Monthly Archives: July 2010
The Rich Default More Often On Mortgages; Where Is The Outrage From The Right-Wing?
News came this morning about the rate at which people in different demographics default on their mortgages. There has been a couple of years’ worth of right-wing rage directed at people who took loans out and ended up not being able to make their payments. I won’t hold my breath waiting for them to direct that rage at the folks who can’t (won’t) pay most often: the super-rich.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Over 14% of million dollar-plus loans are delinquent (and the number is rising).
Only 8% of the rest of loans are delinquent (and the number, which hasn’t been much higher is shrinking).
Guess which demographic is the recipient of the faux rage of the lunatic right-wing. It’s poor people who are lazy and who want to take advantage of the rest of us, according to them. Observe the immoral mission right-wingers took upon themselves to take down the agency that helped some of the non-rich figure out how to buy a house (ACORN). That agency had its government funding revoked. Will they demand that rich people get their wealth (which was transferred from the lower- and middle-class by Con economic policies) revoked? Fat chance.
Why are there people who go out of their way to protect the interests of millionaires and billionaires? Because some people think they’ll actually be one of those millionaires one day, despite the overwhelming evidence that they’ll very likely never achieve that status.
Where are the climage change deniers?
Eugene Robinson says much of the same stuff that I’ve been saying this month. The science isn’t in doubt – it never was. The disinformation campaign won’t stop the climate from reacting to our forcing – that’s not in doubt either.
Conservative Judge Corruption: Failure To Recuse Under Conflict of Interest
Majority of judges hearing drilling moratorium appeal attended oil-funded junkets – the headline from Climate Progress is salient.
The Obama administration’s original drilling moratorium was rejected by a lower court. The administration appealed to the 5th Circuit of the Court of Appeals. Unreported in corporate media circles,
Judges Jerry Smith and Eugene Davis, both of whom are assigned to yesterday’s panel, attended expense-paid junkets for judges sponsored by an oil-industry front group. The third judge on the panel, Judge James Dennis, has not received any free trips from the oil industry, but he is heavily invested in oil stocks with investments that may total as much as $305,000.
Do you want to guess how the court ruled? The moratorium was rejected, of course, while litigation continues.
Why did these judges allow themselves to even hear the case? All three have some degree of bias due to their past activities and investments. Industry literally owns at least two branches of our federal government. Despite our money paying their salaries and benefits, unelected officials cannot help themselves but to rule in favor of industries they invest in.
State of the Poles – 7/7/10
The state of global polar sea ice in July 2010 is fairly good compared to climatological conditions (1979-2008). The Antarctic sea ice extent is rebounding very nicely from its Southern Hemispheric fall minimum. It has passed the climatological median as well as the +2 standard deviation (meaning there is much more ice than is normal for this time of year). Heat isn’t simply making the east coast swelter this week. At the same time that dozens of American cities set daily record highs, the Arctic sea ice extent continues to set calendar-day record lows. Conditions there are the worst on record for July, substantially beating out years such as 2006 and 2007 for record low extent throughout most of June, as this time series shows.
Krugman: Entering 3rd Depression?
Instead of addressing the unemployment crisis, the U.S. and other major world economies are foolishly acting concerned about potential future deficits. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opines that this deficit-attention could lead us into the third depression in modern history.
If you want to see where the true crisis lays, go to this HuffPo article and scroll down a bit to see the long-term unemployment graph. For the first time in recorded history, more than 7,000,000 people have been recorded as unemployed for longer than 27 weeks. That’s 8 months or more, folks. And it absolutely crushes the previous record set in the Reagan Regime of a mere 3,000,000 unemployed people.
What’s the response to 7,000,000 long-term unemployed Americans? A continuation of Reaganomics, the economic theory that got us in this disaster in the first place. President Obama must want to only serve one term. That’s certainly what he’ll get if he continues to be led around by the nose by deficit-concern-trolls.
Ryan Grim: Obama Economic Policy Article
This is well worth the read: Ryan Grim writes a piece that includes Obama’s economic advisers recognizing their deficit-peacock attitude will not be beneficial politically or policy-wise in the long-term.
So why adhere to that mis-begotten attitude?
2010 East Coast Heat Wave Smashing Temperature Records
Another heat wave is gripping the U.S. east coast. Triple-digit temperatures will impact the region today, just like they did yesterday.
The wide-ranging heat extremes should provide folks with a small taste of what every summer will feel like in 2100 if we don’t get our greenhouse gas pollution under control. In fact, can anybody tell me why James Inhofe (Oil-Bought) and his grandchildren aren’t building igloos in Washington D.C. today to mock Al Gore? A record snowstorm in February brought out the Inhofe clan, providing days of chuckles to the anti-science flat-earther crowd. Where are they now?
Scientists in February told media organizations that massive snowstorms like the one affecting D.C. were more likely to occur today than they were 30 years ago because of the increased moisture capacity of the atmosphere that we’ve forced on the climate. If we fail to clean up our act, massive snowstorms and record-breaking heat waves will be even more likely 30 years from today. Count on it; or don’t – the climate will do what it is supposed to do, regardless of how many people choose to ignore it.
So far in 2010, there have been 3380 max temperature records as opposed to only 1273 min temperature records for the U.S. In June alone, there were 808 heat records and a mere 167 cold records. Global cooling, deniers? I don’t think so. This bears repeating: I think it is unfortunately likely that by the time Americans decide to take the kind of actions necessary to address climate change, heat waves like the one impacting the east coast will be a yearly problem.
What is the status of the Senate Climate & Energy bill? The Con helping to draft the legislation has walked away from the process (like he was ever going to vote for it anyway) and Sen. LIE-berman and Sen. Kerry are hard at work gutting the remainder of the bill in order to entice other Cons (or just one Con!) to vote for the bill and send it along its merry way. In other words, by the time it might make it out of the Senate, it will be all but worthless, despite what many are saying about it. Health care legislative advances might be incrementally advanced. Climate legislative advances cannot be. The 40-year window that was available to us has already closed. Robust climate legislation must be passed this year or Americans must become accustomed to enormous price tags to merely deal with the climate change effects that are guaranteed to occur. If we want to mitigate or even reverse some of the damage we’ve caused, that will cost even more. It seems to me we’ve made our choice and it’s a stupid one.
