Foreclosure Fiasco
"California couldn't get the White House to guarantee $5.5 billion in
short-term notes to avert severe cuts in state and local payrolls, from
prison guards to schoolteachers. Compare that with the $50 billion already
given to Citigroup, plus an astounding $300 billion to guarantee that
institution's toxic assets."
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: June 24, 2009
It's not working. The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks
to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while
tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds,
along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money
to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.
As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, "The Mortgage Bankers
Association cut its forecast of home-mortgage lending this year by 27% amid
deflating hopes for a boom in refinancing." The same association said that
the total refinancing under the administration's much ballyhooed Home
Affordable Refinance Program is "very low."
Aside from a tight mortgage market, the problem in preventing foreclosures
has to do with homeowners losing their jobs. Here again the administration,
continuing the Bush strategy, is working the wrong end of the problem.
Although President Obama was wise enough to at least launch a job stimulus
program, a far greater amount of federal funding benefits Wall Street as
opposed to Main Street.
State and local governments have been forced into draconian budget cuts,
firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage
payments-when they have jobs. Yet the Obama administration won't spend even
a small fraction of what it has wasted on the banks to cover state
shortfalls.
California couldn't get the White House to guarantee $5.5 billion in
short-term notes to avert severe cuts in state and local payrolls, from
prison guards to schoolteachers. Compare that with the $50 billion already
given to Citigroup, plus an astounding $300 billion to guarantee that
institution's toxic assets. Citigroup benefits from being a bank "too big to
fail," although through its irresponsible actions to get that large it did
as much as any company to cause this mess.
How big a mess? According to the Federal Reserve's most recent report, seven
straight quarters of declining household wealth have left Americans $14
trillion poorer. Many who thought they were middle class have now joined the
ranks of the poor. Food banks are strapped and welfare rolls are
dramatically on the rise, as the WSJ reports, with a 27 percent year-to-year
increase in Oregon, 23 percent in South Carolina and 10 percent in
California. And you have to be very poor to get on welfare, thanks to
President Clinton's so-called welfare reform, which he signed into law
before he ramped up the radical deregulation of the financial services
industry, enabling our economic downturn.
Citigroup, the prime mover for ending the sensible restraints of the
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, is now a pathetic ward of the state. But back in
the day President Clinton would tour the country with Citigroup founder
Sandy Weill touting the wonderful work that Weill and other moguls were
doing to invest in economically depressed communities. It wasn't really
happening then, and now millions of folks in those communities have seen
their houses snatched from them as if they were just pieces in a game of
Monopoly that Clinton and his fat-cat buddy were playing.
Once Weill got the radical deregulation law he wanted, he issued a statement
giving credit: "In particular, we congratulate President Clinton, Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers, NEC [National Economic Council] Chairman Gene
Sperling, Under Secretary of the Treasury Gary Gensler, Assistant Treasury
Secretaries Linda Robertson and Greg Baer."
Summers is now Obama's top economic adviser, Sperling has been appointed
legal counselor at Treasury, and Gensler, a former partner in Goldman Sachs,
is head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which he once
attempted to prevent from regulating derivatives when it was run by
Brooksley Born. Robertson worked for Summers in pushing through the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which freed the derivatives market from
adult supervision and contained the "Enron Loophole," permitting that
company to go wild. Robertson then became the top Washington lobbyist for
Enron and was recently appointed senior adviser to Fed Chair Ben S.
Bernanke. Baer went to work as a corporate counsel for Bank of America,
which announced his appointment with a press release crediting him with
having "coordinated Treasury policy" during the Clinton years in getting
Glass-Steagall repealed. As a result of deregulation, B of A too spiraled
out of control and ended up as a beneficiary of the Treasury's welfare
program.
Why was I so naive as to have expected this Democratic president to not do
the bidding of the banks when the last president from that party joined the
Republicans in giving the moguls everything they wanted? Please, Obama,
prove me wrong.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/06/24-1
Courageous Women Front Iran's Resistance
by Cathal Kelly
Toronto Star/Canada: June 24, 2007
The brutal death of the young Tehran woman Neda Agha-Soltani continued to
prompt revulsion inside and outside Iran yesterday, but it also drew more
attention to the role the women's movement has played in the current
uprising.
Neda Agha-Soltani, 26, who was shot dead in Tehran on June 20, 2009, has
become an icon of Iran's post-election demonstrations. Her final seconds of
life were captured in a widely distributed Internet video.
(FLICKR/REUTERS) "We have seen courageous women stand up to brutality and
threats, and we have experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to
death in the streets," U.S. President Barack Obama said at a White House
news conference yesterday, noting the recent events in Iran.
"While the loss is raw and painful, we also know this: those who stand up
for justice are always on the right side of history."
The 26-year-old woman, who is widely known simply as Neda, was shot dead
Saturday near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and
demonstrators who allege rampant vote-count fraud in the re-election of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Her final seconds of life were captured in a widely distributed Internet
video.
"It's heartbreaking," Obama said of the video. "I think that anybody who
sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about it."
Since the first embers of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran flared 10
days ago, women have been at the front of the battle line. Photographs show
them confronting security forces and urging others in the crowd - many of
them men - to press forward.
"There is an unfortunate distorted image of Iranian women. Everybody (in the
West) is surprised at what's happening in Iran because they have this image
of women victimized by their state, by their husbands," said Farzeneh
Milani, a University of Virginia professor who has studied the Iranian
women's movement for three decades.
"The truth of the matter is that the women's movement in Iran goes back to
the middle of the 19th century."
Women have played a role in each one of Iran's cultural spasms. Many of the
pro-Islamic activists during the 1979 Islamic Revolution were women. But the
current reformist movement is a reaction to government measures aimed at
pushing women to the sidelines of public life.
In 2005, the regime began a modesty campaign, the goal being a stricter
enforcement of veiling.
"I call it gender apartheid, the separation of men and women in all
spheres," said Shahrzad Mojab, an activist who fled Iran in 1983 and now
teaches at the University of Toronto. "It really has been building up over
the last 30 years."
As it followed a period of relative liberalization under former president
Mohammad Khatami, the modesty campaign provoked a backlash. In 2006, a
demonstration of women in Tehran was attacked by security forces. That
spawned the so-called "one million signature" campaign aimed at reversing
the new laws. Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi is one of the leaders of
that movement.
Another key figure has been Zahra Rahnavard, wife of opposition candidate
Mir Hossein Mousavi.
"(Rahnavard) has been a major force, sometimes much more important than her
husband," said Gholam Reza Afkhami, of Washington's Foundation for Iranian
Studies.
Much of the current network has blossomed inside educational institutions in
large cities. Despite efforts to marginalize them, Iranian women still make
up 65 per cent of all students at universities.
"Iran must be the only country in the world that's thinking of affirmative
action for men," Milani said.
After giving the resistance reason to organize, the regime went further last
year. It attempted to ease restrictions on polygamy and reduce the tax
traditionally paid by husbands to new wives. That drew many conservative
Iranian women, those who had supported the regime's strict moral measures,
toward the reformist movement.
In the past days, we've begun to learn how potent a force the government has
unwittingly created.
"(Women) didn't set the agenda in 1979," said Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, a
professor at the University of Toronto.
"Today we are seeing what is historically the first national movement with a
leadership that is predominantly female. Women are running this resistance."
While the movement is vast, Neda has become its public face.
In an apparent effort to deflect attention drawn by the killing,
state-sponsored Iranian TV yesterday said that Neda had not been shot by a
bullet fired by security forces. It also said that the filming and swift
spread of the video of her death suggested the incident had been staged.
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