US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner claimed today that the US did too much in housing laying the foundation for radical retrenching of the government’s role in housing.
CNN Video of Sec. Geither on New Housing PlanThat determination paves the way for an
extensive revamping of the American housing market, one in which one of the bedrock pillars of the middle class is marginalized to many: homeownership.
Long viewed as emblematic of middle class status as well as an inflationary hedge and retirement investment, the Treasury Secretary is once again playing to his real constituency, Wall Street.
The Obama Administration plan Geithner proffered obscures the multitude of illegal and abusive housing practices Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy
cataloged:
"…The SEC settlements alone have revealed a plethora of illegal, predatory and deceptive lending related to mortgages, securities fraud, accounting fraud, insider trading, brokerage fraud, bribery of government officials, criminal conflict of interest, deception of shareholders and investors, and more.
Now the ”robo-signing” scandal is pulling back the curtain on Act II of this white-collar crime spree — revealing a new array of financial crimes by the very same institutions: robo-signing, fake witnesses, fake notaries, fake documents, fake attorneys, not to mention plain old theft as servicers rob consumers of hundreds or thousands of dollars in misapplied fees. There are additional crimes related to the way that banks have failed to correctly transfer promissory notes through the system and efforts to mislead and defraud investors."Like Obama’s decision to ”
move forward” rather than to investigate and prosecute the Bush administration for crimes like torture and invading a sovereign nation, Iraq, under a false pretense, Geithner’s plan looks past all the financial crimes that contributed to the collapse of the housing market.
Ignoring those illegal and abusive business practices lead to a crisis of 3 million foreclosures nationwide in 2010, and that number
could triple in 2011 to 9 million foreclosures.
By dismantling a pillar of the middle class, Geithner’s plan serves his Wall Street masters by dissolving one way individuals have more control over their future. ”Home ownership is one of the best ways for the middle class to accumulate some assets for retirement, to not have to worry about where they’ll live or what they’ll have to pay to live in their retirement,” points out
karoli.
karoli goes on to nail Geithner’s apparent end game, furthering Wall Street’s interests at the expense of average Americans, by speculating that the whisper campaign against home ownership benefits cash-heavy real estate investors ready for cheap real estate buys, while forcing Americans with excess cash and savings into Wall Street investments.
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