In a revealing article, the New York Times suggests President Obama's "Making Homes Affordable" program is actually harming the homeowners and lending institutions it intended to help by prolonging mortgages that will never get paid off. "The choice we appear to be making is trying to modify our way out of this, which has the effect of lengthening the crisis," Kevin Katari, a manager with Watershed Asset Management, explained to the New York Times. "We have simply slowed the foreclosure pipeline, with people staying in houses they are ultimately not going to be able to afford anyway." The foreclosure crisis is a sympton of the disease but not the disease itself. The proliferation of high-risk loans, which are often bad for lender and lendee, is the disease. Home buyers who have no business buying homes receive loans from banks who have no business lending them money. A rational economic system, i.e., the free market, would punish such maladaptive choices. Through bailouts, to banks and homeowners who made poor choices, the U.S. government encourages such lunacy.

Hey Al Gore, wheres the global warming? You played on our FREARS!

Have these Dem buffoons learned anything from the CRA fiasco and pushing mortg@ges on banks and people who were unqualified to afford them?

No. The answer is no.

So, looks like we'll be looking for another toxic paper problem that will further cripple Wall Street, our short term economy and force another look at an additional government bail out that we can't afford.

Liberalism destroys.

Dr. Dean Baker has been making these points for years (without the gratuitous and silly attacks on homeowners). Thanks for bringing this up.

He has a book out called Plunder and Blunder that documents the disturbing state-corporate nexus. He also has a phenomenal book called The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, which documents conservative crimes in shilling for lucrative subsidies for private tyrannies, then profiting off them after they have served the corporation's interests in government.

That's great PMA. Yes, it's all the fault of those evil Conservative business men - blah, blah, blah.... And we will all admit the Bush Administration's crimes against Conservatism and misdemeanors.

But it took the policies of two Democrat Presidents and an out of control Democrat Congress in blind support of those policies to put a major dent in our economy and it appears that we have another Democrat President and Congress who have not learned those lessons.

Or more likely, they don't care.

It looks like the Marxists will march right into 2010 without missing a beat and if we have another year like 2009, as it looks like it shaping up to be, it won't be the Conservatives who will be the ones dragging us down to being another Euro-socialist backwater.

Why do you function as a stimulus-response organism when conservative crimes are raised or summarily dismiss those crimes. Do you have any respect for yourself?

Along the same lines, more Taibbi glory:

"The essentially complicit nature of the two ruling political parties was in this way covered up for decades, as the crimes of the Democrats were greedily consumed as entertainment by the Limbaugh crowd while the crimes of the Bushies became hot-selling t-shirts and bumper stickers for the Air America listenership. The abiding mutual hatred the red/blue groups shared consistently prevented any kind of collective realization about the structure of the overall scheme.

What worries me is that we’re now reverting to the same old pattern with the financial crisis story. We’re starting to see fault lines develop, where one side blames the government while another side blames Wall Street for the messes of the last two decades. The side blaming the government tends to belong to the free-marketeer class and divines in safety-net purveyors like the GSEs and in the Fed’s money-printing fundamental corruptions of the capitalist ideal, while the side blaming the bankers tends to belong to the left-liberal tradition that focuses on greed and seeming absence of community conscience among the CEO class as primary corruptors of the social contract."
-Matt Taibbi

"Why do you function as a stimulus-response organism when conservative crimes are raised or summarily dismiss those crimes."

The point is that I don't dismiss those crimes. I acknowledge and despise them whoever might commit them. But as some just love to take the easy route and associate corporate greed, hoarding and associated crimes with Conservatives, I just think that it should be pointed out that there is more of that hoarding and crime perpetrated by liberals who, of course, are acting as if they only the best intentions while scorching and pillaging the social landscape. And that would apply to private and public crimes as well.

As an example, take a look at global money manipulator and political king maker George Soros, benefactor and recipient of government largesse from O and his administration. This guy is a player on the largest scale and is not in the same hemisphere as conservative.

That the President of the United States and the Corruptocrats rewarded this guy with $8 Billion of OUR MONEY for private exploration and development of Brazilian gas and oil is a true crime.