I notice that of the solutions suggested, raising taxes on the rich isn’t one of them. Truly, such a thing is unthinkable: far more unthinkable than poor people dying because they don’t have medication.
Interesting set of priorities.
I also strongly suspect that the savings will be less than the government thinks, since without medication many folks will wind up in the hospital.
Just sayin’.
Seriously, when the Administration says they oppose a countrywide freeze on foreclosures only weeks before the election, it’s hard to interpret their statements any other way.
I’m guessing the calculation is that Obama’s squeeze of entitlement spending for the middle class is more likely to pass if there are more Republicans in Congress. (ie. they are completely corrupt and utterly in the pocket of bankers who are giving more money to Republicans.)
Or they could be complete and utter morons with an out of control drug habit. I mean anyone who says, like Axelrod did, that ““I’m hoping that with more seats, Republicans will feel a greater sense of responsibility to work WITH us” is clearly not just in denial, he is as Peter Dauo said, hallucinating.
How the Foreclosure mess would play out in an actual Republic Of Law and an actual Free Market
Here’s how this plays out in an actual free market society which follows the law (ie., not this one.)
You go through and figure out if you can prove title to the property. If you can’t, those who were insured go to the title insurance companies. A huge legal battle ensures, with the title insurance companies claiming that they were the victims of fraud from their clients, the banks. Eventually, the title insurance companies pay out whatever they have to pay out that they can pay out, and most of them probably go bankrupt.
The banks then go bankrupt, which, well, they already are anyway, so maybe we should stop pretending.
The title insurance companies did not do their due diligence. They deserve to be destroyed for not doing their jobs. The banks engaged in and colluded with systemic fraud, they deserve to go out of business and their executives should go to jail.
And no, the real economy does not take it too hard on the chin. You wipe out a ton of debts, those people are no longer underwater and can buy. The banks are taken over by the FDIC, the shareholders are wiped out and the bondholders take a bath. The Fed refloats the banks (after breaking them up) and they go back to lending the way they should have. It costs LESS in the long run to do this than it does to keep extending and pretending, and non-zombie banks can actually lend.
Yes, the investor class takes it on the chin and this includes some widows and orphans, and that’s bad (throw in some undoing of “welfare reform” if you feel bad for them. Not that “slash food stamps” Obama is likely to.) But it’s better than eternal zombie banks and illegal foreclosures up the wazoo. And the investor class is essentially worthless anyway, they have spent the last 30 years investing in asset bubbles and offshoring industries and jobs, not in the useful productive domestic economy. Letting them take their losses (and these are their losses) is a good thing, and is the free market thing to do.
It also wipes out a class of people who are driving the buying of politics, and who tend to prefer Republicans, if you want to do some crass political calculation. Which, frankly, would be nice, since apparently Dems crass political calculations are done with an abacus they don’t know how to work.
Addendum: a friend sends me this suggested course of action by Karl Dennniger, which I think is a good one. Odds of being pursued? Minimal. But we can hope. As Denninger points out, if private interests steal the homes of millions of citizens with the collusion of government, well, that doesn’t lead anywhere pretty.
I keep hearing people saying that Hispanics are angry with Democrats because comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been pushed.
That’s part of it, but in suggesting that Democrats sins are passive, it is effectively a lie. Under Obama deportations have actually increased, and this is entirely an administrative matter, which he could change himself without Congress’s approval.
I would add that the same is true of womens ability to get an abortion. Objectively worse than under Bush. For two major Democratic constituencies, Obama has not just failed to make things better, he has made them worse.
Meanwhile police refuse to pursue criminal charges against banks breaking into housing to change locks when they don’t have clear title to the property. Many people have lost their houses based on fraudulent paperwork submitted by law firms and banks, where the banks committed perjury about their title to property.
Virtually all of this is interstate commerce and falls under RICO statutes if you want it to. The DOJ could go after it tomorrow if Obama wanted to. He doesn’t.
One can only assume, since he has the power to put the fear of God into banksters and refuses to do so, that Obama approves of what they’re doing.
Obama is not a liberal. He is objectively making things worse for many Americans, including the most vulnerable and core constituencies of the Democratic party.
Joel Hafvenstein at Registan has an interesting piece on the incompatibility of the Karzai governing and patronage style that has so far cemented his personal and broader coalition’s hold onto power, and legitimacy. As long as Western money, Western troops and Western air power is flowing into Afghanistan, this means Karzai and his coterie of supporters will maintain formal power but it will also guarantee a long term insurgency as the Taliban has sufficient legitimacy claims in its heartland because the patronage system is so corrupting they just have to out-govern the government:
Karzai’s not going to allow a genuinely rule-of-law based system, because it would alienate the former commanders and nouveaux riches businessmen whom he sees as key to controlling Afghanistan….
Haseeb Humayoon’s coolly descriptive analysis of the 2009 election correctly highlights the breadth of Karzai’s support base – including not just the warlords, ethnocrats, and crooks of lore, but much of the technocratic, educated class beloved of foreign donors…
Karzai has been unwilling to get tough with even the most brazenly predatory and self-enriching figures in his coalition. He doesn’t hold his governors and cabinet members accountable for bad governance (unless he also suspects them of disloyalty)….
he’s in a legitimacy contest with the insurgency – and the Taliban understand the nature of the fight they’re in. They don’t need to win a single pitched battle with the ANA (let alone NATO). They just need to keep out-governing the government, especially on the issues that are most important to ordinary Afghans. They have a vastly better track record at crime prevention and creating security than the ANP. The insurgent shadow courts are more credible than the corrupt government ones….
As long as the Karzai government can count on Western money, Western troops and Western blood fighting to keep them in power, there is minimal incentive for them to piss off members of their governing coalition by actually rewarding good governance practices and cracking down on blatant corruption. This is a structural issue. And it will not be changing as long as the only option is to go various versions of big. And that will be the only political option for the United States to continue to go big even as more and more of ISAF and NATO are either going small or going home in the next eighteen to twenty four months.
We are engaging in a strategy in search of a decent interval and that is it.
A friend of mine notes the wave of fraudulent foreclosures, foreclosures where firms simply faked the paperwork needed to prove they have standing to foreclose (that they actually own the mortgage.) There have been some moves to stem the fraud, not the least of which is by Florida’s Attorney General Bill McCollum, but those who appear to be the worst offenders are firing back, going after him and other judges who have thrown out cases.
This is a logical consequence of refusing to go after banksters for fraud. The fraud was so systemic (the majority of CDOs based on housing) that virtually every major executive was involved. The DOJ and others chose not to prosecute criminally, and as a result the message was sent that the executive class, as a group, will not be prosecuted for fraud.
So, of course, they doubled down.
This is illness creep from the refusal to go after Bush era crimes. Political elites made themselves immune from prosecution for any crime that a lot of them are involved in, then corporate elites.
America isn’t a nation of laws, it is a nation of men. Has been since at least 2007, when Nancy made her choice not to go after wrongdoers. Obama confirmed this in 2009, when he refused to use the DOJ to go after either Bush era crimes or really go after mortgage and security fraud.
I hope it can be firebreaked here. Maybe it can. But when you exempt entire classes of important people from the law, every other group of important people sees no reason why they should be subject to it either.
If it is to be firebreaked here it must be done with criminal prosecution. Corporate elites won’t be deterred by fines, they consider them only a cost of doing business.
(Oh, and the next step if it isn’t firebreaked? Deficiency judgements: going after people for the amount that’s underwater.)
This, from Numerian, is the sort of thing I was talking about when I noted that:
If you can build a factory overseas which produces the same goods for less, meaning more profit for you, why would you build it in the US?
Until that question is adequately answered, by which I mean “until it’s worth investing in the US”, most of the discretionary money of the rich will either go into useless speculative activities like the housing and credit bubbles, which don’t create real growth in the US, or they will go overseas.
We rescued the automakers so they could move to China. GM is a shadow of itself before the 2007-2008 crisis. It has shed plants and workers in the US, along with their ongoing health and other benefit obligations. But in its newly-shrunken state, its emphasis is not on the US, which rescued it from bankruptcy. GM is putting investment money in China almost entirely. Like so many other manufacturers before it, the company has ceased to be American, in the sense that its manufacturing is no longer done here and its workers no longer live here. Instead, its corporate headquarters is here, and little else. Even its profits are kept overseas to avoid paying US taxes.
He goes on to do discuss the debt trap, and notes that the US has lost its technological advantage, meaning there is no way to fix the problem now except through brutal austerity.
I don’t think this is quite true, but it’s damn near true, and it seems to be the assumption the elite is operating on. And by the time we get rid of this bunch of loser Dems, suffer through the Republican government to come and then get another shot at someone competent, it may well be too late.
The future doesn’t happen in America any more, and that means America’s just a place with too high costs and a lot of guns. There’s no damn reason to invest in the US except in leveraged scams, and until the US figures out a way to change that, things aren’t going to get better. Right now the US’s elites seem to think the way to fix it is to reduce wage costs till they’re competitive with China’s.
I’ve said this before, I’ll say this again: if you can get out of the US, GO! If not hunker down and fight, and fight smart. More on that later.
If you value what they do and you can afford to help, you should give. Stuff that’s free, isn’t.
