From Affordable Housing in Missoula to the Austerity War in Greece

by William Skink

A national survey on housing affordability labeled Missoula one of the “expensive surprises”, placing the median cost of owning a home at a quarter of a million dollars. Bob Oaks, director of the North Missoula Community Development Corps., thinks that figure “is pretty crazy“. I don’t disagree.

Housing, though, is just the tip of the crazy iceberg called the economy, which tanked 7 years ago thanks to the bursting of a housing bubble. For more crazy, this Salon piece from last year examines the massive fraud Holder’s Department of Justice failed to address:

Joseph and Mary Romero of Chimayo, N.M., found that their mortgage note was assigned to the Bank of New York three months after the same bank filed a foreclosure complaint against them; in other words, Bank of New York didn’t own the loan when they tried to foreclose on it.

Glenn and Ann Holden of Akron, Ohio, faced foreclosure from Deutsche Bank, but the company filed two different versions of the note at court, each bearing a stamp affirming it as the “true and accurate copy.”

Mary McCulley of Bozeman, Mont., had her loan changed by U.S. Bank without her knowledge, from a $300,000 30-year loan to a $200,000 loan due in 18 months, and in documents submitted to the court, U.S. Bank included four separate loan applications with different terms.

All of these examples, from actual court cases resolved over the last two months, rendered rare judgments in favor of homeowners over banks and mortgage lenders. But despite the fact that the nation’s courtrooms remain active crime scenes, with backdated, forged and fabricated documents still sloshing around them, state and federal regulators have not filed new charges of misconduct against Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank, U.S. Bank or any other mortgage industry participant, since the round of national settlements over foreclosure fraud effectively closed the issue.

Many focus on how the failure to prosecute financial crimes, by Attorney General Eric Holder and colleagues, create a lack of deterrent for the perpetrators, who will surely sin again. But there’s something else that happens when these crimes go unpunished; the root problem, the legacy of fraud, never gets fixed. In this instance, the underlying ownership on potentially millions of loans has been permanently confused, and the resulting disarray will cause chaos for decades into the future, harming homeowners, investors and the broader economy. Holder’s corrupt bargain, to let Wall Street walk, comes at the cost of permanent damage to the largest market in the world, the U.S. residential housing market.

This serious contagion within the U.S. housing market will only be exacerbated by an entire generation so saddled with debt and shitty job opportunities that home ownership will seem an unreachable fantasy. That is basically the conclusion of this NYT article examining the mystery of missing buyers:

Given demographic trends, there should be plenty of housing demand. Immigration has slowed in recent years, but the nation’s population has still grown by about 20 million since the housing downturn began in 2006. Yet those additional people are translating into fewer new households than historical patterns would predict.

This is a problem for the whole economy, and at its core is the mystery of the missing buyers.

“Household formation,” as economists call it, is the foundation of demand in the housing market. When a young adult moves away from home and gets her own apartment, a household is formed; when a retiree moves out of his own place and into the apartment above an adult child’s garage, one ceases to exist. The number of American households is in constant motion; it is determined by millions of individual decisions that Americans make about their living situations.

Since 2007, those decisions have tilted overwhelmingly toward not dividing up into as many households as in the past. The number of households rose by an average of 569,000 a year from 2007 to 2013, according to census data, down from 1.35 million a year from 2001 to 2006.

Using different data sources, Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate information company Trulia, estimates that by last year there were 2.3 million of these “missing” households — households that would exist if historical patterns had held, but instead are nowhere to be found.

Why the missing households? To a large degree, they can be explained by young people choosing — or being forced by circumstance — to remain at home longer than they have in previous generations.

Thanks for solving that mystery for us, NYT. I guess that barista with the masters degree in biology isn’t going to add a quarter million dollars in debt to own a home in Missoula any time soon.

While U.S. bankers continue to avoid any meaningful consequences for their criminal behavior, all eyes will be on Greece this week. As ATMs ran out of cash this weekend, the worsening economic crisis will keep banks closed until at least July 7th, along with the imposition of other capital controls.

Other countries, like Spain and Italy, will be watching what happens to Greece very closely to see how far the ECB is willing to take its austerity war. Stay tuned…

Celebrate, but Remain Vigilant!

by William Skink

Yesterday SCOTUS made it unambiguously clear that two people with the same under-the-belt mechanics can be legally recognized in all the ways us heterosexual married couples take for granted. That is huge.

Yesterday’s victory took decades to accomplish and shouldn’t be minimized, though pandering politicians and old testament zealots obsessed with sex will try. They will try, and they will fail.

My wife and I talked with our kids about this, and they sorta nodded their heads like, so what? And that is huge. It won’t be nearly as big of a deal for them as they grow up because of the sacrifices and bravery of so many before them.

As much as celebration is warranted, political talons are being sharpened and the news cycle is packed with the dire consequences of racism and terrorism. On the political front, Hillary Clinton is publicly cheering the SCOTUS decision while those without political attention deficit disorder recall a not-so-distant position Clinton had to evolve, as pointed out last year in this Atlantic piece.

In that article, written after Terri Gross’ interview with Clinton exposed a deep vein of defensiveness, Andrew Sullivan is quoted from this piece:

She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).

What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was. Here’s my guess: Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.

On the racism front, there are services and speeches and political opportunities for rhetoric against the Confederate flag. Then, this morning, a beautiful direct action from Bree Newsome removed the symbol of hate flying outside the statehouse in Columbia, SC.

And on the terrorism front, there were attacks across the globe. A tweet from @rConflictNews summed up two days of violence like this:

2 Days of Terror:
156 killed in #Kobane
24 killed in #Kuwait
1 killed in #France
27 killed in #Tunisia
30 killed in #Somalia

There are so many hot spots of war around the world, the amount of refugees fleeing violence have hit levels not seen since WWII.

While it’s important to acknowledge glimmers of hope that we humans can be more humane and inclusive with each other, it’s equally important to recognize how far we need to go to address the violence American foreign policy produces.

Rich People Rules, the Corporate Class and the Uselessness of Democrats

by William Skink

Stupid Skink, you allowed a glimmer of hope from Democrats to blind you to how DC functions. You thought enough Dems on Capitol Hill would continue to oppose fast-track authority, but you were wrong. Fucking Democrats. How could you forget that there are Rich People’s Rules when it comes to the desires of the corporate class? I guess you need Dean Baker to remind you:

Congress gave the American people and the world something to celebrate last Friday. The House of Representatives refused to pass the package of bills that would have given President Obama fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This was a huge victory for a campaign led by labor unions, environmentalists, consumer groups and other activists against the country’s biggest corporations.

A victory by the masses, or “everyday people,” over big money and big media is always grounds for celebration. But it is important to remember the game is far from over. This is one of those bills, like the TARP, where we are playing by rich people’s rules.

That means that the other guys get to have do overs until they get the outcome they want. Some folks may remember the vote on the TARP, the Wall Street bailout package. The Washington establishment was shocked when liberal Democrats and populist Republicans combined to defeat the original bill in the House. But that was not the end, after all the life of the Wall Street banks was at stake.

We know how that temporary stand against the TARP bailout turned, don’t we? And now the same thing with fast-tracking America into tighter corporate control. Here are your worthless Democrats, as reported by Mother Jones:

Well, it looks like the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty is in business. The standalone fast-track bill just passed the Senate by a hair, 60-37. Several Republicans defected and voted no even though they had voted yes the first time around, but only one Democrat defected. So now it goes to President Obama’s desk, where he’ll sign it.

I wish Democrats experienced consequences for these constant betrayals, but they don’t. At Salon they think Hillary is going to lose to Bernie because of her deftly vacuous rhetoric around issues like trade. Sure, Salon, and I’ll have some of what you’re smoking please:

Clinton spoke on Roosevelt Island the day after the House TTP vote. She said the word ‘trade’ once, when breathlessly observing that she could see the new World Trade Center over her shoulder. In a year she has made just one statement on the issue. Months ago, when asked a question by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell she said, “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. And we have to do our part in making sure we have the…. skills to be competitive.”

The morning after Announcement II, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, appeared on “Meet the Press.” When asked her position on the TPP he managed to sound indignant: “She actually has been very clear about where she stands on trade…. First, does it grow jobs, grow wages and protect American workers and second, does it protect our national security…”

Podesta said Clinton would “render her final judgment” after the deal was done. That was it. Her non-answer would be her final answer until such time as it no longer mattered what she thought. Podesta’s performance may have tripped an alarm even in the tone-deaf Clinton camp. Later that day in Iowa, she talked for the first time on the record about the TPP. In a story headlined Trade Deal Comments Put Hillary Clinton at Odds With Her Former Boss, the Times told how she “bluntly suggested that the president should ‘listen to and work with’ Democrats to improve the deal and ensure better protections for American workers. If that cannot be done Mrs. Clinton said, ‘there should be no deal.’”

This may have been the story my liberal friends read. It reads as if Clinton came out swinging, but read it again and it’s clear she said even less there than she said to Andrea Mitchell. If Obama can’t work with Democratic House leaders who both support the TPP, there shouldn’t be a deal. But why wouldn’t he? Her verbal feint was sublimely subtle. Without changing her position, without even taking one, she repositioned herself on an issue roiling her party and nation. As message politics goes, it was state of the art. Too bad for Clinton it isn’t working.

Hillary puffs on the hopium and her followers breathe it in deeply. Through the haze the husk of her words are filled by the hopes of her supporters. It’s a choreographed dance of deceit with just enough suspended belief to make it palatable.

John Halle, over at Counterpunch, puts the treasonous support of free trade in juxtaposition to the racist execution of 9 church goers in Charleston. He calls it Obama’s Neoliberal Endgame:

It is a testament to the optimism of the left that some of us were able to find a silver lining even in the most toxic of black clouds which was the Charleston massacre. One of these was Maurice Mitchell of the Movement for Black Lives who was quoted as taking comfort in “the organizing and the heart and resilience we are seeing on the ground”. Mitchell was “hopeful that it will continue—that we might be able to precipitate a meaningful, transformative political and cultural shift in this country.”

Unfortunately, Mitchell’s optimism was probably misplaced for reasons Naomi Klein provides in The Shock Doctrine: crises, even those which might seem to galvanize the left, are routinely used as a smokescreen under which the right pursues their most regressive policies.

Last Thursday was no exception.

Indeed, while the bodies were being counted, the U.S. Congress approved HR 1314, a major step to achieving Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA, which will result in far more devastation in African American communities than white supremacists’ bullets. The difference lies in the violence being effected by fountain pen wielding men in suits resulting in unseen destruction–of jobs, environmental protections and organizing rights all of which adding up to mass unemployment, misery, and hopelessness and, ultimately, thousands of premature deaths.

There’s no connecting of the dots, no examination of the Big Picture. So what if Walmart stops selling Confederate flag merchandise? The corporate class is preparing their “free trade” shackles for us plebes while we discuss Obama’s use of the word nigger. Symbolic wins can’t replace policy losses. Electing Obama is the perfect example. While Democrats celebrated this symbolic victory, Obama served the corporate class more effectively these past 7 years than a McCain or a Romney could have.

And with Hillary we will get the same thing: a symbolic victory while the corporate class continues its incremental enslavement of the useless eaters they despise (but still marginally need for their profits).

And so it goes…

Understanding America’s Relationship with Saudi Arabia

by William Skink

How did America become entangled with one of the worst state-sponsors of terrorism, Saudi Arabia, a nation that just carried out its 100th beheading? According to the report last Monday, one of the dangerous criminals who met this gruesome fate was a foreign national arrested for a non-violent drug crime:

Saudi Arabia has reportedly taken its number of executions for the year to 100, far exceeding last year’s tally and putting it on course for a new record.

According to a statement from the Saudi Press Agency, two more convicted criminals were killed by the government on Monday – including a foreign national guilty only of a non-violent drug smuggling offence.

While all that beheading is taking place half a world away, in the states–specifically, Montana–Saudi nationals have fled to the relative safety of their homeland after allegedly sexually assaulting female students and, just reported today, after being caught cheating. From the link:

CAIRO – A group of Saudi students caught in a cheating scandal at a Montana college were offered flights home by their kingdom’s diplomats to avoid the possibility of deportation or arrest, according to a cache of Saudi Embassy memos recently published by WikiLeaks and a senior official at the school involved.

The students were in a ring of roughly 30 alleged cheaters at Montana Tech accused of having systematically forged grades by giving presents to a college employee.

The cheating was discovered – and the staffer was fired – following an investigation made public in early 2012, but the memos reveal for the first time that the students were almost all Saudis and that their government booked them flights home following a meeting between college administrators and Saudi diplomats in Washington just before the scandal broke.

This story comes courtesy of the cache of memos recently released by Wikileaks, and it will certainly generate lots of interest for those interested in America’s perverse relationship with this barbaric nation.

There is a lot to learn from this release, especially when it comes to media manipulation. Binoy Kampmark at Counterpunch takes a look at that angle, as does Moon of Alabama. Remember that ridiculous plot featuring a used car salesman who was trying to pay assassins to kill a Saudi diplomat in DC? It was supposedly a scheme cooked up by those wily Iranians. Here is the wikipedia entry about the plot.

At the time, b, the German blogger at Moon of Alabama, called the plot nonsense. He was right and the New York Times was more than wrong–it was suckered into promoting a false propaganda narrative that benefited both the Saudi regime and the Obama regime.

To really understand this relationship America has with Saudi Arabia, one must go back to the year 1945. Luckily we have some help from documentary film maker, Adam Curtis. His relatively new film, Bitter Lake, examines the madness that has flowed from the meeting between President Roosevelt and King Abdulaziz:

In 1945 President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia (whose son Abdullah died last week, to be replaced by yet another son, Salman) on board a warship on the Great Bitter Lake. It was a meeting that would have extraordinary, far-reaching and unintended consequences, for the west, for the world.

Curtis’s story unfurls from there, taking in America, Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Soviet Union. And Afghanistan, which found itself not just at the centre of the world, but the centre of a snowballing – and ongoing – international scandal. It’s a story that includes the spread of Wahhabism (no wasabi jokes, thank you); the oversimplification of the world, by Reagan and Bush (Sr) and Bush (Jr) and Blair, into a kind of fairytale of good v evil; the banks, inevitably; Bin Laden and 9/11 too, also inevitably; and now Islamic State, who want pretty much exactly what the Wahhabists wanted over half a century ago.

It’s a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve. America protected Wahhabism through its thirst for Saudi oil, and in doing so helped sow the seeds of radical Islam today. In Afghanistan they built dams to irrigate the Helmand valley, making it perfect to sow actual seeds, opium poppy seeds. The past is strewn with patterns, and warnings, if only anyone had bothered looking and tried to understand. But history is a bit too complicated for today’s politicians.

If we don’t try to understand what this fateful partnership with Saudi Arabia has wrought, then we will continue to operate under the fevered delusions fueling our post-9/11 insanity in the Middle East.