The Banksters KNEW what they were doing
My daughter and I are reading Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” aloud to each other, and those Depression-era injustices seem so familiar today. That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong.
That is the final paragraph of A Banker Speaks, With Regret, today's terrific New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. The banker is James Theckston, who had been a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida. He is very open about the kind of mortgages being written, where
some account executives earned a commission seven times higher from subprime loans, rather than prime mortgages. So they looked for less savvy borrowers — those with less education, without previous mortgage experience, or without fluent English — and nudged them toward subprime loans.They wrote no documentation loans - no income verification for example, with executives looking the other way while people making $20K bought half million dollar houses hoping to quickly flip them. Why didn't they care?
Please keep reading
Harold Meyerson on the GOP's war on labor unions
is a must read. If you think the Boeing-IAM settlement stopped anything, think again. The NLRB is down to three members. If it goes to 2, it ceases to function. And Senate Republicans are determined (a) to confirm no new members while Obama is President, and (b) not to allow a recess so that Obama can do a recess appointment. They could not persuade the sole remaining Republican member to resign (which gives the Dems a 2-1 advantage for now), but member Craig Becker's appoint is about to expire at the end of this month.
You can read the whole piece here
Let me offer part of the article. I am going to start with part of one paragraph:
In the mid-20th century, 40 percent of private-sector workers belonged to unions; today, just 7 percent do. But the Republican struggle continues for two reasons. When it comes to elections, unions are still the most potent mobilizers of the Democratic vote — getting minorities to the polls and persuading members of the white working class to vote Democratic. Indeed, Republican gains among working-class whites (whom they carried by an unprecedented 63 percent to 33 percent in