Live chat with Robert Scheer at 2pm EDT - Topic is latest column, “They Go or Obama Goes”

[Bozita]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/they_go_or_obama_goes_20100825/

Robert Scheer on the Economy

11:00 am PDT — Aug 26, 2010

Join Truthdig Editor and columnist Robert Scheer for a live chat session to discuss his latest column, “They Go or Obama Goes.” Submit your questions now using the link below, e-mail them to [e-mail] or join the chat to ask your questions live.


Here's the column ...


They Go or Obama Goes
By Robert Scheer

Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.

The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers back then trumpeted as necessary “legal certainty” was provided to derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm drafted and which Clinton signed into law, that made legal the trafficking in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street’s sway under Clinton and Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.

It is Obama’s continued deference to the sensibilities of the financiers and his relative indifference to the suffering of ordinary people that threaten his legacy, not to mention the nation’s economic well-being. There have been more than 300,000 foreclosure filings every single month that Obama has been president, and as The New York Times editorialized, “Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Obama administration’s efforts to address the foreclosure problem will make an appreciable dent.” The Times noted that the administration’s main program has been a bust, with only $321 million of the $30 billion allocated to the program having been spent to help folks stay in their homes.

The ugly reality that only 398,198 mortgages have been modified to make the payments more reasonable can be traced to the program being based on the hope that the banks would do the right thing. While Obama continued the Bush practice of showering the banks with bailout money, he did not demand a moratorium on foreclosures or call for increasing the power of bankruptcy courts to force the banks, which created the problem, to now help distressed homeowners.

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[Octafish]

1. K&R every word.

PS: Robert Scheer lost his job as a star columnist for the LA Times for telling the truth about George W Bush and Richard B Cheney. Scheer's successor is the idiot Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne "Blue Dress & GOP Spy" Goldberg.

[Bozita]

2. timely kick