Not that it's much of a surprise, but still not very good news. As unemployment goes up, so goes the mortgage problems. As a first step we at least need to see an end to the bleeding. As the government plan for boosting housing (the $8000 checks for new home buyers) wears off, we could see the pain returning to the housing market.
Among U.S. homeowners with mortgages, a record 7.58 percent were at least 30 days late on payments in August, up from 7.32 percent in July, according to the data obtained exclusively by Reuters.
August marked the fourth consecutive monthly increase in delinquencies, and the report showed an accelerating pace. By comparison, 4.89 percent of mortgages were 30 days past due in August 2008, while in August 2007, the rate was 3.44 percent, Equifax data showed.
It's certainly not related to the central problems caused by the banks nor is it related to the outrageous bonuses that they have reinstated but it's a start. After months of dawdling Obama is going after the banks who are using bailout money to lobby against a new program to fund student loans. The GOP, naturally, is outraged at this "government takeover" but somehow forgot about the fleecing of American families during the credit boom. Lenders often worked in conjunction with universities by providing money back for steering loans their way. (Gosh, isn't paying extra for a loan a type of tax on American families and students? Even worse, it was a tax to pay for fat bonuses at banks who ruined the economy.)
It's a very good target for Obama though I wouldn't mind seeing him expand this and get aggressive about the much more serious and costly problems. Yes, the banks who the American public bailed out have used millions to lobby against change. And no, this is not a new story except for a few people in Washington. There better be a lot more coming soon in this department.
"Ending this unwarranted subsidy for the big banks is a no-brainer for folks everywhere. Everywhere except Washington, that is," Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery at a community college in Troy, New York. "In fact, we're already seeing the special interests rallying to save this giveaway.
"The large banks -- many who have benefited from taxpayer bailouts during the financial crisis -- are lobbying to keep this easy money flowing. This is exactly the kind of special interest effort that has succeeded before and that we cannot allow to succeed again," he said, in fiery comments distancing himself from the banks.
In Virginia, the race for Governor has tightened up considerably over the past few weeks. GOPer Bob McDonnell's lead has shrunk from 15 points over the summer to just 4 points now. In part, that's because voters are getting to know the real Bob McDonnell, not the fake one presented in t.v. ads. McDonnell is the GOP candidate this year and at his core, he's a theocrat. I mean, he's really one of those hard-core religious right types. We know this because Bob McDonnell wrote about his beliefs in a 1989 thesis for Regent University, which revealed his out-of-touch problems with women working outside the home, contraception and, of course, gays. At the time, McDonnell was 34 years old and on his way to becoming a conservative leader in Virginia. But, since the Washington Post exposed the thesis, McDonnell has been running from his record. And, running as fast as he can. In McDonnell's t.v. ads, which we see here in the DC market, the guy is trying so hard to appear happy and normal that it's actually creepy.
McDonnell's opponent, Creigh Deeds, isn't going to let McDonnell run from his record:
Interesting find from "The Fix," 54% of voters "had heard "little or nothing" about the theocratic thesis yet. McDonnell has no where to go but down.
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The Senate is the battleground this week for the health insurance reform issue. The Senate Finance Committee begin marking up the bill written by Max Baucus (D-MT).
Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio, sits on the the Health, Energy, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. That committee already passed strong health insurance reform legislation. Brown is a strong advocate for real reform, including hte need for a public option. He's agreed to answer some questions from AMERICAblog readers on this critical issue. Submit your questions in the comments. We'll send them over to Brown's office and tomorrow morning, he'll answer the questions on video. We'll post that video when as soon as it's live.
This is the first time we've tried this video response -- and the first time we've done it with a U.S. Senator. Last week, Senator Merkley did a similar Q & A on the climate bill at Grist.org.
If this works, we'll hopefully do it more regularly and on more issues.
So, ask away. Senator Brown wants your questions. And, if someone has already asked the question you want, that's okay. Ask it again. I imagine many of us have the same questions, like: is the public option going to pass in the Senate? It's important for the Senator and his staff to see what's on our minds.
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Oh please. Anyone who doesn't think that Baucus is asking for the investigation, and that the Obama administration granted him the investigation, because of politics needs to have their head examined in a health care co-op. Baucus is trying to rehabilitate his image, after people on the right and left have all denounced him as not just an insurance industry stooge, but as representing a grand total of no one, other than the insurance industry and our president, in the health care reform debate. Baucus and Obama need to buff up Baucus' image if he's to get his mediocre, cop-out, GOP-lite, industry-written, health care "reform" package passed.
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UPDATE: The chat is over. You can read the archive in our comments.
Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler will be joining us at 2pm Eastern in the comments for a live chat with you guys in the comment thread on this very post. As we've done before, we invited the congressman to write us a post before the chat, talking about any issues he's particularly focusing on at the moment, in order to give you a bit more fodder for the live chat.
You can certainly ask the congressman about those issues, but also feel free to ask him about anything else that comes to mind as well. He should be with us about a half an hour. Feel free to post questions now, in the comments to this post, and the congressman can get to them when he arrives, or just join us live at 2pm Eastern and jump into the comments then.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler Opening Post AMERICAblog, Liveblogging Monday, September 21, 2009
Thank you to the bloggers and readers of America blog for inviting me to chat with you and answer questions today, at 2:00pm Eastern Time. I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback on the issues of greatest import to you and doing my best to respond.
There are two topics in particular that are on my mind at this moment.
Last week, Congressmembers Baldwin, Polis and I introduced the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation that would repeal the overtly discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act in its entirety. This bill was the product of many months of strategizing and planning with LGBT and Civil Rights advocates and we have garnered a phenomenal amount of support already across the country and in the House of Representatives, with 94 co-sponsors to date. This movement for marriage equality, which began long ago among LGBT leaders and activists, is now beginning in earnest on the federal legislative front. Though the task ahead is not easy, I feel confident that this bill WILL pass, and we must now turn to the work of making that happen.
Also paramount on my mind, and on the minds of millions of Americans, is the topic of health insurance reform. We have all participated or watched as this debate has intensified and as various proposals by the President and Congress have appeared, some good, some excellent, and some downright bad. Today, we are at the moment of truth. Greatly divergent bills have been introduced in the two houses of Congress and the fight to reconcile them is underway. I am, and have always been, committed to fighting for the bottom-line, common-sense provisions that the President and the American people have asked for, including: coverage for everyone, reasonable minimum standards of coverage for all policies, an end to policy rescissions due to illness, no barrier to coverage on account of pre-existing conditions, and a strong public option to keep prices down and instill healthy competition into the insurance marketplace.
They caught the guys for lying. Under the old administration, a lot of people might have suspected that, if they couldn't find more than that, then perhaps the administration was simply making stuff up. I don't have the same suspicions about the Obama administration, but it would be nice if we could actually charge terror suspects with actually planning actual terrorist acts. I know it's not easy, and I'm not knocking the agents - I just get uncomfortable, after the Bush years, when we call people terrorists simply because they lied (as illegal as lying is to an FBI agent).
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Bush on Jimmy Carter: "If I'm ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away."
Laura Bush, says Latimer, "was secretly a Democrat for all intents and purposes, though it really wasn't much of a secret."
For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too "condemnatory" and said, "I'm not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can't get married." (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.)
The Federal Communications Commission's proposal of new rules to prevent companies such as AT&T;, Verizon and Comcast from deliberately blocking or slowing certain Web traffic is expected to advance with three votes out of the five-member agency, according to sources.
The proposal, to be announced Monday by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, will include an additional guideline for carriers that they make public the way they manage traffic on their network, according to sources at the agency. The additional guideline would be a "sixth principle" to four existing guidelines adopted in 2005 on Internet network operations. A fifth principle is expected to be announced by Genachowski on Monday during a speech at the Brookings Institute that would prohibit the discrimination of applications and services on telecommunications, cable and wireless Internet networks.
Obama snubbed FOX. They're the only network not to get an interview this weekend. Now they're angry, and talking about how oppressed they are.
Over the past twenty years of working in politics I've learned that you can either control the media or have the media control you. Specifically, when it comes to politicians, and how they should respond to the media when it gets out of control, there are two schools of thought - both are true. The first school is the Democratic school of thought. We simply must be nice to the media, and keep talking to them, regardless of how nasty they are to us, because they'll be even nastier if we DON'T talk to them. The second, equally true, is that the media needs politicians, and thinks it needs the politicians more than it thinks politicians need the media. Thus, the media will do anything to stop itself from losing access to senior politicians in Washington.
George Bush, the son, was expert at controlling the media because he simply cut their access when they got out of line. I remember hearing from mainstream media sources in DC that their colleagues refused to criticize the Bush administration because the reporter in question couldn't afford to lose his job. And lose his job he would if he were no longer granted access to the White House and he was a reporter covering the White House. In today's economy, a big newspaper, or magazine, or network can't afford to be paying a reporter who doesn't have access when they could just fire him and get a new reporter that does have access. And so it went with George Bush - he had the media eating out of his hands, for a while at least. It's a lot like mainstream news sites dealing with blogs. Or even blogs hiring additional writers. Who is benefiting more, and who should be paying whom? Should ABC, for example, pay me to link to their stuff? Or should I be paying ABC for the right to post their snippets on my blog? Who benefits more? It's all in the eye of the beholder. Same goes for hiring writers. Should you pay new writers to write on your high-trafficked blog, or are you giving new writers a chance to make it big by giving them such a high-profile pedestal, writing on your blog, that they, at the very least, shouldn't expect to be paid. Again, it all depends on perspective, and who spins better.
FOX News wouldn't whine near so much about being snubbed by Obama if they didn't care. They want access. If only to prove that they're just as good as CNN, or ABC. FOX has always had an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the real news networks. At its core, FOX knows it's simply a propaganda organ of the GOP, but at its core, FOX kinda sorta wants to be a real news network, albeit a Republican one. So it really gets their goat when they get shut out. Which only means we should be shutting them out more often.Read More......
This will be a big week for the prospects of real health insurance reform. The Senate Finance Committee is going to start the mark up of the bill introduced by Max Baucus. That bill isn't real reform. There are going to be hundreds of amendments considered -- on both ends of the spectrum. We'll be watching. Hell, everyone will be watching.
Later today, we'll be doing a live chat today at 2:00 PM with Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) who introduced legislation to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). We very much appreciate Nadler joining us -- but more so, very much appreciate his leadership on this issue. We've been waiting a long time to get this legislation moving.
And, I'm a little behind this morning. My building is next door to the Embassy of Gabon -- and the Embassy of Gabon caught on fire last night at around 3:00 a.m. It was quite a scene. Lots of DC fire fighters. Lots of smoke.
Let's get started. It's going to be a busy week...
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Maybe that was Wall Street's secret plan all along. They're environmentalists at heart and were only thinking about saving the world. Who knew they were so thoughtful? AFP:
The unpublished IEA study found carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels had dropped significantly this year -- further than in any year in the past four decades.
Falling industrial output is largely responsible for the plunge in emissions, but other factors also played a role, including shelving plans for new coal-fired power stations because of falling demand and lack of financing.
Very risky and in the end, probably not a good idea. Until there is a basic framework that both the US and Europe can agree on, taking a strong position will do more damage to the EU banks. European Commission president Jose-Manuel Barroso is right to want to force change but not like this. Why Obama continues to carry water for Wall Street does, however, remain a mystery. It's true that Wall Street has controlled a large percentage of the US GDP but they seemed to do just fine before injecting insanity into the market. Somehow mega-bonuses were not enough and they needed even more, regardless of the lack of value it provided outside of their pockets.
Someone needs to lock Summers and Geithner out of the office one day and introduce Obama to some other economists such as Stiglitz or Krugman. Why are they still out in the cold with Obama?
"It would be interesting, important, useful to have if possible the same rules in the world (...) to have the Americans at our side," he told the France TV5 television station.
"But in this case of the bonuses, I am absolutely clear -- it is such a scandal what is happening, it is really an ethical problem and I believe that, if necessary, we have to do it on our own," he said.
The situation is too important to be allowed to drift any longer. Gordon Brown if finally saying something that makes sense. The Guardian:
The UN Copenhagen talks are due to be attended only by environment ministers, but Brown believes the issues are so momentous, so complex and so likely to determine the shape of national economies that the meeting will require the attendance of world leaders in the final set of negotiations in mid-December.
Green groups and his own climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, have been pressing Brown to take the lead and say he is willing to attend the talks.
Writing in Newsweek tomorrow, Brown warns: "The negotiations are proceeding so slowly that a deal is in grave danger." He ups the ante by becoming the first head of government to say he will go to Copenhagen to try to agree a framework on climate change for the post-2012 era when the Kyoto protocol expires.
