Real Estate News

On July 1, 2009, U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan announced an expansion of the Making Home Affordable Refinance Program to include borrowers who are current but up to 125 percent underwater on their mortgage. The announcement was made while the Secretary toured a Las Vegas neighborhood with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Congresswoman Dina Titus.

“This decision is part of our ongoing efforts to maximize the effectiveness of the Making Home Affordable program and adapt to an ever-changing housing market,” said Treasury Secretary Tim Geither. “By expanding refinance eligibility, we can bring relief to more struggling homeowners more quickly. It’s a crucial step in our broader efforts to get America’s housing market and economy on the path to recovery.”

Las Vegas is the ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. Not only does the area lead the nation in foreclosures, more than two-thirds of current mortgage holders in the market have mortgages higher than their property is currently worth. Prior to the announced expansion, only those borrowers whose first mortgage did not exceed 105 percent of the current market value of their property were eligible for the program.

Donovan also announced plans to deploy HUD Foreclosure Rapid Response Teams to assess the area hardest hit by foreclosure, starting in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas team will consist of two-senior-level HUD Field staff having experience in Single Family Housing and community outreach. Over they next two weeks these team members will be determining the need in Nevada and surrounding areas. HUD will commit two full-time employees to implement the Foreclosure Rapid Response Team’s recommendations.

Additionally, HUD plans to deploy two Fair Housing equal opportunity specialists to the Las Vegas HUD office. HUD receive about 100 housing discrimination complaints annually from Nevada residents, more than double what was received in 2005.  The Fair Housing specialists will conduct local outreach and education as well as receiving discrimination complaints and conducting investigations. With a local presence, HUD’s Fair Housing & Equal Opportunity office should make it easier for Nevada Residents to obtain justice and relief , to educate housing consumers about predatory lending and to conduct program compliance and monitoring in more than 3,000 public housing units and over 8,500 Section 8 Vouchers.

Read the original here:
HUD Expands Making Home Affordable Eligibility

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“The economy is based on trust,” said Dean Johnson, associate professor of finance at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan.

In situations like the recent housing bubble, or even the stock market collapse of 1929, where markets were driven by debt and fueled by the false expectation that values can only increase, trust can be a very fragile thing.

“One little blip and everything started to unwind,” Johnson said. “The particulars are different, but the basics are familiar.”

Trust, however, seems to be coming back, according to Johnson. If people are cautious and not spending money, the government and financial industry must take action to encourage capital liquidity. During the first half of 2009, this is exactly what they have been doing. And if the effects have not been as immediate as some would like and others needed, at least their efforts are beginning to take effect.

Why does Johnson believe trust is returning? He points to the Volatility Index, or VIX, which measures investors’ expectations of how volatile the stock markets will be. The VIX reached all-time highs in 2008.

“People think of it as the fear gauge,” Johson explained. “it’s encouraging that the VIX, though still high be historical standards, is down about 60 percent from what it was at its peak in November.”

Other, more recent, signs that trust is being rebuilt in the American housing/real estate markets and the financial industry include:

• USA Today reports that while the construction market remains weak the housing market may be improving slightly. Residential construction reportedly dropped to the lowest level since December 1995. Pending homes sales increased slightly in May, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
• Proposed legislation to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is making progress at the federal level, according to the Washington Post. The Post reports that the Treasury Department’s proposal for a new federal agency to consolidate the plethora of state and federal regulators responsible for overseeing the lending industry arrived on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
• At the end of June, Fannie Mae, which is still under the conservatorship of the federal government, reported its mortgage portfolio grew at a compound annual rate of more than 35 percent in May. A report from Dow Jones appearing in the Wall Street Journal indicates a large jump in the issuing of mortgage-backed securities offset continued rises in single-family and multi-family mortgage delinquencies.

Notes of caution, however, are also being heard. Yale University economist and co-founder of the S&P/Case-Schiller home-price index, Robert Schiller told Bloomberg: “At this point, people are thinking the fall is over. The market is predicting the declines are over.” At the same time he is “not optimistic that we’re going to see any sharp rebound.”

Johnson agrees with Schiller.

“It’s still a risky market,” Johnson stresses. “This is the first time in history that you’ve been better off if you’d put your money under a mattress 10 years ago. But hopefully, this indicates that the financial markets are returning to normal.”

Of course this doesn’t mean the housing market or the financial industry will be returning to the halcyon days of pre-mortgage crisis days anytime soon. It doesn’t matter how badly investors, bankers, consumers, lenders, the government or the world at large want it.

“There’s no easy fix,” Johnson concluded. “We have to take our medicine. It took 20 years to create the over-leverage and it will take time to undo that.”

Read the rest here:
Is Trust Returning to the Mortgage Industry?

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Today is the day the recovery starts, at least according to those peering into the rosiest-colored crystal balls. The Wall Street Journal dug up these great examples:

Most forecasters seem to expect growth to be weak for a few quarters, but then rebound back to trend in the second half of 2008… –Lehman Brothers research note, Dec. 12, 2007

What is shaping up as the deepest and longest recession since the 1930s will end in the second half of 2009. –Wells Fargo press release, Dec. 19, 2008

And what news did we wake to on this glorious July 1?

First, mortgage application dropped 30% last week. The report from the Mortgage Bankers Association says this is a the lowest the rate has been at in seven months. Biggest reasons for this are people’s concerns about their jobs and mortgage rates. Currently the 30-year fixed is averaging 5.34%.

Second, delinquency rates for the LEAST RISKY MORTGAGES more that doubled in the first quarter compared to the same period in ‘08.

Prime mortgages 60 days or more past due climbed to 2.9 percent of such loans through March 31 from 1.1 percent at the same point in 2008, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision said today in a report. First-time foreclosure filings on the loans rose 22 percent from the fourth quarter, the report said.

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“Local reports indicate that homelessness is on the rise and this report [Foreclosure to Homelessness] gives us insight into the role that foreclosures may be having on that increase,” said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The Foreclosure to Homelessness: The Forgotten Victims of the Foreclosure Crisis report released last week provides insight into how foreclosures have affected homeless populations around the country. Based on surveys completed by 178 organizations across the U.S. that provide services to individuals and families experiencing  homelessness it was determined that the nation’s homeless population has been directly impacted by foreclosure and that the is likely to increase along with the number of foreclosures.  Nearly 80 percent of the respondents reported that at least some of their clients became homeless due to foreclosure. The leading self-reported reasons for homelessness, however, remain financial obstacles like job loss, addiction and evictions, according to additional information gathered by the Alliance to End Homelessness.

“The results of this survey make clear that foreclosures are a major factor in the increase of homelessness in the United States,” National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) President Shelia Crowley said.

Conducted earlier this year between January 15 and February 21, the data collected by the survey reflects the previous 12-month period. Other key findings include:

• Housing providers (including emergency, transitional and permanent housing) estimated that 5 percent of their clients experienced homelessness as a result of foreclosure compared to 10 percent of all respondents.

• 34 percent of responding organizations indicated none of their clients were homeless as a result of foreclosure however 14 percent of those surveyed estimated that most of their clients were homeless due to foreclosure.

• Those experiencing homelessness due to foreclosure tended to be renters – not owners.

• Most of those facing homelessness because of foreclosure, whether renters or owners, did not seek legal advice in foreclosure proceedings.

• The most common living situations among those made homeless by foreclosure included staying with family or friends and emergency shelters.

“We’re grateful that since the time this data was collected, federal actions have provided communities with resources to prevent and end homelessness, in the form of stimulus dollars and renter protections.”

The 40-page report was released by the Alliance along with the National Coalition for Homelessness, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC), the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHC), the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness (NPACH).

Another study, Renters in Crisis by Shelia Crowley and Danilo Pelletiere of the National Low Income Housing Coalition and Maria Foscarinis of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, that is also cited in the Foreclosure to Homelessness report, revealed the following facts regarding renters and foreclosures:

• In 2008, one of every five properties in foreclosure were rental properties. Many had multiple units.

• An estimated 40 percent of families facing eviction due to foreclosure are renters.

• Seven million households living on very low incomes (31 to 50 percent of the Area Median Income) are at risk of foreclosure.

Renters received important new federal protections when President Obama signed the Helping Families Keep Their Homes Act in May 2009. The Act states that tenants must be given at least 90 days notice to vacate once a property has been foreclosed on and have the right to occupy the premises until the end of any term entered into under a bona fide lease agreement made prior to the notice of foreclosure is given unless the property will become the owner’s primary residence. Further, the Act protects renters receiving Section 8 assistance by preventing eviction during the term of their lease just so the new owner can sell the property. These and other provisions, while helpful, will not completely solve the problems renters and tenants face during foreclosure.

To assist tenants facing foreclosure, NLIHC has teamed up with the National Housing Law Project (NHLP) to create a toolkit for renters facing eviction due to foreclosure. The toolkit, which is available on the NLIHC website, includes a copy of the law, a one page explanation of its provisions, a question and answer document for tenants, sample letters to send to landlords, judges and public housing agencies and a webinar explaining the new law.

“Under the law, these blameless victims of the foreclosure crisis are now protected,” said Crowley. “The toolkit provides tenants and their advocates with the information necessary to protect families from being evicted unlawfully.”

Some activists and advocates for the homeless have promoted the idea of moving homeless families and individuals into empty properties that are in foreclosure. In April 2009, Real Estate Pro Articles detailed some of the efforts to allow homeless persons to occupy vacant homes occurring around the country.  The New York Times also explored this issue back in February 2009. Since April, however, stories about this alternative have largely vanished from media and the blogoshpere although the release of this new report may revitalize interest.

Read more:
New Report Links Foreclosures and Homelessness

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A great post from Homegrown Evolution on one of the surprising benefits of the housing meltdown: fresh fruit. That’s right. The blog thanks Mr. Mozilo for creating our very own ‘Banana Republic’ as rundown homes and unmanned irrigation systems create the perfect environment for the growth of amazing tropical delights.

These subprime bananas as the blog calls them, were the result of a foreclosed home and a wayward sprinkler system. Homegrown Evolution is a blog maintained by the authors of “The Urban Homestead“. Hat tip Boing Boing for finding this gem.

From Homegrown Evolution:

There’s a house in our neighborhood that’s been for sale for over a year. Two months ago the for sale signs disappeared, junk mail littered the front porch and the mow and blow guys stopped showing up, leaving the lawn to go wild. A busted sprinkler head creates a nightly fountain as the houses’ infrastructure lapses into a timer operated zombification. We knew the nice young family that used to live here and I hope that they were able to sell somehow, but it doesn’t look good.

I started picking up the junk mail to make the place looked lived in. I also remembered that the backyard had both figs and bananas, and ventured beyond the gate to see how the fruit was developing (fyi, picking up fallen fruit is important to keep down the rat population). The figs aren’t quite ready but the bananas, the ones the squirrels didn’t get, were the tastiest damn bananas I’ve ever eaten. It turns out that our national real estate bubble has a fruit filled silver lining. I imagine that all across America there are abandoned fruit trees yielding their bounty for a new generation of gleaners. Thank you Angelo Mozilo for creating a literal banana republic!

Maybe a little scouting in your neighborhood can yield some delicious homegrown summertime fruit too!

Read the original here:
Subprime Bananas

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It’s been quite a week for Citi.

• Tuesday it walked into a feces storm of its own making by announcing it would raise salaries by 50% to offset cuts in bonuses.

To be fair to Citi, they are taking (well-deserved) crap for the entire industry on the salary issue. BofA, Morgan Stanley, UBS and others are also trying to dodge the bad PR when huge bonuses are awarded following huge losses. So now instead of bonuses for bad performance execs will just get a huge salary for bad performance. It’s all about retention – or so Citi would like us to believe. Quote from the NYT: “Citigroup executives are so eager to keep employees from fleeing, that in some cases, they are offering them guaranteed pay contracts.” Well, given that those contracts are being paid for with $45 billion of US taxpayer debt who can blame them. Citi is once again free to play with someone else’s money and are being just as responsible as they were the last time. BTW, the idea that these raises are going to the rank-and-file is absolute hogwash. As Alphaville notes, “the biggest increases will go to investment bankers and traders.”

• Also on Tuesday, Citi temporarily stopped buying new loans after “discovering” it was missing property appraisals and documents showing borrowers’ incomes.

The discovery came in Citi’s correspondent division, which buys loans from banks and independent mortgage firms, and was responsible for about half of the bank’s $115 billion in mortgages last year. Two great quotes about this:

“There remain key areas that fall short of our quality- control process. We ask you to review your processes and join us in this effort to collectively address these areas of concern.”

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Federal law enforcement officials recently announced charges have brought against 41 defendants in five separate cases in Chicago. The cases involve more than $48 million in fraudulently obtained mortgages for dilapidated homes in urban areas as well as deals involving million dollar condominiums in a Chicago high-rise and sprawling homes in affluent suburbs like Wheaton and Glenview. The vice president of a title company, mortgage brokers, loan officers, appraisers, real estate investors and an attorney are among the 37 defendants charged.

“Mortgage fraud is a serious issue that affects not just financial institutions but ordinary citizens who may have invested in such financial institutions or who hope to purchase, sell or refinance a home by honestly setting forth their finances. Today’s charges also show that the mortgage fraud issue affects suburbs as well as cities,” said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who announced the charges along with Robert D. Grant, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Division of the FBI and Barry McLaughlin, Special Agent-in-Charge of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Office of Inspector General in Chicago.

Among the cases are:

• U.S. v. Lisnek, et al. is one of the most comprehensive mortgage fraud schemes ever charged in Chicago. The 22-count indictment names 19 defendants, including LaSalle Title Company and three other businesses, who allegedly schemed to fraudulently obtain loans totaling more than $10 million on 70 residential properties in Chicago, including many blighted homes on the city’s South Side between 2002 and 2007. The resulting losses by various mortgage lenders totaled approximately $5.8 million.
• The 23-count indictment returned in U.S. v Askar, et al. names 10 defendants accused of scheming to fraudulently obtain loans totaling more than $17.2 million on various multi-million-dollar condominiums and penthouses at 33 West Ontario St., also known as Millenium Centre. Between July 2004 and December 2006 the co-defendents are alleged to have fraudulently obtaining more than $17.2 million in loans to purchase nine Millenium Centre units.
• Six defendants accused of fraud and using stolen or fictitious identities to fraudulently obtain approximately $3 million in home loans from various lenders by submitting false applications for loans in U.S. v. Okulaja, et al.
• In another $3 million mortgage fraud scheme,  the nine-count indictment in U.S. v. Beck, et al. alleges six defendants were purported to be in the business of buying, repairing and reselling real estate.
• U.S. v. Luckett charges the chief executive of a Burr Ridge mortgage lender who allegedly defrauded GMAC Bank out of approximately $15 million in funding more than 450 fictitious residential loans.

All the charges filed in these cases are felonies. They carry a variety of maximum penalties including 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine on each count of mail and wire fraud affecting a financial institution or 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if no financial institution was affected. Alternatively, the court may impose a maximum fine totaling twice the gain to any defendant or twice the loss to any victim, whichever is greater. If convicted, the four business entities charged each face a maximum penalty of five years probation and a $500,000 fine.

“People who would want to commit this crime should understand there’s a lot of attention being focused on it, and we’d like to think that we have our ears up,” Fitzgerald told the Chicago Tribune.

See the original post:
41 Charged as Mortgage Fraud Hits Condos & Suburbs

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In this Bloomberg segment Dr. Nouriel Roubini shares his thoughts on why pundits proclaiming the stabilization of the housing market are wrong and why the current policy path is unsustainable and likely to have a messy exit. My favorite part? The idea of our debt ballooning from 40% GDP to 80%. Lovely. Can you say bust?

Definitely worth watching:

Read the rest here:
Roubini: No confidence in government exit strategy

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Nouriel Roubini thinks that the new Obama banking reform plan gets it 75% right.  This in a video interview on Yahoo! Finance.  His one caveat is that the previous Fed under Greenspan had all the power, but didn’t care about managing risk, they wanted innovation at any cost.  That mindset led us to the big bust – so that in addition to the reforms, there must be people who believe that their job is to minimize and manage risk, no push the market towards untested innovation and accumulation of risk.

An overview of the reforms by the WSJ:

Roubini’s interview:

I imagine our regular commenter Capitan Ned has something to say about this. That the push towards unifying regulatory control under one or two federal bodies reduces regulation to the lowest common denominator, easily influenced by the lobbying of the biggest players in Washington, while the people are left hung out to dry. Better, let the states enact and enforce lending at their level, where more oversight and a better understanding of local markets and trends can be applied towards common sense regulation. Further, haven’t we seen concentrated power at the federal level already? And didn’t that precipitate the bust? Letting big, federally chartered banks run rampant with state governments unable to reign in predatory practices? See Wachovia. At least, that’s what I think he’d say.

I’d make a slightly different argument. That we have all the laws we need currently. Maybe a few need to be tightened up, and I’m fine with that. However, instead of simply passing new legislation dollars must be invested in oversight and regulatory scrutiny and prosecution. Laws without enforcement are worthless, and that’s the system we’ve been dealing with over the last decade. In fact, regulatory bodies have been so thinly staffed on the enforcement side that they were unable to keep up with the boom and growth in the market. (For example, California’s department of real estate only had 37 enforcement officers for 500,000 licensed individuals.) This cannot happen again if we’re to expect the new legislation to make one iota of a difference.

See more here:
Roubini: Obama banking reforms get it 75% right

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USA Today, playing Captain Obvious, has an article that highlights how federal regulators failed to properly oversee banking institutions and missed key warning signs of the meltdown as early as 2005.  The FDIC blames the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and other regulatory bodies for incompetence and indifference in the face of mounting problems at small banks that should have been the canaries in the coal mine for broader systemic issues.

In at least 6 failed banks the FDIC notes that if regulators had simply done their job and required banks to curb risky lending behavior that failures may have been averted.  Of course the FDIC is not immune to blame either as there are reports that they waived many reporting requirements during the boom for banks of all sizes.

We have a regular commetor here, Captain Ned, who repeatedly skwerers the idea of federal regulation over the rights of the states to police their own lending institutions.  These reports definitely support that agrument.

From the article:

The inspectors general at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) have both issued reports saying that bank failures surged because regulators in some cases didn’t step in and prevent hazardous behavior, and in others actively helped banks hide their growing problems.

…

In at least six banks examined by the Treasury’s inspector general and at seven more scrutinized by the FDIC’s inspector general, regulators were incompetent or indifferent — willing to look the other way as bank executives took their banks down destructive paths. The Federal Reserve’s inspector general is conducting its own reviews on at least three institutions that failed under its supervision.

Read more here:
From the obvious dept – regulators incompetent

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USA Today, playing Captain Obvious, has an article that highlights how federal regulators failed to properly oversee banking institutions and missed key warning signs of the meltdown as early as 2005.  The FDIC blames the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and other regulatory bodies for incompetence and indifference in the face of mounting problems at small banks that should have been the canaries in the coal mine for broader systemic issues.

In at least 6 failed banks the FDIC notes that if regulators had simply done their job and required banks to curb risky lending behavior that failures may have been averted.  Of course the FDIC is not immune to blame either as there are reports that they waived many reporting requirements during the boom for banks of all sizes.

We have a regular commetor here, Captain Ned, who repeatedly skwerers the idea of federal regulation over the rights of the states to police their own lending institutions.  These reports definitely support that agrument.

From the article:

The inspectors general at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) have both issued reports saying that bank failures surged because regulators in some cases didn’t step in and prevent hazardous behavior, and in others actively helped banks hide their growing problems.

…

In at least six banks examined by the Treasury’s inspector general and at seven more scrutinized by the FDIC’s inspector general, regulators were incompetent or indifferent — willing to look the other way as bank executives took their banks down destructive paths. The Federal Reserve’s inspector general is conducting its own reviews on at least three institutions that failed under its supervision.

Credit:

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Great visualization of the average student loan debt carried by students coming out of college across the country.  Amazing that most states’ averages are more than $15,000 per student.  It’s tough to bash people for not saving enough when going to school automatically puts you in the hole as you enter the workforce.

It will be interesting to see how the secondary education bubble deflates over the next few years as students can’t turn to parents’ home equity loans and 401k’s etc. to fund overpriced college tuitions.

Image and h/t Brazen Careerist:

Go here to read the rest:
Student loans make living with debt a harsh reality for college grads

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The state of California is imposing a 90-day moratorium on all foreclosures as part of the new California Foreclosure Prevention Act that goes into effect tomorrow.  The law requires that lenders prove they tried to modify a borrower’s loan before initiating foreclosure proceedings.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

The law is expected to make lenders try harder to keep borrowers in their homes. Loan companies must prove they tried to modify the delinquent loans before they can begin foreclosing.

But supporters acknowledge the California Foreclosure Prevention Act won’t stop thousands of foreclosures from eventually happening. There have been more than 365,000 foreclosures in California since early 2007, with many more already scheduled.

The highlights of the law are (from California Assembly Member Ted Lieu’s site):

1. Imposes a 90 day foreclosure moratorium to allow distressed homeowners time to work out loan modifications with their lenders.

2. Allows lenders to avoid the moratorium if they have a comprehensive loan modification program based, in part, on criteria set forth by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Loans may be modified several ways, including interest rate reductions, extension of the loan term, or principal reduction.

3. Provides oversight and accountability by requiring regular reports to the legislature on loan modifications and foreclosure reductions, and coordination with appropriate state regulators.

We have some real rocket scientists up in our state legislature.  At least I’m not the only one who thinks this is completely idiotic. From Mish:

This bill is no more likely to work than a bill declaring poverty to be illegal or the sky to be green.

See the rest here:
California Foreclosure Prevention Act goes into effect tomorrow

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GOOD Magazine has a great graphic representation of the biggest bankruptices in history. (click link for bigger size) Check out Lehman bro’s $691 billion BK, more than 7 times the size of GM’s recent bankruptcy. (h/t Boing Boing for the image)

Source:
Largest Bankruptcies in History

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I remember going through a phase where I wanted to learn how to do card tricks to impress my friends and members of the fairer sex.  I read several books on the subject and the number one thing to learn is to get the observer’s eyes off the deck of cards.  Create a distraction.  In fact, it’s in all good illusion handbooks.  Misdirection, getting the audience to look in one place so they don’t notice what is going on in another is the key to being a good magician.

As the Obama administration announces its turn to its key campaign issue of healthcare, I cannot help but think back to those books and the key tenent of illusion – creating a distraction so that no one notices what’s really going on.  Now, granted, pulling it on a national level in front of an unwitting audience of hundreds of millions is far more difficult than getting your three snot-nosed friends off the scent; but the fact remains that this public move to healthcare by Obama seems nothing less than a ruse to get us off the scent of the bailout.  To get us to stop scrutinizing the complete lack of enforcement, investigation, reform or action (other than handing them hundreds of billions of dollars) against the  malfeasance, greed, ineptness of those that engineered this meltdown.

As bills like HR 1728 wind through Congress shifting ever-more power in the real estate market to the remaining big banks, and accounts of the Fed buying more mortgage backed securities and running secret repo accounts to keep the markets moving, and the dog-and-pony Congressional hearing of Ken Lewis and the complete lack of enforcement activity by the Federal government and…no wonder the administration is playing slight of hand.

Hopefully you’re as pissed as I am.  Your pissed that the government decides that 3-card monte is the way to reduce the public ire and let the status quo remain.  That the same folks who caused the mess and are now benefiting from it are also being given the wink-wink, nudge-nudge from the government.  An unspoken offer of amenesty to anyone who goes along with their ill-advised plans.

There is a great piece in the Huffington Post about the same thing, and is well worth the read.

This makes me nervous for two reasons. First, it portends a long drawn out legislative battle on health care reform with more time for industry lobbyists and the Congresspersons and Senate persons on their payrolls to compromise away or wreck the change we so deeply need.

Second, it confirms that the lobbyists for financial institutions — the people responsible for the collapse of our economy—have been scheming and wrangling to gut the reforms that could stop anther economic breakdown. Reviving this industry without restructuring and re-regulating it just guarantees another disaster down the line.

…

Shamus Cooke writes on Global Research: “History will likely show that these bailouts involved the largest transfer of wealth ever – from the working class to that small group of billionaires who own the corporations. This fact is recognized by most people now and is such common knowledge that even the mainstream media feels comfortable discussing it . . . matter-of-factly.

These corporations have also exerted tremendous influence in other realms of politics, working towards destroying Obama’s campaign promises of health care, job creation, civil liberties, the Employee Free Choice Act, peace, etc.

In each case, the promised reform was gutted of its essence, and ‘compromise’ versions of the bills are now being discussed: instead of universal health care, we will likely be universally mandated to purchase health insurance; instead of ‘job creation’ we are told that the stimulus has ’saved jobs’ (contrary to the evidence); while troops are ‘drawing down’ from Iraq, the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan is being escalated; instead of allowing workers to organize unions easier, a compromise version — Employee Free Choice Act, minus card check – seems more politically ‘pragmatic,’ etc.”

What do you think?  How angry are you that while employment tanks we’re being fed a line of crap about healthcare to take our minds off the fact that nothing, NOTHING, has changed.

Hocus Pocus.

Source:
Abracadabra Obama

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