Ellen Brown: We may not be able to beat the banks, but we don’t have to play their game. We can take our marbles and go home.
Fighting Foreclosures: Compassion in Action
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Matt Ward: Nationwide, the Occupy movement’s defense of foreclosed homes and individuals is an embodiment of the compassion espoused by the history’s greatest prophets and philosophers.
Foreclosures 101 – Part 2
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Kwazi Nkrumah: After U.S. housing prices peaked in mid-2006 and began a sharp decline thereafter, refinancing became more difficult.
Kamala Harris: Foreclosure Settlement Scores Points, Raises Questions
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Sharon Kyle: Kamala Harris’ broad smile and “down home” style was gobbled up by the crowd as members of the African American Caucus listened and showed support for their Attorney General.
Foreclosures 101 – Part 1
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Kwazi Nkrumah: For years the banks, real estate agents and investors in real estate securities on Wall Street were making money hand-over-fist. They did all this while pretending to break from their previous established history of gross discrimination and red-lining against the disproportionately non-white borrowers whose limited financial resources forced them into “sub-prime” status in the first place.
Robo-Signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
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Ellen Brown: The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008.
California AG Kamala Harris Standing Firm Against Foreclosure Settlement
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Sharon Kyle: Kamala Harris standing firm on decision to reject bank settlement that could garner the state $15 billion but would release bank liability.
Ex-Marine Fights Freddie Mac to Save His Home
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Peter Dreier: recent report sponsored by bank reform groups reveals that if banks lowered the principal balance on all underwater mortgages to their current market value, it would pump over $70 billion per year back into the economy.
Will Obama Administration Now Go After Massive Mortgage Banking Frauds?
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Ellen Brown: In his State of the Union, President Obama announced that he would be creating a mortgage crisis unit to investigate wrongdoing related to real estate lending.
The Foreclosure Crisis: Urgent as Ever and Could Get Worse
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Carl Bloice: There are an estimated 3.5 million seriously delinquent mortgages out there. There were nearly 2.7 million foreclosure filings on about 1.9 million homes last year. That’s down from 2007, but it’s still about one out of every 69 homes in the country.
Who Will Be the Un-Bloomberg? What Mayors Should Say About Wall Street
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Tom Hayden: In light of the police actions in New York, Berkeley, Oakland, Denver, Portland and beyond—and as massive national demonstrations are about to take place—it’s not too late for the mayors to use their political stature to speak out about the crises befalling their cities.
Time for an Economic Bill of Rights
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Ellen Brown: What was sufficient for a simple agrarian economy does not provide an adequate framework for freedom and democracy today. We need an Economic Bill of Rights, and we need to end the privatization of the national currency.
Greece’s Choice — and Ours: Democracy or Finance?
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Robert Reich: Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou decided in favor of democracy yesterday when he announced a national referendum on the draconian budget cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding from Greece in return for bailing it out.
A Jubilee for Student Debt?
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Ellen Brown: Eliminating, reducing, or deferring student loan debt will free up the budgets of millions of students, allowing them to spend more on goods and services, increasing demand and creating jobs, and adding to tax revenues.
Occupy Wall Street: Separating Fact from Media
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Walter Brasch: Even the most oblivious recognize the protestors as a large cross-section of America. They are students and teachers; housewives, plumbers, and physicians; combat veterans from every war from World War II to the present.
Willful Deafness to Occupy Wall Street
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Tina Dupuy: Politicians won’t take personal responsibility for the crisis – and so Occupy Wall Street has no choice but to be nonpartisan. Or just bipartisan in their frustration.
Behind Europe’s Debt Crisis Lurks Another Giant Bailout of Wall Street
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Robert Reich: Republicans and Wall Street executives who continue to yell about Dodd-Frank overkill are dead wrong. The fact no one seems to know Morgan’s exposure to European banks or derivatives – or that of most other giant Wall Street banks – shows Dodd-Frank didn’t go nearly far enough.
S&P: So What!
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Mark Pash: Ongoing investigations by the SEC and Justice Department, Congress and federal regulators who are looking at ways to implement the Dodd-Frank Act, which contains provisions aimed at reducing the raters’ role in the financial system.
Blacks and Latinos Will Suffer When the Student Debt Bubble Bursts
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David Love: There is every indication that the bursting of the student debt bubble, like the housing bubble before it, is imminent. And when it happens, it will send shockwaves throughout the financial markets. People of color will be especially vulnerable.
The Shameful Murder of Dodd Frank
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Robert Reich: Wall Street has effectively neutered the Dodd-Frank law, which is the best argument I know for applying the nation’s antitrust laws to the biggest banks and limiting their size.
Obama Needs Demand-Side Solutions
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Robert Reich: Businesses are reluctant to spend more and create more jobs because there aren’t enough consumers out there able and willing to buy what businesses have to sell.
Dems: Obama Broke Pledge to Force Banks to Help Homeowners
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Paul Kiel and Olga Pierce: The Obama administration has relied on a voluntary program with few sticks, that simply offers banks incentives to modify mortgages.
Foreclosure Paperwork Scandal
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Marian Wang: Though foreclosures continue to speed through courts in some states, in recent months some judges have increasingly questioned banks bringing foreclosure cases in court, forcing them to prove their legal standing to foreclose.
The Fed’s New Bubble (Masquerading as a Jobs Program)
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Robert Reich: The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn’t really a bill at all. It’s the Fed’s attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy (“quantiative easing” in Fed-speak).
A Permanent Housing Collapse?
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Shamus Cooke: The housing market appears to be on a never-ending downward spiral, with the much-discussed “recovery” always around the next corner.
Did Greedy Homeowners Cause the Big Crash?
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Steve Hochstadt: We grredy American homeowners appear as co-conspirators in many judgments about what caused the great recession. In these interpretations, many of us were greedy for wanting bigger homes than we deserved, foolish to have then bought larger houses than we could afford, and stupid for agreeing to the low-interest/low-payment scams of mortgage sellers.
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