the regional reserve bank told Hoadley the same thing last week.

But Hoadley is not giving up — he is seeking help from Congressman Dennis Kucinich and U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, both Ohio Democrats, in obtaining bailout dollars.

Several school associations were trying to determine whether other districts have sought TARP funding. Miami-Dade Schools chief Alberto Carvalho told the Miami Herald last week that Congress should consider bailing out the nation’s schools, but the district did not apply for funding.

Olmsted Falls’ total enrollment has swelled by 29 percent over the last decade to 3,800 students. The district would spend half of the $100 million in TARP money on building and renovation projects, while the other half would go toward operating expenses.

Two local ballot issues seeking additional school funding failed last month, and the district projects a deficit of $2.6 million at the end of the 2009-10 school year. “We’re not looking at this from a bailout standpoint. We do not want to be lumped in with failing corporations,” said Hoadley. He noted that Olmsted Falls has long been one of the state’s top-rated school districts.

Hoadley is encouraging others to make similar requests to the Treasury Department. “Somebody has to be looking long-term,” Hoadley said. “The only way we are going to dig ourselves out of this economic hole is investing in education.”

So far, the Treasury Department has committed about $270 billion in TARP money for banks and another $40 billion for the insurance company American International Group. U.S. automakers are seeking $25 billion in federal loans, and last month the mayors of Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix asked for a share of the bailout funds.

The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland did not respond to requests for comment.

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Will Any Crumbs Remain After Bankers’ Feast?

Haider Rizvi, November 26, 2008, Inter Press Service

The vast resources the U.S. and Europeans are pouring into ailing financial firms could lead to disastrous consequences for global efforts to reduce poverty and mitigate the impacts of climate change, warns a new study by an independent think tank.

The study, entitled “Skewed Priorities: How the Bailouts Dwarf Other Global Crises”, points out that the U.S. and European governments are willing to help financial firms in crisis with more than $4 trillion dollars — an amount estimated to be 40 times higher than what is being spent on measures to fight climate change and poverty.

According to researchers at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, which released the study’s findings Monday, governments of the rich industrialized countries are very likely to use the cost of their financial sector bailouts as an excuse to backtrack on global aid for poverty and climate change financing commitments.

The study comes as the United Nations (UN) is preparing to hold two major international meetings to advance its agenda on environment and development. The three-day conference on financing for development is scheduled to commence in Doha, Qatar next weekend, while the UN’s conference on climate change is set for in Poznan, Poland next week.The Poznan conference will last for more than a week, with more than 8,000 delegates expected to attend. It is supposed to hammer out further international commitments to fight climate change, including climate-related financial assistance for developing countries.

UN officials hope the meeting will prove to be a “milestone on the road to success” for the negotiation processes launched at past conferences, because it is tasked with setting the agenda for final talks on the future of the climate change treaty at another meeting due to take place in Denmark next year.

But considering the fact that the U.S. and most governments in Europe are currently preoccupied with addressing their own financial crises, observers say it is highly unlikely there will be a major breakthrough in regard to the issue of global funding for climate change mitigation.

Whether or not the rich nations come forward to make fresh commitments on climate change, the fact is, as the study’s authors note, that the current financial crisis is hurting all the countries, no matter how rich or poor.

“Skyrocketing poverty and unemployment in the developing world will mean even more brutal global competition for jobs,” said the study’s lead author John Cavanagh. “Climate change imperils the very future of the planet.”

To Cavanagh, the richest nations in the world “appear fixated almost entirely on responding to the financial crisis, and specifically, on propping up their own financial firms.”

The report’s key findings show that the amount the U.S. and the European governments have committed to the ailing banking industry is way beyond what they spent on development projects in poor countries last year.

According to the study’s authors, the U.S. government’s $152.5 billion rescue plan for one single company — AIG — far exceeds the $90.7 billion the U.S. and European governments spent on development aid in 2007. They note the U.S. government had spent about $23 billion on aid to all developing countries last year. By contrast, the bailout amount it gave away to the failed investment bank Bear Stearns was $29 billion.

The United States also committed $200 billion to prop up mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a figure that dwarfs the $209 million dollars in economic aid in 2007 to Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

According to the report, the U.S. and European governments have committed over 300 times more to rescuing banks, as compared to 13 billion dollars in new commitments made to help poor countries address the climate crisis over the next several years. Researchers note that the Swiss government has committed $60 billion to rescue the ailing investment bank UBS. This amount is five times more than what all Western European governments pledged for climate finance to help poor countries in 2007.

The U.S., according to the study, has made no commitment to fund climate change-related projects in the developing world. The U.S. is not a signatory to the climate change treaty, although it is responsible for more than 25 percent of carbon emissions on the planet, which is considered by scientists as the main cause of global warming.

“Such extremely lopsided priorities will come back to haunt the United States and the rest of the global North in the long run,” said the study’s co-author Sarah Anderson. “The richer countries not only have an obligation to clean up the messes they’ve made abroad. It’s also in their interest.”

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For Obama, a Chance to Push Big Changes

Brian C. Mooney, Boston Globe

Amid the almost surreal numbers that describe the nation’s financial crisis, President-elect Barack Obama and his incoming team are positioned to take advantage of a changed political environment and push for programs and reforms that only a few months ago might have been unimaginable. Since the lame-duck Bush administration and Congress began pumping out hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up one wobbly financial institution after another, many political analysts say the old rules of fiscal debate are out the window. Talk about balancing budgets and pay-as-you-go for new programs now sound like quaint artifacts of the campaign. The projected budget deficit this fiscal year may top $1 trillion — more than double the record — and the national debt has shot up a breathtaking $15 billion per day in the past 10 weeks, to $10.7 trillion and counting, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt.

Mounting job losses in a braking economy have provided an opening for the Democratic president-elect, who will enjoy an expanded partisan majority in both chambers of Congress, to join the ranks of previous presidents who have undertaken major initiatives in bad times. As Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago congressman who will be chief of staff in Obama’s White House said recently, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste . . . They are opportunities to do big things.”

Obama himself has said that priority one after he is sworn in on January 20 will be a massive and costly economic stimulus package aimed at job creation — and that its components will flow from his long-term policy goals.

“Everything that he talked about during the campaign that can be seen as stimulus is going to be in that package,” predicted Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University’s graduate school of public service. Light predicted that the stimulus package will include such initiatives as Obama’s campaign vow to expand national service programs like AmeriCorps by 175,000 relatively low-paying jobs as part of his goal of creating or saving 2.5 million jobs in the first two years of his administration.

Obama has also said his economic team will identify waste and programs that do not work to find savings to offset some of the increases. Light, who has chronicled the growth of the federal bureaucracy under Bush, said Obama might be able to achieve his goal of cutting $40 billion in contractor costs, a modest sum in light of the skyrocketing deficit. By Light’s calculations, the Bush administration added 3.2 million contract employees at a cost of $250 billion, mostly for national defense and antiterrorism.

But Light said Obama will not be able to duplicate the Clinton administration’s reduction of the federal payroll by almost 400,000 civilian employees because most of those cuts resulted from defense cuts and widespread military base closings after the end of the Cold War.

Stephen J. Wayne, professor of American government at Georgetown University, said the political and economic climate should heighten Obama’s clout. “Presidents have more power during crises when they are elected to fix something,” Wayne said. “He should be able to push through a variety of programs when he is the strongest and the fear of not backing him is the greatest. . . . There is a crisis that demands action, and Congress has a lower public approval rating than President Bush, which says something.”

Alice M. Rivlin, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Clinton administration, said Obama should seize the opportunity in this climate to harness the price-setting power of Medicare’s single-payer model to increase efficiency and reduce the cost of healthcare, and to insure Social Security’s long-term solvency. […]

Marie Gottschalk, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said Obama fits the profile of a president who could put his stamp on history in the manner of other famous presidents whose predecessors were widely perceived to be failures. But, perhaps because Obama is the first black president, he appears to be treading cautiously, trying to prove himself to the broad political establishment, she said.

“He should be in a great place to strike out because his predecessor and the Republican Party are delegitimized, and the country seems ready to strike out in a different direction,” Gottschalk said. “The difference is, you have an African-American who has to establish his credentials with the establishment, and that may be constraining him.”

Some of the most profound policy changes in recent American history have been achieved by presidents who were elected in times of great economic stress as voters rejected their predecessors. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded Herbert Hoover, pushed through the New Deal, with its jobs programs, Social Security, and regulation of the stock market during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

A half-century later, following a period of high inflation and stagnant growth under Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan did the same with deep tax cuts, deregulation, tight monetary policies, and a military buildup.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has written biographies of FDR and Lincoln, said, “What happens in times of crisis is the president can mobilize the sentiment of the country in a way that goes over the natural competing interests in Congress and the smaller obstacles in the way of change,” she said. “It allows you to take much bigger steps.”

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Free the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners!
Crime Against Humanity
National Boriqua Human Rights Network

A fiercely innovative play! A play based on the real life experiences of 14 Puerto Rican Political Prisoners — two of them still incarcerated. It will make you laugh and cry, but most of all it will make you want to do something free them! Directed by Michael Anthony Reyes Benavides. It is a production of the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Batey Urbano Production. For more information: www.Crimeagainsthumanity.net.

Imagine 27 years of your life living in a space 6 feet by 9 feet. Imagine being confined in isolation with no human contact. Imagine the shakedowns, the strip searches and the complete disregard for your humanity. Crime Against Humanity is a play based on the real life experiences of fourteen Puerto Rican political prisoners who spent more than two decades in prisons for seditious conspiracy —two are still incarcerated. Crime Against Humanity brings us into the U.S. prison system in a way no other play has, focusing on the politically motivated use of isolation, selective punishment, sensory deprivation and disproportionate sentences.

Written by poet and activist Michael Anthony Reyes Benavides and former Puerto Rican political prisoner Luis Rosa, the play confronts the physical and mental torture these prisoners endured for more than 27 years. We gaze into their cell and experience the loss of parents, the transition of children into adulthood and feel the physical brutality and torture of a government out to make an example of them. We see them as they refuse to be victimized and objectified, confronting their hardships and adversities while maintaining their dignity and upholding their humanity.

Reyes Benavides spent hours interviewing the former Puerto Rican political prisoners, and using extensive written correspondence, the two political prisoners still in jail, Oscar López Rivera and Carlos Alberto Torres. Through the play, we hear from their own mouths, their own words, exactly what it means to be a political prisoner in the United States.

Crime Against Humanity is produced by the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Batey Urbano. These two organizations hope to use this performance piece to raise consciousness and gain support for the campaign to free all Puerto Rican political prisoners.

“By using theater as a tool of resistance, we hope to reach out to those sectors that are often ignored by traditional activist outreach. We want our families, our brothers and sisters and our community to come out and see what these prisoners endured, many of them for almost 20 years, two of them for more than 27,” (author and director Reyes Benavides).

Crime Against Humanity began with a March 3 performance in Chicago and will run through March 3, 2009. The shows are part of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s “100 x 35″ campaign. This campaign will be celebrating the centennial of the birth of Puerto Rican national hero and poet Juan Antonio Corretjer and the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Chicago-based Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center. As part of this celebration a national tour of the play is making stops in several U.S. cities including New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Hartford, Washington D.C., Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The production has plans to tour throughout Puerto Rico in the future as well.

For more information contact Michael Anthony Reyes Benavides at reyespoetry@gmail.com or 773 606 4014. Download the Crime Against Humanity press packet.

Showtimes

Friday, December 12, 7PM at Hostos College (500 Grand Concourse Bronx, New York City)
Sunday, December 14, 4PM at Taller Puertorriqueño (2557 North 5th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Tuesday, December 16, 7PM La Paloma Sabanera 406 Capital Ave, Hartford, CT
Wednesday, December 17, 7PM at 60 Island Street, Lawrence, Massachusetts
Thursday, December 18, 7PM at 169 Amory St., Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
Friday, December 19, at 3361 6th Ave, Albany, New York

Crime Against Humanity in Chicago in 2009!
All shows will begin at 7PM at Batey Urbano, located on 2620 West Division Street, unless otherwise noted.(All shows $5-$15)

Friday, February 6
Saturday, February 7
Friday, February 13
Saturday, February 14
Friday, February 20
Saturday, February 21
Friday, February 27
Saturday, February 28
Tuesday, March 3
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