A look at the suburbs, the housing crisis, crime, ghettos and Neo Liberal solutions. The long article is sarcastic and a flippant, but is spot on with much of its criticism.
After all, pushing the poor out into the exurbs would solve a lot of problems with one simple action: you’d get rid of the housing surplus (by unloading houses that no one wants anyway onto the government) and privatize valuable public land—and you’d do it all for the “benefit” of the poor and disenfranchised. Now that’s free market efficiency at its best.
“ People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street. Unlimited money to blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relatively little money to build things in the US. The Administration may soon bring to Congress a request for an additional $50 billion for war. I can tell you that a Democratic version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is no more acceptable than a Republican version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trillions for war and Wall Street, billions for insurance companies… When we were promised change, we weren’t thinking that we give a dollar and get back two cents. ”
Dennis Kucinich (via afghanibanani) (via danielholter) (via buffleheadcabin)
This is not “news” but should not be forgotten. Sub Prime Mortgages were profitable for those selling them. They sure were expensive for America.
From racewire.orgThe management there, would encourage the loan officers, the subprime loan officers, to go into Baltimore city and target the churches, the African American churches, to get a relationship going with the minister or the reverend at the church and try to get that person to schedule some sort of meeting. They would call it a “wealth-building seminar” to get the parishioners of the church to attend. And any loan that was funded by Wells Fargo, whether a purchase or a refinance, $350 would then be donated to the church. And so, that was the incentive for the church to want to have these seminars there.
But what would happen is the only loan officers that would attend these seminars were generally the subprime loan officers. And on these conference calls, at one point, somebody made a joke who happened to be a white loan officer and said, “Well, will I be able to go to these seminars?” And they were told right there on the conference call, unless you were of color, you could not attend these conferences, these wealth-building conferences. So it seemed me—Wells Fargo didn’t come right out and say this; this is just what I saw—is that they wanted the African American Wells Fargo loan officers to sell loans to the African American community.
By James Howard Kunstler
Author of “The Long Emergency”
on October 19, 2009
Last paragraph:
The sense that Wall Street has pulled off a coup d’etat and taken over the machinery of the United States is the most powerful meme out there now, and its power is growing in magnitude every day among all classes of Americans. I can’t say how much it reflects reality. Even if it is a result of sheer happenstance - the tragic evolution of an industrial economy into a financial finagling economy - the citizens will still experience it as a stealing of their future. Whatever else one might say about American culture, it is keenly attuned to a sense of heroes and villains. We take great pride in our ability to blow away the bad guys. And life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde observed. If a zombie virus is on the loose in America, the first infections showed up in the zombie banks, among the zombie bankers. Watch out, Lloyd Blankfein! Woody is on his way….Commentary on our Financial Crisis
“ In his [Jan 22] speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no idea what he meant. This is, first and foremost, a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it wasn’t because Americans “collectively” refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a great idea. ”
Paul Krugman
[via NY Times]
(via ambivalence)
(via soupsoup)
(via retropolitics)There is so much blame the victim going around, it disturbs me. Look in the mirror did you cause the crisis? I don’t think so.
LINK
Steven Shaviro has written a personal piece concerning the current “crisis” at Re-public. It is well worth reading.
Shaviro is a Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI
Excerpt:
Even now, when the crisis is fully upon us, it’s impossible to understand it, or to make coherent sense of it. For the collapse takes place invisibly, and in slow motion. You can’t really see it as it happens. The day after all the credit dried up, the world looked the same as it had the day before. Eventually, you notice that there have been small, incremental changes. Some businesses have closed; there are less cars out on the street; there have been a few more break-ins in my neighborhood. But the “trickle-down” nature of these disruptions is such that you cannot ever view the changes directly.
The crisis is a disaster, in the sense described by Maurice Blanchot: “the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” My house has not been changed in the time since the crisis hit. It is physically exactly the same as it was, and it is just as comfortable to live in. But it has nonetheless been impalpably transformed. It has gone from being a source of notional wealth to being a burdensome debt. Just a few years ago, the equity I held in it was greater than my yearly salary. But now, its market value is considerably less than the principal that I still owe the bank, according to the terms of my mortgage.
Of course, I am one of the lucky ones. I still have a well-paying job; and one that, as a tenured academic, I am unlikely to lose. I should be able to keep on paying my mortgage without defaulting — even though, strictly speaking, I am paying a considerable sum each month in return for a property value that no longer exists.The bank will continue to earn a profit from me — even as my own savings are negative, and still going down. Because of my employment situation, I won’t face the consequences of this deficit until I am forced to retire — something I hope I can hold off doing as long as possible.
Elizabeth Warren: “The Middle Class Is Under Terrific Assault” from an article in The Huffington Post
Can anyone say Robber Barrons?
“In the film I show paintings that I love – Monet, Picasso, Francis Bacon. I need them. But we had to buy the rights to show them. Buy the rights to show something that you love. Can you believe that? In the time of the nouvelle vague you could just put images on the wall. Now they have agents like monsters. To show a Francis Bacon for less than 10 seconds, I think I paid €4,000.”
Agnés Varda, discussing her new documentary The Beaches of Agnès – The Guardian.
Symptoms of the basic sickness of our political economy, ownership run amok. Art has always been about appropriation and remixing. All the great artists know it and do it.
Nils Gilman: The Global Illicit Economy aka Deviant Globalization
Excellent video presentation (28 minutes) on how deviant (or black) globalization works and how its post-modern approach to commerce and social organization may represent our future. Covers Deviant Pharma, Deviant Medical, Deviant Software
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