Mortgage Crisis

I agree with this woman in the profile: I don't have any faith either McCain or Obama will do anything to right this economy since both are in the tank to the very forces which created the mess in the first place.

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Re-regulation is the answer, just as regulation was the answer during the Great Depression, not bailing out the crooks responsible for the mess.
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Political Commentary

Senator Clinton wants to help people remain in their homes.

That is all well and good, but obviously there needs to be a dramatic reversal of the right-wing economic policies which have put this country on the edge of ruin.

Wall Street Bailout

Naturally the WSWS is critical of the Democrats, but I am not optimistic they will act in the best interests of Americans.

Christopher Dodd getes skewered in this piece.

Since Obama isn't a Democrat, it's small wonder he wants to bail out Wall Street and defer spending.

If you are going to be a Republican, join their party, Barack:

As late as the weekend, in an interview with John Harwood of CNBC, Obama had rejected suggestions that the magnitude of the Treasury expenditure for purchasing mortgage-backed securities would put any new social spending off the agenda. He claimed that he would proceed with a proposal to expand health insurance as well as additional funding for education, the environment and child care.

But by Tuesday the Democrat had abandoned even this position, promising only to retain a series of tax cuts in the first budget of an Obama administration—which will inevitably accrue more to upper-income families—while making no such pledge for social spending.

The FBI has gotten into the act.

The worst thing we could do is sanction this bailout, but I don't trust either political party as far as I can throw them. They refuse to reverse the concentration of wealth to the very top, which is at the root of all of our economic problems:

The mortgage crisis is NOT the cause of this problem. It is merely a symptom of a far deeper problem caused by adhering to conservative political and supply side economic philosophies that have been followed here and abroad before and that have ALWAYS failed similarly to the way they are failing now. These political and economic philosophies always, ALWAYS, concentrate wealth into a progressively decreasing number of hands, eventually reaching a point where those who not possess those hands grow in numbers and decline in wealth to the point where the normal functioning of markets is no longer possible. To put it zoologically, the big fish eventually eat all the smaller fish until there is nothing left for them to eat. Then they spend a brief time eating each other before the entire ecosystem collapses. We have now reached the end of the time where they can survive by devouring each other and so we are left with some pretty stark choices for the future of our little pond. We've been dumping fish-food pellets, made from the little fish (read "working taxpayers") when they were plentiful, into the pond for the past year or so, calling them "bailouts." The Bush administration is now preparing to empty the entire contents of the last container of fish food into the pond to feed the remaining big fish for a little while.

But this doesn't solve the problem. The fish-food pellets will last only a very brief time, and because they float a lot of them will be eaten by the great birds and hungry insects (read China, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait) before they ever enter our little pond's ecosystem. The rest will quickly be eaten by the remaining big fish, and when the pellets are gone, there will be no more to stave off starvation, stagnancy and a fetid rot that will consume the pond itself.

See, the problem is the concentration of wealth in America, a problem we faced once before at the end of the Roaring Twenties. This bailout not only does nothing to address this underlying problem, it actually makes it worse, as We the (Little) People will have less for many, many years to come paying for this largess, while those who were already too fat will be made even fatter.

Our problem cannot be fixed with any immediate infusion of cash to big bankers, no matter how large that infusion might be. The problem can only be fixed by correcting the underlying causes -- the inequalities in our distribution of our wealth among rich and poor that has increased so rapidly over the past quarter-century thanks to following supply-side theory, which is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS WRONG.

The Great Depression should have proved beyond all doubt laissez faire economics is a miserable failure. A society needs a mixed economy in order to prosper. Giving a tiny number of people all of the money is just ruinous for everybody.

Friedmanism should go the way of the Edsel. It doesn't work.

The Booming Economy

As expected, retirees are being screwed over with the mortgage/banking mess, especially since many of them were screwed out of pensions in favor of junk 401(k)s.

The Booming Economy

The bailout seeks $700 billion, and guess who is going to pay for it?

The Bush administration this morning formally asked Congress to grant sweeping new powers to the Treasury secretary to buy as much as $700 billion in nearly worthless mortgage-related assets as part of a herculean effort to clean up Wall Street's financial crisis.

A draft of the plan was delivered to Congress early today and lawmakers will spend the weekend poring through it. As written, the bill would require the Treasury secretary to put equal weight on the welfare of the taxpayer as well as Wall Street in using the extraordinary authority. The new powers would expire after two years.

McCain wants a federal regulator, while Obama praises the Bush administration's plan, and insults are flying back and forth:

"People like Sen. Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven't ever done a thing to actually challenge the system," McCain told a business group in Green Bay, pointing out that Obama had taken advice from two former executives of collapsed mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Obama, who endorsed the rescue package announced Friday by the Bush administration, in turn chided McCain for being hypocritical. Obama supporters pointed out that several McCain advisors have worked on behalf of Fannie, including McCain's campaign manager, who defended the company against increased regulation as president of the industry group Homeownership Alliance.

"At this point, he seems to be willing to say anything, or do anything, or change any position, or violate any principle to try and win this election," Obama said while campaigning in Florida.