um, fuck. new hoovervilles.

Sydni said:
Have any of the candidates commented on this?

I'm a bit naive....so if there is, can someone link for me?

MrStitches said: Don't worry, when they get that $600 stimulus check, their problems will be solved.

Sydni said:
Have any of the candidates commented on this?

MrStitches said:
Don't worry, when they get that $600 stimulus check, their problems will be solved.

Sydni said:

It's bad news for everyone.

DevilsReject said:

hell i am not even homeless and $600 isn't going to save me. It's like pissing on a forest fire.

But that statement always makes me laugh.

MrStitches said:
Don't worry, when they get that $600 stimulus check, their problems will be solved.

attn_ho said:

i dont think the US media has even reported on this; note, its a bbc broadcast.
!

MrStitches said:

Seriously. I get more excited by $10 in a birthday card than I am about this check.

attn_ho said:


goodbye middle class!

The collapse of Bear Stearns last Friday and its subsequent takeover organized by JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Board mark a major turning point in the history of post-war global capitalism. It signifies that the contradictions within the world capitalist economy are now reaching the point where the type of financial catastrophe and social and economic devastation experienced in the 1930s is not only possible, but is becoming increasingly likely.

The plight of Bear Stearns's 14,000 employees, at least half of whom are expected to lose their jobs and whose life savings in company stock have been wiped out at a stroke, foreshadows the social catastrophe that threatens to engulf the working class in the United States and throughout the world.....

In addition, it announced a quarter-point cut in the discount rate it charges for direct loans to banks, and added - in a move with no precedent since the Great Depression - that it would extend unlimited credit for six months not only to commercial banks, but also to investment banks and brokerage houses. Normally, the Fed's so-called discount window is restricted to commercial banks, i.e., depository institutions, and closed to less regulated and traditionally more speculative investment banks.

By invoking an emergency provision added to the Federal Reserve Act in 1932 at the height of the Depression allowing Fed loans to investment houses, the Fed signaled that it feared the failure of other major Wall Street firms. Veteran economist Allen Sinai has predicted that "several major financial institutions" will be lost in some form.........

The Fed's actions, coming on top of massive infusions of liquidity into the financial markets and an agreement to accept as collateral mortgage-backed assets that cannot be sold and are of dubious value, mean that the US central bank is taking onto its balance sheet perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in bad investments. This threatens to undermine global confidence in the solvency of the Fed itself and accelerate the stark fall of the US dollar on world currency markets.........

There were also criticisms from some quarters that the Fed's intervention was interfering in the operations of the "free markets." However, most analysts insisted that the action was necessary because of the state of world financial markets. A complete collapse of Bear Stearns would have led to a fire sale of its assets and a cascading effect across financial markets, as the value of all financial assets was marked down, undermining the balance sheets of other major banks and financial institutions, all of which have made similar investments to Bear Stearns.........
The crisis has its immediate origins in the fall of home prices which started in 2006 and has accelerated since then. This has resulted in tens of billions of dollars being wiped off the value of mortgage-backed securities held by the banks and investment houses, which no amount of interest rate cuts or additional credit will restore. The only way this solvency crisis would end is if home prices started to rise. But with the US economy entering a recession - possibly the deepest since World War Two, according to Harvard economist Martin Feldstein - home prices will continue to decline, further deepening the financial crisis.

The dependence of the global banks on the mortgage-backed securities business is indicated by the fact that the total issuance of these securities, which stood at $16.4 billion in 1998, had risen to $366 billion by 2007. Bear Stearns was only the eighteenth largest underwriter of these securities last year, meaning that many other institutions could go the same way.......

While the unfolding disaster has come as a surprise to so many of the Wall Street experts, one can find in the first chapter of Volume II of Marx's Capital a very timely insight into the background of the crisis. Karl Marx made the point that for the possessor of money capital (the banks and financial houses): "the process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production." The process depicted here as "periodical" by Marx has now become a permanent feature of American capitalism.

This has now led to the situation where fraud, manipulation and outright criminality have become a central feature of the process of wealth accumulation. When the share market bubble burst in 2000-2001, some of these methods came to light with the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. But far from being ended, they were extended on an even broader scale in the next period........

Far from the claims of the "free market" boosters that deregulation has promoted transparency, the financial system has been marked by increasing deception and cover-up. Over the past decade, the volume of financial contracts which are not traded on any major exchange and are completely unregulated has increased rapidly, with trade in derivative contracts tied to stocks and bonds taking place in transactions between financial institutions. And in conditions where, as exemplified by the balance sheet of Bear Stearns, "value" is derived from internally generated computer models, it is only a short step to deliberate deception.

In fact, one of the reasons for the credit crunch is that the major banks and finance houses do not believe what they are being told by each other, and so refuse to make credit available.....


The eruption of financial manipulation and criminality, while of major significance, is not itself the cause of the crisis. Rather, the events taking place at the heights of capitalist economy and society are the product of historical changes in the structure of the world capitalist economy.

It is these processes which have led to the prospect of a re-emergence of the type of social and economic conditions which characterized the 1920s and 1930s, and which eventually led to the eruption of World War Two.

The restabilization of the world economy after the devastation of the Great Depression and the war was grounded on the strength of US capitalism. It laid the basis for the reconstitution of the world market, after it had virtually disappeared in the 1930s, made possible the re-establishment of an international monetary and financial system under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944, and enabled the rebuilding of the European economy via the Marshall Plan of 1947.

The consequent extension to the rest of the advanced capitalist countries of the more productive methods of American industry made possible the upswing in the rate of profit which laid the foundations for the post-war economic boom......

The expansion of credit in the US and the creation of a series of booms - the share market bubble, the dot.com bubble and the housing boom - have sustained the markets necessary for the expansion of production from China and other cheap-labor countries.

At the same time the lowering of production costs resulting from the transfer of manufacturing to these cheap-labor regions has enabled the US Federal Reserve to maintain the low interest rate monetary regime necessary for the creation of credit-based booms.

But these very processes, which led to increased growth over the past period, have now created the conditions for a global economic crisis which threatens to plunge hundreds of millions of people into a disaster.

The massive investments in China, and the increased demand for raw materials it has produced, have produced a resurgence of global inflation. This upsurge in prices is also being fueled by the continuous fall in the value of the dollar. At the same time, the dollar is continuing to slump because of the Fed's cuts in interest rates, aimed at sustaining the financial system. In short, the processes which created the upswing of an earlier period are working in reverse......

For the past two decades, the high priests and publicists of the capitalist system have used the collapse of the counterrevolutionary and bureaucratic Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as the basis for an incessant campaign declaring that socialism is finished and that the capitalist market, based on private ownership and profit, and the division of the world into competing nation states, is the only historically possible form of economic organization.

This historic lie now stands exposed. It is as worthless as the exotic debt products which were passed off by the banks and finance houses as representing real value.....

The rich and super-rich, along with their representatives in the media, will denounce any such program as not viable because it violates the dominance of private property. But the disaster created by their policies and their stewardship of the social order over which they preside means they have lost any right to direct the future economic organization and activity of society.

The working people in the US and the world over cannot allow their fate to be determined by the operations of a financial system which threatens them with catastrophe. They must take matters in their own hands.

They must unite across all national borders to fight for a socialist solution to the crisis, at the center of which is the demand that the entire financial system be taken out of private hands and placed under public ownership, subject to full public accountability and democratic control.

FearTheReaper said:

LA Times did a story on it last month.

The BBC should have said where that was.

MrCrisp said:

hello, it was in america. do your own research.

Toku666 said:
Hmm. That seemed really light on... facts. I just heard a lot of "it's hard, these people used to be" blah blah blah but I get no names, no figures on these peoples' housing finances, nothing. Just dry intoning of how awful it is and glib conclusions about this being a direct result of the housing economy. I'm sympathetic to what's happening to these people, but not at all sympathetic to what I see as a fluff news report full of empty phrasing.

Didn't FearTheReaper tell these people he was glad they lost their houses?

CommunistCanuck said:

Now this has more news content then say K-Fed getting custody of the children or finding out that a man in Paris Texas makes an Eiffel tower out of Cheese, this is what I think of as an example of a Fluff news report.

Indepth and insightful?
Yeah it could have used alot more focus and time to address the proccess at work but for such news reporting you pretty much have to go to an independent news site.

On your other point, they will unfortunetly not be able to receive their virtual shanty warming party card until some one figures out how to connect Hoovervilles to the Bushnet or would the Gonzalesweb be more accurate name for wanting these people to stay......connected?

CommunistCanuck said:
Now this has more news content then say K-Fed getting custody of the children or finding out that a man in Paris Texas makes an Eiffel tower out of Cheese, this is what I think of as an example of a Fluff news report.

Indepth and insightful?
Yeah it could have used alot more focus and time to address the proccess at work but for such news reporting you pretty much have to go to an independent news site.

On your other point, they will unfortunetly not be able to receive their virtual shanty warming party card until some one figures out how to connect Hoovervilles to the Bushnet or would the Gonzalesweb be more accurate name for wanting these people to stay......connected?

Toku666 said:
1) No, it doesn't. "K-Fed" is a name, and stories about him usually include information like names, what is happening to babies, etc. The above is just "ZOMG PEEPLE IN TENTS" and a lot of forced conclusions on the part of the narrator. Feel free to give counter-evidence.

Toku666 said:
2) So... I should stop expecting the BBC to live up to its reputation and... deliver actual news? Okay.

Toku666 said:
3) What the fuck are you talking about? At least you seem to have mastered separating your thoughts by spaces. Kudos.