What questions would you like asked?
About Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
[...]
Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt- Rick-Barac k reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality , corporate malfeasanc e, the destructio n of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillan ce state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate- owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers . The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalist s such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophe rs such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them.
Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorsh ips. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebratio ns to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractor s always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington ?
[...]
There are two clever features of the deal, but neither look intended to benefit ordinary citizens. One is that the deal throws some funding at chronically cash stressed mortgage counselors . They are thus certain to voice approval of the pact. The other is (per the FT story) the deal’s “most favored nations clause” is designed to reduce the bargaining leverage of any AGs that go their own way. It means that any servicer will have the incentive to fight hard against giving any state a better deal because it will automagica lly trigger improved terms across the states that signed on to the Federal deal. But this may have interestin g perverse effects, since banks that refuse to settle with breakaway AGs will ultimately have damages awarded by a court. That means longer and most costly fights by the states, but in most cases, ultimately bigger awards (frankly, the fact set is so bad that all the state AGs need to do is focus on fairly conservati ve legal theories to have good odds of scoring big wins).
[...]
I think you're absolutely correct. I think that getting money out of politics is the only way to repair our broken system.
Unless and until there is drastic and uncompromi
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
This is the kind of deception that Bob Cesca (along with DLC-Democr
Obama to Use Pension Funds of Ordinary Americans to Pay for Bank Mortgage “Settlemen
[...]KEEP READING
[T]he bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modificati ons. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitize d toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-o wned mortgages will be the ones to be restructur ed.
Why is this a bad idea?
The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lien-holde rs take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administra tion’s instigatio n.
Another reason the modification provision is poorly structured is that the banks are given a dollar target to hit. That means they will focus on modifying the biggest mortgages. So help will go to a comparativ ely small number of grossly overhoused borrowers, no doubt reinforcin g the “profligat e borrower” meme.
But those criticisms assume two other things: that the program is actually implemented.
The experience with past consent decrees in the mortgage space is that the servicers get a legal get out of jail free card, a release, and do not hold up their end of the deal. Similarly, we’ve seen bank executives swear in front of Congress in late 2010 that they had stopped robosigning, which turned out to be a brazen lie. So here, odds favor that servicers will pretty much do nothing except perhaps be given credit for mortgage modificati ons they would have made anyhow.
The Supreme Court is lost already. Please remember that Scalia and Thomas made it through a Democratic
And Obama's appointmen
If who gets to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg was such a worry, don't you think she would step down now while it's assured a Democratic president would be choosing?
About Republican Party
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
What are you winning when you put DINOs into power?
When you put DINOs into office, you get Republican
Right after 9/11, when the PatriotAct and the Department
The government of the leading and oldest democracy in the world is tasked to do it, protect us, by keeping the rights we're guaranteed in our Constituti
Even with doing it the "easy" way (violating our Constituti
The same is true for putting DINOs into power.
Real Democratic policies aren't that hard to sell to Americans. When most Americans want Medicare and other government programs which they've benefitted from to continue and teabaggers shout "No government control of healthcare
The DLC got into power by refusing to defend the word 'liberal' when RonaldReag
When informed of the issues, most Americans agree with liberal policies. Neither they (nor I) would characteri
If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your salespitch and tactics. It's not that Bush-Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush-Rove were just more ruthless doing what politician
But Obama only does that to progressiv
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
© Blogger templates Newspaper by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
