Citizen parasite. (photo: Sarcasmo via Flickr)

You’ve probably already read DDay’s and Atrios’s pieces on what some Treasury officials admitted about HAMP the other day. But partly because I want to link to this really comprehensive account of the entire meeting and partly because I want to elaborate on a point made in it, I thought I’d join in.

Basically, at some blogger chats last week, some folks at Treasury judged that, in spite of the catastrophic failure of HAMP to achieve its stated purpose — to help homeowners stay in homes either bought during a bubble or refinanced at a time when lending standards had been all but eliminated — it was still a good thing because it gave the banksters some time to recover from their catastrophic investment in the shitpile.

On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.

As these revelations about Treasury’s self-congratulation on HAMP have come out, I keep thinking of the word “parasite.” The folks we pay to keep our financial system running for the good of the citizens of the United States are unabashedly celebrating that they’ve made individual families’ lives more miserable because the banks–who while SCOTUS may treat them as people are not actually part of the “We the people” originally envisioned by the Constitution–will have time to recover from their own damn mistakes.  . . .

• Gee, never saw this coming.
• We’ll be paying for these wars for decades, cont’d.
• Worried about the deficit? Cut taxes for millionaires.
• Wonder what they think about evolution?
• The party’s over.
• I’m sure this will be the big story on Faux News today.

Hey, gang — Phoenix Woman here, filling in for our good buddy Attaturk. How are you all this fine Monday morning at oh-dark-hundred?

Y’all may have heard about Sarah Palin’s (or was it perhaps her bigot-loving ghost writer Lynn Vincent’s?) dumb-cluck Tweet about feminism being hijacked by a “cackle of rads”, which of course is a lie (as are most of Palin’s statements on the topics of the day) as anyone who knows anything about feminist history knows that it was the radicals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who have advanced it. I’d like to know who dreamed that lie-Tweet up for her. Can you imagine her coming up with that on her own? Me neither.

But wait! I have discovered that Tild of Tildology has already created the Cackle of Rads membership card! Just as the early Christians took a grisly form of execution and turned it into a holy symbol of love and sacrifice, and just as heroes and heroines of the American Revolution took the satirical tune “Yankee Doodle” and adopted it as an anthem, we progressive feminists (and that means you too, feminist guys) can proudly sport our membership in the Cackle of Rads. Oh, and it has Tild’s version of the union bug on it, just to tick off the Dumb Cluck from Wasilla so she runs around like a headless you-know-what. (Well, she does that already, but you know what I mean.) Even better — the word I’m hearing is that in the near future, these cards may be printed with real union bugs on them. Stay tuned.

Your Cackle of Rads Membership Card: Don’t leave home without it!