Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:20 PM
My comments, and suggestions, are below Mr Walker's fine article.
Scott
By: Jon Walker
It is important to put budget issues in perspective, so I have a
simple request that President Obama, the top members of his
administration, and his allies in Congress send a hand written version
of this letter to constituents:
Dear low-income American,
I know times are tough. I know many of you saw your savings and home
values hurt by Wall Street recklessness. I also know that, with
official unemployment above 9 percent, it is tough to find a job, and
many have been forced to choose part-time employment that lacks
benefits. But as a result of extending the Bush tax cuts for
millionaires, the budget deficit has grown.
So, despite your problems, you are going to be asked to sacrifice.
Your president is planning to cut $2.6 billion from Low Income Home
Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps people afford keeping
their homes warm during the winter, despite the fact that due to the
economic downturn the number of poor people needing help has increased
significantly.
As a result of your going without heat next winter, we will be able to
afford almost one whole week of fighting the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, which cost about $468 million a day. Although when you
add in the many hidden costs like increased long-term veteran€™s health
care due to the conflicts, your sacrifice is probably only really
going to cover maybe half a week.
I hope you understand that when we had to choose between providing
basic necessities to our citizens or fighting about five more days in
Iraq and Afghanistan because of [insert newest justification here], we
clearly just had to choose the wars over you.
Sincerely,
Democrats in Washington
- - -
Excellent article.
Maybe to save even more money, all of the Dems who vote to cut heating
for the poor, should just donate what their heating bill would cost, if
they were to have heat, and not turn theirs on for the winter, so they
can show 'how they feel for their base'.
The monetary value of their heating bills, though vastly less people are
involved, will probably make up that few extra days so we can have a
full week of war in the Middle East.
This would make them much more electable, and I bet even the Republicans
would like them more.
If they were to give 80%+ of their food budget to the War effort and
live on the same number of dollars that the poor live on, they might get
an additional 3-4 days of war funded, and the Republicans would possibly
talk in the most admiring manners about how the Democrats show how they
support their base and might even be as committed to their base, as the
Republicans are to their Corporate base, instead of the Democrats trying
to hog in on all of that Corporate money sent to them, so they'll
approve more Corporate welfare, paid for by the poor and middle class
whose heating and medical and food budgets have been cut.
Scott
***
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/home_sweet_wall_street_20110216/
Home Sweet Wall Street
Robert Scheer
Truthdig: February 16, 2010
A most dastardly deed occurred last Friday when the Obama administration
issued a 29-page policy statement totally abandoning the federal
government's
time-honored role in helping Americans achieve the goal of homeownership.
Instead of punishing the banks that sabotaged the American ideal of a nation
of stakeholders by "securitizing" our homesteads into poker chips to be
gambled away in the Wall Street casino, Barack Obama now proposes to turn
over the entire mortgage industry to those same banks.
The proposal, originated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, involves
nothing less than a total "winding down" of the 80-year-old federal housing
program, setting instead a new goal of a two-tiered America in which the
masses are content to be mere renters of the American Dream. Such a deal for
a country where, as the report concedes, "Half of all renters spend more
than a third of their income on housing, and a quarter spend more than
half."
This is the same Geithner who during his tenure in the Clinton Treasury
Department championed the total deregulation of the then-emerging market in
collateralized debt obligations that sliced and diced people's home
mortgages into the toxic securities that created what his new report calls
the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Later, as president
of the New York Fed, he cheered on the banks as they went hog-wild, conning
folks into buying homes they couldn't afford and stuffing them into the
incomprehensible securities that form the rot at the core of our bankrupt
economy.
This is a made-in-the-U.S. nightmare that we inflicted on the world, thanks
to an explosion in those toxic securities brought on by the deregulation
that most of the Obama economic brain trust supported when they worked for
President Bill Clinton and during the ensuing bubble years when they
enriched themselves. As the report admits: "The U.S. is . the only high
income country in which securitization plays a major role in housing
finance." Yet instead of ending that practice Obama now calls for more of
the same: "The Administration believes the securitization market should
continue to play a key role in housing finance." Indeed, the plan's goal of
eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will dry up the alternative public
funding that has provided a source of mortgage support ever since President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched Fannie Mae to check the power of the
banks over mortgages. Now Obama proposes to eliminate that check and leave
would-be homeowners to the tender mercy of the banking giants.
Of course Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also bear responsibility for the
meltdown. They had morphed into for-profit enterprises and, just as with the
Wall Street firms, the massive bonuses paid out to their top executives were
contingent on the value of their stock prices, which in turn were fattened
by the sale of those same toxic assets. As the Obama report puts it, "Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac's profit-maximizing structure undermined their public
mission." What the administration should have proposed is to return the
government-sponsored housing agencies to their original function as
nonprofit entities supplementing, rather than aping, the practices of greedy
bankers.
It wasn't meant to end this way, and key Democrats, quite a few of them
Clinton alums now in the Obama administration, bear the responsibility for
the sad fate of Roosevelt's dream. As the Obama proposal concedes:
"Improving how housing was financed was an important part of these broader
Depression-era reforms. In the 1930s, following severe mortgage market
disruptions, widespread foreclosures, and sinking homeownership rates, the
government created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Fannie Mae, the
Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) and several decades later, Freddie Mac to
help promote secure and sustainable homeownership for future generations of
Americans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac held true to their original mission
for many years." What the report then neglects to discuss is the demise of
Roosevelt's grand experiment at the hands of Democratic Party hustlers who
turned the agencies away from their "original mission" and into their
personal piggy banks while getting Democrats in Congress to approve
regulations enabling their greed.
The folks around President Obama know this sad tale well because some of
them were principal actors in the housing agencies' betrayal of the public
trust. Just take the case of Tom Donilon, whom Obama recently appointed to
the highly sensitive position of national security adviser. It was Donilon
who was the top legal counsel and lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005,
a period when the agency went off the tracks in backing Countrywide and
other private-sector bandits in their irresponsible rip-off scams. "He was
in charge of the lobbyists. . That process involved using the Hill to rein
in the regulators," noted Stephen Blumenthal, who, as director of the Office
of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, was hindered by Donilon's lobbying.
As the report concedes without mentioning Donilon's role, "Over the years,
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's aggressive lobbying efforts had successfully
defeated efforts to bring them under closer supervision."
Donilon, who received $10 million in the three years leading up to the
scandal of 2004, when Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for juggling its
books to enhance executive bonuses, will never have any trouble financing a
home purchase. Not so the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their
homes because of his reprehensible actions and the many more in the future
who will be denied government support in trying to get a place of their own.
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