Will someone also please investigate whether Rahm is a closet Republican? He handed control of Congress to Republicans after NAFTA and he’s doing it again. I’m guessing he and Obama will work the system for their corporate chums while they can, then pop over to work K Street when the ‘thugs return to power. Then they’ll get back into government when the political winds change…

We have to vote out both Republican and Democratic incumbents from the top down. Until we get rid of the leadership of both parties, all the frittering around the edges of the parties won’t get us anywhere we need to be.

I can (almost) understand the heartless too-big-to-fail banks resuming foreclosures, but not Fannie/Freddie. They are the US government, we’re reassured when apologists try to calm us about their infinite bailout. Well, I don’t want my government putting people out of their homes. Is that so hard to understand? I also don’t get why my government needs to endorse a $42,000,000 compensation agreement with what are essentially government employees managing a government-owned portfolio.

We have generals managing larger budgets who are paid according to the military pay scale, and assistant secretaries of defense paid by a GS scale. Time to put Fannie & Freddie managers under a similar scheme.

If they don’t like it, they can find other jobs in the financial sector. There’s plenty of those nowadays, right?

Rahm’s good works apparent? Apparently.

Certain companies are Too Big To Fail, and certain politicians are Too Big To Jail.

“Too big to jail.” That should be a bumpersticker.

Agree, Teddy. As a GSE (gov’t sponsored enterprise) they ought to be at least as responsive to people in houses as they are to the housing market. I get that they’re publicly traded, and have shareholders but it would seem that holders of common shares aren’t going to come out of this very well, either. From Jane’s update link:

Both Fannie Mae CEO Michael Williams and Freddie Mac CEO Charles Haldeman were given $6 million annual pay rates for 2009, with all the compensation coming in cash. Other top executives received annual cash payments of $2 million or more each, according to the companies’ filings.

The lack of stock and options for Fannie and Freddie executives suggests that when Congress and the Obama administration decide what to do with the mortgage firms, shareholders could be left with little or no equity.
[...]
George said it’s not a surprise that top executives at Fannie and Freddie would demand all-cash compensation packages.

“The shares have no long term value,” he wrote. “This reinforces our view that the common shares will eventually trade to zero.”

[emphasis mine]

It’s amazing how the shareholders, whose needs are often cited as the justification to do all sorts of moves that hurt a company’s long-term future, get shafted in the end.

brilliant.

So despite unlimited cash the homeowners get nothing just the banks do banks vote November looks bleak. We can’t save the Dems now.

Chris Christie?
(that was a cheap shot – but too big to pass)

Factor in the health care piracy and by the end of 2010 the whole damned population will be homeless. I recommend everyone invest in a poncho and some snare wire.

Uh, so Fannie and Freddie have been nationalised, being now part of the government, and they’re going to forclose on people. This is going to end well.

The quasi-privatization of government will mark the decline of the American way of life.
It’s bad enough that they game the system to enable excessive risk taking, but when it all goes belly-up, they claim that all the best people were doing it and expect Mama and Papa Mainstreet to cover the bets.

Haha, love it!

thats now the american way, and as a result im sure we will go the way of others like the byzantine empire, the ottoman empire, the russian empire, all full of to big to fail – to important to jail swells. america in the 21st century, good riddance i guess.

well… I recently read a Liberty University (whose seal is the image of a burning book, literally) defense of why the supremacy of America will go on and on. It came down to:

1. Americans are Christians, who, unlike much of the rest of the world, take comfort from their future, immortal life with God, giving them the confidence to be a great nation – impetus that the lack of world lacks.

2. Climate change, if it happens, will benefit America whilst smiting our enemies.

3. Americans make more babies than other countries.

Really. Those were the three reasons given.

Of course, there is another perspective, argued in Atlantic Magazine this month, that Christianity actually caused the foreclosure crisis and the great crash:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel

This is a second bank bailout a stealth one I wonder how long before the Media talking heads figure this out?

According to Calculated Risk, the banks got a bailout but the foreclosures will continue in January

Progressives in these communities should make an all out effort to contact families who will lose their homes.

They should further make an all out effort to publicise their plight by contacting the local media and, with the permission of the families, put actual flesh and blood mothers, fathers and children before the cameras. Show what is being done to them.

They should point out the obscene contrast between what the Obama administration is doing for the banks on Wall Street and what it is not doing for the families on Main Street.

Is this being done? Here you have this golden opportunity to boldly draw attention to how the government treats the rich and the not so rich in the midst of this tsunami of pain and suffering that is The Great Recession.

Now, either progressives are out there doing this and the media is ignoring them or they are not really out there at all.

Wall Street shits on Main Street because Main Street lets them. And if, come November, 2010 they reelect the Republicans, what will progressives have done to stop it.

Let the currency printing presses roll

Compensation to these Doing God’s Work criminals, egregious as it is, pales in comparison to the derivative black holes they created in the financial system.

The U.S. Treasury, FDIC, OCC and Federal Reserve who bungled any meaningful regulation and oversight for a decade, are now filling in those black holes with future taxpayer debt payment to maintain the fiction of actual macrofinancial stability.

It’s beyond pathetic that every 2008-09 bailout, disclosed to or hidden from the public, has worked against forcing predatory lenders to write down their loans and keep struggling homeowners in their homes.

Marcy’s right. When it comes to providing for the corporate good, America’s real economy never gets the memo that it’s been fired.

This is another nail in the coffin of the middle class.

This is just total bullshit, and now we will start hearing from Katrina vanden Huevel that this is another disgrace from which Obama has to be sheltered. We must not harm his election prospects even if he is a threat to the well being of the country.

With these actions it’s as if Obama is defiantly provoking the country and laughing in its face. This jerk assumes he is free to do as he wants and that the public is powerless to react. He has shown that he is unfit to run the country and he should not be re-elected, Katrina vanden Heuvel notwithstanding.

I think this is another area which cries out for public action and redress. One step to pursue is to vigorously investigate and prosecute Emanuel. And the other is to collectively withdraw funds from large financial firms and place deposits into community banks and other holdings into firms that do not engage in derivatives of any kind.

Possibly the biggest victims will be the people who thought that HAMP was anything but a dream come true for the same people who wrote loans that could not be repaid. Subprime loans, Option ARMS and other bubble creating schemes when initially reworked by HAMP have a nasty bunch of surprises in them. Probably the worst being that when the buyer signs up, the new mortgage allows the holder to take the house on demand if they say they believe the new plan won’t work. The holder doesn’t have to inform the people trying to pay the new mortgage payments that they have been foreclosed upon. You come home, see the eviction sign and leave. HAMP pays the mortgage holder no matter which way it goes, does not attempt to address the real problem which is principle and allows the holder to decide when the deal is not going to work.

There have been some interesting stories around Fannie & Freddie, independent pseudo government agencies that they are, using the non-contestable, silent foreclosure apparently without a hint of remorse.

On a side note, ignoring for the moment that the F&F guys are completely underserving of their huge paychecks. The compensation deal is in future cash. These guys won’t take stock in the companies they are running into the ground and certainly wouldn’t take some baskets of the the assets they sell to the taxpayers.

In other countries, nationalization means that the government takes over banks or corporations.
Due to American Exceptionalism a.k.a. the Geithner Doctrine, in the US it means the opposite.
We all work for Freddie, Fannie, GS, Citi and AIG; we just don’t get bonuses.

I also don’t get why my government needs to endorse a $42,000,000 compensation agreement with what are essentially government employees managing a government-owned portfolio.

We have generals managing larger budgets who are paid according to the military pay scale, and assistant secretaries of defense paid by a GS scale. Time to put Fannie & Freddie managers under a similar scheme.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding! ANd the gold star goes to Teddy!

Update: Fannie and Freddie shares soar on the bailout news, 17% and 21% respectively.

Any bets banks, wallstreet insiders and Dems and GOPer bought ahead of the news or had friends and family buy?

Of course who is still not buying are the insiders within Fannie and Freddie. Just the cash, thank you very much.

bbbbbut. That would be illegal! Good Amurican capitalist politicians would never… ;-P

I have a question that a local Right Winger keeps parroting that I find difficult to answer: What fiscal policies of GW Bush has Obama changed? His argument is that Obama is using all of the same policies that Bush was using. Any suggestions on where I can find some profound differences in Obama’s fiscal policies as opposed to Bush’s?

Basically, Obama’s fiscal policies differ from shrub’s in three ways, as I understand it:

- no excluded military contingencies (hiding spending for wars off balance sheet)

- fully costing out Medicare reimbursements, Social Security and other trust-fund items

- inflation-indexing of anticipated tax revenues

The combined impact of these shrubbish acconting manipulations was just shy of $3 trillion a year, which shrub effectively “hid” from public view.

That’s the wonkish answer, at least.

….but not Fannie/Freddie. They are the US government….

What did the health care “reform” charade teach us: That calibrating where Wall Street ends and Washington begins is almost as futile as calibrating where Washington ends and Wall Street begins.

So you have to follow the money. And, of course, having done that you begin to grasp how, in not being able to tell them apart, that is the whole point of their relationship.

You begin to look at American “democracy” in a whole new way.

It either overwhelms you or it doesn’t. If you know what I mean.

You really can’t overestimate the stupidity of this Administration.

Foresclosures will

1) hurt American families (not a real concern of this Administration)

2) depress home prices and should trigger revaluation of bank mortgage related assets (I’m guessing there will be a song and dance and this won’t happen)

3) cause increased CDO defaults and CDS related collateral calls

4) bring the whole MERS controversy to the fore and force lenders to prove their connection to and control of the mortgage deed (I just don’t think boobs like Geithner and Summers have given this any serious consideration at all)

5) will continue to scare consumers into saving further depressing the economy

6) continue not to address the need for cramdowns

HAMP is new. The open ended bailout of Fannie and Freddie is very new. Bumping up the number of troops is new in the sense that Bush didn’t really care much about Afghanistan.

He convinced a few government employees like Greg Craig to stop collecting a federal paycheck so you can’t say he is always spend, spend, spend.

Certain companies are Too Big To Fail, and certain politicians are Too Big To Jail

But that’s only because so many folks on Main Street allow themselves to be too small to matter to either one.

In the 1950s black Americans began to change that for people of color. And in the 60s and 70s feminists and gays began to change that for women and homosexuals.

Hint hint.

There have been some interesting stories around Fannie & Freddie, independent pseudo government agencies that they are, using the non-contestable, silent foreclosure apparently without a hint of remorse

The definition of political economy:

1] The social science that deals with political science and economics as a unified subject 2] the study of the interrelationships between political and economic processes.

Or, to rephrase it, the interrelationship between 1] the government 2] Wall Street and 3] Main Street

Educate yourself about how political economy works in America. Educate yourself about how the mainstream media misdirects us in the opposite direction.

How does political and economic power sustain itself in America? In a word, Bilderberg.

Again:

Here is a list of names we keep reading about in the news relating to the economic crisis.

Tim Geithner
Larry Summers
Hank Paulson
Ben Bernanke
Paul Volcker
Alan Greenspan
David Rockefeller

All members of the Bilderberg Group. All men who wield enormous power when it comes to shaping economic power at home and abroad.

And yet when I suggest it is legitimate to probe the relationship between the Bilderberg agenda and the current economic crisis [regarding both players who started it and players attempting to stop it] I am often viewed by folks as one of those crazy 9/11 truther wackos.

Actually, not to explore the systemic relationships that exist between very rich and very powerful men seems crazy to me

Thanks and the irony is that the right winger hammers on the increased deficits as a rallying cry. OF course he was cheering the Bush era spending. I just wanted some ammo against the local tea bagger.

Thank you.

Thanks Jane.

I am preparing myself for the day David Stockman Rahm gives a speech explaining how tax cuts for the wealthy will trickle down.

Don’t forget it was the Bilderberg meeting near Dulles Airport in June 2008 which candidates Obama and Clinton both ditched the press to secretly attend (Obama going so far as to get the press corps on an airplane to Chicago so they couldn’t follow him before having Gibbs laugh at them on the plane telling them they’d been suckered).

(CNN video of Gibbs misleading the press is here. Sorry I can’t find a copy without the added commentary balloons, but the underlying video is the real thing.)

Oh, I remember that all right. And I remember the mainstream media spending days and days and days diligently trying to probe the significance of it.

Or maybe not? ; o )

While many are lamenting the plight of underwater home owners no one is on the side of the prudent – the savers who get 0.01 percent on Tbills and the renters that did not buy into an over inflated housing market!

We have a political economy that subsidizes mortgage holders, agri-businesses, health insurance companies, Wall Street banks whose debt is guaranteed by taxpayers and so on and on.

Welcome to the next fascist state while both Democrats and Republican party leaders play political kabuki with the citizens and their partisans.

Subsidization of agriculture began a very long time ago and is completely bi-partisan. It works to protect the ag business. The question to day is much like the one about military ‘defense’ spending: have we gone too far and do we need to pull back.

Subsidization of the banks wasn’t Obama’s idea and isn’t wonderful at all. We need to pull back on that as soon as it’s safe.

A lot of gov’t money, subsidization, occurs for some initial good reason and then just goes on and on. We do the same for the oil industry and it is for some good reasons. But, the industry has changed since it began and the program needs to be redesigned and shrunk to retain it’s utility without the extravagant stupidity (and waste of taxpayer dollars).

This open ended fund will help large banks, institutional and foreign investors still holding toxic assets from their speculative binge in housing related products. It will not necessarily help the loan originating local banks, mortgage lenders, or homeowners facing foreclosure. HAMP has hardly been a success with the mortgage servicers, and it’s not clear whether the Treasury’s removal of the government guarantee ceiling on Fannie/Freddie will ultimately make much difference to homeowners. Things will get worse when the Fed stops its MBS repurchases and rates rise. It is what it is. Another bailout of Wall Street but not Main Street.

what does any of this have to do with Rahm Emanuel?