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POPSThe U.S. Needs to Open Up to the World It's better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn't want some of what we've got. America as a gated community won't work, because not even the world's sole superpower can build walls high enough to shield itself from the intertwined realities of the 21st century. There's a better form of security: reconnect with the rest of the world, don't shut it out; stop making enemies and start making friends. Perhaps it's asking a lot to expect America to act differently from all the other empires in history, but wasn't that the original idea?
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POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
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POPSBank can't prove it owns the mortgage, Judge writes off $460k debt This is why Rep. Kaptur was telling people facing eviction to squat in their own homes , refuse to be evicted, and make the bank demonstrate in court that the debt is legitimate . Possession is 9/10 of the law. I predict that this is the first tremble of a massive shock-wave about to move through our economy.
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POPSGoldman Sachs Banksters Knew and Bet on Meltdown Filthy lucre on the backs of investors and then got Bailout money from taxpayers too, with the help of their "insider" (and Treasury Secretary) Timothy Geithner. (It helps to have pals in high places.--see Goldman-Geithner connections )
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POPSFraud Could Undermine Housing Tax Credit as Troubling Report Emerges The Government Accountability Office reports that $10 billion had been spent on 1.4 million credits as of late August. As the economy hit trouble in 2008, Congress passed a $7,500 tax credit for first-time homebuyers as a no-interest, long-term loan to stimulate the housing market. The credit was expanded under the economic recovery act passed in February to $8,000, not as a loan, but a fully refundable credit. Economists worry that the tax break is going to those who would have purchased homes anyway, and filling homes by vacating others " as renters become buyers " without benefit to the economy as a whole. Estimates are that more than three-quarters of the expected 1.5 million taxpayers who will have tapped the program would have bought homes even without the tax credit, putting the price to the government at about $43,000 per homebuyer who would not have bought a house without the credit. The Government Accountability Office reports that 59 percent of those claiming . .
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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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POPSGovernment and the Free Market If I recall, it was the government that pressured mortgage institutes to loosen up there lending requirement. The next thing you know we have a mortgage crisis, and the housing market slumps along with the rest of the economy. Now we have PrezBO, telling banks how to lend. Deja Vu all over again. The enemy is in the White House. Leave no incumbent in office.
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POPSEvicted for Reporting Domestic Abuse To add insult to injury, this past July Cleaves-Milan received a call from a collection agency seeking nearly $3,800 they claimed she owed for the early termination of her lease. She returned home a day after telling police her boyfriend threatened to kill her to find a 10-day eviction notice taped to her door. She didn't terminate her lease early – she was given no choice in the matter. Luckily Aimco dropped this fee, but only after the Chicago Tribune inquired. This story is horrific and unfortunately not uncommon. While the Violence Against Women Act of 2005 protects domestic abuse victims who live in public or subsidized housing from eviction, the law concerning private landlords is unclear. This lack of protection for women who rent in the private market creates a disincentive for women to report abuse, trapping women, and often their children, in violent relationships with no legal recourse.
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POPSU.K. Economic Contraction Is Longest on Record The British economy has now contracted for six successive quarters, making this the longest downturn since the agency started its data series in 1955. And it is starting to further lag behind the 16-member euro area, where France and Germany are contributing to broad improvements in manufacturing, services and consumer demand. Jean-Michel Six, chief European economist at Standard & Poor’s, said the divergence appeared to stem from the higher level of consumer indebtedness in Britain. “U.K. consumers are coming out of a period of very significant leveraging, and the process of unwinding that is long and painful,” he said. “You would expect savings rates to grow and credit demand to fall, weighing on the economy.” Meanwhile, German business confidence in October rose to its highest level in 13 months, according to the Ifo economic research institute in Munich.
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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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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POPSHealthcare Applied to AIDS in DC.....Theft & Fraud More than $500,000 was earmarked for a housing program whose executive director had a string of convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. After the D.C. Inspector General’s Office could find no evidence that he was operating an AIDS nonprofit group, the city terminated the grant but never sought repayment. All told, the Health Department’s HIV/AIDS Administration awarded more than $25 million from 2004 to 2008 to nonprofit agencies marked by questionable spending, a lack of clients, or lapses in record-keeping and care, a 10-month Washington Post investigation found. The conservative solution to AIDS would be to stop spreading it by indulging in degenerate behavior. The liberal solution is to shovel mountains of other people’s money at corrupt ACORN types. Guess which approach will be used under ObamaCare. On a tip from Puffdaddy. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.
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POPSACORN Video: Prostitution Scandal in Philadelphia, PA Part I posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, soliciting advice about a possible housing loan from workers in the Philadelphia office of ACORN Housing Corp. Previous videos showed the same pair, also posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend, visiting ACORN offices in other cities. The Philadelphia visit is significant because of a dispute over statements ACORN has made defending what took place when Giles and O'Keefe visited the Philadelphia office last summer. Supporters of O'Keefe and Giles said ACORN has lied about whether the two were thrown out of the Philadelphia office, how much time they spent there and whether they explicitly told ACORN workers that Giles was a prostitute. At a news conference, O'Keefe went through an edited version of what he said was a 32-minute visit to the Philadelphia office. "At no point were we kicked out, at no time were we asked to leave," O'Keefe said after playing the video. http://biggovernment.com/
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POPSToxic Drywall Leaving Homeowners in Limbo "This is like the small wave that's out on the horizon that's going to continue to grow and grow until it becomes a tsunami," said Florida attorney David Durkee, who represents hundreds of homeowners who are suing builders, suppliers and manufacturers over the drywall. "This is going to become critical mass very shortly." During the height of the U.S. housing boom, with building materials in short supply, American construction companies imported millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap. An Associated Press analysis of shipping records found that more than 500 million pounds of Chinese gypsum board was imported between 2004 and 2008 " enough to have built tens of thousands of homes. They are heavily concentrated in the Southeast, especially Florida.
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POPSAt 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't. And this is the problem with big, macro-thinking. You can point to two GDP trendlines and say "Look, undercapacity..." but that totally ignores the ground level where real employees have to find jobs that they're suited for, and no amount of expansionary practice can change that problem.
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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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POPSSean Hannity helps Jerome Corsi promote his black-helicopter 'New World Order' conspiracy theories As Steven Thomma explained for McClatchy: In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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