the incident is sparking a potentially crippling citywide strike. claudia cowan is live in oakland with the very latest. claudia, who is on board so far for this strike action? reporter: well, martha the protesters out here in oakland getting a big boost from organized labor, the unions that represent the city s teachers and government workers they say they are supportive of this general strike. we re seeing a lot of support coming from that side. this is also prompting however, we understand, some school closures and there could be some service disruptions as well in city departments. we ll have to see how that all plays out. now city workers were told that they could take personal time off to participate in what has become a broad-based call to action including rallies outside of banks, schools, libraries as well as foreclosed homes. protesters also want to shut down the port of oakland before the night shift, calling that a blockade to stop capitalism at the nation s 5th busiest p
personal time off if they wanted to participate in any of today s general strike activities. and many are. this has become a broad-based call to action with rallies outside of schools and libraries. certainly banks and corporations, as well as foreclosed homes. jon you mentioned that organized labor is on board but a number of merchants down in this area don t like this protest. they say that the movement is hurting their economic bottom line and they are part of the 99% too. others expressing safety concerns saying will be closed today not out of solidarity but in case violence erupts as is what happened one week ago when police moved in to dismantle this even campment. jon: what about the police today? where do they stand in all of this? reporter: police are staging just a few miles away. they are on stand by to respond to any trouble. in the meantime, jon, they are in the middle of a whole new turf war with the mayor of oakland jean quan who has come
major blackberry service outage. we re finding out more about what went wrong. good morning to you. it is thursday, october 13th. this is your am wake-up call. the treasury department has slapped new sanctions against iran s force. the government describes a money trail starting within that iranian organization. but former homeland security secretary tom ridge says think bigger. it s a monstrous ly buffet. they are working unilaterally independent of the ayatollah himself. clearly that, is a force under the control of the hierarchy of the mullahs within iran. so i just can t imagine that anybody s been authorized to operate independently of that leadership. senator joe leberman tells cnn a military response should be considering saying this behavior by iran cannot go unresponded to. the president as kmapder in chief, our allies and the you saudis including the target here have a lot of options that are both owe ververt and covert. in my opinion, there has to be a respon
country, and that is the housing market. there are new reports that the white house is working on a new drastic plan to try to get this shaky housing market up off the ground and prevent yet another collapse, they want to let millions of homeowners are government-backed mortgages to refinance at today s lower rates, around 4 percent in most cases. fox business anchor cheryl casone joins us with more on this story. it feels like you ve heard this story every few months, that they ve got a new plan to help people stay in their homes or refinance. what s different about this one? what s different with this one, they want to help people refinance. we ve had an idea floated around by the administration, that is for maybe the government, taxpayers buy out foreclosed homes, turn them into rental properties and the taxpayer makes money off of that. this one says why don t we let them refinance and it sounds great on paper and certainly we do need to see refinancing happening in the markets s
five years. greg gregg really? so the reason for that is, number one, high unemployment, people are just not getting jobs now, and number there, there s a massive backlog of foreclosed homes. so as those foreclosed homes work through the system, the inventory comes down, and prices can start to firm. this could be a one off. we ve seen a steady decline, in fact, many of the 20 major cities are at their 11 year lows. a blip up sounds great but mr. obama likes to talk about trend. gregg: it could be a bump in the road, a false spot. using the obama administration term, after the rise in unemployment last month, they called it a bump in the road, hopefully, this is a trend and not a bump in the road. gregg: we ll wait and see. eric bolling, thank you very much. thanks gregg. gregg: catch eric when he anchors follow the money , airing wednesday and friday night at 10:00 p.m. eastern time. martha: a raging wildfire is threatening one of the most