- Uncategorised
- Published Date
- Rob Joyce
- Hits: 1447803
.
The president said Republicans would be responsible for the economic fallout if they refused to raise it.
Dean Baker: DC insiders want to rig the inflation index and hit seniors' pocketbooks harder than high-earning families'.
The financial crisis of 2008 was terrible for homeowners saddled with heavy mortgage payments, especially the millions of low-income, first-time buyers who were tempted to buy in with deceptive loans during the height of the housing bubble. About 4 million foreclosures have been completed since the financial crisis of 2008, according to CoreLogic, a data provider to the real estate industry. Since 2006, when subprime loans first began to default in large numbers, there have been 9.4 million foreclosures initiated, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (US Fed). To a select group of hedge fund and investment bankers the financial crisis that pivoted on these foreclosures was the opportunity of a lifetime. They made billions from the crash by wagering against the stability of the US housing market.
.
With the most expensive election season in United States history looming heavy in the background, campaign finance reformers have high hopes that federal regulators may consider a new rule requiring corporations to reveal their political spending to shareholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently placed the rule on its regulatory agenda, and SEC staff will consider whether to recommend that the commission propose a new rule under an April timeline. For reformers, a proposal from the SEC would be an important step toward dealing with the fallout of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v Federal Election Commission decision that gave rise to super-PACs and allowed corporations and other large donors to spend unlimited sums to influence elections.
Clive Hamilton in his "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change" describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that "catastrophic climate change is virtually certain." This obliteration of "false hopes," he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.