Do you support the "Occupy" movement?

[Bob Hubbard]

So far the 99%ers are only hitting 27%. Now, I'm no math wiz, but......

Poll ends on the 28th so time will tell.

 

[ballen0351]

Here the Labour candidate can get 1000 votes, the Liberal 1000 votes, the Independant 1000 and the Conservative 10001. The Conservative will get in despite only 10001 people voting for him and 3000 not wanting him so yes voting and the ballot box is very fair... not.
I'd keep to comments about your side of the pond if I were you.

How is that not fair? 10001 is greater then 3000

 

[Bob Hubbard]

How is that not fair? 10001 is greater then 3000

I think theres a typo. Think she meant 1001 not 10,001.

Hell, that's how Lincoln won.

 

[ballen0351]

I think theres a typo. Think she meant 1001 not 10,001.

Hell, that's how Lincoln won.

Ok I got it now. I though math was different over there or something.

 

[billc]

How do they count that high over there, they only have 10 fingers and 10 toes?:angel:

 

[jron]

They have some very good points, they have the potential to tank the cause the same way the PETA has, and they have been villified by right wight turds in an election year. The same turds that supported the bankers that could have tanked the economy.

 

[granfire]

The same turds that supported the bankers that have tanked the economy.

there, fixed.

 

[Big Don]

The same turds that regulated the bankers and strong armed them into making bad loans have tanked the economy.

Fixed it for you and Gran

 

[Sukerkin]

That's really not the case, Don, is it? I know it's the story that's been hitting this forum since about 2008 when the crisis started but it's not the economic truth.

Incentivised greed without proper adult supervision is more like it, with a housing bubble over-pricing assets, boosted by the connivance of the loan-givers, who acted as if the ride would never end as they profit-took with both hands.

 

[ballen0351]

That's really not the case, Don, is it? I know it's the story that's been hitting this forum since about 2008 when the crisis started but it's not the economic truth.

Incentivised greed without proper adult supervision is more like it, with a housing bubble over-pricing assets, boosted by the connivance of the loan-givers, who acted as if the ride would never end as they profit-took with both hands.

I can tell you from 1st hand knowledge thats what happened. My sister is a dirt bag, 3 kids 3 different drug dealing fathers, works for a few weeks then gets high and forgets to work and get fired, lives off my parents, and the Govt. She was living in Section 8 housing when they had a meeting with Govt officals I believe they were from HUD telling her and others they "Deserved" to buy a home. Now granted when she does work its minium wage jobs so she cant afford a home. She filled out the paper work and bam next thing you know she was prequalified with a loan from a bank for $145,000 home loan. Heres the Kick in the butt she only had to pay $200 a month for her house payment the GOVT paid the rest. Then to top it off she recieved a grant for an additional 30,000 to buy furniture and appliances. She lived there for about a year until she could no longer make her $200 a month home payment. She should have NEVER been allowed to borrow money in the first place. Now the house sits vacant, forclosed on, and she never needs to pay back a dime of the $145,000 or the $30,000 grant. She sold off all the appliances and funriture for dope and a car. So Ive seen it happen.

 

[billc]

Or, the federal government threatening the banking industry with federal action if they didn't increase home loan rates to under served groups, that is people who couldn't afford the homes in the first place, and since they weren't going to sit there and absorb the government enforced defaults, they unloaded the debt. Blame Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, his boyfriend, and Chris Dodd.

Ballen, I don't understand how this practice keeps getting left out of the equation when people discuss the mortgage melt down as if the government didn't cause the problem.

Good posts all around Ballen.

This book names the names of the guilty in the mortgage crisis and economic mess...

 

[Big Don]

That's really not the case, Don, is it? I know it's the story that's been hitting this forum since about 2008 when the crisis started but it's not the economic truth.

Except, that it is exactly the case, Mark. There is even a term for it: Ninja Loan

 

[Sukerkin]

I'll have to re-read the post again, Don but I thought that, rather than Ninja loans, it was saying that somehow the Democrats were at fault?

If so, in America, the lenders were literally forced by law to lend? That is not what I have read or heard discussed by those with more economic clout than I have. If it's true then that re-colours my interpretation of how the sub-prime crisis grew.

When I talk of "incentivised greed", what I mean is that conditions were such that the lenders kept on lending despite knowing there was no guarantee that the bubble would inflate forever and so someone would be left holding the baby. The onus is always on the lender when it comes to financial transactions and, in such cases as Ballen describes, even with the tempting cheese of 'free money' from the government, the banks should have kept the cash box closed because they knew that the 'asset' was not going to be worth the 'price' once the bubble burst.

 

[Big Don]

What happened, Mark, was a number of politicians decided everyone should own homes and that the reason that poorer people didn't was because banks were unjustly prejudiced against them. The banks were RIGHT to be prejudiced against people who cannot/will not pay their mortgages, that is, btw, how banks make money.

 

[aedrasteia]

She should have NEVER been allowed to borrow money in the first place. Now the house sits vacant, forclosed on, and she never needs to pay back a dime of the $145,000 or the $30,000 grant. She sold off all the appliances and funriture for dope and a car. So Ive seen it happen.

Yep. The Morgenstern book is great - and here is the best summary of all. THE GIANT POOL OF MONEY

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/355/the-giant-pool-of-money

suggested to me by friend - conservative financial planner, accountant.

" Davidson and Blumberg take you, the listener, along on their reporting journey where you meet (and in some cases may even like) the people who did the borrowing, the bundling, the loaning, the deceiving, and the profiting — until it becomes clear that everyone involved is culpable."What makes this story interesting is that it's not a simple case of some bad actors, some criminals victimizing people," said Davidson, who began working with Blumberg on the story in February. "Sure, there were criminals at every step of the chain. But the core of this story is that almost everyone—from borrowers, to brokers, to bankers and wall street investors—effectively worked together: deceiving themselves and each other into believing that they could create massive wealth with little risk. Almost everyone involved was a victim and a victimizer at the same time."
The benefit of having two smart narrators is that they interrupt one another if something sounds puzzling, then explain it to listeners in a conversational style as if they were sitting together in a coffee shop.
They also masterfully translate economic gobbledy gook.
To explain why a $70 trillion (yes, trillion) global pool of money shunned investing in the safe U.S. government and went instead into risky mortgages, Davidson and Blumberg played a clip from former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan that would go over the heads of most of us. They even apologize for quoting the inscrutable Greenspan.
Then Davidson translates. What Greenspan is really saying is, Davidson tell us, is: "Hey global pool of money, screw you. You are not going to make any money on U.S. Treasury bonds for a very long time. Go somewhere else!"
My friend said this series was the absolute best he'd heard and he substantiated every major point.
He's an old-fashioned guy. old school values. He said that almost every contact person at the financial institutions/banks
he worked with was urging him to join in during 1996 - 2007. they each made HUGE commissions off of every transaction.
The transactions were bundled and resold as 'mortgage securities' - and MORE HUGE commissions were made
as these 'phantom' financial instruments got passed around and up the line - with 'insurance' attached to guarantee
the viability.

I asked him what was at the root??? He's a very old school conservative man: he said -
the loose regulations that allowed the creation of 'securitized' financial instruments - fake things.
Time was, a mortgage was 'held' by a local or (at most) regional bank. If it tanked, local people/banks
felt the hit. But new regulations (pushed by banks etc) let them bundle the mortgages, sell the bundle
as a 'security' and let people buy and sell shares, betting on the repayment of the loan.
Why do this?? Because every person in the chain made HUGE commissions at every step.

He's really an old values person and has a clear-eyed view of people - no idealist. Says greed is behind
every part of this and all the barriers that ought to be in place were wiped out by the industries who paid
their lobbyists to 'de-regulate' and somehow the market would keep the greed restricted. So thats whats happening
now. But the cost is horrific and paid mostly by the people at the bottom of the pyramid or ordinary people
not connected with the institutions caught as the rest of the economy tumbles.

He's right - this series made sense of this mess and his assessment was something I could trust.

 

[billc]

A timeline of the mortgage meltdown...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/what_really_happened_in_the_mo.html

June 1995

Republicans had won control of Congress and planned CRA reforms. The Clinton Administration, however, allied with Rep. Frank, Sen. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Waters (D-California), did an end-around by directing HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo to inject GSEs into the subprime mortgage market.

As Kurtz notes,"ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the CRA from GOP reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond." What resulted was the broadening of the "acceptability of risky subprime loans throughout the financial system, thus precipitating our current crisis."

The administration announced the bold new homeownership strategy which included monumental loosening of credit standards and imposition of subprime lending quotas. HUD reported that President Clinton had committed "to increasing the homeownership rate to 67.5 percent by the year 2000." The plan was "to reduce the financial, information, and systemic barriers to homeownership" which was "amplified by local partnerships at work in over 100 cities."

[FONT=times new roman,times]Kurtz concludes, [/FONT][FONT=times new roman,times]"Urged on by ACORN, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration helped push tolerance for high-risk loans through every sector of the banking system -- far beyond the sort of banks originally subject to the CRA. So it was the efforts of ACORN and its Democratic allies that first spread the subprime virus from the CRA to Fannie and Freddie and thence to the entire financial system. Soon, Democratic politicians and regulators actually began to take pride in lowered credit standards as a sign of ‘fairness' -- and the contagion spread."[/FONT]

[FONT=times new roman,times]Attorney General Janet Reno, with a number of bank lending discrimination settlements already, sternly announces, "We will tackle lending discrimination wherever it appears." With the new policy in full force, "No loan is exempt; no bank is immune." "For those who thumb their nose at us, I promise vigorous enforcement," reiterated Reno.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman,times]
[/FONT]

1980s

With CRA came increased oversight of lending institutions to ensure they were giving credit to low- and moderate-income communities. Regulators expressed that CRA was not designed to compel credit allocation, nor did it require risky lending practices. Moreover, ECOA (Equal Credit Opportunity Act) and FHA, not CRA, were in place to address discrimination in lending. But community organization groups like the radical ACORN began efforts to reshape CRA into government-imposition, in accord with what "affirmative obligation" might suggest. They began pressing the semantic open door and stretching the "discrimination" provision to complain about enforcement of the regulations as lending institutions resisted bad lending practices in poor minority communities.

1990s

With the mechanisms in place, the community organizing groups began developing directed strategies to exert more and more pressure on the lending industry in the cloak of complicity with CRA. Community organizer Barack Obama worked closely with ACORN activists. Employing the radical Alinsky intimidation tactics Obama had learned and was teaching -- "direct action" -- activists crowded bank lobbies, blocked drive-up teller lanes and demonstrated at the homes of bankers to browbeat risky lending in poor and minority communities. Those who resisted were accused of racism to the media and government officials.

The agitators could now stall or hijack bank mergers by filing complaints of non-compliance against the institutions. Lawsuits alleging redlining and racism began flooding the court system. With the prospect of expansions and mergers threatened, banks settled cases and, significantly, increasingly made loans they would not have normally made. The net effect, as ACORN litigation increased, was that credit standards lowered.

Initially the GSEs resisted purchasing these risky mortgages but eventually the Clinton Administration instructed them to substantially increase the percentage of these mortgages in their portfolios. The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of the Clinton reforms became "a feeding trough," in the phrase of Peter Ferrara.

The poor communities and their exploitive leaders benefited from the capitalization with a surge of homeownership, at least on the surface. Wall Street benefited from increased sales of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and guaranteed mortgage-backed securities, as the housing market benefited from new capital channeled from Fannie and Freddie. And the GSE heads profited, with political support in Washington in the form of campaign contributions.

1992

Enforcement of CRA was "sporadic," as the Washington Times notes, until a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study asserted that there were "substantially higher denial rates for black and Hispanic applicants than for white applicants." Co-author Lynn Browne was approached by co-author Alicia Munnell to do the study because "community activists were complaining that mortgage loans were not being made in minority communities."

According to the Times, however, "the study had mishandled statistics on minority default rates. When the errors were accounted for, the same study showed no evidence that nonwhite mortgage applicants were being discriminated against."

 

[Makalakumu]

I support the OWS movement and have take part on several occasions. The movement is leaderless and fractured, but they agree that financial/corporate control of the government has got to end.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

So they support consumers paying their fair share? or just the "rich"?

 

[Makalakumu]

So they support consumers paying their fair share? or just the "rich"?

There are a fair amount of socialists amongst the group and there are also a fair amount of Ron Paul Libertarians. It's better the classify the movement on what is agreed upon rather then their differences...as the corporate pressitutes would have everyone do.

 

[Josh Oakley]

presstitutes. lol