From who did Obama "inherit" the economic mess?

[spence]

Originally Posted by RIROCKHOUND

Damn liberal mindset
"Over 75 percent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 percent of Hispanos and African Americans don't own their home. And that's a gap, that's a homeownership gap. And we've got to do something about it." —George W. Bush, Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 2002

The "ownership society" was a big plank in the 2000 Bush platform. I remember reading a Bush speech from then praising all the efforts of the financial institutions to provide loans to low income borrowers.

What seems to be getting lost is the issue wasn't necessarily low income housing (i.e. where liberals -- and President Bush -- might want to defend populist interests) but also people with moderate to high income who took out massive ARMs to buy into housing they simply couldn't afford. I know first hand of some friends who were making at least 250K a year and blew it because of their own recklessness...ultimately loosing their house.

As has been discussed at length in older threads, this was a massive and systemic problem largely driven by sub prime and prime loans being bundled together without adequate regulation.

Plenty of blame to go all around...

-spence

[scottw]

Frances Fox Piven Rings in The New Year By Calling for Violent Revolution
Posted on December 31, 2010

She’s considered by many as the grandmother of using the American welfare state to implement revolution. Make people dependent on the government, overload the government rolls, and once government services become unsustainable, the people will rise up, overthrow the oppressive capitalist system, and finally create income equality. Collapse the system and create a new one. That‘s the simplified version of Frances Fox Piven’s philosophy originally put forth in the pages of The Nation in the 60s.

Now, as the new year ball drops, Piven is at it again, ringing in 2011 with renewed calls for revolution.

In a chilling and almost unbelievable editorial again in The Nation (”Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 2011 edition), she calls on the jobless to rise up in a violent show of solidarity and force. As before, those calls are dripping with language of class struggle. Language she and her late husband Richard Cloward made popular in the 60s.

“So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?” she writes. “After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?”

“Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity,” she writes. “They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.”

“The out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.”

she says, the “protesters need targets.”

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by spence

The "ownership society" was a big plank in the 2000 Bush platform. I remember reading a Bush speech from then praising all the efforts of the financial institutions to provide loans to low income borrowers.

What seems to be getting lost is the issue wasn't necessarily low income housing (i.e. where liberals -- and President Bush -- might want to defend populist interests) but also people with moderate to high income who took out massive ARMs to buy into housing they simply couldn't afford. I know first hand of some friends who were making at least 250K a year and blew it because of their own recklessness...ultimately loosing their house.

As has been discussed at length in older threads, this was a massive and systemic problem largely driven by sub prime and prime loans being bundled together without adequate regulation.

Plenty of blame to go all around...

-spence

Spence, just because you know some well-fto-do folks that bit off morethan they could chew, means NOTHING. The problem, as everyone who can think rationally knows, was subprime mortgages. I'm not saying that wealthy folsk had no foreclosures. But what brought the system down was mortgages to poor folks who had no business getting those loans.

You keep telling yourself that it was something else. That way you'll make the same exact mistake.

This is why liberalism is a mental disorder. The complete, willful unwillingness to recognize irrefutable fact, unless those facts serve your current agenda. Unbelievable.

You are right, trhere is plenty of blame on both sides. But I have never, ever heard Obama suggest that liberal policies played any role. All he ever says is that the republicans drove the car into the ditch. Or am I wrong Spence?