As I've mentioned before, I sometimes log into the official White House website to get an exact quote or find out what Dubya is up to when we're not looking.
For instance, today it has his official radio address in which he discusses the "period of adjustment" that the mortgage industry is going through. In his address, W says that his priority is "to help American homeowners navigate these financial challenges, so that as many families as possible can stay in their homes. The Federal government will not bail out lenders -- because that would only make a recurrence of the problem more likely. And it is not the government's job to bail out speculators, or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford. But I support action at the Federal level that will help more American families keep their homes."
Hmmm, the Federal government will not bail out lenders...what is it then, when you lower the prime rate? Isn't that lowering the rate at which the Federal Government lends money to banks? Doesn't that kind of help the lenders? Please, those of you with more understanding of these complicated financial things than I have, correct me if I'm wrong on this.
OK, now as to the next part, about it not being the government's job to bail out "those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford." Isn't that the problem here? The people who bought these houses can't afford them? Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of sympathy for the people who found banks that willingly lent them money for mortgages for which they wouldn't ordinarily qualify. But let's call a spade a spade here.
Naturally W's solution is...tax breaks. I'm sure that will do those low income people a lot of good. He also has a couple of other fixes, so we'll see...Given his track record, I expect most of it will benefit the rich and not the poor, but I'll welcome any further knowledge others can provide.
There was actually a very good article in the NY Times magazine on Sunday about how we came to be in this mess. As usual it all goes back to greed and gambling.
However, I digress.
What I was going to tell you about when I started this post was the OTHER White House website. The one I accidentally stumbled upon when I was looking for the Whitehouse.gov site. I typed in "www.whitehouse.org" by mistake and got this! At first as I was reading it I thought it was real. It almost sounded like something W would have said. Then it dawned on me that this was satire. I remembered having read about this alternate "White House" website awhile back but had never read it before.
Check it out, you may find it's closer to the truth than we'd like to think.
21 comments:
I know a lot of people in England who have lost their homes; not because they couldn't afford them when they took out their mortgages but because of rising interest rates, unemployment and mis-sold endowment plans.
Rx
Foreclosures are the highest they have been in 40 years!
Bush only tells more lies and spin!
The White House site that appears as satire is in reality the true version of our times.
Wait till the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2008 when balloon payments must be met on all those loans from easy financing, and it becomes near impossible to obtain a loan.
The real Bush economy will emerge.
Mauigirl, you have outdone yourself with this post... saying many things and all with great flair.
We are in a big mess and of course how like you (tee hee) you liberal bloggerette you to drag things like the truth into it? Things like lowered prime rates and tax breaks?
Girl, what are you saying?
Sorry for the sarcastic interlude, it got the better of me.
Anyway, hitting all the points of your post, I think the satire site works best!
Thanks for all your comments. This country is truly in a mess and to your point, Suzie-Q, it's the worst it's been in decades.
Ruth, very interesting, it seems this is probably a worldwide phenomenon. Or at least in the capitalist world!
Maui, great article. I was familiar with whitehouse.org, because it is run by a friend of Greg Palest, the BBC investigative reporter that keeps finding dirt on Bush. If you remember the scandal about caging voters, the documentation for it came from email to Rove mistakenly sent to whitehouse.org. and passed along to Palest.
Tomcat, thanks for the info, I didn't know that happened; that's great! ;-) I'm sure that website causes the White House no end of annoyance.
You have to be real careful what you type, Mauigirl.
It used to be when you typed Whitehouse.COM you actually got a porn site, something i discovered after a local paper mistakenly put .com instead of .gov in the paper.
Keep finding more treasures like this Mauigirl.
Naturally, Loren, I had to try that out! But now it appears to be a site about the 2008 election! Oh well! ;-)
Larry, I'll keep looking!
As usual it all goes back to greed and gambling.
Buying that first house can be complicated and bewildering. And if you haven't tried to educate yourself about the process beforehand, it can be overwhelming.
Even so, "if it's too good to be true, it usually is" still applies. Even lessor educated people understand that when that 250K house they could never get before, suddenly is "in their reach." There was greed on both sides, but as usual, the preponderance lies with the financial tricksters who make a living preying on people. This time it was houses. Next time....? It doesn't matter to them, as long as there's a dollar to be made.
There was some greed all around. People were greedy for a bigger home than they could afford and lenders knew exactly what was going to happen to the borrower but greed made them sit some of these people up for a fall.
PoP and Future, agree there was some greed on the part of the potential homeowners (perhaps wanting a bigger house than they could afford, etc.) but what I was really referring to was the discussion in the link to the NY Times article where it talks about the transformation of the mortgage industry from a simple transaction a future homeowner makes with a bank (which would then have a vested interest in making sure the homeowner wouldn't default on the loan) to becoming a fund that is traded in the stock market. Once mortgages were bought and sold as commodities and the lenders became removed from the lendees, the local bank that makes the original mortgage loan had less vested interest in what happened after that because they were just going to sell the mortgage to a fund anyway. It all comes down to trading funds and that is very different from a loan to a specific person. And that's where the greed and gambling came in.
I was listening to a commercial on the radio this weekend that was advertising how you can get homes by auction really cheap because of the number of foreclosures. It was so sad...they were way too happy that people were getting kicked out of their homes and now they were able to help someone else buy them right out from under them! Kind of cannibalistic. :-(
The more the better, Maui.
Mary Ellen, I agree, I've heard ads like that as well. And there's a whole website, Realtytrac, devoted to letting investors know which houses are being foreclosed on so they could move in and make an offer on them (which is pretty mortifying, I'm sure, to those involved in the process who would probably rather people not know their house is in foreclosure).
And now the problem is spreading to europe and asia...
It was also made worse by speculators who thought they could turn around houses in a matter of weeks, making thousands. It worked as the bubble frothed, but when the whole thing collapsed, the last ones holding the hot potatoes got burned.
Gypsy, good point - the speculators just heated up the market further and then got burned - and of course, their speculation made the prices go up and that hurt the ordinary person who just wanted to buy a house they could afford and live in it. So those people got caught too because they had to take out riskier mortgages just to afford an ordinary house.
Jollyroger, you're right, of course, about W. And it also just goes to show there are not enough checks and balances on this industry anymore. Some adjustable rate mortgages are OK because they do have 2% caps a year and a lifetime cap (we had one when we first bought our house) but there are so many other types now, like those balloon mortgages, that come due completely in a certain amount of time, etc., that some inexperienced people can really get burned. And even the ARM's that have caps, etc., can burn someone if they've lost their job or their pay hasn't kept pace with the mortgage rate increases.
mauigirl,
What ever happened to whitehouse.org????
It has not been updated since august 2007. I am worried sick. WHO KNOWS PLEASE.
Thanks
Tom E. Evans
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