September 14, 2009 archive

We’re a long, long way from home,

Home’s a long, long way from us . . .

Millions More Foreclosures Coming . . .

Only 12 percent of U.S. homeowners eligible for loan modifications under the Obama administration’s housing rescue plan have had their mortgages reworked, and millions more foreclosures are coming, the Treasury Department said last Wednesday.

Impending Commercial Real Estate Crisis . . .

Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.  Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds.  Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession.

Banking System Bound for Hell With the Hammer Down . . .

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.  “In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

The Afghanistan Quagmire . . .

The Taliban are back. The Afghans are tired of American troops in their midst  . . . virtually every military expert agrees that Afghanistan is the last place on Earth for a modern army to wage war and that includes every NATO general.

Long ago, the British learned that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die. The notion that democracy as practiced in the West can be transplanted there is farcical . . . since the 1700’s the primary export from Afghanistan has been heroin and it remains so today.   Other than growing poppies, there’s not much that passes for an economy there.   It doesn’t matter who’s elected because the business of Afghanistan is opium.  American troops will not alter that.

And the business of America is corporate greed, corporate profit, corporate expansion. Obama won’t alter that.  It doesn’t matter who’s elected, because other than speeches and smoke and mirrors policies, there’s not much that passes for reform here.

I don’t see any real change,

I don’t feel much hope,

I feel a dirty wind blowing,

I see Devils and Dust.