News, Etc.

For fun here are the places in the United States with the highest foreclosures.

I don't have to tell you Vegas is in the top spot with one in nine homes.
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Expect more teachers to be targeted with this "new" "improved" teacher evaluation system in Washoe County.

Despite the talk about principals being held under scrutiny, it'll never happen. If they have trouble, they are merely reassigned or promoted.
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Detroit plans to close half of its schools.

The Foreclosure Crisis

just goes to show just how full of rot this country is, and it will be a miracle if it ever is righted again.

Bernanke and our elected officials, including and especially Obama, are trying to plug leaks into a dam that is about to burst. It is going to fail, of course, and heads should roll, or rather, should be in prison for fraud, when the dam finally bursts and sends our economy and the world's into a death spiral.

Taibbi's article is long but worth the read.

These snips lay it all out there:

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

...

For most people, the former bit about homeowners not paying their damn bills is the important part, while the latter, about the sudden and strange inability of the world's biggest and wealthiest banks to keep proper records, is incidental. Just a little office sloppiness, and who cares? Those deadbeat homeowners still owe the money, right? "They had it coming to them," is how a bartender at the Jacksonville airport put it to me.

But in reality, it's the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core — with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets.

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

There is a reason why there were all of those regulations, but these goddamned morons in Congress and the Friedmanites who peddled this deregulation crap were incapable of asking the obvious. They were too enthralled with a cult that has no basis in reality.

Meanwhile, the crooks on Wall Street belong in prison with all of their assets seized or shot and their bodies dragged through the streets of New York.

The Economy

Banks are stepping up home foreclosures.

The Foreclosure Crisis

No longer is the crisis limited to just the low-income who defaulted; ALL income levels are being affected.

It's hard to sympathize with those who have or had million dollar homes, but the mess is affecting as well.
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The Booming Economy

Foreclosures don't just affect homeowners.

The Booming Economy

Because he is doing much better than almost everybody else in this country, Phil Gramm can afford to call everybody else "whiners."

The rising number of foreclosures is proof we are having a "mental recession."

So is this bank seizure by the feds.

The Booming Economy.

Home foreclosures are at an all-time high.

This was going to happen because of the outrageous spike in the cost of houses. People who would never have been approved for mortgages were suddenly approved, and those who would have qualified for cheaper homes "bought," or rather got in over their heads in debt, for more expensive digs.
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The Booming Economy Casualty List for 11/8-11/15.

Home foreclosures are double what they were a year ago.
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Striking Hollywood writers give their side of the story.
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As the World Turns.

UCLA is rocked by a cheating scandal.
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California and Florida metro areas are leading in the foreclosure race.
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More About Our Booming Economy.

The plain unvarnished truth is if the raids against illegal immigrants continue, the economy will be impacted because companies would have to raise pay in order to attract workers who legally live in the United States.

And we can't have those uppity working-class people get a fair share of the economic pie, can we?
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It's "no shit, Sherlock" as the number of foreclosures rises in the Bay Area.
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Financial firms join businesses in trying to find ways to screw workers over on their pensions.
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