The 2010-2011 Housing Crime Of The Century

I read the other day about California taking money from its Redevelopment Fund this year so that it could help with balancing its budget. It is also asking for donations towards raising revenue (taxes) and it raised $1.2 million in 2 weeks.

Redevelopment funds are used to help states redevelop blighted areas. Sometimes when I look at pictures of Detroit, or other major cities, I understand what redevelopment means to the people that still live there. When I look at boarded up homes in beautiful subdivisions and know that there will be no redevelopment monies for those neighbors, let alone the homeowners that have lost everything. That these homeowners will have to band together to keep their property values as high as they can - and they will.

But when I hear about Tracy Moss, who having lost her house in Texas due to foreclosure, is now living in Slab City in California, I am saddened and offended. Offended that my Congress can continue to act badly and like spoiled children while 73 year old ladies would have to live out in the middle of the Salton Sea. Slab City, which is about 600 acres of concrete slabs and rutted roads, the remaining foundations of what once was Camp Dunlap, a Marine artillery training base during World War II. Ownership passed to the state of California in the 1950s, and since the late 1960s, Slab City has drawn people from the margins who pull up trailers and RVs, find a slab and set up a life of sorts. There is no town government, no official services like electricity, street repair and clean water.

73 and living in a temporary shelter, while the head of Lehman Brothers takes it bankrupt and comes out with a $426 million bonus…..Is this really how capitalism works, the “Invisible Hand of the Market?” How many of us realize that there is no longer an Invisible Hand in US Capital markets. The “Hand” here is firmly in the pocket of the US Government. The two are the same. The fact that US Congressmen get inside information from these cronies on Wall Street and actually trade on this information, sometimes against the US in terribly detrimental ways, such as Eric Kantor, while on the deficit committee which resulted in our credit rating, was actually in instruments that were shorting the US currency. That's American?

So, I diverse, but we know that various State District Attorneys are not letting the banks off with the proposal they presented that they would pay in repatriations to homeowners - how obscene is that! How much are they going to hold the banks feet to the fire and when do you think that the banks will actually figure it out. That this is not a business deal, there is no waiting the other side out. The other side are District Attorney's that can put them in jail and the homeowners - they have lost everything so I think they can wait the bankers out and stare down the devil.