White Americans are still a majority. Demographic trends are away from that, but it'll still take awhile.
It's also noteworthy that even when white Americans eventually make up less than 50% of the population, they will still be the plurality until they pass below the percentage of another racial/ethnic group. Only when that happens can they truly be considered a minority.
American politics are mostly about race. There was a broad coalition for all kinds of positive, worker empowering reform as long as black people weren't benefiting too visibly from it. Once it became clear that they were, and the rest of White America wasn't going to make sure that didn't happen, the coalition split right down the middle.
Nope, its all about the money, but as long as the white workers can look down on the black workers they won't look up at the investing class to see how far down they really are.
American politics are mostly about race. There was a broad coalition for all kinds of positive, worker empowering reform as long as black people weren't benefiting too visibly from it. Once it became clear that they were, and the rest of White America wasn't going to make sure that didn't happen, the coalition split right down the middle.Nope, its all about the money, but as long as the white workers can look down on the black workers they won't look up at the investing class to see how far down they really are.
You just said yourself that race trumps cash.
You just said yourself that race trumps cash.American politics are mostly about race. There was a broad coalition for all kinds of positive, worker empowering reform as long as black people weren't benefiting too visibly from it. Once it became clear that they were, and the rest of White America wasn't going to make sure that didn't happen, the coalition split right down the middle.Nope, its all about the money, but as long as the white workers can look down on the black workers they won't look up at the investing class to see how far down they really are.
No, the race is a smokescreen. Its not real. Its perpetuated, exacerbated, if not outright manufactured with the express purpose of keeping the money at the top.
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Since the OP topic asks about the past 4 years and what impact it had on lives, I shall relate mine.
In 2008 I took the plunge from gainfully-employed full-time wage slave grossing ~$49k a year into a small business. This small business deals with preserving vacant, usually foreclosed, rarely abandoned, homes from vandalism, intrusion and stabilizing against further deterioration due to neglect / abandonment. The demand was substantial enough to where I projected 3rd year earnings at a gross of ~90k annually working 45 out of 52 weeks annually. (There's an incredibly slow stretch for pretty much all real estate stuff for 7 weeks starting shortly before Thanksgiving that goes a little ways past the New Year).
In early 2009 The Administration put a series of moratoriums into play that culminated with the massive national class-action lawsuit that took ~15 months to resolve (late spring of 2012). The direct impact on my small business has resulted in an 85% drop in gross revenue that will not begin to recover until the banks are ready to let the foreclosures begin again. As things currently stand that is not going to happen before March 2013. I have my suspicions about the banks' reasonings over the ~six months since then.
In 2009 I had to take on an evening/weekend job - the best that I could find without sacrificing my small business on the asheap - that roughly doubles my income. I like the job well enough. It is purely a stopgap to keep a weekly cashflow to absorb some of the day-to-day expenses.
In the now 3 1/2 years since the moratoriums hit we, like so many, had to go the better part of a year without paying our mortgage before we could get the bank to restructure the loan into something that is actually affordable. A great many cost-cutting measures have been taken, the new normal. The price of gas has more than doubled since 2008. With what my wife and I do for a living, that doubling the price of gas doubles our costs to do business. The bitter pill of this "restructuring" is that it became a 40 year note with $100k lump sum due at the end of it all - a third of the value of our home!
I do not blame the Administration for the cost of fuel that has doubled since October 2009 ($1.84 compared to $3.82 in my neck of the woods). I can and DO blame the Administration for the ill-advised steps that have directly affected my small business in such a profoundly negative way. My family cannot afford another 4 years of this idiocy.
Social matters can be fixed later. Very, very few of them matter if everyone is working two part-time jobs to remain just below the poverty line. Both majority parties are to blame. It is time to throw out the bathwater and the babies. The spoiled brats need to be euthanised.
It was better when the purple hooved horse ran around saying funny things.
Face it, everything is going to continue to get worse. The future although technologically amazing isn't going to even resemble freedom. Not even remotely.
Oh, and it doesn't matter who gets elected.
Nor is it any politician's fault per se.
It's just the way it is.
It was better when the purple hooved horse ran around saying funny things.
Face it, everything is going to continue to get worse. The future although technologically amazing isn't going to even resemble freedom. Not even remotely.
Oh, and it doesn't matter who gets elected.
Nor is it any politician's fault per se.
It's just the way it is.
Those beliefs and not taking action against them are what will make those beliefs into reality.
Even if my actions have no significant effect, at least I try. Do nothing, what is feared will come to pass. Do something and make it less of a certainty. The Arab Spring demonstrates this in both the good and the bad of it.
I still like Citizen--no, Comrade!--Thiago's thread, but I wish it was more about police repression of leftists under Obama like it used to be.
Please.
I'm not blaming them on Obama.
To thejeff:
My business wasn't built around a spike - it was built around the numbers over the preceeding 20 years. These numbers are very sustainable under normal circumstances. I am very, very good at this line of work and I enjoy it. Not many get to work at doing something that fulfills both of these criteria.
We "benefited" from the policies only by the narrowest of margins. 80% of those who need to benefit from them cannot - they don't meet the requirements, thus the program spends very little of the money budgeted for it. If those requirements are adopted to meet the real needs, that money will be spent plenty fast.
The freezes have the singularly nasty effect of merely delaying the inevitable. Most of those foreclosures have to happen to allow the housing market to fully correct and heal. The housing finance reforms will take care of the primary sources of what caused the mess to begin with.
Regarding gas prices, I specifically stated in my neck of the woods. Where I live, the prices I quoted are accurate data. Receipts don't lie.
No, the race is a smokescreen. Its not real. Its perpetuated, exacerbated, if not outright manufactured with the express purpose of keeping the money at the top.
Movements are made of people. They don't just randomly pick stuff to get incensed about. The racial division scheme would not work in the slightest except for the fact that large numbers of white Americans really do hate differently-colored people so much that they'll cut their own throats to spite them. So yeah, race remains the driving factor.
And, of course, plenty of the ruling class are racists too. The Klan types are foot soldiers, but the generals wear suits and run for office.
There's truth in that. But there's also a feedback loop. There's a whole industry devoted to telling them that minorities are the cause of all their problems. And of course at least some of the generals are motivated at least as much by using racism (or sexism or whatever other form of hatred they choose) to gain power as they are by actual personal racism.
Sure. Social systems work like that. There's even some truth, at least in the late 60s when the changeover took place, that black poor Americans were benefiting more than poor white Americans. They had further to go, after all. But it was fine by white America when poor whites were benefiting more than middle class or wealthy whites. Plus white minorities have a long history of becoming part of "regular" America, usually after only a few generations. The average black American's family has been here for twelve or more and is still definitely not in the club.
But as for the generals that may not personally be racists, and I'll give up George Wallace as an example, it's a distinction without difference to me. The end result is identical.
I was just going to ignore it, but I've got a spare moment so may as well dump some water down the gopher hole.
I don't care about anti-white racism in the US; I really don't give a damn. Why? Not because I think it's ok or because I think white Americans have it coming, but because it's such a minuscule factor in American politics and society that we can safely ignore it most of the time without it making any real difference. By contrast, the racism of white America has been the chief driving factor in most political and social conflicts in the United States for as long as there has been a United States and its victims number in the millions.
It's triage.
Turin, thank you for sharing your story with such aplomb and courtesy. I would like to hear more of your thoughts on banks, however, as I do think they are equally to blame for your situation along with the administration.
To thejeff:
My business wasn't built around a spike - it was built around the numbers over the preceeding 20 years. These numbers are very sustainable under normal circumstances. I am very, very good at this line of work and I enjoy it. Not many get to work at doing something that fulfills both of these criteria.
So you're claiming that, due to the moratorium, there were less vacant houses during the recession and after record foreclosures for at least a year, than in normal years? That seems off to me. May depend on where you are, I suppose.
Or do you only work with new vacancies?
Property preservation - what I do - works pretty simply. Most banks contract with a company to provide servicing of all of their properties: re-keying/securing, lawm maintenance, winterization and a gob of other tasks. The ones that don't leave it to their foreclosure brokerages (and thus their agents) to find contractors like me to attend to those needs.
Once a property is assigned to an agent, they use their contractors to deal with the property. In my case I work with those agents that have to drum up suitable contractors. Such an agent is assigned the property through their broker's liason from the owning bank along with a list of tasks such as securing / re-keying the property, basic lawn maintenance, trashing out the personal property left behind [along with personal property evictions, as necessary beforehand], winterizing the property ad nauseam.
When an agent loses the listing for a property, the new agent also receives the same tasks list and they go to their contractors to attend to that list.
The driving force (after determining that the business is viable even on a one-person scale of operation) was and remains that most contractors are pretty unreliable and, worse for this work, often very late in attending to the tasks as the agent needs them to be completed in the time frames they need them to be completed within. I am able to perform within the narrow time frames required or less, often a day ahead of the required time. Word of mouth grew my business pretty rapidly.
We "benefited" from the policies only by the narrowest of margins. 80% of those who need to benefit from them cannot - they don't meet the requirements, thus the program spends very little of the money budgeted for it. If those requirements are adopted to meet the real needs, that money will be spent plenty fast.
[/QUOTE="thejeff"]And a lot of people who meet the requirements are stonewalled by banks anyway.
Absolutely correct. The banks - used generically - are still the primary problem, exacerbating the "challenge" of renegotiating the loan. As long as you can technically afford the note, they basically won't talk to you. Then you have to prove you cannot afford it, but can afford a reduced note to remain.
Thus we had to make the decision to take the risky road, throwing the dice and praying that we could browbeat them into retooling the loan. We were going to lose the house if we didn't, so we took a big gamble in order to keep our home. The very legitimate complaint boils down to the legislation that has been enacted makes it ridiculously difficult to qualify for and then obtain the reworking of mortgages necessary to stay in one's home. Pair this up with the banks' willingness to let their assets continue to degrade in spectacular fashion in some vain hope that they will be able to acquire pre-collapse value "later".
The freezes have the singularly nasty effect of merely delaying the inevitable. Most of those foreclosures have to happen to allow the housing market to fully correct and heal. The housing finance reforms will take care of the primary sources of what caused the mess to begin with.
[/QUOTE="thejeff"] There is some truth in that. OTOH, allowing the banks to get away with and profit from all the short cuts they took to maximize profits in the boom years doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Not to mention the outright fraud in foreclosures.
Ironically, the fraudulent foreclosures stem from fraudulent loans being given out to begin with. "Signature" mortgages, the worst offenders of a big bunch of offenders, being awarded at all was a bed that the banks collectively made. They should have been collectively made to lie in that bed. If they had, I have no idea how it would have turned out. I can hazard a guess based on the Great Depression though ... and current events relating to foreclosures and abandoned properties may well go that way again.
I'm definitely not trying to say that nothing should have been done. Personally, my opinion is that the banks should never have been bailed out to begin with. Short term pain, long term gain.
Real property, like all business, is cyclic in its very nature - that has the singular advantage of (generally) improving in value over the long term. Everything else stems from real property. Crops are grown on it, resources are gathered from it, people live on it, businesses do business on it, livestock is grazed and herded upon it, factories build stuff on it, etc. etc. etc.
regarding gas prices, I specifically stated in my neck of the woods. Where I live, the prices I quoted are accurate data. Receipts don't lie.
[/QUOTE="thejeff"] I can't argue with you. I was just surprised since your current figures matched the average closely, but the early ones are much below it. Ignores my larger point though, that those low prices were due to the collapse and the increase matches longer term trends.
:-) I can only relate what I have hard data on regarding the prices. The national averages in '09 were higher than they were here in the D.C. area as I recall. Getting 17 mpg in the truck needed to do the work at that time demanded that I shop around for the best price relative to the time/distance necessary to get that price.
I do recall any number of contractors freaking out at the big fuel price spike upwards about that time - breaking $3 a gallon for the first time ever, 2005 maybe? - driving bunches of people to snatch up all the gas cans they could find to stock up. Gas stations sold out everything they had in mere hours, it took the better part of a week to resupply, it was a mess.
Sometimes I can do as much as 20 cents a gallon cheaper for fuel, depending on where I'm going. Having switched to primarily using a vehicle that gets a bit more than twice the fuel economy of the aforementioned truck tilts the "gas cost" towards what gets me en route the fastest. At present, even with a 20 cent-per-gallon "surcharge", the $2 extra for a tank of fuel is not worth the effort or mileage to drive where it's cheaper unless I know that cheaper gas is en route or at / near the destination.
Please.
I'm not blaming them on Obama.
Then you might not want to put your link under a line that says "police repression of leftists under Obama".
It's a natural mistake to think you might think Obama had something to do with it.
The title of the thread is "Living Under Obama's Presidency." I mean, it didn't happen under Bush...
For the record, I don't think Paul Robeson was interviewed by HUAC under Obama, either.
Turin, thank you for sharing your story with such aplomb and courtesy. I would like to hear more of your thoughts on banks, however, as I do think they are equally to blame for your situation along with the administration.
I would be happy to, although anything lengthly would require some research to nail down the timeline of catastrophe with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
TL;DR on banks' role in the housing market going belly up: they got greedy, legislation permitted the circumstances to happen, very few banks looked at the common sense rules of thumb for greenlighting mortgages because the cash cow was Bunyon-esque ... and so very golden and so,so shiny. I want to say the legislation in question came about ~2003 - 2005 ... but I really don't know from the top of my head.
EDIT - addendum: the banks are not on my good list for their role in the past 4 years. I can only let my money do the talking, and maybe let a few votes do some talking as well. Even now the banks seem to be erring on the side of stupid....
Did Samnell mention New York?
Did Lazar X mention triage?
Who are you talking to?
Just to be clear, I do not care one bit about your political fanatiscisms. There will not be any debating, because your mind is made up, and no amount of reality, philosophy, truth, or fact will sway your opinion.
It's not really clear who you're objecting to, but you're the same person who "Liked" Andrew R's crazy I-don't-know-what-racism-actually-means post, so as far as I'm concerned the above line coming from you is nothing but comedy.
New York is one of the dumping spots of the US, and really does not at all deserve to be given as any kind of example for the country for what is normal, common, or even acceptible. No offense to NYers, but it is neither the center of the country nor is it a good representation of anything about the rest of the country, in any way. Cali is the other big one, basically seen as the US when in reality they are really the exceptions.
Perhaps, but quite frankly we'd be a lot better off if more of the country had more in common with places like California and New York.
EDIT - addendum: the banks are not on my good list for their role in the past 4 years. I can only let my money do the talking, and maybe let a few votes do some talking as well. Even now the banks seem to be erring on the side of stupid....May I suggest a credit union? They've done well by me for years and seem to have avoided most of the greed driven disasters.
Just my usual plug when the subject comes up.
I would if I qualified for any. So far as I know, I don't. ^____^
I deleted my comment, albeit to late. I don't want to get drawn in to anther one of these, so my apologies. I was responding to a few people in that post, not any one in particular. Somtimes people are going to believe what they want regardless of anything else, and it's pointless.
Your major contribution to this thread has been, "White Americans are already a minority," and you have the gall to accuse ANYONE of holding stubborn beliefs that do not waver in the face of facts?
And yes, triage. By which he means, I assume, that racism against whites is a much less serious problem in this country than racism against minorities and thus can be put on the back burner while we deal with the more serious ones.
Almost infinitely less serious, in fact. I'd rank it on about the same level as prejudice against Christians in the US. They face the same sort of "persecution" and "oppression". White racism is right up there with, and cannot really be extricated from, is one of America's greatest and most grievous vices. It has made victims of entire generations of non-white people who paid its price with their bodies.
Anti-white racism? An unfortunate triviality almost anywhere this side of Zimbabwe.
An unfortunate, though undoubtedly intentional, choice of example. I suspect there's a lot of overlap between those who worry about racism against whites and prejudice against Christians in the US.Almost infinitely less serious, in fact. I'd rank it on about the same level as prejudice against Christians in the US. They face the same sort of "persecution" and "oppression".
And yes, triage. By which he means, I assume, that racism against whites is a much less serious problem in this country than racism against minorities and thus can be put on the back burner while we deal with the more serious ones.
I would argue that there are a lot of comorbid traits that these people share - none of them particularly flattering. They're essentially an embarrassment to the rest of the country. There is some solace to be had in the knowledge that they could never get into the heaven they purport belief in.
Not much, though.
Not much, though.
I take it where I can get it.
I would argue that there are a lot of comorbid traits that these people share - none of them particularly flattering. They're essentially an embarrassment to the rest of the country. There is some solace to be had in the knowledge that they could never get into the heaven they purport belief in.
When I'm feeling sort of whimsically vengeful I sometimes mentally wish a blind, pitiless universe that ends in death for everyone on them. (To be clear: Not wishing death on them. Just the lack of an afterlife.)
But then I think of all the resources, time, and effort wasted on the stuff and the irony isn't so fun again. :(
When I'm feeling sort of whimsically vengeful I sometimes mentally wish a blind, pitiless universe that ends in death for everyone on them. (To be clear: Not wishing death on them. Just the lack of an afterlife.)
The lack of an afterlife would mean very little. Wish for an afterlife, but wish for a just one - the sort that they've deluded themselves into believing they qualify for, but don't.