Month: October 2010

I keep hearing people saying that Hispanics are angry with Democrats because comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been pushed.

That’s part of it, but in suggesting that Democrats sins are passive, it is effectively a lie. Under Obama deportations have actually increased, and this is entirely an administrative matter, which he could change himself without Congress’s approval.

I would add that the same is true of womens ability to get an abortion. Objectively worse than under Bush. For two major Democratic constituencies, Obama has not just failed to make things better, he has made them worse.

Meanwhile police refuse to pursue criminal charges against banks breaking into housing to change locks when they don’t have clear title to the property. Many people have lost their houses based on fraudulent paperwork submitted by law firms and banks, where the banks committed perjury about their title to property.

Virtually all of this is interstate commerce and falls under RICO statutes if you want it to. The DOJ could go after it tomorrow if Obama wanted to. He doesn’t.

One can only assume, since he has the power to put the fear of God into banksters and refuses to do so, that Obama approves of what they’re doing.

Obama is not a liberal. He is objectively making things worse for many Americans, including the most vulnerable and core constituencies of the Democratic party.

Republic of Men Rather Than Laws

By Ian Welsh

On October 1, 2010

Comments

A friend of mine notes the wave of fraudulent foreclosures, foreclosures where firms simply faked the paperwork needed to prove they have standing to foreclose (that they actually own the mortgage.) There have been some moves to stem the fraud, not the least of which is by Florida’s Attorney General Bill McCollum, but those who appear to be the worst offenders are firing back, going after him and other judges who have thrown out cases.

This is a logical consequence of refusing to go after banksters for fraud. The fraud was so systemic (the majority of CDOs based on housing) that virtually every major executive was involved. The DOJ and others chose not to prosecute criminally, and as a result the message was sent that the executive class, as a group, will not be prosecuted for fraud.

So, of course, they doubled down.

This is illness creep from the refusal to go after Bush era crimes. Political elites made themselves immune from prosecution for any crime that a lot of them are involved in, then corporate elites.

America isn’t a nation of laws, it is a nation of men. Has been since at least 2007, when Nancy made her choice not to go after wrongdoers. Obama confirmed this in 2009, when he refused to use the DOJ to go after either Bush era crimes or really go after mortgage and security fraud.

I hope it can be firebreaked here. Maybe it can. But when you exempt entire classes of important people from the law, every other group of important people sees no reason why they should be subject to it either.

If it is to be firebreaked here it must be done with criminal prosecution. Corporate elites won’t be deterred by fines, they consider them only a cost of doing business.

(Oh, and the next step if it isn’t firebreaked? Deficiency judgements: going after people for the amount that’s underwater.)

Is America past the point of no return economically?

By Ian Welsh

On October 1, 2010

Comments

This, from Numerian, is the sort of thing I was talking about when I noted that:

If you can build a factory overseas which produces the same goods for less, meaning more profit for you, why would you build it in the US?

Until that question is adequately answered, by which I mean “until it’s worth investing in the US”, most of the discretionary money of the rich will either go into useless speculative activities like the housing and credit bubbles, which don’t create real growth in the US, or they will go overseas.

Numerian notes:

We rescued the automakers so they could move to China. GM is a shadow of itself before the 2007-2008 crisis. It has shed plants and workers in the US, along with their ongoing health and other benefit obligations. But in its newly-shrunken state, its emphasis is not on the US, which rescued it from bankruptcy. GM is putting investment money in China almost entirely. Like so many other manufacturers before it, the company has ceased to be American, in the sense that its manufacturing is no longer done here and its workers no longer live here. Instead, its corporate headquarters is here, and little else. Even its profits are kept overseas to avoid paying US taxes.

He goes on to do discuss the debt trap, and notes that the US has lost its technological advantage, meaning there is no way to fix the problem now except through brutal austerity.

I don’t think this is quite true, but it’s damn near true, and it seems to be the assumption the elite is operating on. And by the time we get rid of this bunch of loser Dems, suffer through the Republican government to come and then get another shot at someone competent, it may well be too late.

The future doesn’t happen in America any more, and that means America’s just a place with too high costs and a lot of guns. There’s no damn reason to invest in the US except in leveraged scams, and until the US figures out a way to change that, things aren’t going to get better. Right now the US’s elites seem to think the way to fix it is to reduce wage costs till they’re competitive with China’s.

I’ve said this before, I’ll say this again: if you can get out of the US, GO! If not hunker down and fight, and fight smart. More on that later.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: October 2010

Objectively worse off under Obama

Republic of Men Rather Than Laws

Is America past the point of no return economically?