They Said It Couldn't Happen Here. They Lied

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

This is what happens when a govt is focused on saving the rich and lets the middle and lower classes go pound sand: the other class gets slammed by the defenestration of the economy and voila! they're suddenly on the streets.

The Obama Admin refused to pressure the banksters into allowing judges to reset mortgage payments in line with actual incomes instead of the fairy tales the sales people put on the paperwork in order to jam it through a corrupt and greedy system. Result: fewer than a quarter of the mortgages that were eligible for mediation were ever allowed into the program due to bankster resistance and now those people are living under bridges while Goldman Sachs is passing out - swallow your coffee so you won't spit it through your nose - over $23BIL in bonuses. That's right, kids. That's Billion with a "b". For one year.

“The absolute size of compensation payouts will rise significantly,” Keith Horowitz, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in a note to clients two weeks ago.

To put that $23 billion bonus pool number in perspective, it is the most Goldman Sachs has accumulated for bonuses in its history — twice as much as in 2008. And it is doing so while memories are still fresh that just a year ago taxpayers had to step in when Wall Street, and even Goldman, were facing a run on the bank.

Something is rotten here and it isn't in Denmark. We are dealing with an Administration and a Congress that are owned and operated by the wealthiest in the nation, and the wealthy don't care about anything except their own bank accounts. They're holding our foreign policy, our economy, and our energy policy hostage, and the collateral damage throughout the country doesn't concern them.

Take the global warming bill, a bill that's supposed to encourage alternate energy sources that won't pollute, like wind power. Instead, the bill has turned into a food fight between the usual suspects over which giant industry is going to come out with the biggest subsidies.

As the Senate prepares to tackle global warming, the nation’s energy producers, once united, are battling one another over policy decisions worth hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades.

Producers of natural gas are battling their erstwhile allies, the oil companies. Electrical utilities are fighting among themselves over the use of coal versus wind power or other renewable energy. Coal companies are battling natural gas firms over which should be used to produce electricity. And the renewable power industry is elbowing for advantage against all of them.

The NYT article by Jon Broder and Jad Mouawad tries very hard to convince you that this is actually good for the country but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to figure out that the only thing this bill is going to be good for is energy corporations' profits.

The American Petroleum Institute trade group, dominated by major oil companies, opposes the legislation, saying it would discourage domestic exploration and lead to higher oil prices. But some natural gas companies, though longtime members of the institute, have formed a separate lobby and are working actively with the bill’s sponsors to cut a better deal for their product.

The proposal moving through Congress would cap the emissions of greenhouse gases each year and allow companies to buy and sell permits to pollute. That approach, known as cap and trade, is meant to guarantee that emissions will decline, while providing market incentives for companies to invest in low-carbon technologies.

Yeah. Right. Cap-and-trade is classic Bushian corporate policy: "Go ahead and pollute, and while you're at it here's a chance to profit from your polluting that we'll all pretend is going to help the environment but won't change a goddam thing." Meanwhile, the "incentives" for alternatives get weaker and weaker as the winning industries send a flood of lobbyists to tell the bought-and-paid-for Congress what's expected of them: "Kill the competition."

More proof that we are living in a plutocracy, an oligarchy run by the rich to suit themselves at the cost of the rest of us. Hoo-Hah!