Labels: accountability, bailout, banksters, elites, James Kunstler, Occupy Wall Street, personal debt, Russia Today, super-rich
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posted by profmarcus at
10/24/2011
In a nutshell, Americans are ticked off. Millions are struggling financially; many are out of a job or are underemployed. They can't pay their bills. They are falling deeper into personal debt. They are losing hope that things will improve in the foreseeable future. Worst of all, while they are falling further behind a small minority appears to be leaping further ahead.
Wall Street and the big banks caused the market crash that cost millions of jobs and plunged the US economy into near-depression. Yet three years later, the country's financial elite continues to prosper while the other 99% suffers. Meanwhile, Washington, due mainly to the unceasing obstructionism of the Republican party, seems completely incapable of arresting America's decline.
In some ways, what's most amazing about OWS – and the support it's receiving – is not that it happened, but frankly why the hell it took so long.
[...]
OWS has arisen not because of the left's activism, but despite it. Focusing on electoral victories and legislative accomplishments, the left has failed to push an effective populist movement, focusing its energy more on social issues than economic ones. Democratic leaders have stayed at arm's length from the party's activist base for fear of being stained by their perceived political excesses (a position that has rightly alienated a generation of liberals). Considering these larger failures of the left, it seems almost appropriate that OWS has come about in such an organic and ad hoc manner.
Labels: 99%, banksters, Democrats, elites, leftists, Occupy Wall Street, personal debt, poverty, super-rich, U.S. politics, unemployment
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/17/2011
...when you hear a Republican talk about class warfare, you know they’re waging it.
[...]
I think that for the last 30 years we’ve seen a political battle being waged by the super-rich against everyone else, and this is the latest move in the shadow dance, which is completely dysfunctional economically and politically. I mean, it’s the reason why young people have just abandoned any thought of appealing to politicians. We all know what’s going to happen. The tax proposals are a sort of mock populist gesture, which everyone knows will be shot down. What will actually probably happen would be more cuts to social services. The very fact that the rhetoric is about the debt, which is really a non-issue, is itself the problem.
[...]
I think President Obama really has bought into the dominant ideology, which is essentially Republican. Finally, he has to wage an election campaign, so he has to make some gestures in the other direction, because he knows the overwhelming majorities of the American public are in favor of taxing the rich. And he also knows that it’s almost certainly going to be shot down. There’s nothing that the Republicans are less likely to put up with than a proposal like this.
[...]
In the ancient Middle East, often new kings would simply declare a clean slate and cancel all debts, or all consumer debts, commercial debts, between merchants were often left alone. The Jubilee was a way of institutionalizing that. In the Middle Ages, there were bans on interest taking entirely. There have been many mechanisms.
But whenever you have what I call a period of virtual credit money, when money is recognized not to be a thing like gold and silver, but a social relation or promise that people make to each other, which has become increasingly clear since the '70s, when we went off the gold standard—and I think 2008 really brought that home—debts can be renegotiated. They're not set in stone. Trillions of dollars of debt was made to disappear. We understand now that this is a political arrangement, and it can always be readjusted. And I think what the people coming to the squares—and Wall Street now included—are saying is that, well, if that’s true, if democracy is going to mean anything now, we’re all going to have to be able to weigh in on what sort of promises are made and what sort of promises are adjusted when you enter into a crisis.
Labels: Amy Goodman, banksters, Barack Obama, class warfare, David Graeber, debt crisis, Democracy Now, elites, personal debt, Republicans, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
9/19/2011
Labels: Economist, elites, kleptocracy, national debt, personal debt, sheeple, super-rich, world debt
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
8/04/2011
Labels: American Empire, Citizen-led politics, endless war, national debt, personal debt, Scott Horton
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
6/07/2011
Labels: banksters, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, elites, foreclosures, John Perkins, Max Keiser, personal debt, propaganda, Russia Today, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/25/2011
Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30 thousand in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year over year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.
Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 '10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think.
The number of vacant homes for rent fell by 493 thousand, as rental demand rose. 471,000 homes are listed as "Held off Market" about half for temporary use, but the other half are likely foreclosures. And no, the shadow inventory isn't just 200,000, it's far higher than that.
So think about it. Eleven percent of the houses in America are empty. This as builders start to get more bullish, and renting apartments becomes ever more popular. Vacancies in the apartment sector have been falling steadily and dramatically, why? Because we're still recovering emotionally from the toll of the housing crash.
Younger Americans have seen what home ownership has done to their friends and families, and many want no part of it. Credit has become very nearly elitist. Home prices, whatever your particular data provider preference might be, are still falling.
Labels: economic enslavement, foreclosures, homeowner vacancy rate, mortgage delinquencies, personal debt, rental vacancy rate
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
2/01/2011
We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Mr. Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Mr. Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.
The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+%, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) The pretense is “to create jobs,” evidently to be headed by employment of shipyard workers to build yachts for the nouveau riches and sheriff’s deputies to foreclose on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich.
Mr. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Mr. Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.
Labels: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Catfood Commission, elites, Larry Summers, national debt, personal debt, Ponzi scheme, Social Security, super-rich, Tim Geithner
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/16/2010
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage delinquencies among the most creditworthy homeowners rose 50 percent in a month as borrowers said drops in income or too much debt caused them to fall behind, according to data from federal regulators.
The number of so-called prime borrowers at least 60 days behind on mortgages owned or guaranteed by the companies rose to 743,686 in January, from 497,131 in December, and is almost double the total for October, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in a report to Congress today.
Of all borrowers who ended up in default, 34 percent told Fannie and Freddie they were earning less money, about 20 percent cited excessive debt as a reason for missing mortgage payments, and 8.1 percent blamed unemployment, FHFA said.
Labels: economic collapse, Fannie Mae, financial meltdown, Freddie Mac, housing market, mortgage delinquencies, personal debt, recession
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/23/2009
An Argentine opinion on the Global Financial Crisis, describing the whole Global Financial System as one vast Ponzi Scheme. Like a pyramid, it has four sides and is a predictable model. The four sides are: (1) Artificially control the supply of public State-issued Currency, (2) Artificially impose Banking Money as the primary source of funding in the economy, (3) Promote doing everything by Debt and (4) Erect complex channels that allow privatizing profits when the Model is in expansion mode and socialize losses when the model goes into contraction mode.
Labels: Argentina 2001 economic collapse, economic collapse, economic instability, economic warfare, financial meltdown, national debt, personal debt
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
4/08/2009
Ellen Hodgson Brown has a solution for you.
Nationalize the Federal Reserve.
The lawyer and author of The Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System And How We Can Break Free told the Lone Star Iconoclast that the idea is more American than apple pie, mom, and baseball.
"The government used to create the money in the 18th century before the American Revolution. It was a brilliant system. The American colonists printed their own money, and the people think it is the government that creates the money, but it’s not. Today, it’s banks," she explained.
Right now, the Federal Reserve is a corporate institution owned and controlled by private banks chartered to create money through a process of fractional reserve lending to themselves. Money is created when these private banks lend up to 10 times their debt deposits from the Federal Reserve to public and private institutions plus interest. This money (aka debt) is, therefore, created out of thin air.
By "nationalization," Brown means having Congress turn the Federal Reserve into the acting central bank of the United States that prints money interest free.
[...]
"They’re never going to change the system when everybody is doing well," she said. "Everybody is ready for change, so we have to scramble in and make sure that change turns out the right way and doesn’t go into fascism and police state."
Labels: Federal Reserve System, national debt, nationalization, personal debt
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
3/12/2009
[T]he freewheeling days of credit and risk may have run their course — at least for a while and perhaps much longer — as a period of involuntary thrift unfolds in many households. With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.
“We don’t use our credit cards anymore,” said Lisa Merhaut, a professional at a telecommunications company who lives in Leesburg, Va., and whose family last year ran up credit card debt it could not handle.
Today, Ms. Merhaut, 44, manages her money the way her father did. Despite a household income reaching six figures, she uses cash for every purchase. “What we have is what we have,” Ms. Merhaut said. “We have to rely on the money that we’re bringing in.”
[...]
“The long collapse in the United States savings rate is over,” said Ethan S. Harris, chief United States economist for Lehman Brothers. “People are going to start saving the old-fashioned way, rather than letting the stock market and rising home values do it for them.”
In 1984, Americans were still saving more than one-tenth of their income, according to the government. A decade later, the rate was down by half. Now, the savings rate is slightly negative, suggesting that on average Americans spend more than their disposable income.
The top fifth of American earners generates half of all consumer spending, noted Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital.
Labels: conspicuous consumption, economy, personal debt, savings rate
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
2/05/2008
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