Charles Ferguson on Barack Obama.
Category: The New Depression
99ers
This 60 Minutes episode on “The 99ers” was really difficult to watch, and not only because I’m in the same boat. (My benefits ran out in March after 72 weeks. If you’re collecting the top of the scale, benefits run out faster.) Watching people who were making good wages picking through the trash for recyclables or eating in a soup kitchen is a very, very emotional experience:
“60 Minutes” and correspondent Scott Pelley went to several communities in search of the 99ers, but we didn’t expect to find such a crisis in Silicon Valley, the high tech capital that many people hoped would be creating jobs.
If you want to understand why the economy is stalled, come to San Jose, Calif., and talk with 99ers like Marianne Rose. “I remember it coming close to like six months. I was saying, ‘I can’t believe I’m out of work this long.’ Then the year mark hit. And I just started just panicking seriously. Now that it’s over two years I can’t believe it. I just, I can’t believe it,” she told Pelley.
Rose was a financial analyst at a real estate firm. Age 54, she’s single with a grown daughter. After being laid off with about 100 co-workers, she spent her savings, lost her home and finally found herself sitting in a truck with her dog and all of her possessions.
She made a desperate call to a friend and found refuge upstairs in the home of strangers, her friend’s brother and sister-in-law.
“How long did you think you would be in here?” Pelley asked.
“Two weeks really. That’s all I thought,” she replied.
But she told Pelley it has been six months. “And not really an end in sight, yet.”
“What sort of things would you be willing to do at this point?” Pelley asked.
“Well, I can say that probably the lowest level position for me has been now to apply for a clerk, a county clerk and I just realized the competition is pretty stiff out there,” she replied.
Asked what she meant by stiff competition, Rose explained, “There’s a lot of people, speaking of the county. I had applied to those clerk positions. There’s actually four positions that were open. I found there were over 2,000 people that applied for those four positions.”
Rose is one of at least a million and a half Americans who’ve exhausted their unemployment checks.
Crazyland
You’ve noticed, I’m sure, the continuing corporate media refrain: Those irresponsible people ran up their debt and got mortgages they couldn’t afford!
This, of course, is bullshit. We have lots of evidence that mortgage brokers not only lied for people on their mortgage applications, they actually forced qualified minority buyers out of conventional mortgages and into riskier subprime mortgages — on purpose.
Why? Because the bankers made more money by betting against the same mortgage bonds they sold to suckers, and at a certain point in the Ponzi scheme, they simply needed more bad mortgages to maintain the profits.
It’s not that hard to understand — that is, once you ascribe the worst possible motives to the financial services players.
Yet still we have these hacks (either stupid, venal or stupefyingly naive — you decide) who try to turn this whole mess into a morality play by blaming the victims of the con — but not the investors, mind you! The people who got tricked and trapped into the mortgages that would inevitably go bad were the cold-blooded people who tried to milk the system!
Although I don’t believe there’s a hell, it would be pretty to think so.
UK budget cuts
The more I read about these British budget cuts, the madder I get. They put a 12-month cap on… long-term disability? So we’re unofficially renaming them “short-term” disability — and when the money runs out, I suppose they can simply curl up and die?
And they’re raising the rents in public housing to market rates? I hope they have enough cardboard boxes.
Politicians seems to be under the impression that everyone is sitting on hidden resources, which will magically come to light when people are backed into a corner. What will actually happen is, people will die on the streets. Oh well!
That sinking feeling
Obama always sounds like a student arguing with a professor over his grade, doesn’t he? Bob Herbert explains why it’s not working this time:
Barack Obama seems to think he’s done a pretty terrific job as president, but maybe he hasn’t trumpeted his accomplishments effectively enough.
He told The Times’s Peter Baker, in an interview for the Sunday magazine, “Given how much stuff was coming at us, we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular.”
This assessment by the president is debatable, but it won’t be among the things that are front and center in the minds of voters as the November elections approach. The problem for Mr. Obama and the Democrats is the widespread sense among anxiety-riddled Americans that the country is still in very bad shape and headed in the wrong direction.
A Gallup poll last week found that 62 percent feel that economic conditions are deteriorating.
The president and his party may have racked up one legislative victory after another — on the bank bailouts, the stimulus package, the health care bill, and so forth — but ordinary Americans do not feel as if their lives or their prospects are improving. And they don’t think it’s a public relations problem.
Nearly 15 million are jobless and many who are working are worried that they (or a close relative) will soon become unemployed. The once solid foundation of home ownership has grown increasingly wobbly, with the number of foreclosures this year expected to surpass a million. And the country is still at war.
The voter unrest that is manifesting itself in myriad (and often peculiar) ways reflects a real fear that not just family finances but the country itself is in a state of decline. “I don’t know where we’re headed,” said a businessman named Chuck Carruthers, who chatted with me in a coffee shop in Atlanta last week. “But I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s anyplace good.”
The benefit of the doubt
I have to wonder: At what point, if ever, will they deal with this crisis head on0? Is this their version of aggressive action? It puzzle me that hey’re more concerned about the real estate foreclosure market than the fact that they people buying those houses may not have a clear title:
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s housing secretary said on Sunday “it’s shameful” that financial institutions may have made the housing crisis worse by improperly processing foreclosures.
Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said in a column on the Huffington Post website that a comprehensive review of the foreclosure crisis was under way and that the administration would respond with “the full force of the law where problems are found.”
[…] Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” that regulators needed to gauge the scope of the improper processing.
“We have been told that this is a process issue – that all of the information is in the file, the problem is the person who needed to sign the affidavit had not been looking at the file before they’d done so. So we need to independently verify that,” Bair said.
Continue reading “The benefit of the doubt”
Don’t despair – organize!
Did you know that during the Greater Depression, communists and socialists organized people all over the country to stop foreclosures and evictions? Why aren’t more of us doing it now?
After the Battle of the Bronx, as it was later called, the landlords at Bronx Park East asked a blue ribbon committee of Bronx Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute. But the strike leaders rejected arbitration. “When times were good,” strike leader Max Kaimowitz declared “the landlords didn’t offer to share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money off us when we had it. Now that we haven’t got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less.”
The landlords retaliated by forming rent strike committees. They used their resources to push through quick evictions. Many of the renter strikes were broken. Mass evictions took place at 665 Allerton Avenue and 1890 Unionport Road.
The landlords continued their offensive and the judges rarely considered the neediness of the families. By December 1932 is appeared that the Bronx rent strikes had largely been crushed.
But then something happened.
in December of 1932 and January of 1933, the Unemployed Councils began a new wave of strikes that rapidly assumed far greater proportions than the last one. Beginning in Crotona Park East, the strikes spread into Brownsville, Williamsburg, Boro Park, the Lower East Side, and much of the East Bronx. In February of 1933, a panicked Real Estate News writer warned that “there are more than 200 buildings in the Borough of the Bronx in which rent strikes are in progress, and a considerably greater number in which such disturbances are brewing or in contemplation.”
Capitalism
I have to say, without even the slightest exaggeration, that I’ve never trusted capitalism, because for capitalism to work, there has to be some degree of trust in the information on which you base financial decisions. I always assumed that the game was rigged, and believed that only occasionally would the rights of the working class be upheld under the law — just enough to keep down any real rebellion.
None of my friends agreed with me, by the way. (Although now, many of them are finally coming to the same conclusion.)
All we’re seeing with the foreclosure fraud is that the rats and roaches are running out into the light of day.
Improper foreclosures
Since the upstanding ladies and gentlemen of our fabulous corporate media have already informed us that this is simply not happening, these people claiming to be victimized should be punished!
Among those whose foreclosure is in limbo for the moment are Michael and Carol Rendes, both 49, who bought their 1,350-square-foot home in Berea in January 2006. But the couple says the foreclosure isn’t even justified.
Their loan originally was with subprime lender Argent Mortgage, then LaSalle Bank, then Wilkshire Financial. The loan was sold to Bank of America in September 2009, although the couple said they weren’t initially notified. They made their September and October payments to Wilkshire.
“I had no clue. I just made my payment,” Michael Rendes said. “I knew I had a mortgage.” Wilkshire then told him the loan had been sold. He called Bank of America many times, but bank employees couldn’t find the couple in the system. They tried using names, Social Security numbers, the parcel number, dates of birth, everything.Their two payments were cashed but apparently not forwarded to Bank of America, or at least not posted to the couple’s account. In November, they received a letter that they were in default.
The couple had the money to get caught up, but they said Bank of America wouldn’t take it.
“It’s a nightmare,” Rendes said. “I’m paying lawyers. I’m going to the Justice Center all of the time. I’m almost to the point where I want to take that house apart and tell them to shove it.”
Corporations simply don’t do such things! Therefore, we know these shameless people are just making this stuff up.