Obama's Budget Betrayal - Questions and Answers

Question: Why did President Obama put Social Security and Medicare on the table in the budget negotiations when 80% of the people oppose cuts to these programs?

Answer: The president is not in office to represent those people. He was selected, funded and carried over the finish line by corporate America. Look at the appointment of Wall Streeter Timothy Geithner, the bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any of the crooks who caused the current recession. He's serving the people who put him in office. Those people don't need Social Security and Medicare.

Q: Doesn't the president need to worry about reelection? Why would he risk that by going against such a large majority?

A: President Obama has no personal or financial risk if he loses his job.. He has a tidy lifetime pension and will, no doubt, be on plenty of corporate boards, not to mention the opportunities for huge speaking fees. There is less political risk than you might think. The only Republican presidential candidate who might be other than certifiable is the largely unknown John Huntsman, former governor of Utah and Obama's ambassador to China. The rest would do much more harm to seniors than Obama concessions this time around (if they materialize) and people know that.

Bankruptcy Hell - The Sequel to ForeclosureGate

Michael Collins
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You're headed for bankruptcy court tomorrow. It's been a long and difficult road. You and your husband both worked. You made decent money. Then your husband became ill. There was no sick leave because he worked for himself. His disability insurance had a six-month delay and only covered half of the lost income. That was all you could afford. (Image Wikimedia Commons)

His condition was critical and required medication three times a day at a monthly cost of $2500. Your company plan covered your husband but it didn't cover the medication because the insurance company termed it experimental. It was the sole option for the crippling illness according to the three specialists consulted.

Your husband contributed 40% of the family income. The loss was a big hit but you persevered. You couldn't sell the house, even if you wanted to. It was $150,000 upside down. There was no federal or bank program to relieve that burden. After four months of cashing in a modest 401(k), it became obvious that you couldn't make it. You needed relief and time for your husband to get well.

You consulted your accountant. On his advice, you decided to file for bankruptcy.

MERS Leaves the Field

By Numerian

How the banks could inflict such damage on the country’s home title and mortgage registry system would take another investigation by Congress to determine – assuming Congress was interested.
The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems company (known as MERS), which has been at the center of legal problems affecting the securitization of home mortgages and foreclosures, has given up one of its principal corporate objectives. It is now instructing its members to cease foreclosing on residential properties in the name of MERS, and to begin immediately to register all assignments of mortgages with local county recorders of deeds. (Image)

The whole purpose of MERS when it was established in 1996 was to by-pass the county recording process, and the billions of dollars of fees that banks and mortgage companies would have had to pay to comply with state and local real estate laws. MERS operated on a legal assumption that it could have its cake and eat it too, by acting as an agent for its member banks in their real estate transactions, but also acting if necessary as a principal in its own name when it came to assigning mortgages and foreclosing on properties.

Egyptians Revolt - Rubin's Folly and Labor Arbitrage

By Numerian

The forces of globalization are increasingly and in surprising places and ways under attack. Globalization did not happen by accident; it was the result of policies put in place by people with a particular agenda.

Matt Stoller, a former policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson, has posted this morning his insights into the Egyptian Revolution – insights that are quite different from the usual take on these events. They can be found here at the Naked Capitalism blog managed by Yves Smith.

Stoller dismisses the fanciful praise of social networks as a driving force behind the revolution – a story the mainstream media are plugging rigorously. He focuses instead on the participation of young men and women who labor anonymously in the new cheap-labor factory mills set up in Egypt under the direction of Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son and anointed successor. These are the workers who organized the first protests – who responded at great risk to the call for demonstrations, who continued to occupy Tahrir Square despite the provocations from the government, and whose focus on civil liberties was motivated by the repressive police tactics used by the government to enforce the discipline demanded by the mostly-foreign corporations that run the labor mills.

The Arc of Justice - The Ibanez Case Ruling

By Numerian posted by Michael Collins

What is beginning to unfold before our eyes is a situation which can only be comprehended with jaw-dropping incredulity.

The Too Big To Fail banks have been waiting with trepidation for a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court of the State of Massachusetts on the case titled US Bank National Association (as trustee) vs. Antonio Ibanez. They were right to be fearful. The state supreme court has ruled against the banks and upheld a lower court order that nullified foreclosures by US Bancorp and Wells Fargo, on the grounds that neither bank had the legal right under Massachusetts law to foreclose. Today’s ruling has far-reaching consequences for the banks and the housing market in general, as it throws into serious question the legal soundness of millions of mortgages in the US if, as expected, courts in other states come to similar conclusions as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Decline and Fall (Maybe) New Years Edition

Nothing has been done to address the rapid increase of citizens in poverty. That would require jobs. The only jobs those in power produce are for themselves and their cronies.
The Happy New Year Edition (with some good news about 2011)

Michael Collins
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<p>The best thing about 2010 is that it's over. It was a year filled with utter stupidity, mendacity, and greed beyond all bounds on the part of our rulers, also known as <a href= The Money Party. Lots of fiddling while Rome and the rest of the world burned. Knowledge is power and among the ruling elite in the United States, the power was off. Somebody forgot to pay the bill or paid with a bad check, no doubt.

A Decade of Job Stagnation In 2000, 135 million citizens were employed. In 2010 there were 139 million Americans employed. Given the 9.7% increase in population since 2000, we would expect to see at least 148 million citizens with jobs. Nobody much wants to talk about this or the true unemployment figures produced by the US Census called "U6". That measure accounts for, "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force." Bureau of Labor Statistics

A Merry Christmas for the Inheritance Tax

By Numerian
...nothing is more important to the establishment and continuation of a democracy than a rigorous inheritance tax.
Image-Mark Fiore

My first Christmas gift to you is my most favorite of all quotes, from that most astute observer of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. He was a man who was intimately familiar with the social sclerosis that resulted from aristocracy, and he had a chance to compare it in the 1830s to the newly-invented American democracy. He said the following in Book I of his Democracy in America.

I am surprised that ancient and modern writers have not attributed greater importance to the laws of inheritance and their effect on the progress of human affairs. They are, it is true, civil laws, but they should head the list of all political institutions, for they have an unbelievable influence on the social state of peoples, and political laws are no more than the expression of that state. Moreover, their way of influencing society is both sure and uniform; in some sense they lay hands on each generation before it is born. By their means man is armed with almost supernatural power over the future of his fellows. When the lawgiver has once fixed the law of inheritance, he can rest for centuries; once the impulse has been given to his handiwork, he can take his hand away; the mechanism works by its own power and apparently spontaneously aims at the goal indicated beforehand. If it has been drafted in a certain way, it assembles, concentrates, and piles up property, and soon power too, in the hands of one man; in a sense it makes an aristocracy leap forth from the ground. Guided by other principles and directed towards other goals, its effect is even quicker; it divides, shares, and spreads property and power; then sometimes people get frightened at the speed of its progress; despairing of stopping its motion, men seek at least to put obstacles and difficulties in its way; there is an attempt to balance its action by measures of opposite tendency. But all in vain! It grinds up or smashes everything that stands in its way; with the continual rise and fall of its hammer strokes, everything is reduced to a fine, impalpable dust, and that dust is the foundation for democracy.

You're on Your Own

These public figures and many more promised to correct the chaos and depravity of the Bush era. It’s all a scam. A new war, more bailouts for Wall Street, the continued assault on the Constitution, and lower taxes for the super rich are what we got.

Michael Collins

Some of us have known this for a long time. Some of us just found out and some will find out very soon. There are few, if any, elected officials who really care about our interests unless we're one of the few thousand ultra rich who control Congress and the White House. (Image)

The Obama-Republican tax plan was just approved in the United States Senate. It will become law soon. What did we lose?

The Senate put the Social Security system at risk with a 33% cut to employee payroll taxes, from 6.2% to 4.2% of wages. Social Security is doing well with a $2.5 trillion surplus. But this major change begins the starvation of the system. Those who voted in favor will turn around sometime soon and say that Social Security is faltering. Of course, their cynical actions will be at fault. They'll conveniently avoid mentioning that.

The Obama-Republican plan keeps the tax rate on investment income (capital gains) well below the rates for income taxes and below the capital gains rates in 2000. Wall Street ruins the economy with their shady deals then gets more tax breaks on their shady stock deals.

Greenspan Calls Fraud

"There are two fundamental reforms we need - to get adequate capital and, two, to get far higher levels of enforcements of statutes of fraud statutes, existing ones. I'm not even talking about new ones. Things were being done which were certainly illegal and fairly criminal in certain cases. Fraud, fraud is a fact. Fraud creates very considerable instability in competitive markets. If you cannot trust your counterparties, it won't work. And indeed, we saw that it didn't." Alan Greenspan Nov. 9, 2010

Via Karl Denninger Alan Greenspan: The Banks Robbed You

As many of us are saying... (e.g. Social Security)

More after the break.

Corporate Takeover Stalls in California - Healhens hold the line

Michael Collins
California

California's economic depression is the key campaign issue. The official state unemployment rate is 12.4%. When you add those who've simply given up looking for a job plus the marginally employed, the figure for the state is over 20%. Official unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley, a huge agribusiness region, ranges from 15% to 19%. Long the economic engine for the nation, the state is not accustomed to hard times.

The corporate takeover of California is on hold according to the latest polls out of the nation’s largest state. Just nine days before the election, the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California poll shows a nearly impossible uphill battle for the big business ticket of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina.

Among likely voters in the governor’s race, Brown leads Whitman 50% to 38%. In the race for United States Senator, two term Senator Barbara Boxer maintained an 8% lead. The leads by Democrats come from a brand new constituency, those who "never" go to church. More on that later.

money party