Image via WikipediaFor one, the Recession is not over. Just look around you and at your friends and neighbors.
Second, inflation is getting out of hand. Oh, I know, you can't count food and fuel - the two items people need to survive. (Another lie by our government). Food and fuel inflates daily. Food especially by double digits.
Third, unemployment is worse then "they" tell us it is. Almost every community feels the impact of the 'real' un/under employment figures. Florida for instance, has "reported" unemployment figures of over 14% in areas like Tampa. Real unemployment is probably closer to 28%.
Here is a story which aired yesterday, Oct. 20, 2010, on CBS 60 Minutes: It tells the truth and shows the reality. We are not on the road to recovery. Only the banks are healthy as they continue to steal from the rest of us.
The late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman asked the U.S. Treasury in January 2009 to identify $301 billion of securities owned by Citigroup Inc. that the government had agreed to guarantee. He made the request on the grounds that taxpayers ought to know how their money was being used.
ReplyDeleteMore than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails -- none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as "Did you just try to call me?" and "Monday will be a busy day!"
None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for "records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities" or the dates and terms of the guarantees. Even so, the U.S. government considers the collection of e-mails a partial response to an official request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The Justice Department in July cited an increase in such responses as evidence that "more information is being released" under the law.
President Barack Obama vowed to usher in a new era of open government. On Jan. 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration and a week before Pittman submitted his FOIA request, Obama directed agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-25/u-s-treasury-shielding-of-citigroup-with-deletions-make-foia-meaningless.html
"fire Holder, fire Geithner, fire Bernanke, get people in who will
ReplyDeleteenforce the rule of law."
http://tinyurl.com/2fdnwsk
Elections soon...remember this....
ReplyDeleteSIGTARP set up a Hotline to take borrower complaints about HAMP, and many reported violations of HAMP rules and guidelines. For instance (from p. 172):
“I entered into an agreement with [my servicer] through the Making Home Affordable program in April 2009. I have made every payment on time; that, they said, would result in the modification becoming permanent after six months. They have had us…submit the same paperwork seven times in the last two year. Now they have, in their words, ‘decided not to go forward’ and put a notice on the house of a sheriff’s sale….a negotiator (who has never contacted me) made the decision to stop the modification with no reason as to why. I have not been late or missed a payment in 13 months.”
From page 174:
“I called to try to get an update and to try to get a payment processed by phone. I gave [the servicer employee] my bank information for payment and then asked if there was any update she could give me. She responded by telling me that [the servicer] had sent me to the attorney for foreclosure! How do you tell me not to pay, tell me for months I am not allowed to send in payments, tell me to pay down other bills with the money, and then two weeks later try and foreclose on my home Your moratorium is why I stopped sending in the money.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/sigtarp-hamp-servicing-abuses-led-to-unwarranted-foreclosures.html
Placing servicers in charge of the HAMP signifies at least two things:
1. It’s yet another smoking gun proving that the government in general sees its duty as serving the banks. Nobody who actually wanted to achieve mortgage mods, or indeed who wanted anything other than to help the banksters, would’ve gone about things this way.
2. It’s indicative of Obama’s congenital corporatism. I’ve previously challenged Obama supporters to provide a single example of an initiative which wasn’t conceived so as to erect a corporate toll booth. No one even tried. And they sure won’t be able to cite the HAMP, where the first assumption was, “We have to have the banks run this”, and the first question was, “How can it be set up so that in itself it’ll be profitable for the banks?” (Those are clearly true even if someone wanted to waste his time trying to claim Obama ever did want to achieve mods.)
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/sigtarp-hamp-servicing-abuses-led-to-unwarranted-foreclosures.html#comment-212430
People better wake up and take back the country before there is nothing left...Obama is a farce but so are the Republicans...we need new leadership!
ReplyDeleteAmerica on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's 'Griftopia'
And America is taking Daley's advice. At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.
The reason these lease deals happen is the same reason the investment banks made bad investments in mortgage-backed crap that was sure to blow up later, but provided big bonuses today — because the politicians making these deals, the Rendells and Daleys, are going to be long gone into retirement by the time the real bill comes due.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206?RS_show_page=0
Thank God for France
ReplyDeleteThank God for France. While American liberals tremble at the idea of sending an angry email to congress for fear that their name will appear on the State Department's list of terrorists, French workers are on the front lines choking on tear gas and fending off billyclubs in hand-to-hand combat with Sarkozy's Gendarmerie. That's because the French haven't forgotten their class roots. When the government gets too big for its britches, people pour out onto to the streets and Paris becomes a warzone replete with overturned Mercedes Benzs, smashed storefront windows, and stacks of smoldering tires issuing pillars of black smoke. This is what democracy looks like when it hasn't been emasculated by decades of propaganda and consumerism. Here's a blurp from the trenches:
There's no question that Washington elites have joined with Wall Street to offload the massive debts from the financial meltdown onto workers and retirees. Nor is their any doubt that they will invoke (what Slavoj Zizek calls) a "permanent state of economic emergency" to justify their actions. That will allow them to move ahead with so-called "austerity measures" that are designed to impoverish workers and strip popular government programs of their funding. The trend towards "belt-tightening" merely masks the ongoing class war which is aimed at restoring a feudal system of royalty and serfs.
http://tinyurl.com/25syzpm
Homeowners Protest HAMP: 'It's Just A Scam And The Banks Are Getting Everything'
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/26/homeowners-protest-hamp-i_n_773582.html
You think?????????????
ReplyDelete'Obama Failed to Connect the Dots'
The US mid-term elections on Tuesday are shaping up to be a referendum on President Barack Obama's administration. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich about demagoguery in US politics, economic inequality and the parallels between 2010 and 1929.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The US goes to the polls on Tuesday for critical mid-term elections. It is a difficult time for the country -- you have said it is facing a "perfect storm." What do you mean by that?
Reich: First, we have got an unprecedented degree of concentrated income and wealth at the very top of our society. The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now makes more than the bottom 120 million. Secondly, courtesy of a grotesque opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States, we now have virtually unlimited money flowing from the rich and from corporations through secret devices that make it impossible to know who is contributing what to various campaigns and to advertising for and against various candidates. Such anonymous groups have spent more than $400 million on the latest election, according to estimates. And finally, we have a broad electorate still unemployed or in danger of being unemployed, still in danger of losing their homes or already having lost their homes, still experiencing a major drop in their savings or their net worth. This frustrated and anxious population is easy prey to demagogues who will blame others for their problems rather than explain what needs to be done.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726575,00.html