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Banking and Housing
Email this Blog entryOccupy Movement Demands Home Mortgages Correction
On Thursday, OccupyWashingtonDC.org teamed up with the Backbone Campaign, National People's Action, and the New Economy Working Group in a march from Freedom Plaza to the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA).
The demand they brought, along with giant props including a foreclosed house under water, was for a correction. The 1%, they said, inflated house values and made off with ill-gotten gains, but those left with underwater mortgages when the house values were brought back down have suffered. The demand is for mortgage values to be adjusted to match the current market values of houses.
Killing Old People Is Fiscally Responsible
"The fiscal good has to outweigh the pain," a nameless Democrat told the Washington Post regarding President Obama's latest proposal to massively cut Social Security, against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans, in order to fund a military 670% larger than the next largest in the world, keep in place tax cuts for billionaires, fail to tax corporations or estates or investments or carbon, and balance a budget that nobody gives a rat's ass about balancing when Wall Street comes asking for handouts.
Bloombergvilles of the Future
We're years behind Tunisia and Egypt in public understanding of how government of, by, and for the people works, but some in the United States have been inspired and begun forming a path that has real potential. In New York City, students, academics, activists, and workers have joined together to resist the global-national-local agenda of plutocracy being pushed by Mayor Bloomberg.
The numbers are small, but the alliance joining workers with students important. And the approach is exactly right. This group is attempting to interfere with the work of City Hall until City Hall comes to represent the people of New York City. And they are attempting to do this, not for an hour or a day, but until they are satisfied that the tide is turning in a better direction.
Who's Running This Hallucination?
Most people are just living along
Humming a song
Trying to get by
A gleam or a tear in their eye
But they're not helping push the world back the other way
Yet there will come a day
And maybe it's this one
When every shoulder joins in
And then the world begins again
But this time -- damn it -- we're in charge of the production
And we're writing the script
And if you've slipped we'll help you up
But there will be no sitting down
Until every last person has a home to own
And millions of those homes
Are inside the abandoned bones
Of what we used to call banks
And savings and loans
Two Events This Saturday 2/26 in Boca Raton, FLA
1. Authors David Swanson and Sandy Davies with Nuremberg War Crimes Prosecutor Ben Ferencz
2. Protest at Bank of America, which takes billions from govt. while you work for a living and pay taxes
1. War Is A Lie and There Is Blood on Our Hands
David Swanson and Nicolas "Sandy" Davies in South Florida on Feb. 26, 2011
Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor from the World War II Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and founding father of the International Criminal Court, will make an important statement on U.S. foreign policy at an event with David Swanson and Sandy Davies in Boca Raton on Feb. 26, 2011.
David Swanson will discuss and sign copies of "War Is A Lie".
Sandy Davies will discuss and sign copies of "Blood on Our Hands".
3-5 p.m. Saturday, February 26, 2011
Obama Is Hurting Poor People in Ways ACORN Blocked Bush from Achieving
By David Swanson
Obama is seeking to cut off poor people's heat in the winter and AC in the summer, in a move that Bush attempted and saw blocked by ACORN.
This brings a whole new meaning to Obama's "ACORN who? Never met them in my life!" routine when Fox News destroyed the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now with a big assist from Congress.
Let's take a little trip back in time, shall we? All the way baaaaaaaaack to 2003:
U.S. Wars Are Bankrupting the World
The endless and infinite "war on terra" is bankrupting the planet. I don't mean moral bankruptcy; that goes without saying. I mean financial bankruptcy. And don't take my word for it. This is the argument made in a new book called "Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror Is Bankrupting the World," by Loretta Napoleoni, a financial reporter for Internazionale, l'Unita, il Caffe, Mondo e Missione, El Pais, Vanity Fair Spain, and Vanity Fair Italy.
Wall Street's Mercenaries Ride Donkeys
Robert Scheer's new book "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street," is not yet another account of how we got robbed or "why the economy imploded for dummies." If you're like me, you just didn't need another lesson in how swapped collateralized debt obligation derivative tranches didn't really make the pie higher. Scheer's book is something else: a straightforward broad-view account of the past thirty years focused on who did the robbing.
Here's the short answer that Scheer provides: Reagan announced the robbery but couldn't pull it off. Clinton robbed us blind. Bush Jr. and Obama drove the get-away car, with Obama disguised as a security guard.
