 sj |
||
|
||
BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown
|
|
|
|||||||
|
BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown |
Share Thread
|
||||||
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Donuel Date: 09 Jul 10 - 01:28 PM Art for a real eye opener click on your name and randomly review something you wrote 10 years ago. I bet you would be shocked to see how insightful and talented your post was, despite the fact you will not even remotely remember writing it. I call it hypnogogic writing. Others call it internet posting. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 08 Jul 10 - 08:13 PM "Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income" Wibble, wibble, - oh why do I bother.... sigh... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 07 Jul 10 - 08:16 PM Well, Art... Whether or not you did it is between you and yer doctor but... ...if you did it, thanks... If you didn't do it then tahnks to whoever did... B~ |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Art Thieme Date: 07 Jul 10 - 08:03 PM Granted I have terrible recent memory, but I have no memory at all of refreshing this thread yesterday! I'm not kidding. Is it at all possible for someone else to post using my name???????????? Joe or someone, please lemme know what you think!! Art
-Joe- |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Riginslinger Date: 07 Jul 10 - 07:02 PM If George Bush had been successful in privatizing Social Security, I wonder how long the US would have gone before things crashed. It surely would have bought a few years. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Donuel Date: 07 Jul 10 - 05:05 PM If we had only privatized everything including water, good air quality zones, Social Security hedge funds, Special courts... ad infinitum, we would no longer have need for the meddlesome middleman of goverment. We would simply be ruled by a board of corporations who of course have the most patriotic, empathetic, diverse and everyman's needs at heart. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 07 Jul 10 - 03:20 PM And as for these folks being revolutionaries??? Not really... They were independent-aries... |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: GUEST,Whistle Stop Date: 07 Jul 10 - 02:03 PM "The problem in the Colonies was not paying taxes; it was having no voice in their assessment or levying." Not really, Amos. "No taxation without representation" was a rallying cry of the time, to be sure, but the last thing the revolutionaries really wanted was proportional representation in Parliament. Any "voice in their assessment or levying" that the colonies would have gained by having colonial representatives in Parliament would certainly have been outvoted anyway, so the colonies would have been stuck with ineffectual representation AND taxes, and would have had their principle argument for independence taken away. No, the revolutionary colonists wanted independence, pure and simple. Fortunately for their cause, the mother country didn't call their bluff. [In case you're wondering, I'm an American.] |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 07 Jul 10 - 08:39 AM The taxes we currently pay are at a 30 year low... Yet to hear the Repubs talk one would think it was quite the opposite... No wonder we have such a large deficit... B~ |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Amos Date: 06 Jul 10 - 10:52 PM The problem in the Colonies was not paying taxes; it was having no voice in their assessment or levying. A |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 06 Jul 10 - 08:56 PM Yeah, The good ol' USA is a country on its way down... I mean, way down... The corporations have used very stupid and ignorant peiople to vote in corrupt representatives who in turn have turned the hen house over to the corporations... Let the Dems put a little regulation into the banking industry and Wall Street doubles down with their donations to the Repubs (Washington Post story about this today)... Bottom line: the Dems will learn their lesson to not mess with Boss Hog next time they have control... Bottom line, Part 2: We are screwed!!! B~ |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: ollaimh Date: 06 Jul 10 - 08:25 PM theright has been on a decades long campaign to lower taxes on the rich and run up government debt that is born by the average taxpayer. not unlike the french economy before the revolution. its a delusional time in america. people are looking to scape goat anyone but the poor economic planning of not taxing in proportion to debt. this is fueled by religions that promise a deist solution by rapture and end of days. but then american have always wanted to avoid taxes--remember the american revolution. the british were trying to getthe colonies to pay part of the debt england had incurred defending the colonies from the french. i don't think common sense is going to retur before a real collapse |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 06 Jul 10 - 08:27 AM I'll stick with my last post... Things are still the same on the ground... Just further along... We now hear that the corporations are sitting on a couple trillion bucks that they are not inclined to invest... Duhhhhh!!! Is there life after George Bush and 30 years of the corporations writing the rules???? I'm beginning to doubt it... And now the flat-earth Repubs are perfectly willing to put a stake in the heart of a fregile recovery in order to get back Congress??? What kind of heartless people are these people... Have they no love for the country??? Doesn't look like love... Looks quite the opposite... B~ |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Art Thieme Date: 06 Jul 10 - 02:04 AM refresh |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: Bobert Date: 26 Oct 08 - 08:37 AM Well, one thing is for sure and that is that the entire model for economic growth cannot be based on borrowing... That is what has occured... The entire housing boom was not suppotrted by actual growth in other areas of the economy but quite the opposite... It was doomed to failure because there was no real growth... There was artifical growth... Now we have run up a massive debt at a tine when we look around and find that most of the machinery used to produce products are no longer here in this country but in India, Pakistan, Baglidesh, China and everywhere but where American workers live.... Even Alan Greenspan has all but said, "We fu*ked up..." I think of the situation we find ourselves in and think of it as a house party that went very bad and now there's alot of mess to be cleaned up... B~ |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: CarolC Date: 26 Oct 08 - 07:30 AM THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much for that wonderful Atlanta welcome. It's nice to be back in this incredibly important community. You know, our nation faces a lot of huge challenges. Right now, we've got 60,000 troops fighting terrorism so that we can be free, all of us can be free. I appreciate so very much the resolve and unity and determination of this great land. I appreciate our military for their sacrifices. We're also doing everything we can to secure the homeland, to make sure that those who hate us won't take innocent life again. President George W. Bush and new home owner Al Smith tour Pryor Road Corridor Development in Atlanta, Georgia, Monday, June 17. White House photo by Eric Draper. And as we work for a more secure world, we've got to work for a better world, too. (Applause.) And that means as we work on our security from possible attacks by terrorists, we also work on economic security. The two securities go hand in hand. Anybody who wants a job who can't find one means we've got a problem. In Washington, they talk statistics all the time, and that's important -- people who count numbers need to make a living, too. (Laughter and applause.) But my attitude is, if somebody can't find work and they want to work, we've got to continue to work on expanding the job base. And part of economic security is owning your own home. (Applause.) Part of being a secure America is to encourage homeownership. So somebody can say, this is my home, welcome to my home. Now, we've got a problem here in America that we have to address. Too many American families, too many minorities do not own a home. There is a home ownership gap in America. The difference between Anglo America and African American and Hispanic home ownership is too big. (Applause.) And we've got to focus the attention on this nation to address this. And it starts with setting a goal. And so by the year 2010, we must increase minority home owners by at least 5.5 million. In order to close the homeownership gap, we've got to set a big goal for America, and focus our attention and resources on that goal. (Applause.)... ...And so one of the things that I'm going to talk about a little bit today is how to create a sustained commitment by the private sector that will have a powerful impact. First of all, we want to make sure that we help work to expand capital available to buyers, and as I mentioned, overcome the barriers that I've delineated, as well as provide the education component. In other words, this is not just a federal responsibility. That's why I've challenged the industry leaders all across the country to get after it for this goal, to stay focused, to make sure that we achieve a more secure America, by achieving the goal of 5.5 million new minority home owners. I call it America's home ownership challenge. And let me talk about some of the progress which we have made to date, as an example for others to follow. First of all, government sponsored corporations that help create our mortgage system -- I introduced two of the leaders here today -- they call those people Fannie May and Freddie Mac, as well as the federal home loan banks, will increase their commitment to minority markets by more than $440 billion. (Applause.) I want to thank Leland and Franklin for that commitment. It's a commitment that conforms to their charters, as well, and also conforms to their hearts. This means they will purchase more loans made by banks after Americans, Hispanics and other minorities, which will encourage homeownership. Freddie Mac will launch 25 initiatives to eliminate homeownership barriers. More here... http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020617-2.html |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: CarolC Date: 26 Oct 08 - 07:06 AM http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sasha-abramsky/blaming-the-poor_b_133864.html A funny thing has happened on the way to the forum. As the institutions of super-capitalism continue to implode, a number of conservative commentators have started to lay blame for the mess on poor people. Now that might seem strange given that poor people control approximately no major financial institutions; and it might seem unfair in light of the unprecedented redistribution of wealth away from the working and middle classes and toward the wealthy these past several years. According to the Urban Institute, these days sixty percent of low-income families still don't own homes - despite years of the hard sell designed to get them to buy; more than a third of them don't own cars, which in many instances means they can't get jobs since they have no way of getting to work; and nine out of ten of them have no retirement savings. By contrast, Forbes recently estimated that America's 499 billionaires (a number that has doubled in the past eight years) control $1.4 trillion in assets -- or at least did until the catastrophic market failures of the past month. It might even seem bizarre given the fact that millions of desperate men and women signed onto utterly manipulative, usurious, "creative" mortgages during the sub-prime gold-rush years, and, as a result, ended up losing what little capital they had accumulated over lifetimes of hard work as well as losing the roofs over their heads. To stretch a point, one could even view such a suggestion as offensive, since so many banks got into trouble by "bundling" mortgage securities that only preserved their value and generated profits so long as enough poor people signed on for the ride and agreed to be screwed. But, apparently, that's because you and I, dear readers, don't understand the intense psychological pull poor people have on rich folks, a pull that can, apparently, make the world's hardest, meanest, and most ruthless CEOs - highly educated men and women who've spent years honing the fine arts of profit-making -- part with good money on a whim and hand it over to a bunch of irresponsible, check-bouncing lay-abouts. Fox News's Neil Cavuto went so far as to explicitly link banks' lending to minority customers - a move they only reluctantly agreed to after decades of redlining minority neighborhoods and effectively removing most African-Americans from the home-ownership society -- with the current financial collapse. Thursday night, on Larry King, a conservative spokeswoman accused the community organizing group ACORN of "pressuring" banks to give mortgage loans to people with no jobs. Obama is supported by ACORN. QED: the whole bloody mess is Obama's fault. Let's forget for a minute about the attempt to blame the collapsing global financial edifice on a man who in one breath the Republicans accuse of having no government experience and in the next try to position as being single-handedly responsible for the creation of trillions of dollars in dubious loans. Let's look at the deeper notion that manipulative poor people are responsible for all of our current pocket-ache. Earlier this year, researchers from Demos, the think tank of which I am a fellow, published a book on America's escalating personal debt crisis, titled Up to Our Eyeballs. Among the findings: starting four or five years back, mortgage brokers were being paid by sub-prime lenders to trawl low-income and minority neighborhoods looking for marks whom they could hang high-interest rate loans on. The brokers were paid "yield spread premiums" for getting borrowers to accept higher interest rate loans than the baseline rate the company would have been prepared to lend them money at. The loans were front-loaded with high fees and adorned with such small-print items as pre-payment penalties. Between 1994 and 2005, the authors found, "subprime home loans increased from $35 billion to $665 billion." Many of these loans were given to people who in fact would have qualified for regular mortgages had they only known where to look and how to go about applying; had they gotten those regular mortgages they might not have faced personal ruin when their variable rates kicked in in 2007 and 2008. But then, again, had they got those mortgages a whole lot of sub-prime middle-men wouldn't have gotten their profits. That unqualified borrowers were given huge loans is, at this point, a given. That these borrowers, en masse, are to blame for the resultant crisis makes no sense. Sure, some people took out huge mortgages they had no intention of paying off simply because they were selfish. But that's not the story experienced by most of the low-income borrowers. Let's get real here. People borrowed because they were presented with offers they couldn't refuse. They were told that home ownership was the path to prosperity, and, like everyone else, they wanted their chance to realize their dreams. When they held back from buying property, they found the decks stacked against them: the same people who urged deregulation of the mortgage industry also lobbied for an end to rent controls and curtailments of government-funded public housing. And for those who still held back, who risked ever-rising rents and an ever-greater economic disempowerment, they were bombarded with pre-approval notices regarding mortgage applications from banks and finance companies who thought they could make a few quick bucks. They were repeatedly told, by financial specialists who ought to have known better, that buying, and then refinancing, their homes was a painless way to cushion their lifestyles. After all, the shills said, property values would inevitably keep soaring. And they were misled by brokers who didn't tell them what sub-prime loans really entailed. So I'll say it again: yes, many people made bad bets, didn't read the small print, didn't understand what they were getting into. But these are poor people, most of whom don't have the benefit of years of specialized higher education. When the times were good, conservatives were gleeful at the moneys liberated by lending to them at inflated rates of interest. How truly shameful that now the chips are down they're asking the poor to shoulder the moral responsibility for the country's fiscal collapse. It's as stupid a notion as Marie Antoinette telling Paris's starving masses to eat cake when they could no longer afford their daily bread. |
|
Subject: RE: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: CarolC Date: 26 Oct 08 - 07:03 AM http://www.newsweek.com/id/163451 Remember the ownership society? President George W. Bush championed the concept when he was running for re-election in 2004, envisioning a world in which every American family owned a house and a stock portfolio, and government stayed out of the way of the American Dream. These families were, of course, conservative, or at a minimum traditional and nuclear, consisting of a heterosexual married couple and at least two kids living in a stand-alone home with a yard, a car or two and a multimedia room with a flat-screen television. The latter was a new addition to this 21st-century simulacrum of the 1950s "Leave It to Beaver" idyll. But the dream was the same. Such a country would be more stable, Bush argued, and more prosperous. "America is a stronger country every single time a family moves into a home of their own," he said in October 2004. To achieve his vision, Bush pushed new policies encouraging homeownership, like the "zero-down-payment initiative," which was much as it sounds—a government-sponsored program that allowed people to get mortgages without a down payment. More exotic mortgages followed, including ones with no monthly payments for the first two years. Other mortgages required no documentation other than the say-so of the borrower. Absurd though these all were, they paled in comparison to the financial innovations that grew out of the mortgages—derivatives built on other derivatives, packaged and repackaged until no one could identify what they contained and how much they were, in fact, worth. As we know by now, these instruments have brought the global financial system, improbably, to the brink of collapse. And as financial strains drive husbands and wives apart, Bush's ownership ideology may end up having the same effect on the stable nuclear families conservatives so badly wanted to foster. The dream of a better society through homeownership didn't originate with George W. Bush. It's as American as Manifest Destiny. The Homestead Act in 1862 offered acres to anyone willing to brave the Western frontier. During Reconstruction, freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule." And after World War II, with Levittown and its cousins, affordable homes were a reward of victory. But until very recently, those hopes and dreams were connected to actual income and gainful employment. No longer. The giddiness of the Bush years built on the promise of the New Economy era, a promise perfectly encapsulated by a 1999 billboard advertising a shiny new subdivision in Scroggins, Texas, filled with homes that most of their owners couldn't really afford: YES, YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! That dream took a sharp hit with the collapse of the Internet stock bubble in 2000-2001 and then with 9/11, both of which destroyed billions of dollars of wealth. But it came roaring back in 2002, encouraged by Bush's post-9/11 exhortation that Americans could do their patriotic duty by going shopping and paying lower taxes, even as government spending exploded. Shop they did, and homes they bought. The spree wasn't confined to the United States. Britain has its own version of the ownership society, which received a boost from Margaret Thatcher, who promoted "a property-owning democracy" that her Labour successors, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, endorsed. Blair liked to talk of building a "stakeholder economy" with a big role for the ordinary property-owning citizen. More recently, Brown has spoken of creating a "homeowning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy." Millions were happy to buy into the vision. Tenants of government-owned properties gladly took up Thatcher's offer to sell them their homes at knockdown prices. More than 70 percent of Britons now own their homes, compared with 40 percent of Germans and 50 percent of French. The rest is here... http://www.newsweek.com/id/163451/page/2 |
|
Subject: BS: Bush's Ownership Society & the Meltdown From: CarolC Date: 26 Oct 08 - 06:55 AM This thread is a retrospective look at GW Bush's "Ownership Society" and its relationship to the current economic meltdown. Starting with this from Naomi Klein... http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/klein Disowned by the Ownership Society By Naomi Klein Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker. Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic. It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down. So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness. As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born. Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street. Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy. Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top. Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society. The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it? |
