The Word Not Spoken: Foreclosure
I didn’t watch the SOTU last night–though I did follow along on Twitter. It seems like those actually watching came away with a renewed belief in American exceptionalism, which I suppose is one important–but not necessarily wise–point of the SOTU. Huzzah! USA! USA! USA!
And I’ll have more to say later about other parts of the content of the speech. But for the moment, I wanted to call attention to one word not spoken: foreclosure.
Mind you, the mortgage crisis did not go without mention. Here are the places where the giant trauma that has devastated our economy was discussed:
One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt. Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression. So we acted – immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.
But the devastation remains. One in ten Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined.
[snip]
These struggles are what I’ve witnessed for years in places like Elkhart, Indiana and Galesburg, Illinois. I hear about them in the letters that I read each night. The toughest to read are those written by children – asking why they have to move from their home, or when their mom or dad will be able to go back to work.
[snip]
Our most urgent task upon taking office was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis. It was not easy to do. And if there’s one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it’s that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal.
But when I ran for President, I promised I wouldn’t just do what was popular – I would do what was necessary. And if we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today. More businesses would certainly have closed. More homes would have surely been lost.
[snip]
Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95% of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped businesses keep more workers.
[snip]
We cannot afford another so-called economic “expansion” like the one from last decade – what some call the “lost decade” – where jobs grew more slowly than during any prior expansion; where the income of the average American household declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record highs; where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial speculation.
[snip]
As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may be, it’s time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.
One place to start is serious financial reform. Look, I am not interested in punishing banks, I’m interested in protecting our economy. A strong, healthy financial market makes it possible for businesses to access credit and create new jobs. It channels the savings of families into investments that raise incomes.
[snip]
The steps we took last year to shore up the housing market have allowed millions of Americans to take out new loans and save an average of $1,500 on mortgage payments. This year, we will step up re-financing so that homeowners can move into more affordable mortgages. [my emphasis]
Now, I get it. The point of the SOTU is to speak of the positive, to look forward, not back. You don’t want to plant a bummer word like “foreclosure” in the middle of such a speech, like a turd in a punchbowl, to kill the buzz. I get it–pundits were looking to count the number of times Obama said “jobs” (23, by my count), and so were not focused on the housing crisis that is at the root of the jobs crisis.
But I am utterly fascinated by the way Obama dealt with this–probably his Administration’s single biggest failure–the failure to keep more people in their homes. Aside from the mention of those abstract children, asking why they have to move, there’s no admission of the human cost of the mortgage crisis. Instead, homes are just investments, the ability for individual families to spend more to stimulate the economy, a store of value. And the claim–that without the bank bailout, more homes would surely have been lost? I’m not sure I buy that. After all, as it is the banks can’t find the paperwork for the mortgages they hold, and if the crash had happened, I think people would have just become common law owners of their own homes (though admittedly job losses would have been far worse).
So while it’s perhaps a subtle rhetorical point, it is, to me, also a stunning revelation of the way in which the Administration still fails to see how the banks should be punished, because their fraud devastated all these families. Obama fails to see that housing has not just an upside–investment, jobs, growth–but also a huge downside of crumbling communities as one after another neighbor gets evicted from their home.
Obama, at least from his rhetoric, doesn’t see the foreclosures still happening all over this country (and he sure as hell didn’t admit that Commercial Real Estate is about to repeat the foreclosure pattern). Which is, I guess, why he’s never really going to fix that problem.
the housing crisis that is at the root of the jobs crisis.
I look at it the other way. If people were not losing their jobs, there would be a lot less foreclosures.
And I am still extremely disappointed at the timidity of the White House.
That’s true in the mid-west. But not true of the real bubble states: CA, Az, NV, and FL.
Also, the root of the financial crisis, which led to a lot of the job losses, is the mortgage crisis.
did not say “foreclosure” he did say “30 billion” of the paid back bailout money would go to community banks. Did not say anything about how that money should be used.
Some of his points that jumped out at me
*pushing for ” nuclear power plants”
*double exports over the next five yaars which he claimed would create 2 million more jobs
*after graducation college students should not be paying more than 10% of their income a year on their loans . After 20 years their loans should be forgiven. If they have service jobs, their loans should be forgiven after 10 years
* he hammered away at the mis-use of the filibuster
* a shout out to Iran
* my all time favorite moment was when he hammered the Supreme Court decision
And the root of the mortgage crisis is the “Community Reinvestment Act”, another progressive socialistic democrat program which has managed to bankrupt the country..Thanks guys..
Why don’t you just come out and say “it’s all the niggers’ fault”, like you really want to?
Because you’re a coward, too?
Cling to fantasies if you want, but that doesn’t explain why prime is going south in a big way. The only way that happens is if the valuations were bunk (which they were) which has to do with the failures of the industry.
There are a lot of people responsible. But the homeowners are at the bottom of that list and the banksters at teh top.
The homeowners are at the very TOP of the list. They bought homes they couldn’t afford. If you work at Walmart, you cannot afford a home of any kind..period. Yet, they bought them. Why?? Because the “Community Reinvestment Act” forced the banks to give these loans. (Read the Bill)It is not a RIGHT to own a home. It is a privelege that must be EARNED. It is time to put blame where it belongs….One of the things that is breaking this great country is blame shifting. Those who make bad choices must step up to the plate, look in the mirror and say, “YES” I made a very bad choice and I have to take the CONSEQUENCES. This makes for a stronger individual, thus a stronger nation..Life is not easy and is not meant to be easy. No one is ENTITLED.
That is total bullshit. Bull. Shit.
Funny.
Those banks “reviewed” every single last one of those mortgages. Every one! And declared that the homeowner could afford the mortgage.
So you do the math, whether the people who do this for a living, and made the same “mistake” over and over, millions of times are responsible, or those who don’t do this for a living and made the mistake (assuming, of course, that something like layoffs didn’t lead to foreclosure) once, but the latter are paying the price.
Your argument doesn’t make sense at any level. SO if you want to make such transparently false arguments, do so. But don’t expect not to get laughed at for your silly little fantasies!
About 10 years ago, I represented a guy who’d been involved in doing refinance deals. He had gotten dragged in – by borrowers being foreclosed upon because they’d defaulted -as a third-party defendant, being accused of any number of different flavors of fraudulent conduct. Later, the banks decided to try to pin the blame on him for the lending decisions the banks had made. In every case (nearly a thousand bad loans, or, rather, loans gone bad), there were appraisals that supported every deal, and the banks and their staffs reviewed and signed off on the deals and wrote the checks and happily collected the payments on the loans they’d made. And every time, the loans had been made to “meet the deal”, but the banks said they were, of course, ignorant of that.
They weren’t. Their officers were part of the scheme – “you can steal more with a pen than with a knife”, and get away with it, too. The banks were more than happy to collect all the profits given on these loans, given at hideous interest rates. The officers gladly cashed their bonus checks, same being predicated on these loans having been made. When the loans failed, they blamed someone else. It’s the way they operate. The bankers’ genius is not in the making of money, but rather in laying the blame off on someone else. It’s what they do best.
Anyone who’s spent time around real bankers can only agree. Anyone who disagrees … I don’t want to get near what they’re smoking.
You must be one of those rocket surgeons. Man you sure are smart. How’d you learn all that stuff?
Read “Founding Brothers” by Joseph J. Ellis, “Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith, “Applied Economics” by Thomas Sowell, “Benjamin Franklin” by Walter Isaacson, and “Gusher of Lies” by Robert Bryce..then get back to me
How bout you go do some more reading and don’t get back to us.
You are cruel, making the guy read Thomas Sowell, it’s enough to make the skin crawl.
holy crap, what a convoluted excuse for an argument.
forgive my blunt candor, but your position is comparable to blaming the patient when he trusts a negligent doctor to perform surgery with sterile instruments while he is sober! or worse, blaming the incest victim when she trusts her stepfather to protect her from harm.
you’re right about one thing, though, this blame-shifting poison. however, you need to do some serious mirror-gazing when considering that one. there is likely nothing worse on the planet than shifting the blame from those in power and authority who know better and do the wrong thing anyway to those they victimize, standing to profit wildly from their inhumane decisions at those victims’ expense.
i’m with the rest of those here laughing at your clueless stance, but find it utterly frightening, in truth, that you can take your position so seriously. that twisted capacity to blame the victim and relieve the perp of culpability may well stand at the core of what is destroying this country.
please, stop.
Yes, kumari please stop. Unless you’re a bankster or an insurance executive. Otherwise you are enabling this unprecedented redistribution of wealth by going along with the narrative that workers are bad and stupid and irresponsible when they become unable to pay their bills and must be punished, whereas corporations and banks get bailouts, do-overs, and annual bonuses that amount to more money than you will ever see in your lifetime. Quit being a sucker.
Our society, our nation, is at a great divide.
There are people who will help other people and there are those who will not.
This follows on from whether one views other people as essentially decent or as vile, grasping, self-centered beings.
dw, could not agree more. in fact, this natural division of humanity is one that i have used to try and explain to my daughter why i am a democrat. it wasn’t the glitz of the blue that bedazzled my cultish impulses, but their tendency over the long term to actually champion, support, propose, and pass the closest things to social legislation, legislation that protects the huddled masses from the bad guys.
on the other hand, we have the republicans who have just blatantly over time championed, supported, proposed, and passed the closest thing to protections for the powerful one could imagine. quite the opposite sentiment of this democracy, to my mind.
i would take the division one step further, though, and say it is a line drawn between those who are led by their fears and those who are not, those who are strong enough to know trust and those who are so weak they give way to paranoia at every turn, making the whole world their enemy to fight into submission.
that is why, for all his flaws, obama’s mantra of hope is so, well, hopeful.
full disclosure: while i fall far to the left of likely most folks here on my own personal political perspective, when applied to the reality out there, i quickly become a serious pragmatist. have said it here before and will say it again: i defy anyone dismissing obama as a wuss (congressional dems, another matter) to do any better at pulling this megaton aircraft carrier out of the full force whirlpool tailspin the republicans have worked so hard to accomplish since at least reagan. the man really has to pick his battles carefully and build the power we progressives know we deserve and the country needs. but, hey, this is a democracy and not a dictatorship, and leadership does not mean pulling that bush decider bs. it truly is about compromise and pulling the people together, or else we’ll just stay stuck in this tug-o’-war forever.
not saying we should stop with the truth-speaking and give him unquestioned free rein; in the blessed memory of howard zinn, absolutely protest and force the nation’s conscience to the fore! but just as importantly, in the blessed memory of teddy kennedy, we need to recognize the realities and work our asses off to bring about a unity of purpose.
both paths require tall orders of us as citizens, sacrifices and deep investments, but hey, this is what is required of the citizenry if we can ever hope to keep this republic (to paraphrase ben franklin). both paths deserve respect and not disdain; obama’s role right now is not the knight in shining armor come to rescue us from the dark ages of bush/cheney, as nothing could be less democratic. however he guides this ship of state, he will need our voices and actions, way beyond our votes, to keep him – and everyone else – honest.
I agree with your “further step”.
My sensibilities, so far as I may know them, lie much closer to Zinn than Obama.
I know your pragmatism is not akin to appeasement, lllphd, but frankly, that appears to be the fundamental position of the Democrats, including, I have come to think, Obama.
This “divide” goes beyond America, of course, for if human nature is the issue, and it is, we are all a part of it.
However, for our species is to survive, and, I would HOPE, thrive, we must begin to think, all of us, not simply(!) about “finding” our common humanity among those with whom we share the planet today, but, more complexly(?), with generations as yet unborn.
Though I know most will think it impratical or un-pragmatic, I am convinced that we need to think a thousand years out.
Not for control or hegemony, but to insure that adequate “resources” remain for those who really are “our” future, if we care, or can bring ourselves to be truly honest; those far generations, yet unborn, who will inherent such “legacy” as we dare and, as decent beings, must leave to them.
DW
dw, my comparison highlighted both zinn and ted kennedy, each in his own way deeply liberal but each in his own way highly effective.
it was the juxtaposition of the actions of these two heroes that i wished to focus on. both are important, but one is essentially uncompromising – zinn – and the other is essentially compromising – kennedy. one is driven by principled ideology and acts on that, while the other – also driven by principled ideology – recognizes that his is not the only perspective out there, and getting the rules of the game to shift will require compromises.
again, both styles are crucial for implementing change in this country, and neither is ‘better’. i would say that obama is importantly respectful that his office prohibits his choosing the former, zinn, style. but he can – and should – channel teddy. it is simply a fact of life – that reality thang – that a confrontational firebrand such as zinn (god love ‘im; eternally grateful for his important actions), when in a position of power, can do more harm than good and set back a cause light years. think W; he chose that kickass, take no prisoners, my way or the highway style, and you see how rejected that is now (in truth; don’t pay any attention to those fox idiots who are currently mourning his exit). when in an elected office, you truly MUST respect that not all your constituents share your principles, not just to get elected, but that this is what
means.
thus, compromise becomes necessary. the alternative that’s too easy is the one W longed for when he said a dictatorship is easier, as long as W is the dictator. we simply canNOT start thinking this way and still call ourselves a democracy, no matter which side of the aisle you fall on.
now, that said, i share with you your concerns about the urgency of global survival matters. things are truly at a very grave point, and we must find a way to overcome the resistance. my point is simply that force feeding those who resist will not get rid of them, and will in fact only fan their flames of resistance. it seems to be some kind of law of nature, but there it is, no matter how stupid or misguided the resistance, it flourishes in the face of perceived oppression.
which is precisely why – more than ever – honey will work far better than vinegar for this very grave and urgent matter. look at it this way: what will we have accomplished if we get a bunch of laws in place for the big companies to follow if we don’t get the ordinary individuals on board? if we don’t bring into the fold of understanding those folks who have no clue how much their consumerism and meat-eating and plastic gobbling and resource wasting are contributing, then the battle is completely lost, despite corporate energy regulations up the wazoo? the pendulum will swing back that much harder.
i so understand that time is wasting and we need to act quickly, but if we act too forcefully and too quickly, we run the very serious risk of reversing any gains we might make. we truly have to sweet-talk, and to compromise. and if we turn our backs on the master of sweet-talk and compromise, not to mention vision and stunning chess-playing foresight, who will replace him? much as i love zinn (and i met the man; he was truly a saint), i would rather have teddy in office (met him, too, and love him no more or less). still need the zinn’s on the outside, but not the inside; for that, we need the teddy’s. both are key in a democracy; reflect on your own strengths and passions and potentials for sacrifice (personal freedom and security v. the edges of principles and ridicule; both require sacrifice), and act on that truth of yourself with the awareness of the limits of each.
i support both choices, as long as they are true and wise. obama is wise to know the breadth of his principles and the limits of his office. i’m just saying i respect that, and it would be good if more of us could grant that respect, while still holding his feet to the fire. we can let our principles be known without trying to destroy him, especially when we see him exhibiting such strong evidence of wisdom and truth.
he’s not doing what i would do, but then i’m the firebrand type and would likely slam in and bulldoze the opposition and dictate what i feel is right, only to be furiously escorted out of the building within minutes, case closed, achievements zilch or in the negative. firebrands should never run for office, which is why i could never support nader for anything but rubbing our faces in the wrongs of government
.
bottom line: we each and all need to get real about all this. and quick. those reality resisters out there who swallow the noglobalwarming lies for sure, but also the nothingshortofperfectconscience lefties as well. compromise does not just mean nobody’s happy (my ex-husband’s take); it also means working hard to find the common ground because we’re all in this together. i still think this is possible, even with the unbelievably oppositional republican saboteurs. in fact, those guys may well be setting themselves up for the ultimate shaming into taking part instead of taking apart of this democratic process. most often, the idiots in a standoff will tie their own nooses, and obama seems to be adept at allowing that to happen (think his stunning management of the hillary fiasco).
sorry; way too overlong. i find i just get so tired of hearing all the whining about obama’s imperfections when we have to ask ourselves what is the alternative? and how would that be different, and how successful would that really be in the long term? that’s what i trust about this guy; he has a preternatural capacity to see what battles to pick and when and keep the big picture clearly in view.
i mean, where is it at to give up on the guy one year in?? sometimes the lefties are as bad as the fox naysayers, and i do wish it would just stop. so not productive.
That is damned fine bunch of thoughts, lllphd.
Your assertion that one such as Zinn, in a position of power would possibly do harm remains but that, as Zinn never had such power and I should be quite reluctant to say that someone might be “like” or “just like” him.
So that hypothesis remains untested, to my knowledge, at least.
You speak of “resistance” and I find myself uncertain as to precisely what you mean, the resistance to “accepting” the “understanding” and implications of the fact that we are one “family”, more closely related than many care to admit, or the undeniable reality that human beings actually affect their global environment, perhaps, or something of that magnitude?
And then there is the “resistance” of the elites, who will not, I shall speculate, willingly, relinquish ANY of their power or wealth … ever.
Honey yes, but justice as well, is sweet, revenge bitter and “time” is really “all” that human beings ever get to “spend”. That is the admixture we might call “truth”.
Beyond that, and these ARE minor points in terms of understanding, we are in solidarity, lllphd.
And I thank you most sincerely for the kind and deep consideration behind your most-thoughtful comments and your willingness to discuss an issue that many people are reluctant, as yet, to engage.
Yet it is precisely that engagement which will lead to the narratives that will be necessary to further encourage reason, tolerance, and understanding.
Apologies to EW and everyone else for length of comment and OT “excursions”.
DW
I too think there is entirely too much complaining about Obama. Complaining doesn’t help. We have to keep pushing for the policies we think are best, without personal attacks. We don’t have any way to understand the psyche of our leaders. Anything we guess won’t tell us how to act anyway. The only act that makes sense is calling, writing, electioneering (this site gives us all tools to do that even if our district or state is hopelessly red) and giving money to people who are generally voting the way we want them to.
I ante up your post by +1
Obama richly deserves a lot of the disdain showered upon him when, after carefully picking his battles, he has chosen to ignore the rule of law and actively campaigns to cement some of Bush’s worst legal atrocities.
Extraordinary rendition – still allowed, torture – still allowed, abuse of the State Secrets Privilege – still going strong, the murder of detainees – ignored, the Geneva Conventions – ignored…
He made many commitments during his campaign to fight these and other battles. Yet when the opportunity came to fight them, we find him on the other side of the line fighting against these commitments and fighting the very people that made it possible for him to become President.
ok, this is that whole tangled radioactive mess we assume he could simply correct if he would “just do it.”
i submit – after considerable thought for the consequences, both immediate and long-term – that those things you listed are all part of the military-industrial complex, defense-intelligence shadow government, national security hot potato that no president can simply control because he’s commander in chief, even if he wanted to and even if his intentions were pure and proper. in fact, the doj itself remains so burrowed and riddled with bushies it’s not entirely fair to say that obama could effectively prosecute anything right now, or that he is endorsing everything that comes out of holder’s office, or even that holder is.
take scott horton’s recent revelations of those three gitmo murders as just one example for testing your imagination for likely consequences. horton noted in his own article that mchenry – who glossed over the doj ‘investigation’ – was a bush appointee. for the same reasons it is likely she did so to protect her republican ideologues, it is likely she did not share this case with holder in the first place. if holder did not know, then obama did not know.
now of course i have no way of knowing if this is what went down, but it seems as likely as not to me, given how easily the bush folks circumvented the rules and justified it at every turn. repeatedly. especially when it came to taking over the doj. the fact that holder is not commenting on this case suggests to me that he needs time to review just what happened and then what to do about it. if he knew all along, i suspect he would have had a ready response at hand, given that everyone involved knew that the witnesses were coming forward and certainly would if the investigation went nowhere.
now that’s just one trajectory of well-informed imagination about what we might expect to be going on with one case. if we bother to think about it. let’s continue speculating that holder was caught unawares; what does he do now? no doubt he and obama reviewed what they now know. why would we expect either one of them to come out swinging, and this quickly? their review will necessarily require some questioning of the players, including mchenry, who is not going to cooperate fully, and who knows who else might be involved who will also refuse? we truly cannot forget just how riddled with saboteurs the doj is these days, including many of the folks writing the briefs and arguing these cases in defense of the bush/cheney model that we persist in tagging as obama’s decisions. granted, the buck stops with him, but i think he’d be the first to acknowledge that. still, some latitude must be given under these clearly sabotaged circumstances.
holder and obama know all this. this particular case is a landmine of the first order, positioned as just one telltale nub of the larger tangled radioactive mess of a titanic iceberg that will swallow everything up to and beyond the horizon of what obama hopes to accomplish. don’t know if i said this here already, but the whole warcrimes/torture/detainee nightmare is untouchable until obama himself is.
keep that in mind while we consider the less immediate but no less risky aspects of obama’s bringing these truths to the fore. (and i purposely emphasize obama’s role here, as we cannot relent in our bringing these truths forward; in fact, he needs and may well be waiting for our voices to drown out the naysayers [see below] before he acts.) this is not – i repeat, NOT – 1973. we do not have a washington post that will support a woodward and bernstein to expose a third rate burglary, nor do we have a nytimes that will publish pentagon papers. nor do we have a public that would interpret those truths accurately at a rate above 30%, thanks to fox news. this is far more like 1998 when we had no crime of consequence whatsoever, certainly as it concerned governance, and the vicious rhetoric determined to bring down a man hated for his popularity as a democrat.
truly, now, do you honestly believe embarking on the deadly risky game of calling the bush/cheney crime machine to task in this climate – where a disturbing racist percentage of the populace does not even believe obama is a legit citizen, where fox news is the most trusted name in news, where cheney and rove continue to enjoy a ‘respected’ place in the debates – is going to play the way it should? i could not agree more with what should happen; however, i’m far more interested in dealing with what could likely happen. and right now, my humble IANAL FWIW opinion is, ain’t no way in hog’s hell any case brought against any sizable player beyond small fry would result in anything beyond a slap on the poor slob’s wrist and a big fat slap in obama’s face from which he would not likely recover, ever. it’s a horrible, ugly, shameful truth, but…there it is. this is the reality we’re dealing with; this is the america we’ve been left with. and i feel it’s high time we in this reality-based community stand up and face it, full square.
don’t get me wrong; all those crimes against humanity you listed repulse me beyond words. but even more repulsive is the thought that the situation might be bungled and played wrong and these criminals would go free and unchallenged forever.
a friend of mine is a former federal prosecutor. in fact, she resigned during the early bush years because one of those crazy inept bushies drove all the principled players out of the office (in fact, the office mueller left to become head of the fbi). she simply could not stomach the insanity any longer. and she has pointed out to me how important it is for a prosecutor to carefully build a case before going in for the kill. it occurs to me that one thing obama and holder may be trying to do is catch some of these burrowed holdovers in the act of some crime or misdemeanor or other in order to clear out and recover the doj to the point where they could actually have the trustworthy manpower to build these war crime cases to the solid position necessary to actually try them with any success.
whew; exhausts me just thinking about it.
in the meantime, the positions obama is forced to take in public make sense to me. when i allow my informed imagination – that is, being aware of the role of fox propaganda and the rove/cheney bully pulpit and the knee-jerk sensationalist punditry and the shallow mindless media – to follow the course of likely trajectory, it just does NOT play out successrully right now. you don’t destroy a hornet’s nest by taking a bat to it in full summer heat. you wait until the first freeze and simply remove it out from under the snoozing critters, rendered harmless by their own natural cycle.
again, this is so radioactive at this stage, so dangerous to everyone concerned, the stakes are so high, that it is best handled with the utmost watchful care. i hold out hope that obama has taken the public position of waiting until there is overwhelming unequivocal evidence, while keeping a very keen and watchful eye on the signs of that first frost. and i certainly believe strongly that when that time comes, he will not equivocate. it’s up to us to keep pounding the evidence, confronting the criminals, and supporting justice.
this will happen.
[as an aside, the doj problems may actually enjoy some intriguing public scrutiny thanks to none other than james o’keefe and his band of bungling republican trust-babies. as marcy pointed out, those in the position of actually prosecuting this motley crew are bush holdovers; these sorts of little things will only continue to emerge over time, and they’ll only serve to ultimately backfire on the bad players. patience and diligence.]
That’s just ignorant. Homeownership obviously didn’t have to be earned. Banks loaned money to people who didn’t have down payments and couldn’t possibly make the payments on the notes. The borrower may be foolish, but the bank is a fool, and should have known better.
A little something from that DFH Barry Ritholtz on the CRA-did-it meme. And he’s not the only one who’s studded that coffin.
Got some reading for ya’ –
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=what+is+the+cause+of+the+mortgage+crisis%3F&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aql=&aqi=&oq=
Brainwashed corporate tool. The entire housing crash was deliberate.
Bush quashed numerous states investigation by the FBI into fraudulent loans in 2007. Elliott Spizer was days away from opening a real can of worms, when they swooped in and destroyed him.
But, don’t fret. We’re in the midst of a full spectrum corporate takeover.
Free market capitalism will reign and Reaganites will rejoice.
They’ll turn all of us into Helots and you’ll still be spewing the efficiency of private enterprise.
WTF? That meme is still floating around? Where is a good plumber when you need one?
“mortgage crisis” is a term which does not begin to articulate the layer upon layer of rot, corruption, fraud (etc.) interconnected throughout US policy in foreign affairs (Iraq and it’s funding through FED debt issues), tax policy (breaks for everyone giving big $$s to GOP), defending & declawing US institutions charged w/maintaining long understand standards of fairness/integrity etc. (FDA/SEC/SOS/FTC…)
The many people losing (or underwater on) homes is only the affect of last dominoes falling. Tracing those dominoes upstream is the hard work, and in doing so is where a deconstruction (forensic analysis) reveals the nearly incomprehensible scope of crimes leading to the last domino’s affect.
There has been no such effort to deconstruct, analyze and correct by BO or his admin…. none, zero. zilch.
At best, his finance/econ crew has stacked up a few auxiliary domino streams on the tail end of the collapse, slapped a few band aids on ’em, marketed them in same manner as W’s “Mission accomplished”: eg. a pile of lies.
Obama has done nothing to address (much less correct) massive, fundamental, and (now, thanks to 8 yrs of Bush-enomics) massively tilting the balance of received economic benefit to his connected few at the expense of everyone else, with avenues of recourse eviscerated…
Obama = status quo from his predecessor. Nothing more, nothing less.
…
I watched BO’s SOU w/my 88/89 yr. old parents. Dad thought it was a “good speach”. Mom (who’s oddly taken to nightly intravenous inputs from Hannity/Beck/O’Reily) openly scorned BO’s every word… listening to her, one would get the impression ‘da prez was some mix of Stalin, Chamberlain and Alfred E. Neuman.
For me, most obvious in this address was that, if I didn’t know what I know about the anatomy of US economic evisceration, I could see how one may take some “hope” from his speech: it seemed sincere, optimistic… all that “stuff”.
What I know, however, is that he’s done none of the things he said he did: he didn’t fix the financial system (nor even try), he enabled feeding the beast. He claimed toxic asset purchases were making the American People $$, when in fact not only is that false, but those things are losing money by any objective measure.
Beyond that, the mission of the FED pretty clearly defines purchase of all that junk as illegal. Yet, at the very moment of this SOTU speach, BO was twisting arms for re-upping Bernacke… a guy who missed not only conditions which incubated the “bubble”, but (from ’05 on) the bubble itself.
And then lied about it.
And then bought all the worthless CDO’s and put it on US taxpayer’s dime, while refinancing the crooks who created it…
And BO, in this speach, told us this was the “change we could believe in”…
(sheesh)
I took months off to pound the streets for his election. My big question during that time was his lack of accomplishments: he made the great speech at Kerry’s convention, but other than that… ????
I worked for his election on faith. My worst fears at the time: that he was eloquent speaker… maybe most eloquent since JFK, and nothing else.
My worst fears of this guy have been realized, in spades.
…
Marcy, the “mortgage crisis” is, as I say, the last domino. The savings of US citizens, over decades, was stolen… literally, in this “mortgage crisis.” The “profits” have already been dispersed, they are gone.
That $$, much of the core wealth which, in a sound financial system, would fuel/finance useful endeavors: it’s gone.
The evisceration of US economy to off-shoring just about everything for quick profits of a few, the evaporation (much less expanding cost) of state run universities to prepare US workers for increasingly technological future… gone.
Public universities are running on fumes. They’ve raised tuition enormously… almost to levels reminding one of the ball-and-chains of excessive gambling debt. They’ve simultaneously replaced (varying in degree from state to state) large portions of their best instructors w/no-nothings, in-experienced in field they are charged w/teaching… all to meet demands of dwindling budgets.
Everything that functions in machinery of an economy needs intelligent, determined, and (because of scope of deterioration) near frantic effort if real value is produced in volumes whereby US citizens can actually afford the things they have been accustomed to having.
We have not yet begun this process. Obama has not begun this process. It exists only in the awareness of a precious few who have taken the time and made the effort to disassemble the mess, much as you did w/US Atty scandal, Libby trial, torture stuff and GITMO/JAG coverups…
Obama/Geithner/Big Ben (etc.) have pretty much shot their wad: eg. there’s not much of a $$ reservoir left to direct to what’s really needed… it’s just not there. It’s been spent, on… junk.
From where I sit, looks like anyone “hoping” for redress in the “mortgage crisis” is in a position similar to the Dust-Bowl era farmers waiting for rain.
You can explain the inequity of people caught in various mortgage traps, the wrongs of how their jobs evaporated, the unfairness of broken labor agreements and all the rest.
But IMO, it’s futile: the resources for redress do not exist. Understanding all that, at this stage, is the booby prize: eg. there is nothing to do with it except get & stay angry.
At some point, when something… anything, involving groups of people in any endeavor, get’s so corrupted and broken… saturated w/rot, there is not much left to do but throw it away and start from scratch.
I think we’re there.
Hey, where you been lately? We missed you….
Exactly right. And here is the perversity:
The admin has had to forestall real job creation that would prevent foreclosures in order to maintain the value of credit default swaps. But no one can talk about this filthy secret that we are maintaining a recession for China.
Going back September 2008: China called in their CDS holdings, and all available money market cash couldn’t pay them. That was the credit crisis in a nutshell. The fragile cds market could easily collapse again if China gets wind of real job growth before the cds market stabilizes.
chief, did not see your comment b4 i posted mine at 70; deepest apologies.
as i said, hard to tease out, but again, the furry freak brothers support the most logical perspective on this.
Also, note that encouraging more loans to be taken is bank-friendly. If houses are declining in value, it’s a bad idea to take another loan.
Ick.
Only the wealthy get tax cuts large enough to make a mortgage payment. Obama is such a Wall Street toady it is sickening. It makes sense though – Warren Buffet signaled the power structure that he was an okay guy before Obama announced.
I’ve missed this. What’s in store for our lovely “roadside commercial” landscape? There’s more to come than shuttered Circuit City-s and “For Sale” signs in the remaining roadside woodlands that change from one realtor to another every few months?
Well, vacancy rates at roadsides are already really high. But what is beginning to happen is the end result of that–commercial owners of that real estate go under. Morgan Stanley had to basically give back a number of SF skyscrapers a few months back (with few pointing out that if it’s not okay for homeowners to walk away, then it shouldn’t be okay for Morgan Stanley to).
ANd a lot of pension funds and whatnot are the ones who will be eating this crash.
FWIW, I get a real laugh out of people saying it’s not “good” for people to walk away from debt.
To put it in short: in commercial contexts (in which your home mortgage or credit card most assuredly resides) a contract is an agreement between two parties to do, or refrain from doing, certan things. Usually, that means one party gives the other some thing, and the other party gives the first party money. But, if one party decides to balk (usually in the context of one party not paying the other), the only things the “Wronged” party can do are to (A) enforce the contract or (B) seek damages.
Moral suasion, calling someone “bad”, “dishonorable”, “immoral”, “evil”, or whatever because they walk away from a debt, is so much hot air. IF the wronged party was serious about wanting their money, they would sue. Just that simple.
All that speechifying is so much propaganda to get people to do that which hey are not required – absent a court order – to do.
A friend recently settled a credit card bill by, in essence, remaining silent for close to a year. “I’ll pay you when I can” was the most this friend would say when the bill collectors managed to slip through. It also was true that the friend could not pay. After nearly a year, the credit card company offered to settle the bill for less than 50 cents on the dollar, which happened to coincide with the friend finally getting enough money to pay. Issue resolved. They barked about honor, about scummy behavior, all sorts of abuse, but in the end they made an offer to take less than half of what they claimed they were owed, and my friend – in the course of nearly a year – never proposed any number. When the credit card company came forward with their proposal, my friend said OK.
In other words, “if you think I owe you, make me pay” is both a rational and acceptable capitalist’s response. And it will either wind up with one or the other side losing, or the parties settling – usually for less than the amount in issue. Similarly, saying “assuming I owe you what you say, the game is not worth the candle so I’m going to walk away” is no more reprehensible than and as sensible as folding a busted flush rather than continue betting on a hand you cannot win. Indeed, if one didn’t walk away from a bad hand and kept betting, your poker playing buddies would look at you like you were insane. So why should you keep paying a debt that’s bigger than the property is worth? It’s equally insane.
That’s one of the reasons I found the unwillingness to talk about the real effects of the mortgage crisis so haunting. I really believe that Obama (aided by Summers and Geither, no doubt) believe that those who are underwater failed morally somehow. They have never once been willing to connect the ways the mortgage industry, at every step of the process, committed both legal and illegal fraud. And so those whose houses are a big suckhole on their pocketbook will just have to pay up for their own good.
One of the big issues here is that mortgages are valued at an agreed (market) value at the time the contract is drawn up. In the good old bubble days, if the property appreciates, which is what everyone expected, the borrower reaps the windfall. If the market deflates, the borrower is expected to take the bath. This brought into the economic lexicon the idea of the “notional” value of mortgage properties. There was talk at one point of using the “mark to market” value of mortgage properties, widely discussed but seldom agreed to, IIRC.
Any mortgage includes an implicit bet on the direction of the housing market. The moral thing in such a context is to make the consequences of the market a more explicit part of the dialog– one which the consumer is usually not well prepared to understand.
Bob in AZ
Thank you, EW…thank you. I can tell you I would not have gone under because of the real estate valuations. (in the midwest my property value is good)I went under because they violated the laws after I missed a payment. They did all kinds of illegal behavior during my foreclosure…and they continue to do illegal things…I will be interested to see if any of this changes now that the feds co-own GMAC as of Dec 31st. I am hoping this means they will work with me and get rid of the crazy fees…lawyers fees. I think it was interesting that he said “I am not interesting in punishing the banks”. Bummer for the millions who lost their homes to truly illegal behaviors. If he doesn’t know now, he soon will if he gets to see the books of GMAC. But I think that’s why he won’t punish…he can’t afford to. I think that GMAC spent all last year deny refinancing and continuing to get people into these smelly loans. They never stopped their bad behavior even as Homecomings went under and became GMAC.
He’s never mentioned the illegal behavior…but he has to know.
” …he has to know.”
Yes.
In addition, remember that apartment buildings of more than 4 units are counted as commercial real estate. (From 1 to 4 are all considered single family.) Rental apartment buildings of all sizes have been entering foreclosure at higher rates all along, and some spectacular cases are beginning to show up.
The Lembi Group is the SanFran default mentioned above; that’s mainly apartments I believe, or in any case many of the the properties are apartments. And the biggest commercial deal for apartments, Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, just officially turned turtle last week. masaccio posted on it yesterday at the base camp.
A big problem when apartments go bad is that there’s not a lot of legal protection to tenants, as a rule, though the law can vary at least as widely as the foreclosure and recourse laws from state to state. Over the last couple of years, a few states and cities have granted some leeway or extended right to stay in place to tenants, and the two huge cases so far have occured in places where there is well-developed landlord-tenant law, but this could become yet another issue in many places soon.
And as with single family foreclosures, there is also the matter of property maintenance, physical and otherwise, while new management is found and put into place. Et cetera.
Oh, yeah. A hell of a lot more to come. The distinction is that when the commercial properties go into foreclosure, the owners/mortgagors have a hell of a lot less protections compared to the protections afforded residential owners/mortgagors.
In one sense, that might make it easier. Because there are fewer protections, the foreclosures should go more quickly. So it will be like tearing off the band-aid. OTOH, there are going to be a hell of a lot of vacant buildings and devastated malls and blasted investment portfolios. Not to mention the lack of construction jobs until the surplus capacity gets absorbed.
Yeah, that last sentence is important out here where, as Marcy pointed out above, construction is an economy driver. Also all that open space will drive rents down, which will cause tax losses, etc. etc.
Goldman wins when commercial real estate crashes. Bankers pick it up cheap, like in the Great Depression, then unload their losses on us like they did with housing. Those toxic assts are still sitting there like a time bomb, in case anyone forgot.
And, that’s how it works now.
A few more words not spoken: accountability, rule of law, prosecution, privacy, Fourth Amendment, transparency, regulation, anti-trust.
And I believe “torture” was only uttered once, to claim he ended it. I don’t believe him.
!
Obama mentioned the Constitution only once, and in bragging on the DOJ, kudos went to the Civil Rights division and not much else. I guess this is in line with EW’s perception of presenting a positive face. Investigation of people for war crimes is, well, oh so negative and backwards looking, you know.
Bob in AZ
Well, he did mention transparency. He thinks “other people” should have to be transparent, but posting lobbyist info on the web. OTOH, his EO authorized killings and non-prosecution agreements, not so much.
Compartmental thinking/morality.
It’s all the rage, these days, Mary.
DW
Another word not spoken: “FBI.” Marcy Kaptur was on Bill Moyers’ show a few months ago and she said if this administration was serious about dealing with the mortgage crisis, it would hire at least 1000 FBI agents to go after mortgage fraud.
From last October:
What’s more shovel ready than going after mortgage fraud?
While I was waiting for the Roosevelt moment which never came. I howled when he slammed the Supreme Court decision. Chris Matthews brought attention to how the camera work ( of course on his station) was weak. How they should have spent more time on showing how the Republicans were sitting even while Obama continuously reached out to them. He slammed them for not responding to Obama’s continuous efforts to reach out in a bipartisan way.
Matthews slammed Republicans for not moving the health care reform ball down the field when they had the ball and their rigid road blocks to block health care reform for the uninsured now.
My favorite moment
Obama Slams Supreme Court, Alito Fights Back (Video)
Posted by John Romano in Politics on January 28, 2010
XWelcome! If you find this page useful, please Facebook or Tweet this post. Also, follow us on Twitter for updates. Thank you. – YBH! Washington, D.C. (YBH.ME) – Tonight President Obama publicly rebuked the Supreme Court’s recent decision to gut McCain-Feingold campaign election finance laws.
After the rebuke, which the President said “turned over a century of legislation, Justice Samuel Alito mouthed the words “That’s not true.”
Look for the political class to debate the meaning and/or the appropriateness of either Mr. Obama’s remarks or Mr. Alito’s quiet comeback in coming days.
No Roosevelt moment, but rather the anti-Roosevelt moment when he announced “Spending Freeze!” before SOTU.
This will be in the news for a while. There appears to be a division within the court over the implications for foreign company involvement in election spending. For example, minority dissents called attention to this problem, IIRC, and Alito’s comment at the SOTU imply to me that he doesn’t think the decision opens any such floodgates. The SCOTUS is getting more than usual blowback for this decision, so I think they may choose to hear a new case that will allow them to clarify the involvement of foreign companies in campaign expenditures.
Bob in AZ
Glenn Greewald has something up about Alito’s behaviour over at Salon. There is a thread about this over at Seminal as well.
Wish the cameras had been spanning all of Supreme Court members faces up close at this point. Glad they caught Alito’s “not true” mumblings
you know, it’s pretty impressive – ballsy, actually – that obama has taken such an unprecedented bold stand against a SCOTUS decision.
of course, it’s also relatively ‘safe’ in that he can – and has – garnered real bipartisan support toward legislation to thwart the rightwing supremes’ neanderthal interpretation.
what would truly set things straight on oh so many levels – the list is endless! the source of all our woes! – would be to impose a constitutional amendment that establishes what a ‘person’ is and is not, presumably to exclude ‘fictional entities’ like corporations. natch, this would invite the anti-choice folks to insist on embryo inclusion, so shy of that, we might hope to exclude foreign involvement in any and all enterprises that affect our governance.
properly worded, this would also exclude foreign involvement in the media; buhbye murdoch!
hey, i can dream, can’t i? and we might as well shoot for the moon hoping to land anywhere shy of that.
Was wondering whether the Supreme Court had ever been called out like that during a SOTU before? He slammed the decision with precision. I howled that moment was so amazing
a josh reader addressed this very question:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/01/history.php
I howled so loud that my youngest daughter and her friends were taken back. Had them go read parts of the decision and what others had said and written about it.
he walloped the 5/4 decision. He smacked the decision in public in front of the nation and the world upside the head. Kept wondering if that had ever been done before not in my memory.
After the 2000 Supreme Court Judicial coup I went into political involvement over drive (even made it into one of the SCOTUS hearings during that dark dark period of our history)
The lsst eight years have been disastrous and they are in a very big way responsible.
glenn Greenwald, Senator Feingold all have things to say today about that public pounding
Would have been nice if Mr. Constitutional Scholar could have actually read the decision and/or interpreted it correctly. I fail to see why anybody should be excited by a President being disingenuous.
you are a lawyer I am obviously not. I have read many of the opinions about this decision from Krugman, Reich, E.J Dionne etc. Many saying what I heard Obama repeat last night that this decision sets us back a ‘century”
What exactly do you mean by Obama being “disengenous?”
Do you agree with the 5/4 decision?
I have to admit that I have lots of negative feelings that still run through my veins after the SCOTUS coup in 2000
Yeah, well Josh Marshall and his “reader” completely failed to note that Obama was disingenuous, at the very best, with how he characterized the Citizens United decision. I think Alito was out of line, but so was Obama. He is entitled to denounce the effects of the decision, there is nothing against a President doing so in a SOTU or any other speech, but he should not misrepresent them.
…what i said at 123
“but he should not misrepresent them”
Can you explain exactly what you mean
Sure. Obama said Citizens United struck down 100 years of law; it most certainly did not. The only corporate restriction that goes back that far prohibits direct political contributions by corporations to political candidates and that law was not specifically set aside by CU. By saying this Obama was flat out inferring that corporate money could flow unlimited directly to candidates, and that was not the holding by the court in the least. Even if the ban on direct corporate donations to campaigns is lifted, they will be subject to the same limits individuals have; it is just that they may not be limited in their efforts and expenditures via indirect, i.e. independent, advocacy. That is a huge distinction and Obama painted it in a false light.
Secondly, the Citizens United decision did NOT remove the ban on foreign corporations, individuals or interests making “a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election” under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e. How Obama painted the effects as to foreign interests was patently dishonest and sheer political demagoguery. It was also unbelievably unbecoming and tawdry for a man that sells himself as a “Constitutional scholar”.
Bmaz “. Even if the ban on direct corporate donations to campaigns is lifted, they will be subject to the same limits individuals have”
someone on Hardball the other night pointed out that now corporations can donate as much as say Soros.
Bmaz” it is just that they may not be limited in their efforts and expenditures via indirect, i.e. independent, advocacy.”
What does this mean?
You are going to counter with “someone on Hardball”?? And especially some asswipe tossing in Soros for inflammatory effect? You have got to be fucking kidding me. As to your second part, it means just what it says, corporations will still be limited the same as individuals as to direct contributions to a campaign; but they will not be restricted from running advocacy ads on their own for a candidate or issue; just not directly through the official campaign.
What you just throw all guest on Hardball out the window? Come on that is rather extreme
Yes, I would throw most of them out the window (especially ones you cannot even name and may not know their ass from a hole in the ground) and I would throw that happy leg belligerent blathering village clown Matthews out the window too.
Defenestration en mass?
Opening said window(s) might let in some fresh breezes …
Heave ho! bmaz!
Indeed!
Do glass houses have windows?
Yes, but they are mostly found as “hot houses” where epiphitics, among other things, are grown.
;~p
Don’t you mean “GREEN $$$ HOUSE”?
The “names” are inter-changable, say like “submarine” sandwich or “grinder”, but the essence remains the same, Gitcheegumee,
(I propose that you and I “team up” as a “tag-team” on some troll-infested thread, sometime, between us we should manage to arrive at the same “place” often enough that either hilarious confusion or confused hilarity must surely result. What think you?)
;~DW
DW, I would do my best to do my duty…I am at your service.
Why is it that one rarely comes across a droll troll?
We disagree about Matthews and many of his guest.
What do you think about what Glenn Greenwald had to say about Alito’s response to Obama’s “set us back” statement
” all while the judges they most revere cavalierly violate those “principles” over and over — exacerbates that problem further (the unnecessarily broad scope of Citizens United is the latest example of that, too, and John “balls and strikes” Roberts may be the greatest hypocrite ever to sit on the Supreme Court). All of that is destroying the ability of the judicial branch to be perceived — and to act — as one of the few truly apolitical and objective institutions.”
Unable to link to his article at Salon
Does this link work? Hope so.
thanks
Are these a few of the “fanboys” or “asswipes” that you would throw out the window along with Chris Matthews. Arrogant generalizations out of such an alleged wise man.
Fred Werthheimer on Hardball “changing the future of elections”
http://www.democracy21.org/
“this takes us back more than a century”
“a century of history thrown out the door”
Looking for Howard Fineman’s response to this decision. He was on Hardball a while back discussing this ruling.
I have never seen Fineman so upset
This bunk is just a joke, please stop with it; Howard Fineman does not know jack about constitutional law and the other dude is an activist not a lawyer. If you want some propaganda and pablum, by all means listen to these twits; but don’t bother me with claims that they are some legal authority, they are not. Fuck Chris Matthews and his village wise men.
So what Wirtheimer is full of shit. Look Bmaz I know we are all supposed to defer to your wisdom and clearly are not as brilliant as you. But some of us are just peasants out here trying hard to figure this shit out. Find your arrogant generalizations just that…smug and arrogant.
You are not supposed to defer to me in the least, I am often wrong; but it would be nice if you could do a little better to respond to the content as opposed to just citing some blowhard on Chris Matthews without any indication of what facts or expertise they base their blathering opinions on. My default is that, with only a few exceptions, the usual people on Matthews et. al are totally full of shit.
Oh and by the fucking way I went back looking for who it had been who had said this based on what you had said earlier
Bmaz”Yes, I would throw most of them out the window (especially ones you cannot even name and may not know their ass from a hole in the ground) and I would throw that happy leg belligerent blathering village clown Matthews out the window too.
“ESPECIALLY ONES YOU CAN NOT EVEN NAME”
I named the source. Jesus Mary and Joseph Bmaz I was responding to what you had claimed.
fucking arrogant
so if they are limited to the same amount as an individual that seems reasonable from this peasants point of view. But being able to pour as much as they please into a campaign seems like a huge punch in the publics face. They rule in campaigns
“Obama said Citizens United struck down 100 years of law;”
why do you think Krugman etc are selling this statement?
How would I know? Because they are fanboys spewing about things they really don’t know about I guess. Last I checked, Krugman was not a lawyer.
What was also ballsy, but extremely unimpressive, was the way he was disingenuous, if not downright lying, about the scope and potential affect of Citizens United vis a vis the corporate influx of money and, especially, the ability of foreign money.
lying? still using such inflammatory language, i see.
bmaz, i cannot pretend to know the man’s thinking, but i suspect he knows full well the ‘real’ limits of the SCOTUS decision, while at the same time knowing that what really matters are the perceived limits.
what is cool here is that he is taking a very safe stride toward addressing the real culprit of all our woes, unchecked corporate power, by bringing it into the debate in this way. it will force all manner of discussion about what it means to incorporate, to be regulated and not, to hold up for the public to view raw and unadorned the truth about this insidious poison that has taken over power in our country.
to my mind, this is no small step, not even a giant stride; it is a great leap toward putting the reality of our plight on the table. it may not get to the deepest core of the matter, but it’s a start. and i think, a truly smart choice, as he has so much bipartisan support. what will be interesting to watch will be how fast the republicans start backstroking when the discussion cuts too close to their bones.
i would not underestimate this move on obama’s part. another case where political savvy trumps constitutional legalese when you’re making those front line decisions. long as you’re not choosing to break the law.
He either doesn’t personally know jack shit about the opinion, doesn’t have the requisite knowledge and background with which to interpret it or he is being dishonest for rhetorical political gain. Those are really the only options from what I heard him say. If you find that admirable and great, that is your right; I do not.
so sorry, bmaz; again, IANAL, but i have now read no less than three (maybe four) scholarly treatments of just this topic, and every one of them sees an opening for the foreign influence issue as wide as a galaxy.
seems to me that you leave out in your list the very real possibility that obama sees in their decision a glaring disingenuousness wrt its implications, by so broadly defining ‘individual’ and so narrowly ignoring the potential for foreign influence (which was in fact addressed in the hearing).
Well, IANAL either but yeah, there are ways for the foreign corporate influence without the corporations being able to donate directly to candidates.
They can fund the “issues ads” against one candidate or another.
But I don’t think that’s the point that bmaz has been arguing about with how Obama addressed the issue in the SOTU.
ah, could very well be the case. i would have to reread obama’s precise wording to check that, but must beg off for now, as i have far overdone my indulgence of enjoying this debate here. a little mini-vacation from the immediacies of life, including a paper and book nearing completion. but it’s been well worth it, as these smart folks are always challenging and stimulating. have missed it, and will miss it again as i disappear once more into the cave.
keep it up! and thanks for all the fish.
Well, that “opening” if it is to occur will require further litigation all the way to the Supreme Court to invalidate the crystal clear statute I cited for you. Until that has been done, the “scholars” are musing about the hypothetical, and to say otherwise is disingenuous.
forgot to note that i reject out of hand your first two options. i have no doubt obama has read the opinion, and it’s pretty clear he boasts the requisite knowledge to opine on the matter. moreover, i can’t imagine that he would publicly opine so boldly, in their faces, had he not read the decision.
which leaves on your list the possibility that he is using his bold reaction for political gain. i will concede that he might be taking advantage of the bipartisan reaction to the decision, but why assume this would be used only for his own gain? as i suggested above, it’s just as possible he can see a way to bring the biggest problem we face, in many respects – corporate power – into the public debate, front and center. that will ultimately serve us all quite well, at least potentially, and certainly more than was the case before last night.
bmaz, i have so much respect for your mind, but your heart sometimes leaks vinegar. you trust enemies not at all, but potential allies no better. there actually are sometimes benefit of the doubt scenarios you might consider opening that steel trap mind of yours to. might help if you lead with an open heart.
;-)
I do not reject those out of hand in the least. first off, it is a 90 page opinion, I can easily see him not reading it. Secondly, he has never displayed much depth at Constitutional analysis that I have witnessed. In fact, he has repeatedly made glaring errors just like this. During the campaign, at one of the debates, he made a series of statements that pretty much told me he did not understand the discreet vagaries of equal protection analysis. He is politician; his value as a lawyer is pretty thin.
Would this be true of politician/lawyers in general?
And would it have any bearing on the “values” and value of a bunch of them.?
Say in Congress?
An unfortunate number of them yes.
Saudi dynasty endorses right-wing Fox News dynasty.
This week, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia — the largest shareholder of News Corp outside the Murdoch family — endorsed Rupert Murdoch’s son James to succeed the elder Murdoch when he retires. Alwaleed, King Abdullah’s nephew, is Saudi Arabia’s richest person and the world’s 22nd wealthiest (Murdoch is number 132). He holds large stakes in many American companies, including Citi. The prince met with Murdoch last week to discuss a “future potential alliance with News Corp,” and he told Charlie Rose Wednesday about his respect for the Murdoch dynasty:
ALWALEED: I met with Mr. Rupert Murdoch and Mr. James Murdoch. We are always in tough. I’m second biggest shareholder there. And no doubt that News Corp is moving on all the fronts. You’ve seen how FOX rating is skyrocketing. … James is now managing Europe and Asia. … I’ll be the first one to nominate him to be the successor of Mr. Rupert Murdoch, god forbid if something happens to him. … I have full confidence in [James], full trust in him, and he’s capable. He’s really Rupert Murdoch in the making, and he’s almost there now.
Alwaleed came to most Americans’ attention following the 9/11 terror attacks when New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani turned down a $10 million donation from Alwaleed over a controversial comment he had made about U.S. foreign policy. As Media Matters noted, several Fox News personalities criticized Alwaleed at the time. Fox News host Sean Hannity called Alwaleed’s comment an “egregious, outrageous, unfair offense.” That was before Alwaleed purchased a seven percent stake in its parent company.
Think Progress…January 21,2010
NOTE: Exactly WHAT was the date of the SCOTUS ruling regarding corporate free speech?
Here’s your thinkprogress link, Gitcheegumee.
Glad they caught Alito’s “not true” mumblings~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does that count as the SCOTUS equivalent to……”YOU LIE!” ?
Repeat often. MAybe someone will get the message.
Thank you EW.
good morning Emptywheel and Firedogs –
nice try on the “devastating” letters from children, really – except I don’t recall sh* coming outta your WH when the Banksters had their goons arrayed around the Senate chamber for the Cramdowns vote
off to do non bloggy things – bbl
Have a FDL day y’all
Yes, granting cramdown authority to judges was the correct response to the problem. But cramdown legislation was sabotaged.
Every program/facility that the government has set up to deal with the real estate mess has had a single purpose. To put as many taxpayer dollars as possible into the hands of the banks.
And mainstream media…. they love to tell stories about the school bus driver that took out a million dollar mortgage. The obvious purpose is to direct public anger away from the banks and on to the soon to be homeless. Never mind the millions that are simply caught in the maelstrom.
Thanks for showing us the shape of the hidden thing around which the president rhetorically danced. Could even call it his “silent partner.”
I presume you saw Elizabeth Warren on TDS. Back in the 80s, a serious effort at regulatory capture began, she said. Once the cops were off the beat, they changed their profit model, selling ever riskier products to ever riskier borrowers. Then, when the inevitable collapse came, the “gov’t” bailed out “Wall Street,” which, due to regulatory capture, are almost one and the same.
So what’s the difference between that and a Perkinsian economic hit job? I think it’s obvious that the EHMs, while corrupting governments around the world, were also at work right here at home, complete with two fake presidential elections.
And now, there are people who just can’t seem to get fired, making me wonder: Who are their silent partners, who’s calling the tune, etc.?
BTW, I’ll be hosting Perkins for a book salon on February 6. And yes, I think it’s a great question.
WOOHOO! Thanks, that’s one date I just might remember.
I met him when Confessions of an Economic Hit Man came out, at an event in Seattle. While he was signing my copy, I told him my Zen knock-knock joke (buddha who? know, buddha u!). He looked up, obviously chagrined, paused, and said, “I fell for it!”
just asking for a point of clarification, what’s the basis for this claim?
which
I supposeis one important–but not necessarily wise–point of the SOTU.Fixed it. You’re being way too charitable.
Great reporting as always, however.
We live in Arizona. We’re in foreclosure. My husband is a carpenter and there’s no work for him; there hasn’t been for a long time. My adult son moved in with us; he doesn’t have a job either. We built an additional house on our property during the past five years that we’ve owned our house and we are still upside down, or at least not able to sell or lease at a break-even point. We’re “luckier” than most people in our situation because we stopped paying our mortgage a few months ago while we still had money, so we will have the means to move and pay rent somewhere else when we have to leave (assuming someone will look beyond our damaged credit score and rent to us). Figuring out what to do has kept us up at night; we could stay here and be all hopey changey and keep paying Goldman Sachs (yes, my house is actually owned by them) or we could step off the hamster wheel. I’m a freelancer and my work has diminished by about 30 percent in the past few months, but on paper I make too much to be eligible for a loan modification. At some point in the not-too-distant future our position would become unsustainable so we decided to try to get ahead of that. Now that it’s actually happening and our house will be on the auction block in a little over two months, it’s scary as hell. But it makes no sense to stay here in this sinking ship.
Sorry to hear that–and best of luck to you. That’s sort of why I raised this. This problem is not going away, and your story is being repeated millions of times over around the country, and it’s going to hold back all other recovery until it’s fixed.
Lots about squating and making a stand when you google foreclosures. Lots of advice for avoiding and help. Go check it out
Thank you for the advice. I’ve spent the last few months researching this and we made the affirmative decision to walk away and not try to hold out, much as I would like to tell Goldman Sachs (Litton Loan) to produce the paperwork and see how long we could squat. But we’re just putting off the inevitable; we need to go where we all can have jobs. I may do a bankruptcy; I have until the day before the sale to make that choice. Supposedly a bankruptcy is not as bad of a hit on your credit as the foreclosure. I only care about this in terms of its practical impact; I have always been sideways with the system so this kind of stuff doesn’t hurt my feelings. I don’t equate my self-esteem with my credit score (although it’s the American Way) and I feel absolutely no moral hazard in taking care of myself and my family. In spite of the fear, I would still tell anyone to seriously consider walking away if they think a foreclosure is inevitable anyway, or if it makes sound financial sense.
Call your Congressperson. They have people who can help and advise. Look over your mortgage. Even possibly give you legal help if you fit in to their economic categories.
Damn EW you sure noticed what many others did not. you go girl
Leen, my congressperson is Raul Grijalva and he’s got his hands full standing up for a decent healthcare bill. I would certainly call him if I thought he could help, but we really have purposely chosen this path and it doesn’t make sense for us to try to stay here and hang on to this house. There are no jobs and at some point we would be unable to pay our mortgage even if it were modified. For us the healthier and saner decision is to cut our losses.
You would not be talking with him. Most congress folks have people who specifically deal with foreclosures. They may be able to suggest something that you have not thought of and I hear that it sound like you have made your decision. But you mught want to call and may fall into the category for free legal acvise.
Good luck
Carol, there are several persons on a Congress member’s staff whose sole job description is “case worker.” They’re not writing/reviewing legislation, attending hearings, or doing anything related to Congressional operations.
Their sole function is to aid constituents, usually in dealing with Federal agencies [like the IRS] or other government entities. For instance, when a letter signed by a Congressman is sent to a government agency inquiring about the “status” of a “matter brought to my attention by my constituent ___,” the government agency tends to be a little more attentive.
Even if Grijalva’s case worker can’t help you, perhaps she [it’s usually a she] can offer suggestions/directions.
Best of luck to you.
Mauimom –
Thank you. I didn’t mean that statement in my earlier post the way it came across. Raul Grijalva is actually very accessible. I’ve met him at various events, I’ve called his office many times over the years and I’ve been there in person. I’m sure if I wanted to talk to him personally, I probably could. And of course he has staff members to take care of constituents. I was just sort of giving him a shoutout as someone who had our back on healthcare.
The thing is, I am not trying to stay in my house or keep it; it doesn’t make sense for me to do that. I don’t think there is any sort of program for helping someone walk away; you just do it. So there’s not anything that Raul could do for me in that regard. However, I’m certain his office would try to help if I was trying to stay and get a loan modification or whatever.
mentioned this earlier
did you feel Obama said anything last night to address your situation.
He did say that 30 billion of the bank bailout pay backs would be flipped over to community banks. Could that help you?
I didn’t watch Obama’s speech because I just couldn’t. The pomp and circumstance and the monarchical behavior of the SOTU is always hard for me, and now I can barely stand the sound of Obama’s voice. I say that with extreme regret, because I worked and voted for him and was really hopeful a year ago that we would some see some modest change in the distribution of wealth and the warmongering and so on.
I did read the live blogging here at FDL, though, and watch a few clips, so I basically know what was in the speech. And no, he didn’t say anything that made me feel better about my own situation, or that of so many others in foreclosure who will find themselves on the street without a house or a job. (As I said, I really do consider my family to be lucky at this point. We have one job and a little bit of money.) The money he proposes to spend on jobs and tax breaks is a pittance compared to what he’s given the banks, and the absolute refusal to touch the defense budget is just ridiculous. Same old, same old.
You know better than anyone that the problems so many people, including your family, are facing are not going away anytime soon. We’re on path where the best we can do is to help where we can and try to avoid owing any more than absolutely necessary. Being underwater almost always makes renting a much better choice because values in most places are not likely to turn around for quite a while. Good luck.
Cyber hugs and prayers your way. It’s an overwhelming and devasting thing you’re having to do – be good to yourself while you are trying to deal with it all.
Mary –
Thank you, that means a lot! I am trying to just put one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t too freaked out until the Notice of Sale arrived and foreclosure was official. The scariest part is finding a place to land in two months. We’re going back to the Bay Area where we’re from, where we have connections and a lot more job potential (in spite of Cali’s economy). The rental prices that ran us out of there 10 years ago are way, way down but we are a truckload of trouble: four hippies (two young, two old) and three cats, and not a one of us has a decent credit score. We have some money and a job, and the ability to keep paying rent for the near term, so we are not quite the Joads (but close). I appreciate the good wishes, we’ll need them!
good luck “hotflashcarol” Best book on what I like to refer as “mentalpause” is a book called “Woman” (an intimate geography) by Natalie Angier if you happen to be the throes of this passage.
She weaves her incredible sense of humor and insights with lots of medical facts. great book for men who live with women too
Thanks Leen, it’s on the wane but I kept the name anyway.
Good luck. As scary as it is for you, at least one tiny slice of Goldman Sachs will have heartburn; a small but real satisfaction.
Yes, that’s the silver lining! I was actually thrilled to discover that my lender, Litton Loan, is owned by Goldman Sachs.
My boy Mikey weighs in on the SOTU and, unlike Obama, he’s not pulling any punches.
Our favorite Marcy always noticing.
Always digging
when you google foreclosures.. Many many pages
A few of the headings
One Million Homes Lost To Foreclosure Last Year : Bergen County …
Boston House Foreclosures
Florida Keys Foreclosure, REO, Bank Owned, Short Sales Expert …
10 million more foreclosures to hit the market??? – hawkpwr2000’s …
Leesburg Today – The Journal of Loudoun County – Loudoun Home …
Ripoff Report: WELLS FARGO HOME MORTGAGE SOLD OUR HOME IN …
The Impact of Foreclosures on Neighborhood Crime in New York NY …
More than 30000 South Floridians lost their homes to foreclosure …
‘Fast track to foreclosure’ | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas …
Asheville Foreclosure | Bank Owned Properties in Asheville Area
Detroit leads nation in foreclosures; Cleveland-Elyria-Lorain …
The Continuing Home Foreclosure Tsunami
Forclosures – Oakland County, Oxford, and Lake Orion, Real Estate …
Washtenaw County foreclosures hit record in ’08 | Ann Arbor News …
The Top 10 Mortgage Fraud States For 2008 – The Home Front (usnews …
AND THEN
Making Millions in Foreclosures | Armando Montelongo
Make Millions in Foreclosure?… a Sucker is Born Every Minute
Foreclosed Listing – How to Make Millions From Foreclosures
Make Millions with Foreclosures and Short Sales – Secrets on How …
The other night on my teevee there was a re-run of a Frontline from last fall about credit cards, debit cards and payday lending. The bankers all defended their right to make money, the Repugs all defended the bankers and said any regulation would strangle the market, and Dodd and others said mea culpa.
Bottom line, they all admit that the poor pay the highest costs and lose the most. People who were given a $500 line of credit on a card could owe the straight faced banks $3000 due to the accumulation of charges from one late charge followed by over-limit fees followed by increase in interest etc. etc.
So when the banks do this to themselves, they are “too big to fail.”
No one is too small to bilk.
Of all the things that really bother me, Obama’s statements that the financial fraud that threw trillions in value down a rat hole and shoved trillions more onto the Treasury and Feds balance sheets should ignored and kept hidden in order to protect the perpetrators is up in the top five. The fact that he uses the SOTU to once again announce that he has no intention of making justice a priority because it would effect the efficient scams that have become our economic system. One which protects the wealthy on the backs of the middle-class is really irritating.
On the general issue of the importance of tax cuts. If the banks receive billions which their management converts into pocket change for themselves while the middle-class gets a $250 tax cut that they still owe next year with some interest added on, then there was only one winner. It wasn’t the middle-class and their short-term ability to fill their gas tank a couple of more times.
I was always under the impression that part of the far right’s agenda was to get as much real estate out of the hands of the common folk and in the hands of the top 1% so the people would not longer be land-owners. The next step would be making voting or other rights limited to land owners.
(Removing tin foil hat now.)
During his recitation of all the ‘clean energy’ avenues we’ll pursue, there was no mention whatsoever of solar or wind energy. I guess it’s more economical to our leaders to create nuclear waste ad infinitum than to build facilities which, once built, then cease to produce toxic waste, except indirectly through maintenance activities. Dollar for dollar these technologies are more efficient than nuclear.
And really? Clean coal? How 2007.
Egad. Good point.
He did mention the CA company that would be hiring 1000 new employees to build solar panels, and I think in same context another company in the south.
…and don’t forget that shout out he gave to offshore drilling…IMO there was nothing very green about his speech
FWIW, the foreclosure problem is being exacerbated – deliberately, I’d say – by the banks and lenders refusing to lend.
When this avatar’s driver had to sell the condo they inhabited because of craptastic business and going into foreclosure, the buyer came forward and then undertook to get a mortgage. The normal period allocated in real estate contracts for buyers to get mortgages is a month. This buyer took six weeks. The realtors were apoplectic out of fear of losing the deal (wasn’t going to happen, but this avatar’s driver wasn’t going to show that card). The lenders were approaching every mortgage application like it was the first mortgage ever applied for and like they had no idea what a frickin’ mortgage was, let alone how to process it.
Ultimately, the buyer got a mortgage and the deal closed and this avatar’s driver got out from under a pile o’ debt. But the lenders spent six weeks dicking around trying (or trying not) to make a mortgage loan.
That buyer, BTW, was a professional working for … Goldman Sachs in one of their big offices. If the lenders dicked around giving a mortgage to a professional working for Goldman Sachs, one can only conclude that lesser mortals with lesser jobs are getting an even bigger runaround.
hotflashcarol
my sympathies I am in similar straights also in AZ
Word on the street is Treasury is preparing to try to use Paulsons epic fail, Hope for Homeowners (which helped 96 Americans)to try and address the principal writedowns which Geithner told the COngressional Oversight Panel they deliberately avoided in their plan…
they have to do it, walkaways are already increasing, people see Blackrock and Tischman walk away from Stuyvesant Town project in NYC and think WTH am I doing?!
the new new new roolz for HAMP.MHA the EPIC FAIL part two under Obama this time, will include as of March, requirements like, making the bank admit they got your HAMP application ! gee what a novel idea!!
and making the bank/servicer make a decision within 30 days! Heck I have been sending in docs since August!
there is another bubble here in AZ, flippers/investors buying these short sales with cash! beating out American families with FHA financing by coming with cash aided and abetted by easy money from the Fed
unreal and Bernanke doesnt think low rates were the root of the issue
Gawd help us, it WILL drag the economy back down into a double dip, the Obama team ignored this to their detriment
of course Obama was the Credit Suisse.UBS funded candidate and he did slam Hillarys proposal we do HOLC like FDR did back on the primaries
jedimom, best of luck to you, too. People have to decide to act in their own best interest just as the banks do. As other posters have mentioned, companies walk away from bad real estate deals all the time. The only people in this equation who are supposed to act “morally” are the workers. Well, fuck that! The sooner it all falls down, the sooner it will get better. Although I ain’t holding my breath; I don’t know how bad it will have to get for a majority of Americans to stop playing this game.
Watching the president’s speech, I was reminded how powerful a medium teevee is for personal communication over long social as well as physical distances.
I rarely watch political speeches. They are tedious, predictable set pieces. But even though a tedious predictable set piece, this was a solid speech that I would guess did the prez much good, or at least, as much good as a speech could do under the circumstances of a badly bungled first year in office.
I found Obama in (teevee) person handsome, charming, a very appealing personality. Michelle Obama’s face was simply beautiful, especially her lustrous dark eyes, just gorgeous.
The problem for the nation is that one speech is just a bunch of words strung together.
What the nation needs is a bunch of presidential speeches strung together to delineate a wise, coherent, progressive set of policies that will accompny us into our unfolding future.
Some specifics:
I too enjoyed the criticism of the supreme court.
I too noted how the camera shots were manipulated to avoid showing a the ungiving, glowering republicans on their side of the chamber.
In the end, the question for me is:
Does this president have a heart, as did Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt?
Or is he just a lover of politics as a game, a sports contest?
There is little that president Obama has done this first year that hasconvinced me he has the passion to do the job well.
We’ll see.
I believe it was the credit bubble that played a central role in fomenting the housing bubble that drove house prices up by 3 standard deviations from the historical trend. Lax lending standards driven by securitization of mortgage debt and rent-seeking by Wall Street was what allowed income starved Americans from leveraging rising home prices into current income via the housing ATM. Like any Ponzi scheme the housing and credit bubble has collapsed.
The Obama administration does not want to get to the root of the issues that caused these twin bubbles as it would point a big fat finger on Bernanke and the Fed as well as Wall Street and homeowners that pulled out all their equity and lived high on the hog while housing values were rising.
Note that those who played a central role in fomenting these bubbles have prized positions in the Obama administration – Summers and Bernanke.
So what are these bright lights that created the biggest credit bubble in US history doing to return to the status quo of inflated home prices – blowing the next bubble in the sovereign credit of the US. Socializing the losses of Wall Street banks while allowing the privatization of Wall Street profits based on fictitious accounting like mark-to-fantasy of balance sheet assets.
Yes, change you can believe in! Watch what they do not what they say. Talk is cheap!
And lots of small businesses use their credit card lines of credit as short term loans. When the banks began to shut those down and levy high interest, business owners found that everyone from their suppliers to their employees and customers began to get the idea that the business was in trouble.
It happened to our business. We went from paying 12% or so to 29.9%. We were able to transfer our balance to another company b/c of my personal good credit. But we would have been ruined by the high interest rate that came from out of nowhere.
Keep wondering about the fat cats swooping up these foreclosures and making millions. The $$$$ sharks have been circling and eating.
I remember finding out years ago that many one the inside circle in Athens Ohio, former Sheriffs, cops, prosecuting attorneys etc would be the folks to buy up foreclosures based on bank and tax foreclosures. They would be on the inside getting the information from the County Treasurer etc. Bet this goes on across the coutry. The folks on the inside feeding the sharks who take advantage of others losses
Here in Maryland it’s the same con the only difference is now it’s mainlined into FHA and FannieMae backed mortgages. Unscrupulous brokers working hand in hand with corrupt appraisers borrowing up to 95% on houses in neighborhoods that have lost 40% of their value still using the high end of sales from 2 years ago. On one block the FHA lent on a home that sold for 300% more than 2 recent sales. FanniMae is buying house at auction for full mortgage value, paying off the bank then selling the house for a steep loss. It’s taxpayer money being thrown away. On one street in my white bread neighborhood 3 houses in a row are vacant. One was foreclosed on and is owned by an investment company in the Mid-West, the second is in foreclosure, the third, from records, appears heading that way. In this particular development nothing is selling, btw it adjoins a garden apartment complex with a 30% vacancy. Decent neighborhood, close to public transportation, in the burbs.A year ago General Growth Properties was close to bankruptcy and trading at 33 cents, today it’s stock is over $9, the reason as I see it was the debt holders renegotiating massive loans with TARP money and zero percent Fed loaned, tax payer backed cash. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=GGWPQ.PK#chart1:symbol=ggwpq.pk;range=2y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
There’s this from Calculated Risk: The venture acquired the 56-building, 11,000-unit property for $5.4 billion in 2006 … By some accounts, Stuyvesant Town is only valued at $1.8 billion now … all the equity investors—including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a Florida pension fund and the Church of England—and many of the debtholders, including Government of Singapore Investment Corp., or GIC, and Hartford Financial Services Group, are in danger of seeing most, if not all, of their investments wiped out. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/01/stuyvesant-town-turned-over-to.html
Damn, $3 billion lost on the “Community Reinvestment Act”.
Credit card crisis is coming soon bitches.
Sometimes, I hate it when you’re right, because it brings home the misery that is happening on Barack Obama’s watch – not George Bush’s – and that he’s going to do as much about it as George. Nada, zilch, nothing. As he did last night, he will pretend he fixed some amorphous problem and beg us pretty please to re-elect him so that he can stay the course. I don’t think so, not if he keeps his pretty little head stuck so far in the sand.
Clean energy and new technology were mentioned in several places. Here is the graf I referred to:
Next, we need to encourage American innovation. Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history -– (applause) — an investment that could lead to the world’s cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy -– in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries; or in the California business that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels.
Sadly, as much as we would like Pinocchio to speak, they are still the words spoken by a puppet. If we listen we hear Walt Disney. If we look, we see the same folks that brought us ruin.
Their conspiracy is not ours. We are just the victims. We have no further use for these beings. Humanity is not something they share with the rest of us.
marcy, i of course agree with the thrust of your position here, but take issue with this:
it seems to me that, to a great extent, the cause-effect line runs in the opposition direction, the jobs crisis preceded the housing crisis. though it would be hard to pull them apart, despite the fact that they stem from two fairly unrelated scams.
my point, though, is that the jobs crisis began a decade ago with NAFTA and the exodus of jobs to third world countries where wages – and the laws governing all aspects of fair employment – are lower. when the jobs are there, folks can at least make some payments toward their mortgages; the outofcontrol spiral began when the jobs started disappearing at an accelerated rate (about the same time wall street was seeing another balloon). when the jobs are gone, folks can’t pay for their mortgages, no matter how low they might be.
of course, NAFTA happened about the same time we gave up Glass-Steagall, which unleashed the mortgage default swap derivatives hootchy-kootchy insanity. so it is a bit difficult to tease out the chicken-egg question.
still, i’ll defer to the furry freak brothers’ analysis of such situations; to paraphrase:
times of jobs and bad mortgage are better than times of bad mortgage and no jobs.
I think Krugman has a good point here: Obama is still using our enemies rhetoric, and this is as much so on mortgages as on everything else.
EW.All
Ot
Last night on it was either Keith Olberman’s or Chris Matthews when they were talking about Not wiregate I think it was during a conversation with John Dean that Karl Rove’s name came up. Just a thread that somehow he could be involved with this. Or some indication that these are methods that he would have given the big o.k. to.
Just saying his name came up
not am american.. i think much of this is capitalist ideology driven… bailout the banks, but not the small person, as it helps keep the bigger picture alive… yes, homes are treated as nothing more then investments, as that is how capitalists view them… for those who live in a more simple world, a house is a place to live and necessary… when capitalists stop eating everyone who isn’t strong enough( that is the jargon anyway), then maybe another way will be seen to be attractive… as it stands now, avoidance and happy platitudes are what the usa has and they have the perfect president to give them all of this in the most shallow manner imaginable…
i am glad people like marcy are not buying into it.. i am sure there are many others with the same mind… the housing bubble was designed for the rich, not the poor or working class… not sure what the next one will be…
I don’t know if we can foreclose on the White House, but would an eviction of the current tenants work?
why, exactly, would you want to do that??
and with whom would you replace the current residents??
The White House is the PEOPLE”S HOUSE.
Every President is a tenant.
And their eligibility for occupancy is predicated upon winning an election.
The length of their lease should be in proportion to the visible results of their campaign compact with the landlord(American Public).
And bringing in undesirables to loot the economy and steal the “silverware” is a violation,too.
BTW,in reply to your second question,I think it would be nice to have a doctor in the house for a change. Real change…not being nickle and dimed change, like now.
Down With Quadrenial Looting!!!
;~DW
i agree it’s the people’s house and the resident is a tenant, but respectfully, that is what an election every four years is about.
don’t vote for the guy in ’12 if you don’t think he’s at least attempted to accomplish his every stated goal, and if you don’t think anyone else out there could do as well with the next four years.
in the meantime, we still have three years, and i for one remain exquisitely relieved that he and no one else in the arena is at the helm for this period of time.
imperfect, sure; but sincere and earnest. “inviting them in to steal the silver” is a bit harsh, i think. he may have been foolish to deal with them in good faith, just as he has been foolish with the republicans. but his current stance to demand they pay us back is laudable.
i mean, cut the guy some slack here. could you do any better and not succumb to dictatorship??
gitchee, had meant to comment also on your opining we need a doctor in the house; not sure if that was a nod to my phd, and am not entirely comfy with assuming or even acknowledging so. most likely you were referring to howard dean, who i would dearly love to see in a position of high counsel to obama, certainly instead of rahm (gag).
however, i for one am comforted by the fact that obama is a constitutional scholar. many here, such as bmaz, find that laughable in light of several of obama’s positions re: detainees and torture, etc. that whole piece is troubling, but i think i understand why that whole tangled radioactive mess must be kept on the back burner for the time being. obama is just not in a position at present to start pulling those threads out of the tangle; there is the very real risk that everything – and that means everything – would unravel, and not the way we would want it to. it doesn’t take much imagination to consider just how badly it could go, given the current climate.
still, i feel obama never forgets his constitutional charge, while simultaneously recognizing just how carefully all these huge issues must be approached. a doctor, any doctor, right now would not bring me that same comfort.
but, still, thanks for the nod, even if it was for dean and not for me.
I do not presume to speak for all, but I will proffer an opinion.
I think that the disillusionment of many with Obama’s performance in this past year, is not so much on the contents of his actions, but, with the underlying intents of his actions.
There is much cognitive dissonance bewteen what is said and what is done-and the motivational disconnect between the two.
The housing crisis is not the root cause of the economic crisis. That’s crap. It was a part of it, but by no means was it the root cause. The root cause of the financial crisis/economic crisis was that much of the financial and housing markets were being propped up by instruments that shouldn’t have existed, both the walk-away, rent-only loans (that are/were only for people who intended to roll over the houses) thus falsely ballooning housing value, and the CDO/CDS voodoo, that had this profit-engine that was infinitely leveraged, and also taken out recursively, so that one CDO/CDS was being backstopped by another one, and on and on ad bankruptia. Both were false-value, inflationary mechanisms, just like the buying of stock on margin that took place in the 1920s, with the same result.
Don’t muddy the facts for rhetorical point-scoring.
After decades of dismantling our ability to produce actual wealth, the epiphitic classes felt that the people needed some “icing” on their cake.
The “housing crisis”.
Now we’re playing musical chairs and pin the “tale” on the donkeys.
And the people’s well-being (including access to affordable health AND justice) is the Pinata.
Shall we partay on?
DW
Um, those are part of the “housing crisis”. But you are right, it is deeper; the real culprit is over-leveraging, and it has been, and continues to be, systemic.
Exactly what “housing crisis” do you have in mind that was not precipitated by those loans of which you speak?
ot
from Larissa over at Largely
Larisa Alexandrovna: Ratfuckers Strike Again
“UPDATE I noticed something odd. Earlier today I checked the Facebook pages of Stan Dai and he had friends. I checked it about two hours ago, and all of his friends were scrubbed. So, did this guy delete all of his friends from jail or did he do this shortly after he got home. The question is why would someone just arrested on federal charges think that deleting his Facebook friends is a priority?”
He’s trying to turn over a new leaf?
He’s found Jebus?
Or?
What would G. Gordon do?
;~DW
lie
And “there” you have it.
The upstanding, in-your-face, boyz’ll be boyz, truth of it,
All.
(One thing’s certain -they’ll be back …)
;~(
Never went away
Over at national Review and Weekly standard
Haven’t We Heard This Before?
Obama’s shopworn State of the Union speech.
BY Fred Barnes
Obama’s Dirty Laundry List
A bad first State of the Union.
BY Matthew Continetti
How the Citizens United Court Decision Will Impact 2010 Election
Supremely uncertain.
BY Gary Andres
I stand (you don’t imagine I’d take this lying laying down, didja)
corrected.
It’s just that, in the current (almost an undertow in some regions) flow of hopiness, I’d imagined Dai might be out of “commission” for a time, but a part of me wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if this whole farce is not a means of providing “deep cover” for something even more egregiously arrogant and genuinely destructive.
Such “suspeculation”, Leen, being in keeping with my “theories” regarding predicting American “history” and determining the “normative range” of the overarching American social “psychology” of denial and projection, especially as … um … “influenced” by the fear-mongering sub set.
;~p
Larissa over at largely nails it ‘ratfucking’ history overview
For the last couple of days in the runup to last night’s STOT address, there has been much discussed here at ew (on the two teabugger threads) about New Orleans.
Among the commentaries included, one particular issue came up,quite as a collateral issu,incidentally.
HUD had been defrauded of millions of dollars in a house flipping scheme in New Orleans BEFORE Katrina, involving a State Senator’s son and several accomplices who were aiding and abetting falsification of tax returns and such to justify the loans.
I will post link .
@#96
Michael O’Keefe Jr. indicted
By Martha Carr
June 18, 2007,
By Susan Finch
Michael O’Keefe Jr., son of disgraced former state Sen. President Michael O’Keefe and owner of Citywide Mortgage Co., defrauded the federal government into guaranteeing nearly $600,000 in Citywide loans to unqualified borrowers involved in a “house flipping” scam, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed Monday.
Other lenders, attracted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development guarantees, bought the loans from Citywide before the borrowers quit paying on the debts, leaving HUD holding the bag, the mid-May indictment said.
O’Keefe is charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and violating mail fraud and other federal laws to launder money.
If convicted of the five counts against him, O’Keefe could get as much as 45 years in prison and be ordered to pay millions of dollars in fines, though under sentencing guidelines used in federal court he would likely face a lesser punishment.
Citywide is now located in Picayune, Miss. O’Keefe moved the business there after the company’s 3625 Canal St. headquarters were heavily flooded following Hurricane Katrina.
O’Keefe’s father, Michael O’Keefe Sr., was convicted in 1999 of bilking a failed insurance company. He is scheduled to be released in 2016, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons(excerpt)
Michael O’Keefe Jr. indicted | Breaking News Updates New Orleans …Jun 18, 2007 … He is scheduled to be released in 2016, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons. … Do relatives of Louisiana politicians ever get a real job? …. far as race goes , being a stinking , no good , lying , F@#& …
blog.nola.com/times…/06/michael_okeefe_jr_indicted.html – Cached – Similar
NOTE: Think this is the only person who was doing this nationallY?
The article itself delineates FULLY how the scam was devised and discusses the role of the other accomplicies involved. Very informative.
Unless you can establish a link between the O’Keefes, and I have yet to see any at all made whatsoever, what is the purpose of continuing to talk about the other O’Keefes and confusing the issue and polluting the waters? It seems a disservice to the facts and both O’Keefes.
BMaz, this has nothing to do with the teabuggers.
I am NOT making any assertion that it HAS any connection, in fact I state that this was a collateral issue.
Make GS show the note in court proving they have title to the house. There’s a reasonable chance that they don’t (unless they are the original mortgager) and therefore can’t foreclose on you.
Incidentally, wavpeace commented that one of the companies that was especially troublesome after Katrina,was Homecoming Financial.
According to Wiki, Homecomings Financial was/is owned by GMAC .
Remember, at one time GMAC ,before it was allowed to become a bank,and got TARP money ,had Ezra Merkin as its top executive.
Yes, the same Ezra Merkin that was closerthanthis with Bernie MAdoof and his feeder funds.
In regards to Homecoming Financial,and the GMAC affiliation ,forthwith an update:
GMAC to Close 200 Retail Offices,
Cease Lending at Homecomings Financial 03Sep08
GMAC’s Residential Capital announced today that it will close all 200 GMAC Mortgage retail locations and cease lending at its wholesale lending subsidiary Homecomings Financial.
As a result of the closures, roughly 5,000 employees will lose their jobs, including 3,000 as soon as this month and another 2,000 by the end of the year.The loss represents about 60 percent of the remaining workforce at ResCap, which was rocked by layoffs last October when about a quarter of the staff was sent packing.
Homecomings sent a memo to mortgage brokers, notifying them that all loans must be submitted no later than 5pm eastern on Thursday, and all loans must fund by October 24.GMAC’s ResCap unit expects a related charge in the range of $90 to $120 million, much of which will be reflected in the third quarter.
However, ResCap will continue to originate loans both domestically and internationally, so long as there is a secondary market to dump off the loans.
The plan is to originate home loans via its direct (probably Ditech) and correspondent channels and expand its servicing platform to “preserve homeownership.”Last year, ResCap lost a whopping $4.35 billion, driving once-profitable GMAC to a $2.33 billion loss.
It had been one of the top ten largest home loan lenders until the mortgage crisis took flight in mid-2007.
Corporate Aristocrat’s failure to control passion for profit having leveraged their self interest to the detriment of the republic and the governed, have extracted vast fortunes of liberty from the people. People lose property when energy cost increase and choices concerning “Life” must be made in the absence of “assets,” deprived under law.
When Jefferson spoke of private banks and the relationships between banks, corporations and financial institutions depriving people of property and ultimately “Liberty,” by inflation and deflation he was warning of the “concocted” bust and boom cycles by financial institutions/corporations to “”wealth extraction”” from the governed. This is an old game and the “SJC’s” recent decision concerning campaign finance is “CORPORATE IDENTITY’S,” “Ace Card.” The SJC in “Dred Scott v Sanford” protected the slave owners and the institution of slavery. Meanwhile irony is, the 14th Amendment which answered the issue of citizenship for America’s Dred Scotts, also created the legal concept of due process rights for state based “CORPORATIONS!”
You see the slave owners morphed into the legal entity known as corporations under the 14th Amendment. No wonder why Jefferson and Madison both wanted an 11th Amendment placing restrictions on corporations, in essence denying corporations the very “Human,” status equivalents with living human beings. Jefferson and Madison sought to protect the governed from the undue influence of monied interests similar to the King’s tax exempt East India Tea Corporation, which the SJC has now just protected…? Dred Scott was not property Justice Taney. You where wrong and your decision contributed to the loss of millions of American lives. The current SJC is just as wrong as was the Taney Court.
People are not property just as money often has nothing to do with merit! Money buys amplification of often, merit less propositions and proposals with dire consequences is acted upon. It also can instill lies and falsehoods that when repeated become hollow truths….
F orfiet
O ownwership
R obbery
C alculated
L ikley
O rigins
S ystematic
U sery
E xtraction
S chemes
Protect Corporations? Bullshit! Restrict Them!!!!
So, SCOTUS has solved the riddle of when does life actually begin….upon incorporation.
snigger; emphasis on the “IN”
Heh heh; good one!
that is great
(and he sure as hell didn’t admit that Commercial Real Estate is about to repeat the foreclosure pattern).
Seeing more and more empty commercial buildings these days. So the next shoe is about to drop, then? What kind of delusional state do these people live in, anyway? Geez…
O/T: Well, well, one corporation has now filed to run for Congress.
Corporation files to run for Congress: important marketing strategy questions remain unanswered
Probably won’t get anywhere, but it’s a start. And the longest journey begins with the first step, dontcha know.
Don’t know what a “diversifying corporation” is, but this one is one of those.
Murray Hill for Congress! Yeppers.
I think what Alito was reacting to was the foreign influence issue. The Supremes dodged that issue. I think that leaves foreign influence still open to legislative action. It was only corporate free speech they addressed and hence only that aspect that needs to be addressed constitutionally, i.e. by amendment.
INAL and may also suffer from a bad memory. Feel free to correct me.
OT the procedural vote on Bernake is supposed to happen at 3:20pm EST on C-SPAN2. Just an FYI.
Feingold has a fact sheet up about the decision (unable to link)
Feingold Fact Sheet on Supreme Court Decision
I think this is it (Feingold Fact Sheet on Supremes’ Decision).
Obama “infers” that he may “imply” (whatever it is) to the rest of us.
Obama is adding, deliberately it would seem, to the confusions which surround the entire issue, from corporate personhood to purchasing politicians to playing the people for stupid rubes who just don’t “understand” …
OT again…73 aye votes for cloture on Bernanke.
later.
Ew thanks for pointing out “foreclosure” issue being completely left out of the SOTU
Excepting the understandable anger of those on the “receiving end” … of course.
(If they are still around.)
OT Bernanke confirmed 70/30
In regards to commercial real estate being the next bust,a few additional words about GMAC ,from Wiki:
On March 23, 2006, GM announced that it completed the sale of a 78% interest in GMAC Commercial Holding, its commercial real estate subsidiary, for $1.5 billion in cash to a private investment group including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Five Mile Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. The deal includes the payoff of all intracompany debt owed to GMAC, bringing the total value of the deal to $9 billion. The new entity, in which GMAC owns a 21% interest, is known as Capmark Financial Group, Inc.
Other businesses in the GMAC portfolio include ResCap Holding, an umbrella company for GMAC’s residential mortgage business, and GMAC Home Services, a real estate services subsidiary. ResCap Holding is the parent for GMAC Mortgage, GMAC-RFC, Ally Bank, Ditech.com, and Homecomings Financial.
GMAC (or GMAC Financial Services), formerly known as General Motors Acceptance Corporation, is a United States bank holding company that was previously the wholly owned financial services arm of General Motors.
On 24 December 2008, the Federal Reserve accepted GMAC’s application to become a bank holding company in order to gain access to billions of dollars in government aid, a crucial attempt to ensure the survival of the company.[1]
On December 29, 2008, the United States Department of the Treasury gave GMAC $5 billion from its $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).As of May 15, 2009, GMAC’s banking unit officially changed its name to Ally Bank. On May 21, 2009, the U.S. Treasury announced it would invest an additional $7.5 billion in GMAC LLC which gave the U.S. government the majority stake
As of June 2009, approximately 40.1% of GMAC was owned by Cerberus Capital Management and related investors, 35.4% by the United States Treasury, 9.9% by General Motors, and the remaining in a blind trust.[3]
OK, Goldman Sachs and KKR filed for bankruptcy a year ago in regards to their GMAC purchased real estate mortgage entity known as CapMark.
That was after TARP money was distributed,right?
And, Goldman wasn’t talking,according to the Bloomberg article.
Not to worry,Buffet too the rescue,with Berkadian.
You gotta read these,folks.
Capmark Financial GroupBerkadia Commercial Mortgage LLC (Berkadia) recently acquired the North American loan origination and servicing business of Capmark Financial Group Inc. and …
http://www.gmaccm.com/ – Cached – Similar
Capmark Files for Bankruptcy With $21 Billion in Debt (Update3 …Oct 26, 2009 … Capmark Financial Group Inc., the lender owned by companies including [bn:WBTKR=GS:US] Goldman Sachs Group Inc. [] and [bn:WBTKR=KKR:US] KKR …
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=abkxwVZ_eXi0
and bmaz, i have to confess i’ve missed your steel trap mind and vinegar most of all.
with admiration and affection,
;-)
I love you too!
113 – *g*
129 – now that’s hilarious! Maybe we can have a bunch of them register to vote, too. Or to overturn state law requirements for establishing their subsidiaries as interference with their reproductive rights, or … *g*
But here’s an opportunity for ALL of us. Hot day-um. Not just running for office as corporations, but learning how to set up off-shore bank accounts and everything! Maybe they’ll even throw in mood rings or jester hats or sumpthin. Let’s all rush over and sign up.
I’m kind of a sucker for mood rings.
I didn’t make myself watch the SOTU (I’m starting to have the same trouble watching Obama as I did with Bush) and while I’ve seen the clip on Alito, I haven’t really heard all that was said leading up to it
but
I will say bmaz is spot on @ 135 on what he references. I don’t know how Obama represented things, but there is a big difference between believing that a decision makes it more likely that a statute (like 2 USC 441e) might be more likely, in a future case, to be overturned bc of the language/reasoning used in the case before the court and an actual decision by the court that is broad enough that it directly affects other statutes, not before the court.
Mary, I have the same reaction.
Sad. Infuriating, disappointing and a lot of other things, but sad as well.
I don’t (yet) have the same reaction. There’s too much going on.
I did shift my thinking about Obama’s Year 2 strategy. Recently, I’ve been thinking that since Year 2 is a campaign year, he would go after the Republicans more. Well, he is, sorta. First, I have become convinced that he really does want to govern from the center– but in the face of Republican intransigence, I think he’s re-thinking what the Center consists of. I think his long range strategy falls into two parts:
1. Republicans: Hold out the olive branch, and never sound too partisan. I don’t think he’s expecting much positive response. But look for him to use wedge issues to split the Republicans apart (Remember how the Republicans used to use wedge issues against Democrats? Remember the so-called “Reagan Democrats”?) One such issue is Afghanistan: He got more support from Republicans (in % terms) than he got from Democrats on that one, but at least he was able to make an alliance with Republicans on that one. Other potential issues are flogging Bankers (Republicans instinctively favor bankers, but do they really want that tag this year?) and Big Business. Of course, Republicans always talked as if they favored small business, but that was usually a cover for favoritism for Exxon, Enron, Halliburton, etc. Look for more wedge issues like those during this year.
2. The real target of Obama’s happy talk about bipartisanship is the Independents. He knows that they don’t like partisanship, and he knows that Coakley lost the Independents in Massachusetts. So when he does the kumbaya talk, his target may overtly seem to be “moderate” Republicans, but he may be really talking to the independents.
He knows Clinton was successful because he learned how to govern from the middle. I think he’s starting out with a somewhat Clintonian strategy, but I don’t really think that Obama’s a blue dog. Ideologically, I think he’s progressive on most things, but strategically he’s a centrist. And he’s much more a pragmatist than an ideologue.
Bob in AZ
Think Progress » Right-wing Saudi dynasty endorses right-wing Fox …Jan 22, 2010 … The Saudi royals and Fox News are going to partner up? Huh. ….
thinkprogress.org/2010/01/22/saudi-murdoch/ – Cached
I too noticed the dismissal of any talk about “foreclosures”. However, it was brought up during the post speech chat with four well-dressed White House interns/junior junior advisors.
Was dosing off a bit during the Q&A, but did hear a question from an alleged e-mailer on foreclosure. The answer was jarring in its aloofness. Heavily couched response such as pledging that “responsible” homeowners could apply for a federal program that might help lower monthly payments. It was definately a pro-banker/business approach and answer.
Anyone else tune into that chat?
@#182
Merci,mon ami.
teehee, could not resist sharing this with everyone here, wrt the citizens united case:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/01/28/corporation-election/
ya gotta love it; a yes men show in ‘real’ life.
unclear if they boast any foreign shareholders, but if they don’t, they could easily, especially now.
winkwink
One thing I have noticed…is that whenever we talk about foreclosure or the homeowners…it seems like we get trolls. Same thing happens on Dkos and seminal. I think it’s interesting…always the meme is to blame the home owners who got these horrible loans. I can’t say it’s happened every time…but I am sensitive to the topic…and I notice that it happens at least “frequently”.
Just a suggestion, but maybe you should inquire of these trolls if they ever had to deal with foreclosure or a recalcitrant insurance company on a personal basis.
Dear hotflashcarol,
My wife’s daughter went through a similar situation in southern California. There came a point when the only thing to do was to walk away from the house and find an affordable rental. She was able to do that.
Good luck!
Bob in AZ
Thanks Bob. That’s the plan. I will miss some things about Arizona but not all of them . . .
Lots of land sharks circling to buy foreclosed properties.
So important that EW picked up on this issue not being mentioned last night
While it was probably unintentional and I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, it seemed to me that there was an implicit rejection of American exceptionalism in the speech when Obama talked about how there was no guarantee during Bull Run(?) and Normandy Beach.
I didn’t hear the speech, but I assume he was referring to the Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas (VA). There were actually two of them: one on July 21, 1861 and the second on August 28-30, 1862. Just google or go to the wiki for starters.
eblair @ 210–
I totally missed that one. Did he really mention Bull Run???
Bob in AZ
yep
On the Diane Rehm show they brought up how Obama avoided the Israeli Palestinian conflict and many other International issues. Although he did strike out at Iran following the Israeli lobbies orders