If $100 were distributed in the US among 100 people

Right wingers link


 http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/war-on-the-rich-dumbest-idea-in-history-of-man.381770/page-41#post-10019842

 Another good one

http://afferentinput.blogspot.com/2007/12/if-america-had-100-and-100-people.html

Fin crisis one area blog

As for blame, this report identifies who the real perps were:

From the FHFA report 2010:

• Credit Scores: Eighty-four percent of single-family mortgages acquired by the GSEs during 2001 to 2008 were made to borrowers with FICO credit scores above 660, while 5 percent were made to borrowers with FICO scores below 620. In contrast, 47 percent of mortgages financed with private-label MBS originated during this period were made to borrowers with FICO scores above 660, while 32 percent were made to borrowers with FICO scores lower than 620.

• Loan-to-Value (LTV) Ratios: Over 82 percent of GSE-acquired loans had LTV ratios at origination of 80 percent or less, while two-thirds of mortgages financed with private-label MBS had LTV ratios at or below 80 percent, with that share increasing from 54 percent of 2001 originations to 81 percent of 2008 originations.

• Loan Payment Type: Eighty-eight percent of GSE-acquired mortgages were fixed-rate loans originated between 2001 and 2008 and ranged from 79 percent for 2004 originations to 96 percent for 2001 originations. Mortgages financed with private-label MBS were predominantly adjustable-rate loans; comprising more than 70 percent of mortgages financed with private-label MBS originated between 2001 and 2008.

You can blame Dubya's regulator failure based on the GOP's 'hands off approach' is the best and the private banks for the housing crash.

 FHFA Report Shows GSE Loans Outperformed Private-Label MBS Loans

 https://www.ncsha.org/blog/fhfa-report-shows-gse-loans-outperformed-private-label-mbs-loans



 There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren’t among them.

The biggest culprits in the housing fiasco came from the private sector, and more specifically from a mortgage industry that was out of control. These included lenders who originated home loans, investment bankers who packaged them into securities, rating agencies that misjudged these securities, and global investors who bought them without much, if any, study.

In other words, America’s mortgage securitization machine was fundamentally broken. It created millions of mortgage loans that, even under reasonable economic assumptions, stood little chance of being repaid — and were not.




Also to blame, of course, were regulators, who gave the private mortgage market little, if any, oversight. The market’s watchdogs were lulled to sleep by a misplaced view that self-interested private financial institutions would regulate themselves. This flawed thinking was most pervasive at the nation’s most important financial regulatory agency, the Federal Reserve.



By Mark Zandi


http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-01-24/news/35438120_1_mortgage-loans-total-residential-mortgage-debt-subprime-and-alt-a

FOUNDERS QUOTES INEQUALITY

Why Thomas Jefferson Favored Profit Sharing
By David Cay Johnston

The founders, despite decades of rancorous disagreements about almost every other aspect of their grand experiment, agreed that America would survive and thrive only if there was widespread ownership of land and businesses.

George Washington, nine months before his inauguration as the first president, predicted that America "will be the most favorable country of any kind in the world for persons of industry and frugality, possessed of moderate capital, to inhabit." And, he continued, "it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property."

The second president, John Adams, feared "monopolies of land" would destroy the nation and that a business aristocracy born of inequality would manipulate voters, creating "a system of subordination to all... The capricious will of one or a very few" dominating the rest. Unless constrained, Adams wrote, "the rich and the proud" would wield economic and political power that "will destroy all the equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of the people themselves."

James Madison, the Constitution's main author, described inequality as an evil, saying government should prevent "an immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches." He favored "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigents towards a state of comfort."

Alexander Hamilton, who championed manufacturing and banking as the first Treasury secretary, also argued for widespread ownership of assets, warning in 1782 that, "whenever a discretionary power is lodged in any set of men over the property of their neighbors, they will abuse it."

Late in life, Adams, pessimistic about whether the republic would endure, wrote that the goal of the democratic government was not to help the wealthy and powerful but to achieve "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."



http://www.newsweek.com/2014/02/07/why-thomas-jefferson-favored-profit-sharing-245454.html

Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS AND OTHER QUOTES

• What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for his own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty, and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice. 
• •  Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS
  • “True Americanism” (1915).
  
  
   Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.
  
  Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43
  
  
   Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution-an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state. The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their private wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens of hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men. Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power. And, as ownership of the shares is becoming continually more dispersed, the power which formerly accompanied ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few... [and] coincident with the growth of these giant corporations, there has occurred a marked concentration of individual wealth; and that the resulting disparity in incomes is a major cause of the existing depression.
  
   Louis Brandeis, SCOTUS
  
  • Dissent, Liggett Co. v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933), at 565-67.
  
  
    Brandeis, who predicted the crash of 1929 and would have predicted the crash of 2008, was the most far-seeing prophet of economic regulation in an age of financial crisis and the most ferocious critic of “the curse of bigness” in an age that anticipated “too big to fail.”
  
  
   http://www.newrepublic.com/article/75902/why-brandeis-matters
  
  
  
   Brandeis’s legacy as an economic prophet rests on Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, the remarkable book that he published in 1914, based on a series of prescient articles he had written the previous year for Harper’s. Those articles were written to promote the findings of the Pujo Committee, a House banking subcommittee in 1912 headed by Arsène Pujo of Louisiana. Convened to investigate the excesses of the “money trust,” the Pujo Committee concluded that a small group of Wall Street bankers had abused the public’s trust by consolidating their control over banks and industries, choking off credit and competition in the process. Brandeis set out to enumerate the ways that “our financial oligarchy” threatened not only the American economy but also American democracy.
  
  
  
   “The American people have as little need of oligarchy in business as in politics,” Brandeis declared.
  
  
  In 1890, there was no national constituency about the dangers of corporate bigness; but twenty years later the Progressive movement had been so successful that presidential candidates in both parties crusaded against the money trusts, although they disagreed about the appropriate responses
  
  
  
   http://www.newrepublic.com/article/75902/why-brandeis-matters
  

Higher the Pay, the Worse the CEO

Study: The Higher the Pay, the Worse the CEO (Vocativ)
Daniel Edward Rosen looks at a study from the University of Utah, which shows that companies that pay CEOs more than $20 million a year have average annual losses over $1 billion.


 http://www.vocativ.com/money/business/study-higher-pay-worse-ceo/

• Roosevelt Take: Roosevelt Institute Fellow and Director of Research Susan Holmberg and Campus Network alumna Lydia Austin look at additional ways high CEO pay distorts the economy.

 Fixing a Hole: How the Tax Code for Executive Pay Distorts Economic Incentives and Burdens Taxpayers

 http://rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideas/big-ideas/fixing-hole-how-tax-code-executive-pay-distorts-economic-incentives

Fin Crisis

Myth 1

There has been no official bipartisan consensus on the causes of the financial crisis: An official government report was produced in April 2011 by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ranking Member Tom Coburn (R-OK), titled Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. The “Levin-Coburn Report,” a 639-page document, including 2,849 footnotes unanimously and unambiguously concluded that “the [2008] crisis was not a natural disaster, but the result of high risk, complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of regulators, the credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”


This myth got traction in January 2011, when after conducting over five hundred interviews and holding twelve days of hearings, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) failed to produce a unified report. The 545-page book the panel did publish, titled The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, had three sections. The first part was a lengthy majority report endorsed by the six Democratic appointees. This was followed by two much shorter dissents. Reading the three parts together, it is clear that all ten commissioners agreed that the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble was the proximate cause of the crisis.
In addition, there was substantial consensus among nine of the commissioners. For these nine—including three of the four Republican appointees—the centerpiece of the consensus was that poor risk management at U.S. financial institutions was a chief contributor to the crisis. For example, all nine agreed that risk management failures at financial institutions led to insufficient capital and a reliance on short-term borrowing.


 http://www.salon.com/2014/05/25/toxic_bankers_captive_regulators_everything_you_think_about_the_housing_market_is_wrong/

Modern racists just repeat conservative talking points

 

 

Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy and the ugly face of GOP policies

Sterling and Bundy aren't vestiges of another time. They are the embodiment of Paul Ryan & Michele Bachmann's ideas 

 http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/modern_racists_just_repeat_conservative_talking_points_donald_sterling_cliven_bundy_and_the_ugly_face_of_gop_policies/

Donald Trump: Donald Sterling was “set up” by his “very, very bad” “girlfriend from hell”

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Krugman: Cliven Bundy is proof conservatives are dumber than ever

 

The New York Times columnist argues the right embraced Bundy out of a crude and short-sighted anti-intellectualism 

 

 

In his latest column for the New York Times, best-selling author and award-winning economist claims that the right’s recent, unfortunate embrace of Cliven Bundy, the Nevada renegade rancher who has revealed himself to be extremely racist, is the consequence of a larger, troubling shift on the right: the “dumbing down” of American conservatism.


After noting how unconscious or unspoken views on race likely influenced conservatives’ embrace of the tax-avoiding Bundy — who is a white cowboy, not a resident of the “inner city” — Krugman writes that, fundamentally, the Bundy story is about conservatism becoming, well, kind of dumb. ”[T]he Bundy fiasco,” Krugman writes, “was a byproduct of the dumbing down that seems ever more central to the way America’s right operates.”

“American conservatism used to have room for fairly sophisticated views about the role of government,” Krugman laments. “Its economic patron saint used to be Milton Friedman, who advocated aggressive money-printing, if necessary, to avoid depressions. It used to include environmentalists who took pollution seriously but advocated market-based solutions like cap-and-trade or emissions taxes rather than rigid rules.”

But that day, Krugman says, is over: “[T]oday’s conservative leaders were raised on Ayn Rand’s novels and Ronald Reagan’s speeches … They insist that the rights of private property are absolute, and that government is always the problem, never the solution.”

 

 http://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/paul_krugman_cliven_bundy_is_proof_conservatives_are_dumber_than_ever/

 

 

 

80% of the population owns 5% of the wealth.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The middle class has been eviscerated. What middle class?