How Monica Lewinsky saved Social Security

(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)

I have repeatedly said that progressives have to be most on the alert when Democrats are in power. It is under Democratic administrations that the oligarchy tries to achieve major goals because the party’s base, ever-vigilant to guard against encroachments when Republicans hold power, falls asleep when their own party is at the helm. We see Obama doing things in the name of national security that would have evoked howls of protest if Bush had done them. We see Obama treating Wall Street with a generosity that would be loudly protested if a Republican did it.

The big prize for the oligarchy is, of course, Social Security. The privatization of Social Security has been a long-cherished dream of Wall Street anxious to get their hands on that trillion-dollar account. In general, Republicans have been thwarted when they tried to do it. George W. Bush tried to privatize it in his second term but was beaten back and gave up on it. The Democratic Party has long been seen as the defenders of Social Security, which is why the oligarchy sees it as a better agent for achieving its goals.

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Our banking overlords get a rare setback

Recall all the speculation in housing that resulted in the crash that is currently causing large numbers of people to be foreclosed upon? That was due to mortgages being bundled together into huge slabs, sliced into small packages that were called SIVs (Structured or Special Investment Vehicles) and then traded like stock. (I did a series of posts explaining this debacle back in 2008 and the specific ones that dealt with this topic are #7 and #8.)

The result of this practice was that ownership of mortgages was diversified and it became unclear as to who the actual owner of any given property was, which enabled them to deny any responsibility for the upkeep of abandoned property as required by local ordinances. The blight on neighborhoods caused by this evasiveness was so bad that a Cleveland housing court judge got fed up and started levying penalties on whichever entity he could hold responsible.

But when it comes to selling off properties, the banks are not shy of claiming ownership. It turns out that banks, the very organizations that were instrumental in the crash, are now foreclosing on, and selling off, people’s property without proper documentation showing that they own the property. They decided they could just manufacture documents to show ownership.

Last fall, the banking industry’s foreclosure machine came under intense scrutiny with revelations that low-level employees called “robo signers” powered through hundreds of foreclosure affidavits a day without verifying a single sentence. At the time, analysts warned that the banks’ allegedly fraudulent document procedures could imperil their ability to prove that they owned the mortgages.

The Massachusetts State Supreme Court on Friday upheld a housing court judge’s ruling in that state that ordered a halt to two foreclosures unless the banks can properly documented their ownership. The history of that case can be read here.

To you and me, this would seem a perfectly reasonable requirement: you should not be able to sell something that you cannot prove that you own. But we live in a country in which banks have got used to thinking that normal rules don’t apply to them and these perfectly reasonable court rulings are being greeted with shock by the banking sector.

If this ruling is repeated in other states I wonder how long will it be before the banks demand of the Congressional and presidential clients that they pass special measures exempting them from the tedious business of carefully maintaining records that prove ownership?

Understanding the ‘bad’ choices of poor people

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell writes in chapter 6 about how government and social service agencies calculate carefully how much money should be given as public assistance to be sufficient, with careful budgeting, to purchase enough wholesome food to meet their nutritional needs. However, the actual choices of the poor, with its outlays on alcohol, tobacco and sweets, would appall social workers. These better-off people would scold the miners and their families for wasting their money on what should be considered luxuries, when their basic nutritional needs were not being taken care of first.
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Counting calories for the poor

Because people have such negative prejudices about the poor and unemployed as being lazy good-for-nothings who are trying to live off the fruits of other people’s hard work, they pay unusually close attention to prevent cheating and fraud by the poor. This explains why some people get more worked up by stories of petty fraud by poor people than by huge corporations and rich people carrying out massive swindles that have a far greater negative impact on almost all of us. People will rail about welfare cheats or workers in the cash economy not reporting all their incomes and thus paying less tax, while ignoring the tax sheltering schemes of the rich.
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George Orwell on the poor and unemployed

My ideas about what being poor and unemployed must be like were shaped by two books by George Orwell that I read at an impressionable age in my late teens that eloquently recounted his own direct experiences of that condition. One is Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), a semi-autobiographical account of a period in his life when he was really poor and at times homeless. The other is The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), where he recounts his experiences after he was sent on assignment to the north of England for an extended period, and lived in the homes of coal mining families at a time when there was widespread unemployment.
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Denigrating the poor and unemployed

The current high levels of unemployment in the US, hovering around 10% officially and likely around 20% really, seems to be on its way to becoming perceived as ‘structural’, an euphemism among policymakers for ‘permanent’ or close to it. Along with it, the poverty rate has risen to the point where one in seven people are now below the poverty line.

Unemployed people are dangerous to the oligarchy since they are the ones who are most likely to demand changes in the way things are done. What governments try to do to pacify people is make the unemployed feel as if their situation is due to their own fault, that they have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves. One way is to cook the unemployment numbers so as to make the figures seem lower than they really are. Low unemployment rates makes the unemployed feel that they are alone and isolated, and thus make them less likely to organize and protest.
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Is the US a nation of secret socialists?

Dan Ariely of Duke Business School is quite ingenious when it comes to devising experiments to determine how people think and what drives their decision making when it comes to economic matters. In his entertaining book Predictably Irrational, he challenged the traditional notion of economists that people are rational actors on the economic stage, making decisions in their own best interest. Instead he argues that people are irrational (i.e., not really thinking things through to get the best result for themselves) but irrational in a predictable way.
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Dean Baker on solving the budget deficit problem

I just returned from a talk by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and he said that there is no crisis in social security and the real crisis is the rapid rise in health care costs that, if unchecked, could raise the budget deficits from their current value of around 10% of GDP to disastrous levels of 30%, 40%, and even 50% in the next few decades. But our policy makers, instead of addressing this issue head-on, are instead deflecting attention to other things.

If our per capita health care costs could be made the same as Canada and the UK, the current budget deficits would become surpluses even if we did absolutely nothing else, such as raising taxes or cutting costs in other areas. It is that simple.

This is pretty much what I have been saying for some time, but Baker has studied this issue in great depth for many years and so has way more facts at his fingertips. He is one of the foremost authorities on social security, Medicare, and the budget. You can follow him on his blog.