Train Wreck of the Week

The mortgage crisis grossly underestimated, the bankrupting of America, the softening of the economy, the corruption and scams for rebuilding Iraq, Yahoo! turns over identities to Chinese government, Blackwater mercenaries now have an air force

Link to this article | Printer Friendly Version The underside of the home mortgage market is not very well known, so the size of threat is being grossly underestimated. It is a sprawling, varied enterprise that no one regulator oversees, making it impossible to know how many mortgages or lenders not insured by the government are in trouble. No public records are available to show who holds the trillions of dollars worth of mortgages that have been turned into CDOs and flogged worldwide. Last fall there were 90,000 non-bank lenders. There could be only half that now. These are state licensed lenders who have made 70% of annual mortgages. You hear about Countrywide and Indymac, but not of the others. We know federally regulated lenders past due loans were 10.6% last quarter at $6.4 billion. What lurks below the surface we do not know, but we do know it is not good. The Census Bureau reports that median household come rose 0.7% last year, its second annual increase in a row to $48,201. There may have been a five year recovery, but not for the average Americans. The median household income last year was still $1,000 less than in 2000. In 2006, 36.5 million Americans were living in poverty, five million more than six years ago, when the poverty level fell to 11.3%. If you figure in an average inflation rate of 8% for five years you find the average American’s purchasing power has been deeply depleted. Our Comptroller General tells us the truth but our elected officials do not want to hear that they are bankrupting America. Our media makes mention of what David Walker has to say and then you hear nothing else about the matter. In fact, most of the media doesn’t report what he has to say. The media is rigged, politicians do not care, business interests want the truth to disappear and the public is generally in denial. America has become an empire and with that mantel has come declining moral values, corruption and a political system that refuses to function in behalf of the American people. Our military has to fight wars based on lies for profit, and is over extended in foreign lands. We wallow in fiscal and monetary irresponsibility by our government. We have more problems than Rome did before the barbarians broke down the gates. We certainly haven’t learned from history because we know so little of history. In addition we think of only tomorrow, not much further. If America doesn’t wake up and use the brains God has given them we’ll not only be broke but we will be a second-class nation. Mortgage application volume fell 4% for the week ended August 24th. Refi volume fell 4.2%. Mortgages have gone increasingly delinquent and into default in recent months. ARMs accounted for 15% of all mortgage applications during the week, down from 18.6% during the prior week, and 26.8% yoy. The 30-year fixed as reported by the MBA fell to 6.41% from 6.49%. It should be noted that 142 major lenders have gone bankrupt this year with only several being bought out. Softening conditions and volatility in financial markets and a softening economy assisted by a collapsing housing and credit market has pushed the consumer confidence index down to 105.0 in August from a revised 111.9 in July. This is the lowest level since 9/05 after Katrina. One after another the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. For daring to report illegal arms sales, a Navy veteran says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods. They did the total number on him. He told the FBI that the company he worked for, Shield Security Co. was a Wal-Mart for guns and it was all illegal and everyone knew it. The corruption in Iraq is staggering. Hundreds of projects will never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. $30 billion was allocated for Iraq by Congress and $8.8 billion has been stolen. People who expose these crooks are destroyed. They cannot get jobs, they lose their families; they lose everything. You are dealing with entrenched fascists who give no quarter and specialize in revenge that extends to murder. It is heartbreaking and goes beyond corruption. It is a culture of evil. The government doesn’t care because so many people at the top are in on the corruption. There is no question that our government has forfeited its right to exist. One of our great corporate citizens Yahoo is fighting efforts to hold it accountable for the imprisonment and alleged torture of two Chinese citizens after Yahoo turned their identities over to the Chinese Communist government. The husband and wife are serving ten years in jail for advocating Democratic reforms. The Bush-Cheney neocons have taken private enterprise way beyond what is reasonable, desirable and safe. They have turned over national security functions to those not adequately trained, not accountable to the public or law or on the political radar. They have created their own private legions of mercenaries, intelligence analysts, security guards, etc. These mercenaries are answerable only to those who pay them. As a former part of our nation’s counterintelligence apparatus we are enraged that this is going on. This is the Praetorian Guard and the Legions of ancient Roman Caesars and Hitler’s Brownshirts. Someone has to tell us how it is that mercenary company Blackwater can buy combat aircraft? It is incredible that our government allows mercenaries to have their own private Air Force. The D.I.A. is paying $1 billion for private companies to conduct core intelligence that we were paid $300 a month to do. Sorry if I missed any copyright information, but I could not create a link to this article - V

My reluctance to publish this article here has nothing whatsoever to do with language used; it has to do with - is it GLOBALLY relevant. I've been sitting on posting this since it came out, but today I thought, why not??!!

There are obviouslly some "healing" issues raised in it .. issues about GREED and allowing human misery so here goes ..
V


Editor's Note from Truthout.org: In this article below, Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, uses some off-color expletives. While our editors usually try to avoid such language, we feel Taibbi's piece is overall well-researched and an important part of the public record. Accordingly, we have made the decision to republish it here.

Go to Original

The Great Iraq Swindle
By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

Thursday 23 August 2007

How Bush allowed an army of for-profit contractors to invade the US Treasury.

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins - he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.

You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress - until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.

Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you've been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good - four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.

*snip*

According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success? There's no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don't pay the bills.

Read this in its entirety at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/083007C.shtml