Robert Scheer - Home Sweet Wall Street

[Doctor_J]

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.

...

What the report then neglects to discuss is the demise of Roosevelt's grand experiment at the hands of Democratic Party hustlers who turned the agencies away from their "original mission" and into their personal piggy banks, while getting Democrats in Congress to approve regulations enabling their greed.

Another Bush presidency...

http://www.truth-out.org/robert-scheer-home-sweet-wall-street67838