Unemployment Insurance Keeps Middle Class Families Out of Poverty

/in /by

As Arthur Delaney reports, CBO just came out with analysis that shows unemployment insurance kept an extra percent of the population out of poverty last year (which would work out to be around 3 million people).

Extended unemployment insurance put in place to fight the recession prevented the poverty rate from rising to 15.4 percent in 2009, a level unseen since the 1960s, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The government announced in September that that the 2009 poverty rate had risen to 14.3 percent from 13.2 percent the previous year.

But that’s not the most interesting part of this analysis. In addition, CBO noted that middle class families are much bigger beneficiaries of extended unemployment insurance than the poor; those making 200% of the poverty level received 70% of the unemployment benefits in 2009.

In 2009, about 14 percent of families had income below the federal poverty threshold; those families received about 8 percent of total UI benefits paid out during the year. In contrast, 67 percent of families in 2009 had income more than twice the poverty threshold; those families received about 70 percent of total UI benefits. The higher-income families received a larger share of benefits for several reasons: because only people with sufficient recent work histories qualify for benefits, benefit levels rise with previous earnings, and receiving benefits tends to push families into higher income groups.

Now, frankly, given the ridiculously low poverty guidelines, 200% of the federal poverty threshold is still pretty damned poor. But the point is, UI is not about a bunch of poor people suckling at the federal teat. It’s about keeping families from slipping into poverty.

Nevertheless, the GOP will continue to mobilize classist and racist narratives to make sure this useful benefit is not extended.

With 50 Million Food Insecure and 59 Million Uninsured, No Wonder Dems Lost

/in /by

In the last week or so, two public reports have cataloged the growing insecurity of Americans.

Last week, CDC reported that the number of people without health insurance topped 59 million in the first quarter of this year (up 400,000 from last year and 2.7 million from 2008).

And today, USDA reported that 50.2 million were food insecure in 2009 (up 900,000 from the previous year, though it does say the increase may have been due to statistical sampling).

A sixth of this country doesn’t have the bare necessities. A tenth of this country don’t have jobs.

Is it any wonder that Dems lost two weeks ago?

Sheriff Dart: 5% of Chicago’s Foreclosures DON’T Have Problems

/in , /by

The WaPo has a story on the growing realization that the banksters have been engaging in massive fraud to keep churning out foreclosures. It includes a detail about Chicago Sheriff Thomas Dart’s refusal to enforce foreclosures I did not know: that when he had a sample of foreclosures reviewed, he found that only 5% of them had all their paperwork in order.

After reading about problems such as banks “robo-signing” foreclosure documents without verifying their accuracy, Dart asked that attorneys for mortgage companies sign something personally confirming that evictions are justified. None did. So Dart has refused to honor their requests.

[snip]

In Illinois, Dart said in an interview that, after hearing about improperly prepared paperwork at major lenders, he and his deputies pulled an admittedly unscientific sample of 400 foreclosure cases processed by the courts. He said they found that only 20 of them had the proper paperwork and that the others were missing “very significant” documents.

While not carrying out evictions could land Dart in trouble if a judge decides to bring contempt-of-court charges, he said he thinks his actions have been “just and legal.”

“When I have the lending institutions themselves admitting to problems, what are we supposed to do?” Dart said. “All I’m asking them to do is certify that what they are doing is legal. The fact that they are not racing to do this makes the case for us.”

One of the biggest problems communicating the problems the deadbeat banksters have introduced through their own shoddy or fraudulent work lies in explaining the scope of the problem. And while the numbers Chicago found may be worse than other places–with a very high population of people of color, after all, it would have been a target for predatory lending–I’m happy using the 5% number a law enforcement officer has provided in the interim.

Are Obama and Congress Set To Screw American Counties, Homeowners and Give Wall Street Mortgage Banksters a Retroactive Immunity Bailout?

/in , , , , , , , /by

There are rapidly emerging signs the Obama Administration and Congress may be actively, quickly and covertly working furiously on a plan to retroactively legitimize and ratify the shoddy, fraudulent and non-conforming conduct by MERS on literally millions of mortgages.

From CNBC:

When Congress comes back into session next week, it may consider measures intended to bolster the legal status of a controversial bank owned electronic mortgage registration system that contains three out of every five mortgages in the country.

The system is known as MERS, the acronym for a private company called Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems. Set up by banks in the 1997, MERS is a system for tracking ownership of home loans as they move from mortgage originator through the financial pipeline to the trusts set up when mortgage securities are sold.

Just to make clear the implications of this craven action, the White House and Congress are conspiring to give a get out of jail free bailout card to the biggest banks and finance companies in the country to cover up and mask their illegal behavior and behavior that did not conform with state, county and local laws throughout the United States. On at least sixty (60%) percent of the existing mortgages in America.

There are dozens of implications to individuals and both private and public entities. At a root minimum, it will likely decimate, if not bankrupt, most counties in every state of the union.

If courts rule against MERS, the damage could be catastrophic. Here’s how the AP tallies up the potential damage:

Assuming each mortgage it tracks had been resold, and re-recorded, just once, MERS would have saved the industry $2.4 billion in recording costs, R.K. Arnold, the firm’s chief executive officer, testified in 2009. It’s not unusual for a mortgage to be resold a dozen times or more.

The California suit alone could cost MERS $60 billion to $120 billion in damages and penalties from unpaid recording fees.

The liabilities are astronomical because, according to laws in California and many other states, penalties between $5,000 and $10,000 can be imposed each time a recording fee went unpaid. Because the suits are filed as false claims, the law stipulates that the penalties can then be tripled.

Perhaps even more devastatingly, some critics say that sloppiness at MERS—which has just 40 full-time employees—may have botched chain of title for many mortgages. They say that MERS lacks standing to bring foreclosure actions, and the botched chain of title may cast doubts on whether anyone has clear enough ownership of some mortgages to foreclose on a defaulting borrower.

Why would the Obama Administration and Congress be doing this? Because the foreclosure fraud suits and other challenges to the mass production slice, dice and securitize lifestyle on the American finance sector, the very same activity that wrecked the economy and put the nation in the depression it is either still in, or barely recovering from, depending on your point of view, have left the root balance sheets and stability of the largest financial institutions on the wrong side of the credibility and, likely, the legal auditory line. And that affects not only our economy, but that of the world who is all chips in on the American real estate and financial products markets.

What does that mean to you? Everything. As quoted above, even the most conservative estimate (and that estimate is based on only a single recording fee per mortgage, when in reality there are almost certainly multiple recordings legally required for most all mortgages due to the slicing, dicing and tranching necessary to accomplish the securitization that has occurred) for the state of California alone is $60 billion dollars. That is $60,000,000,000.00. California alone is actually likely several times that. Your county is in the loss column heavy from this too.

Where will the roads come from? Where will the county courts, judges and prosecutors come from? The Sheriffs? Who will build and maintain the bridges, parks and public works entities? Removal and obviation of this funding mechanism may literally kill any and every county.

That is without even going into the real and myriad effects on individuals, families and communities. This is a death knell to the real property system as we have always known it and the county structure of American society as we have known it. And millions of people will have lost the ability to benefit from the established rule and process of law that they understood and relied on. After the fact. Retroactively. So Obama and Congress can once again give a handout and bailout to the very banks and financial malefactors that put us here.

The Obama Disconnect: Arlington, Korea and Catfood

/in , , , , , , /by

Marcy wrote earlier this morning about David Axelrod’s despicable announcement of Obama’s capitulation to the oligarchs on tax cuts (another lead balloon the Obama White House incompetently tried and failed to walk back). Later this morning, however, were a couple of events that put an even starker gloss on this pig.

First, was this from The Oval:

President Obama is in Seoul, South Korea, where today he said lawmakers in the United States should hold off on comments about his fiscal commission’s proposals to slash the federal budget deficit through spending cuts, ending tax breaks, and a revamping of the Social Security system.

“Before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts,” Obama told reporters.

He added: “If people are, in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country, then they’re going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can’t just engage in political rhetoric.”

So, Barack Obama is in Korea lecturing Americans to suck it up and embrace the catfood he and the wealthy elite have deemed necessary to feed us in order to pay for their grotesque largesse. Notably, at the same time Vice President Biden was left to be the White House representative at the traditional Arlington National Cemetery ceremony to honor America’s Veterans, where Presidents usually pay their respects and appreciation to veterans and the military. Especially during a “time of war”. Obama couldn’t make it to Arlington for the Memorial Day Ceremony either.

But Mr. Obama could not be present at Arlington this time because he was in Korea. And just what was so pressing in Korea? As Jane Hamsher points out, it is the desire to press for a horribly conceived US-Korea free trade deal:

It would be a truly horrific blow to whatever is left of American manufacturing at a time when unemployment is rampant. But from a political standpoint, fighting for another so-called “free trade” agreement right now has got to represent some kind of death wish for the Democratic party.

Yes indeed, but thus is what we are constantly served by Barack Obama. As Paul Krugman today rightfully termed it, Mush From the Wimp.

You know, it is not just that the arrogant and cluelessly detached President Pangloss is steaming toward a one and done Presidency, it is that he is literally destroying the Democratic Party and liberal ideology in the process and leaving them in his wake.

UPDATE: I guess Obama couldn’t even sell crack free trade to Charlie Sheen the Koreans.

David Axelrod’s Quaint Idea of Middle Class “Security”

/in /by

There’s a lot to despise about David Axelrod’s announcement of Obama’s capitulation to the oligarchs on tax cuts, not least that he made this announcement on the same day Obama’s Catfood Commission Chairs started the process of stealing from seniors to “fix” our deficit.

Let yesterday be marked as the day when a nominally Democratic President began to dismantle Democrats’ signature policy achievement, social security, so he could shovel $700 billion to the very rich.

But I was particularly irked by what Axe described as “middle class security.”

“There are concerns,” he added, that Congress will continue to kick the can down the road in the future by passing temporary extensions for the wealthy time and time again. “But I don’t want to trade away security for the middle class in order to make that point.

Here, Axe is defining “security for the middle class” as tax cuts. Not “jobs.” Not “access to health care, not just insurance.” Not “a guarantee a bankster can’t just foreclose on their house with a trumped up piece of paper.” Not “some basic safety net for retirement.” But “tax cuts.”

According to Axe, we have to shovel even more money on the already rich so as to ensure the “security” of the middle class by giving them a tax cut.

And while I agree that raising middle class tax cuts at this point would be bad for the economy, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to the economy.

In fact, the worst thing that could happen to this economy may well be passing legislation that continues to hollow out of the middle class and with it increasing the massive income inequality that continues to subject the American people to the craven demands of a few very rich people. That is, precisely what Axe and Obama have now agreed to do.

These men either don’t know or don’t give a damn about the security of the middle class.

Mark Warner’s Chocolate Fountain Remorse

/in , /by

Once upon a time in 2006, a dirty fucking hippie blogger had an opportunity to ask aspiring presidential candidate Mark Warner a few questions. Mark Warner had just dedicated part of a speech to talking about how Iran was the biggest WMD threat. So with her questions, the dirty fucking hippie blogger asked Mark Warner how, if the NIE had said Iran was years away from having nukes whereas Pakistan and its al Qaeda favoring Generals and unstable government already had nukes, Iran could be the biggest WMD threat. Warner then listed three reasons why Iran was the biggest WMD threat: its support of Hezbollah and Hamas, its nutty president, and its aspirations for hegemony in the Middle East. “But none of those things are WMD,” the blogger said.

Matt Bai, who observed the entire exchange, would later blame the dirty fucking hippie’s questions (which, after all, proved correct on several counts and served mostly to highlight to Warner how blindly he had embraced a popular talking point) for single-handedly driving nice moderate Mark Warner from the presidential race and with him potentially the ability to succeed as a party.

The dirty fucking hippie blogger took from that exchange the following: 1) Mark Warner doesn’t have the analytic ability to understand what threatens this country 2) Matt Bai tends to spout stupid centrist ideology even when reality proves him wrong.

More than four years have passed since that exchange. In that time, Warner became a centrist Senator. As a Senator, he has been one of those who claimed no one knew the financial crisis was coming. And he was part of a group of centrist Senators that stripped the too-small stimulus bill in early 2009.

In other words, Warner continues to be unable to identify real threats to this country. It’s in that context–and specifically in the context of picking a time of almost 10% unemployment to cut the deficit–that Mark Warner chose to equate the “far left” of his own party with the TeaBaggers.

But the question will be will the super-left on my party – the MoveOn crowd in my party – and the Tea Party crowd on the other party, you know, they don’t compromise, so you know, I for one am…you know, there were too many times I bit my lip in the first year, or bit my tongue…I’m done…

[snip]

But I think an equal threat to our country’s national security is that we don’t get our balance sheet in order.

Now, Mark Warner and his friends that maintain the deficit as a bigger threat than a stagnant economy are precisely what we dirty fucking hippie bloggers point to as the problem with the last two years. Because these centrists put their own pet theories ahead of real analysis of what our country needed, the legislation they passed failed to do the job. It’s the economy, stupid, and the economy is still so shitty at least partly because deficit scolds like Mark Warner cut the already too-small stimulus package back when it could do some good.

Which is what Matt Bai fails to understand with his piece trying to refute the theory that Democrats failed because they catered to people like Mark Warner.

The theory here, embraced by a lot of the most prominent liberal bloggers and activists, is that centrist Democrats doomed the party when they blocked liberals in Congress from making good on President Obama’s promise of bold change. Specifically, they refused to adopt a more populist stance toward business and opposed greater stimulus spending and a government-run health care plan. As a result, the thinking goes, frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.

No, Matt, you misunderstand completely (or simply build another of your favored straw men). The problem is not that “frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.” Frustrated voters rejected the party because its watered down legislation didn’t do the job. And the centrists were the ones that watered down that legislation and made it ineffective.

And the biggest problem both Mark Warner and Matt Bai make is in pretending that they’re stuck in an ideology-free zone between two extremist ideologies. Leaving aside the TeaBaggers, whose ideology was very diverse up until the Koch brothers made them a wholy owned but less ideologically consistent subsidiary, this is not about a left ideology and a right ideology and the nice non-ideological centrists in between. Rather, this debate is about progressives who insist that legislation not be compromised by a blindly ideological insistence on things like deficit cutting, all because some think tanker has been paid to claim that issue, like Iran, is a greater threat than millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes. It’s about efficacy versus the flabby centrist ideology that got us into this mess.

What Bai and Warner choose not to understand is that centrism is an ideology even more stubborn than the left or right they love to attack, but an ideology that got us into the mess we’re in now, both fiscally and electorally.

Tax the Deadbeats, Tax the Banksters

/in , /by

The narrative the banksters and their enablers have used to fight a foreclosure moratorium focuses on property values. If we put off foreclosures, they argue, it’ll have detrimental effects on the local community, not least by (continuing to) drive down local property values.

Now, the entire premise ignores the fact that the banksters have been sitting on a bunch of shadow inventory for years; the banks have been in no rush to foreclose on these properties and write down the losses, and Treasury has been happy to string out foreclosures to avoid a hit on the housing market.

But there’s another problem with that narrative.

If property values are falling because the properties are falling into disrepair, that’s partly the fault of the banks.

If property values are going down because no one is mowing lawns and preventing squatters, then that’s partly because banks are deadbeat neighbors who are not paying for the upkeep on the houses they own.

And, as this post from Mike Konczal (subbing for Ezra) notes, those deadbeat banks are costing local communities a fortune.

At $20,000 a pop, three vacant, unsecured and abandoned properties is the same as a teacher’s salary.

As Konczal explains, LA recently figured out a way to do something about the deadbeat banksters ruining our communities:

Given the high economic and social costs, the Los Angeles City Council, led by community activists including Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and others, as well as city workers who are members of SEIU Local 721 and L.A. Council member Richard Alarcon, did the sensible economic thing: They proposed a tax on abandoned and unkempt properties.

The details: “L.A.’s City Council recently passed a ‘foreclosure registry’ ordinance, requiring lenders to maintain foreclosed properties or be fined $1,000 per day, up to $100,000 a year. Lenders will have 30 days to fix problems before fines set in.”

What a sensible and elegant policy solution. This encourages banks to find suitable negotiations with homeowners to keep people in their homes. It has a serious stick to require banks to actually obey the law when it comes to the destruction of blight in neighborhood.

It works because everyone is well-incentivized to do their jobs; the city will collect money, which it loves to do, if the banks don’t comply. Citizens have a means to report blight, which they want to do to keep their neighborhoods well functioning and safe. In fact, cool online innovations like SEIU’s “Hoodwinked LA” Web page, which allows citizens to track foreclosed properties to report to city officials, have been created to empower people. And banks will avoid destroying neighborhoods out of neglect lest they pay a tax, which they had no incentive to do previously. The thing practically runs itself.

Not only does this policy have important benefits for local communities, not only does it incent everyone to modify loans and prevent foreclosures.

But it highlights the fact that banks are the deadbeats destroying your local community, not individual homeowners.

I hope as other communities follow LA’s example, they call this the “Deadbeat Bank Tax.”

Update: Via Atrios, here’s a heart-breaking story of a young boy who died in a foreclosed home’s pool. When his parents tried to sue for wrongful death, they couldn’t sort out who actually owned the house.

It took months for the family’s attorney, Janet Spence of Pembroke Pines, to sort through the property’s muddied chain of title possessions and transfers. At one point, Spence said, the home had two separate foreclosure actions pending simultaneously.

Spence also has faced some of the same paperwork irregularities that have put the nation’s foreclosure cases on indeterminate hold.

Several documents transferring the mortgage appear to be flawed or possibly fraudulent, with conflicting dates. Two documents show that the mortgage was transferred from one mortgage company to an affiliated company in November 2007 and again in February 2008.

One of the questionable documents was generated by the Florida Default Law Group in Tampa, one of four law firms that are under state investigation for allegedly “fabricating and/or presenting false and misleading documents in foreclosure cases,” according to the Florida Attorney General’s Office.

COMPLEX TRAIL

Because of the confusing paper trail, Spence has named 20 defendants in the case. They include banks that once owned the mortgage, companies that serviced the loan, property maintenance companies and even a company that was holding the mortgage for the banks.

Obama Sidles Up to the People Not Creating Jobs

/in /by

From the Department of reading the wrong message in an election is this news, of Timmeh Geithner meeting with the Chamber of Commerce’s odious Thomas Donohue to talk about international issues (read: “let’s talk about other countries we can ship American jobs to”).

But this week, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, met with the chief executive, Thomas J. Donohue, to discuss international economic issues. In his news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Obama came close to conceding the chamber’s main argument, that American businesses had concluded — wrongly, in Mr. Obama’s view — that his policies were antibusiness.

“I think business took the message that, well, gosh, it seems like we may be always painted as the bad guy,” Mr. Obama told reporters. He acknowledged that a relationship with the business community had not been “managed by me as well as it needed to be.”

[snip]

“I’ve got to take responsibility in terms of making sure that I make clear to the business community as well as to the country that the most important thing we can do is to boost and encourage our business sector, and make sure that they’re hiring,” Mr. Obama said. “We do have specific plans in terms of how we can structure that outreach.”

The outreach includes the meeting this week between Mr. Geithner and Mr. Donohue, according to an administration official briefed on the discussions. The pair talked about the president’s coming Asia trip, including issues relating to the Group of 20 economic meeting, China and South Korea, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Now, on its face, this is about Obama’s renewed push to sign a Free Trade agreement with South Korea, a country with no intention of engaging in Fair Trade with us.

But the Administration appears to want it to symbolize something larger–outreach to the people who have to start creating jobs to get our economy running again.

There’s a problem with that.

First of all, there’s the problem of the national Chamber’s increasing irrelevance to real American businesses. Individual companies are finding the Chamber’s willful ignorance to be detrimental to their business interests and general grounding in reality. Local Chambers are making an explicit point of distinguishing themselves from the national Chamber. And it’s not really clear whether the US Chamber of Commerce represents American companies more generally, or rather foreign business.

So at a time when both local Chambers of Commerce and individual corporations are signaling the national Chamber does not represent their interests, then why choose the Chamber as target for outreach? Why not reach out to those splintering from the Chamber’s explicitly anti-Democratic stance?

Furthermore, the companies whose interests the Chamber largely did boost this election have no interest in hiring. With money so cheap (thanks Helicopter Ben), they’re better off just playing more financial games than actually making something someone wants to buy.

Sure, Obama needs to listen to businesses to learn a little something about what will keep or create jobs in this country. But talking to Thomas Donohue about how to ship jobs away is not the way to do that.

Neo-Feudalism and the Housing Crisis

/in , /by

A number of people have linked to the part of this Joseph Stiglitz interview where he says we won’t fix the economy without some good old fashioned prosecutions. But I wanted to highlight where he describes the way our system of debt imposes a kind of indentured servitude on the debtors.

Can we draw a direct line from the outsize influence of the executives and the bankers — because these skewed incentives and penalties out of whack didn’t just arise out of a vacuum. How did we get to where we are?

It’s clearly the influence of campaign contributions and lobbyists. Let me give you another example of where the legal system has gotten very much out of whack, and which contributed to the financial crisis.

In 2005, we passed a bankruptcy reform. It was a reform pushed by the banks. It was designed to allow them to make bad loans to people to who didn’t understand what was going on, and then basically choke them. Squeeze them dry. And we should have called it, “the new indentured servitude law.” Because that’s what it did.

Let me just tell you how bad it is. I don’t think Americans understand how bad it is. It becomes really very difficult for individuals to discharge their debt. The basic principle in the past in America was people should have the right for a fresh start. People make mistakes. Especially when they’re preyed upon. And so you should be able to start afresh again. Get a clean slate. Pay what you can and start again. Now if you do it over and over again that’s a different thing. But at least when there are these lenders preying on you should be able to get a fresh start.

But they [the banks] said, “No, no, you can’t discharge your debt,” or you can’t discharge it very easily. They have a right, now, to take 25% of your before-tax income. Now imagine what that means. Let’s assume that you wound up, as it’s not that hard to do, with a debt equal to 100% of your income. You’re making $40,000, and your debt is $40,000. You have to turn over to the credit card company, to the bank, $10,000 of your before-tax income every year. But, the banks can now charge you 30% interest.

So what does that mean? At the end of the year, you’ve paid the bank $10,000, a quarter of your income. But what you owe the bank has gone from $40,000 to an even larger number because they’re charging you 30%. So you’re debt is larger. So the next year you have to give a quarter of your income again to the bank. And the year after. Until you die.

This is indentured servitude. And we criticize other countries for having indentured servitude of this kind, bonded labor. But in America we instituted this in 2005 with almost no discussion of the consequences. But what it did was encourage the banks to engage in even worse lending practices.

We’ve made it so difficult for individuals to discharge their debt and have this fresh start, and yet it is just taken for granted that a corporation or a company can blow up and then they can file for bankruptcy and then they can start over.

We give rights to corporations that we don’t give to ordinary Americans. One of my proposals in my book Freefall — one of the ways to deal with this foreclosure problem, the fact that one out of four Americans who have a mortgage are underwater: They owe more money on their home than the value of their home. Their home used to be what they used as the reserve for paying their kids college education, for their retirement. Now it’s a liability, not an asset.

So what I’ve argued is, we have these laws called Chapter 11 to give a fresh start to corporations. We say it’s very important to be able to do this quickly, we want to keep jobs, we want to keep the corporation going as an ongoing enterprise.

Families are as important as corporations. Keeping kids in school, not forcing them out of their home, keeping the community together, is certainly as important as keeping a corporation alive.

He calls this indentured servitude, but I call it (because I’m also factoring things in like the privatization of security and decline of the nation-state) neo-feudalism. In either case it’s an observation that people who used to be citizens have been turned into profit centers for the very powerful. Through a variety of means, these very powerful entities have secured the ability to oblige those profit center people to turn over large chunks of their  worldly gain for the foreseeable future, and even though those powerful entities offer little in return, the people bound to them have little hope of escape. Hell, in many states, mortgages serve as a similar kind of legal bind to a piece of territory, one ultimately owned (if they can prove they have the note) by these powerful entities.

And as Stiglitz notes, a key to pulling this shift off is to write the law to favor the powerful entities and disempower the weak. And (as he points out elsewhere in this interview) to make sure that only those powerful entities have access to justice.

Yet, as a recent study made clear, the access to justice for the poor in this country rivals that of Mexico and Croatia.

In January 2008, well before the financial crisis became an emergency, I asked Chuck Schumer why Democrats didn’t repeal the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill Stiglitz addresses above. I pointed out that repealing it might mitigate the problem of foreclosures and with it, stave off a larger crisis.

Schumer responded by saying we did not yet have the votes to make the kind of substantive overhaul that was necessary. We had to wait, he said in January 2008, eight months before foreclosures contributed to the the collapse of financial system, until 2009, when we had a larger majority.

We just lost the majority that Schumer claimed we would use to repeal the bankruptcy bill. During the entire time the Democrats had the majority, families were losing their homes in ever increasing numbers.

And yet Democrats never used their vaunted majority to stem the advance of neo-feudalism in this country.