Make Rogue Corporations Pay for Foreclosure Crisis “We know how to prevent foreclosures,” Federal Reserve Bank senior economist Paul Willen told The New York Times. “We just need to be prepared to spend the money.” Willen “sees two possible solutions: Require banks to modify loans, basically imposing the cost on them; or pay banks to modify loans, imposing the cost on taxpayers.” Millions of American families have lost their homes to foreclosure since the global economy crashed in 2008. At this writing 4.4 million more households are in severe default on their mortgages—and that doesn’t count the millions of renters who are getting evicted. A few distressed homeowners are professional “flippers” who took out short-term adjustable-rate mortgages on dozens of houses at a time. When the housing bubble burst, their dream of easy profits using borrowed cash to turn a quick profit blew up too. But that’s a rare story. The overwhelming majority are people who got into trouble through…

Ban Foreclosures Now What would happen to you if you got caught forging a mortgage application? You’d go to jail. And rightly so. In one case in Florida, an employee of GMAC Mortgage admitted under oath that he personally forged 10,000 foreclosure affidavits. This low-level schlub is the tip of the tip of a massive iceberg, one of countless “robo-signers” whom voracious banks including GMAC, Bank of America, Citibank and JPMorganChase hired in order to kick American families out of their homes as quickly as possible. Ignoring state banking laws, which require bank officers to review each foreclosure document to make sure all the facts are correct, banks instead hired low-wage “Burger King kids,” as B of A execs called them, to sign thousands of foreclosures they never looked at. Many were signed under someone else’s name. Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures—maybe millions—were processed illegally by these huge banks gone wild. “Behind the question of improper foreclosure documentation lies a…

Advice Obama Has To Ignore American capitalism is broken. So is the Democratic-Republican duopoly that supports it. Neither can be fixed. The system is collapsing. A power vacuum is beginning to open. As murderous as our dying system is, it still features a veneer of sanity. What comes next will certainly be worse. It will probably be Very Bad. Dictatorship? A 21st century po-mo variant of fascism? Warlordism? A Christianist Taliban-style terror state, as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”? Before moronic right-wing tyrants seize power, I urge in my new book “The Anti-American Manifesto,” the left should do it first. Well, first they have to become a big-L Left: organized, and with a program the people of the Soon-to-be Former United States of America can get behind. Readers and critics agree with my analysis of the situation. But, they complain, my “Manifesto” doesn’t contain that political program. That’s intentional. The “Manifesto” is a call to arms.…

An Overview of the Enthusiasm Gap Liberal Democrats are twice as likely as conservative Republicans to stay home this November. Establishmentarian liberals are urging left-of-center voters to ignore the President’s failure to deliver—and his refusal to try—on the issues they care about. “The biggest mistake we [Democrats] could make right now,” urged Obama last week, “is to let impatience or frustration lead to apathy and indifference—because that guarantees the other side wins.” “Impatience”? That implies there’s something to be impatient about. That Obama is moving too slowly. But that’s not the case. Liberals don’t see a slow process. They see no process. And what, exactly, is this “other side”? On issue after issue, Obama has cut-and-pasted Bush’s Republican policies. Which isn’t surprising, given that he didn’t appoint a single liberal to his Cabinet. The real problem for the Dems is a perception gap. The Democratic Party leadership thinks it deserves credit. They think they’ve accomplished a lot. “We’ve done the…

Will Americans Act To Prevent Economic and Environmental Collapse? I am touring to promote my new book. “The Anti-American Manifesto” lays out America’s biggest problems and what we can do to fix them. Before I started out, I knew that Americans were angry. With a real unemployment rate of 20-plus percent and a government that gave $1.4 trillion to banks instead of people in need, how could they not be? Americans have lost faith in “their” government’s willingness or ability to address their needs and concerns. But Americans’ pessimism is deeper and broader than I thought. And their rage is burning white hot. At the beginning of each event I ask attendees to answer two questions: Question One: What is the worst problem that you face? Something the government could solve or at least mitigate? The top response is healthcare; either or they or someone they know can’t afford to see a doctor. Other answers include making college affordable and…

Presidents and Bankers, But No Action on the Ground KARA-TEPE, AFGHANISTAN—There is no pipeline. There probably won’t be one. Yet the pipeline-that-will-never-exist is one of the main reasons that hundreds of thousands of Afghans and two thousand American soldiers are dead. Among my goals during my late-summer trip to Afghanistan was to find the construction site for the Trans-Afghanistan oil and gas pipeline (TAP). Also known as Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan, TAP would carry the world’s biggest new energy reserves, which are in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan’s sections of the landlocked Caspian Sea, across Afghanistan to a deep-sea port in Pakistan. (A modified version of the plan, TAPI, would add an extension to India.) Some background: The idea dates to the mid-1990s. Unocal, owner of the Union 76 gas station chain, led a consortium of oil companies that negotiated with the Taliban government. Among their consultants was Zalmay Khalilzad, who later served as Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations. (While in…

America Faces Permanent Unemployment SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN–It has been two years since the U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, drew its last breath. Millions of homeowners have gotten evicted. Unemployment has soared to Great Depression-era levels. Yet, aside from the witless “take America back” rants of the Tea Party crazies, things are calm. Remarkably so, when you consider the misery and rage that is tearing families apart. The explanation: unemployment benefits. By the time I got laid off as an editor in April 2009, Congress and the Obama Administration had extended checks for the jobless to a record 99 weeks. Another extension was approved in July. The money isn’t great. In New York, you get $405 a week plus $25 “Obama bucks” per week. But it’s enough to make a difference. If you hustle a little–odd jobs paid in cash, off the books, for example–unemployment makes it possible for many of the 20 percent-plus of Americans who lost…

If the U.S. Can’t Help Afghanistan, Who Can? DO AB, AFGHANISTAN–Afghanistan has more infrastructure than it did in 2001. But Afghans also have less soul. In many ways, Afghanistan was a more dangerous country nine years ago. There were more mines, more random acts of violence, warlordism everywhere. U.S. warplanes were bombing everything that moved. But, particularly in the Tajik-dominated north, there was also boundless optimism, a feeling that anything was possible. Good times might not be right around the corner–not exactly. But soon. If anyone could fix Afghanistan, people thought, the United States could. The superpower colossus! A nation so rich that Afghans couldn’t begin to measure, much less really understand it. Rebuilding Afghanistan from the ground up would be chump change for mighty America. The U.S. media did nothing to temper Afghan optimism. An October 2001 piece for Slate was typical: “Terrorism, the most ardent proponents of intervention argue, can’t be defeated without a complete reconstruction of Afghanistan’s…

Nine Years Later, Afghanistan Looks Much the Same: A Mess HERAT, AFGHANISTAN–OK. The roads are impressive. Specifically, the fact that they exist. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, more than two decades of civil conflict had left the country bereft of basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges and tunnels had been bombed and mined. What didn’t blow up got ground down by tanks. Maintenance? Don’t be funny. It took them too long to get started, but U.S. occupation forces deserve credit for slapping down asphalt. Brutal, bone-crushing ordeals that used to take four days can be measured in smooth, endless-grey-ribboned hours. Bridges have been replaced. Tunnels have been shored up. Most major highways and major city streets have been paved. But that’s about it. As of 2008 the U.S. claimed to have spent $1.3 billion on construction projects in Afghanistan. Where’d it all go? Roads don’t cost that much. That’s the Big Question here. As far as anyone can tell, the…