AP/Mark Lennihan American flags fly in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 10.
A most dastardly deed occurred last Friday
when the Obama administration issued a 29-page policy statement totally
abandoning the federal government's time-honored role in helping
Americans achieve the goal of home-ownership. Instead of punishing the
banks that sabotaged the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders by
"securitizing" our homesteads into poker chips to be gambled away in the
Wall Street casino, Barack Obama now proposes to turn over the entire
mortgage industry to those same banks.
The proposal, originated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner,
involves nothing less than a total "winding down" of the 80-year-old
federal housing program, setting instead a new goal of a two-tiered
America in which the masses are content to be mere renters of the
American Dream. Such a deal for a country where, as the report concedes,
"Half of all renters spend more than a third of their income on
housing, and a quarter spend more than half."
This is the same Geithner who during his tenure in the Clinton Treasury Department championed the total deregulation of the then-emerging market in collateralized debt obligations that sliced and diced people's home mortgages into the toxic securities that created what his new report calls the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Later, as president of the New York Fed, he cheered on the banks as they went hog-wild, conning folks into buying homes they couldn't afford and stuffing them into the incomprehensible securities that form the rot at the core of our bankrupt economy.
This is a made-in-the-U.S. nightmare that we inflicted on the world, thanks to an explosion in those toxic securities brought on by the deregulation that most of the Obama economic brain trust supported when they worked for President Bill Clinton and during the ensuing bubble years when they enriched themselves. As the report admits: "The U.S. is " the only high income country in which securitization plays a major role in housing finance." Yet instead of ending that practice Obama now calls for more of the same: "The Administration believes the securitization market should continue to play a key role in housing finance." Indeed, the plan's goal of eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will dry up the alternative public funding that has provided a source of mortgage support ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched Fannie Mae to check the power of the banks over mortgages. Now Obama proposes to eliminate that check and leave would-be homeowners to the tender mercy of the banking giants.
