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POPSThe Afghan Quagmire
So what would a rigorous public and internal administration debate have highlighted? First, the more occupation forces there are, the more they fuel the insurgency against the occupation, especially since so many more civilians than fighters lose their lives. Witness the wedding parties, villagers, and innocent bystanders blown up by the U.S. military’s superior weaponry. Second, there was a remarkable absence in Obama’s speech about the tribal conflicts and the diversity of motivations of those he lumped under the name of “Taliban.” Some are protecting their valleys, others are in the drug trade, others want to drive out the occupiers, others are struggling for supremacy between the Pashtuns on one side and the Tajiks and Uzbeks on the other (roughly the south against the north). The latter has been the substance of a continuing civil war for many years. Third, how can Obama’s plan begin to work, requiring a stable, functioning Afghan government—which now is largely a collection
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POPSStacking The Deck Against Kids "We still have a hideously dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of manufacturing dropouts and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to turn that around. We still keep fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home, where the need for nation-building is beyond critical. The U.S. should be a paradise for young people. We need big changes in this country, approaches that are constructive, creative and fundamentally new, if we’re going to give those smiling kids I saw on Thanksgiving Day the kind of society they deserve. " And those are what I call Family Values.
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POPSPart ONE: Whats WRONG with AMERICA
H is for Health insurance (or lack thereof) – Just another financial scam to enslave Americans in a medical police state while denying them access to real health services. I is for Intellectual Property laws – Corporations already own patents on 20% of the human genome, including your genes. J is for Junk food – Is it junk? Or is it food? It looks like food, but nourishes like junk. Let’s all eat some more… K is for Krispy Kreme doughnuts – Because as long as we’re all gonna be clinically obese, we might as well die with a smile on our faces and donut powder on our lips. L is for corporate Lies – Just when you thought they ran out of ‘em, they miraculously come up with new ones. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027483_S…) M is for Mainstream Media and Mammograms – The Mainstream Media pushes mammograms, a brilliant technology for causing breast cancer and heart damage. N is for National debt – It’ll never be paid off, but it’s fun to watch it expand. I wonder what happens
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POPSConvert The UN Building Into NYC Homeless Shelter
wallowing in desperate poverty, with crime so rampant and violent that the police won’t even venture into them. And you have the nerve to come here and investigate us ? The United Nations has become nothing less than a shabby podium used by corrupt third-world demagogues to do what they could never do in any other way - attempt to destroy and bring into disrepute the United States. We’re being nibbled to death by ducks. And we’re letting it happen. Not only that, we’re paying for it. I’d like to see the Obama Administration tell the U.N. to pound sand (but they won’t). Take your investigation to somewhere that needs it, and that list is endless. North Korea, Darfur, Tibet, Cuba….I could go on almost ad infinitum about third world hell holes where people have no rights whatsoever, where food is something that may or may not come your way today - or tomorrow. Where “housing” consists of whatever you can scrape together to try to keep out the cold, where women . .
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POPSGenius: Mortgage Program Will Spend $3,000,000 per Loan Repair Three million mortgages are believed to be eligible for HAMP with 500,000 in a trial phase. The trial was supposed to last three months, but it has since been stretched to five months . The Doctor believes that many of these "repaired" loans will simply re-default. Why? For one reason, the underwriting (courtesy of TurboTax Tim) for the program uses "stated income", not verified income. These are the very same "liar's loans" that helped trigger the mortgage meltdown! Examining the chart, of the 50,130 trial modifications entered into in May, only 1,711 (or only 3%) resulted in a permanent modification! As The Huffington Post reported a few days ago, the low number of permanent modifications is still appallingly low ("HAMP will come nowhere close to keeping up with foreclosures"). Among the reasons for the low conversion rate: failure to make timely payments (doh!), failure to assemble necessary documentation (like income verification), and other . . .
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POPSPlease quit listening to "expert"! Wow, wish I lived in these people's world. Unemployment is skyrocketing every day, people are being moved from full time to part time (could you pay your mortgage on 50% of your pay?), and this guys thinks that a "moratorium" on foreclosures will help? Banks are barely issuing mortgages NOW, you allow this to happen and they will stop altogether. And finally, the reason December sales "grew" was because of nationwide AUCTIONS. This is not a positive. We are not 3/4s of the way through, we aren't even 1/2 way there. Hope you all are stashing cash (at home, not banks) and stocking up on food, when all these foolhardy plans are finally stopped-as they will have to be-we will see the real trouble.
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POPSAmerican Casino: A Documentary About the Home-Mortgage Crisis more @ clip source the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
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POPSThe G-20 Protests Have Begun Sunday's march, which fell far short of the thousands organizers had hoped for, was one of several demonstrations expected to take place around theG-20 summit in Pittsburgh, a two-day gathering of the leaders of the world's 20 top economies that starts Thursday. Bail Out The People Movement, one of the march's organizers, also called for an end to foreclosures and evictions. Marchers walked three-quarters of a mile from the church to a place known as Freedom Corner, which has served as a protest meeting spot dating to the 1950s when local black residents fought the demolition of homes, stores and churches in preparation for an arena.
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POPSWall Street's Disaster Has Spawned Our Greatest Terrorist Threat It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.
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POPSUnder Bush, or Obama, the results will be the same 1. If you are unemployed, or lost a substantial part of your income, or being screwed on credit cards, you won't get a modification. 2. If your home has lost too much in value as compared to debt, you won't get a modification. 3. Even if you get it, your odds of defaulting are still better than 50% in most cases. 4. Calling it something else, while doing the exact same thing that has failed twice already, would only work in fairyland. Apparently, we are in fairy land
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POPSSmall Banks Fail in Big Numbers
Closures and government takeovers of failing banks have become so routine that they barely gets noticed each Friday when the FDIC makes its announcements. While the banking crisis began with escalating defaults and foreclosures on home mortgages, the increase of bank failures in recent weeks has been driven by rising losses on commercial real estate loans, which are starting to default in large numbers. Community and regional banks hold a disproportionate share of commercial real estate and construction loans. My sister-in-law works at a local bank and says they are only accepting signature loan applications, fixed 5-yr home loans, and no car loans. My brother-in-law sells commercial real estate and every loan he has setup this year has been denied. My wife works for a car dealer who is losing his lines of credit after years of pristine credit. Our home value lost $50,000 and our property taxes went up $500. How the middle class is going to survive this mess is anyone
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POPSMajor Cities' Plummeting Crime Rates Mystifying Not sure why they are baffled, it is pretty simple. Between Madoff, Wall Street and the banks wiping out a large portion of people's money and then the taxman, government, and foreclosures/layoffs taking the rest, there is not much for criminals to steal. You have to figure theft is out of the question since large majority of population has no $$, breaking and entering is tough - since so many foreclosures.
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POPSGive Thanks It's Not 1932 This article was actually written last November 2008, but I thought some perspective might be nice. We have many blessings to be thankful for this July 4th, and one of them, most assuredly, is that 2009 is not 1932.
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