Bailout for Brendan?

A bailout is in the eyes of the beholder.

Individuals who should have known better just leave your keys in the mailbox.

Educated professionals who were screwing around with mortgages? The soup line forms to the left for the poor uninformed shareholders...........

No soup for you Brendan.....

Walmart Broke Labor Laws, Again

I stopped shopping at Walmart years ago, when I learned:

> they locked their nightshift employees;

> put women on a different carrier path;

> failed to provide health care

> paid indentured servants wages


Unfortunately, there is a disconnect with our consumer citizens that Walmart's low prices are not good for their community. How many small businesses were put out of business?

The employees can't afford homes near these superstores. So they have to commute and be subjected to managerial behavior that harkens back to the Industial Age.

Compounding the problem, stores such as Walmart don't pay local taxes. Locally governments give away the store for fear another town will have the priviledge of their presence.

Walmart is a bad employer and neighbor.

Herbert: Oh Happy Day, For the Oil Companies

"One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, American troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target — the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The Times Magazine in November 2003:
“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry — not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry — probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”
How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its contracts with big oil."

Once again, Bob Herbert nails it. Did we forget, the guy who folks wanted to have a cup a coffee with is an oilman?

Far too many voters, vote against their own economic interest because cultural reasons. The Republican party kidnapped God and high jacked values during the Nixon administration.

The money being spent to retrieve the oil in Iraq will not be spent on the bridges, health care or new green initiatives.

Folks were outraged when Clinton and Company stole a few White House trinkets before they left. What we are witnessing with this band of theives is the theft of our economy. Worse the death and destruction of our war heroes and the collateral damage to their families.

If this is not the case for treason, I really don't know what is?

Ralph Cioffi should be jailed

Mr. Cioffi saw fit to move his money in March but turned down investors requests to do the same in April. The best lawyers on Wall Street can't explain this away. 

What these greedy bastards did was criminal.

Paul Krugman: Yes We Did!

Krugman is correct in saying that we as a nation have changed for the better.

With the focus on terriorists, poor people and black men are no longer the major focus of contempt. Education is critical in order to compete in a global economy.

However, crappy schools in the inner cities and rural America leads to crime and feeds racism.

Racism is alive and well as evidence in the Clinton campaign. I will be interested in Krugman's view after the McCain camp has fun with the Clinton talking points.

Clinton = Four more years of Bush

Robert Reich is being polite in his post. HRC sounds just like Bush. Why listen to experts when I just know I know best?

Her gas plan coupled with obliterating Iran is straight out of the Karl Rove playbook.

Now I know why he resigned from the Bush administration, to work for HRC.

God help us.

Labor Day is Important

“I just don’t think that as a country we’ve conceptualized that this is not our father’s or our grandfather’s economy,” Mr. Stern said in an interview. “We’re going through profound change and we have no plan.”

The feeling that seems to override all others for workers is anxiety. American families, already saddled with enormous debt, are trying to make it in an environment in which employment is becoming increasingly contingent and subject to worldwide competition. Health insurance, unaffordable for millions, is a huge problem. And guaranteed pensions are going the way of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper.

“We’re ending defined benefit pensions in front of our eyes,” said Mr. Stern. “I’d say today’s retirement plan for young workers is: ‘I’m going to work until I die.’ ”

Unless you inherit a nice trust fund, my daughter's soon to be obtained college degree will only increase her debt. We as a national are in a bad place.

When this is articulated by the liberal community, the Repugs scream that we are pessimistic. If you go to work everyday and do not fear for your job or benefits, this is not a issue.

Our true concerns should be the shaky economy not the portrait Guiliani and Bush continue to paint. One week of money currently being dumped into Iraq could be spent on affordable education and a sane health care delivery system.

We all should pay attention to Labor Day.

Work it out

"Our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn’t prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.

Most of the proposals I’ve seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices — which would have been very useful three years ago — but they wouldn’t help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.

Consider a borrower who can’t meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan’s terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.

Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, “the first link in a financial merry-go-round.” The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there’s nobody to deal with.

This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there’s a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn’t be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.

And we’ve done this sort of thing before — for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries’ debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.

The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages — not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans — at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I’m happy to listen to better ideas.

The point, however, is that doing nothing isn’t the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts — but let’s help borrowers work things out."