It’s called racism. It’s a helluva drug.
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Yeah, it is irritating when reality gets in the way of a narrative.
(By which I mean the narrative that the establishment Democrats are something other than well-mannered Republicans.)
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Wow, you weren’t kidding about it being a long read. Certainly worth it, though. Thanks for sharing that.
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The rest of the world is heavily outgunned, and a China/Saudi/Russia/India/France/UK/Japan/Germany alliance [1] seems unlikely, to say the least.
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[1] The next eight largest military spenders, totalling roughly equal to the US on military expenditure in 2017. We might need a few more countries after the latest budget, though.
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Your point is well made.
However, I was more referring to individual countries where the “team white, right, etc” is in the ascendancy. US, UK, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Philippines, Brazil, etc.
Upon reflection, I was wrong to include “white” in the list of adjectives, given some of the countries where the culture wars are coming to a head, even though it is clear that this is a major part of their platform in places like US, UK, Poland, Hungary, Italy.
Basically, all of these countries face some sort of culture war that goes beyond economics and politics, and it is just that in some (if not all) of them part of that cultural difference being weaponised is colour or ethnicity.
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I’d be more inclined to stick with your first version of the list. The roots of all this lie in the history and present manifestation of European imperial capitalism, and white supremacy was a foundational element of that. The consequences have spread beyond that now, but it’s still a key factor.
The extreme right is stirring in Australia as well, BTW.
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On the one hand, in the vast majority of the foreclosure fraud cases, the borrower pledged the property as security for a loan, and the defaulted by failing to make the payments as they had agreed to in the contract that they signed. And I see no evidence here that Cesar Sayoc’s house was one of the rare exceptions. OTOH, the lenders consistently, intentionally and as a matter of course simply ignored the legal requirements to be able to foreclose upon the property in case the borrower defaulted on the loan. Of course those legal requirements are there partly to prevent those rare cases of foreclosure by mistake or as theft. They create an independent paper trail so that there is something more then he said/she said when the government taked the property of one person and hands it to another. And it’s not like the lenders shouldn’t have been familiar with the legal necessities to complete a foreclosure action. These were long-standing rules that stand at the very heart of mortgage business. But they ignored them to save a little time and money.
And then, when confronted with a lack of the legal authority to initiate a foreclosure action, the banks had forged documents created. For the most part they didn’t do this in house, but farmed it out to companies such as “Lender Processing Services,” but there is no credibility to their claim that the lender’s didn’t know what was being done on their behalf. So I would argue that while the debt shouldn’t have been extinguished, it should have been converted to unsecured debt, like a credit card, which is relatively easily extinguished in bankruptcy. And of course the mortgage loans should have been pushed back on the lenders that made them since they did not comply with the “representations and warranties” made by the originator when they sold them to the big finance companies to be securitized.
Of course the failure to hold anybody but the borrower responsible for this shitstorm of laziness and fraud does fall squarely upon the Obama administration and Turbotax Timmy, who were more highly concerned with saving the the banks on Wall Street than the people on Main Street. It is also true that this might not have happened in the first place if the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration had tried to prevent the RE bubble in the first place, instead of cheering it on.
Edited to add: And there should have been a whole bunch of disbarments. All those lawyers that signed off on documents that they should have known to be forgeries should have been disbarred and prevented from submitting documents or pleading in court again.
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…Say what
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I’m sure it was the premonition of getting a mortgage that he would end up unable to pay that led Sayoc to phone in a bomb threat in 2002.
Yes. And no. I agree ref European imperial capitalist roots, up to a point. But Islamist right wing fuckwittery (Turkey, Philippines? Saudi?) has its own flavour, and other varieties have other sources (Brazil?). And what about Russia, China, and so on? Authoritarian, nationalist, right wing culture battlegrounds where anything that is leftish or liberal or open or international is the enemy. (Plus see Uighur education camps in China and the near eradication of Tibetan culture.)
Although, to come back to your point, and use a gardening metaphor, they may just be different varieties grafted on to the same rootstock to ensure vigour as they grow to produce their own fruit. So, perhaps, yeah, on balance. I guess “we” taught the world how to do this, first.
Say what?
The Democratic establishment is far from perfect, and certainly not socialists despite what the GOP propaganda says. But if you actually look at the stuff they do, it should be blatantly obvious to any honest observer that there’s a massive difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Anyone who thinks that the hypothetical Clinton administration would be the same as the unfortunately factual Trump administration has left behind the reality.
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Wait til you hear his opinions on non-constitutional monarchies vs. liberal democracies.
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And then there’s this.
The Democratic establishment is far from perfect, and certainly not socialists despite what the GOP propaganda says. But if you actually look at the stuff they do, it should be blatantly obvious to any honest observer that there’s a massive difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Anyone who thinks that the hypothetical Clinton administration would be the same as the unfortunately factual Trump administration has left behind the reality.
Think back to Bill Clinton’s presidency. Republicans hated him, remember their impeachment farce. But think about what sort of things Clinton actually did: ‘tough on crime’ minimum sentencing, dropping enforcement of anti-monopoly laws etc. B Clinton discovered that the way for a Democrat to win the presidency in the post-Reagan era was to pursue a Republican-agenda. And Obama used basically the same playbook. H Clinton’s campaign leaves no doubt that she would have done the same.
Would H Clinton have been better than Trump in the short term? Almost certainly, though it’s pretty low bar and she would have to be a pretty slick limbo dancer to make it under. And the face of the presidency would be radically different. But how fundamentally different would anything be? Would she have pushed universal, single-payer healthcare or more government-sanctioned bolstering of the health insurance industry? Would she have pushed for free higher education, or continued the predatory loan system in place currently? Would she have stopped the US’s collaboration in Saudi mass killing in Yemen and put economic sanctions in place against the regressive Islamic terror nation or would she have shook the hands of bone saw princes because they have big gold purses?
Talk about leaving reality behind.
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Exactly. Because Hillary is not supportive of every single program that Sanders supports, she is just as bad as Trump. All her legislation, all her executive orders, all her executive and judiciary appointments would be just as bad as Trump. Isn’t this just common sense?
You make what seem like logical points. I just wonder why so many deluded people don’t agree with you.
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Yeah, and I bet she would also talk of ‘fine people on both sides’, approve of people bodyslamming reporters, support known child molesters, and (well, you get the idea).
In the leadup to the market collapse, lenders were aggressively incenting mortgage bankers and brokers to steer prospective home buyers into unnecessarily risky loans. So much so that new Reg Z provisions were added to curb the practice.
Additionally, it was not until the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Dodd-Frank act (post depression) that there were substantial laws governing how mortgages loan were to be serviced.
Did a loan servicer misapply, or otherwise make an accounting mistake with one of your payments? Tough fucking luck. With no framework for conflict resolution, and no motivation for banks to care, a loan could slide into delinquency or foreclosure before a customer’s valid complaint was even resolved.
This doesn’t even account for the raft of predatory practices surrounding bank accounts and credit cards.
Suffice to say the deck was so clearly stacked against consumers that a large volume of “legitimate” foreclosures were very likely caused by a financial insolvency created entirely by predatory practices in the banking and lending services industry.
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I’ll simply say she wouldn’t have nominated Kavanaugh, or put these idiots in as her cabinet -
These assholes have done more damage to our country than cadet bonespurs could do on his own.
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Absoloutely. Many people agreed to get loans that were demonstrably not the best loans that were available to them. And many more got loans that for which there was no reasonable expectation on ANYBODY’S part that they would be able to pay them off according to the terms without refinancing. But nobody forced any of these borrowers to get these loans. There were no gun toting thugs threatening them if they didn’t agree to buy a house and agree to mortgage terms like reverse amortization or horribly high pre-payment penalties. Yes, many of the "used money salesmen in the mortgage business were unscrupulous sharks, but it is NOT unreasonable to expect that people should actually understand the very basics of the terms of their mortgage before they “sign on the line that is dotted,” and make the biggest financial decision of their lives. Instead many, many people gambled that house prices would continue going higher forever so that they could be saved by the “appreciation fairy.” And when that fairy failed to show up, they almost invariably found somebody else to blame for the fact that THEY agreed to a series of payments that they never had any chance of making.
edited to add. Keep in mind the Florida (like my state, Maryland) is a “full recourse” state. After a property with a mortgage has been forecloses on, the lender has the legal right to go after you for THE REST OF THE MONEY THAT YOU OWE. THAT was how I persuaded my Brother-in-law that buying a second house to gamble on the RE bubble was a BAD idea.
