Home Savers/Home Defenders

Feel Safe?

Via Yglesias:

"It's Like a Delicacy"

Large numbers of Americans live on the margins all the time; now, there are more of them, so we pay attention.

"Like Playing Hot Potato with a Time Bomb"

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Plan

A good summary of spending provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.  

Home Defenders

via Firedoglake:

Last week I showcased the plight of Rosa and Juan Rico in Oakland, CA. They had had so many problems working with their lender to get a modification of their loan that they joined with 40 ACORN members and moved themselves into a local branch of the bank in order to force the bank to deal with them.

They are but one of the 2.3 million families that faced foreclosure proceedings in 2008. And they are on the leading edge of a crisis that will claim up to 9 million more by 2013, costing the economy up to $850 billion, if we sit idly by, doing nothing about the root cause of the economic maelstrom that has engulfed our country.

ACORN members like the Ricos have made the commitment to save their homes and rebuild their communities through civil disobedience. Today, I am proud to announce that we are launching a program that gives everyone an opportunity to help keep families in their homes and put pressure on our elected officials to address this root cause of the economic collapse.

Called the ACORN Home Defenders, this program links members of local communities with families who have taken the courageous step of refusing to cooperate with the foreclosure process. It responds to the desperate calls for help found in the grim foreclosure statistics and echoes the sentiments of leaders like Toledo, Ohio-area Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur who recently said, "stay in your homes. If the American people, anybody out there is being foreclosed, don't leave[.]"

The urgency of this crisis demands immediate action. So the Home Defenders program is rolling out in two stages. The first stage will include eight "Tier 1" metro areas: Baltimore, MD; Contra Costa County, CA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Oakland, CA; Orlando, FL and Tucson, AZ. Initial trainings for people located in these metro areas will take place during the second week in February, with kick-off events scheduled to occur during the 3rd week of the month.

The second stage will include 16 "Tier 2" metro areas: Albany, NY; Boston, MA; Bridgeport, CT; Broward County, FL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Durham, NC; Flint, MI; Minneapolis, MN; Pittsburgh, PA; Raleigh, NC; San Mateo County, CA; and Wilmington, DE. Trainings and kick-off events will occur a few weeks after those in the Tier 1 cities.

New cities are continuing to join this campaign, so if you do not live near any of the metro areas listed above, you can still participate in actions to save the homes of families in your community as they come on-board. For people who live in areas that will not have local organizers helping drive this program, ACORN is creating Home Defender Tool-Kits that help you fight back against the crisis in your neighborhood.

I urge you to take this step in helping local families fight back against the crisis caused by reckless financiers who made billions in bonuses in equity-stripping schemes designed to set homebuyers up for failure.

By showing that communities are refusing to participate in their own decimation, we will force elected officials to finally shift their emphasis from bailing out Wall Street to bailing out Main Street.

Join with us. The good folks at Change.org have already taken one step by covering the announcement of the Home Defenders. Let's all join together and keep families in their homes.

A Primer

on the School Lunch Program.

Senate Stimulus

Text, via Ezra K.

Women and Public Policy

Compare and contrast.

Fighting Foreclosure

"This is a crowd that won't scatter."

There's a Certain Kind of Fire That No Water Can Put Out

MLK on war and poverty.

FDR's First Inaugural

Seems appropriate:

. . . the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men. . . .

Three Charts: Conclusion Draws Itself?

Unemployment at 13.5%

By the BLS U-6 Measure.

Utterly Predictable

But no less awful for that:

• In July - November 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, the number of families entering New York City homeless shelters jumped by 40 percent.[2]

• Massachusetts reports a 32 percent increase between November 2007 and November 2008 in the number of homeless families residing in state-supported emergency shelters.[3]

• In Connecticut, family homeless shelters turned away 30 percent more families due to lack of bed space in September 2008 than in September 2007.[4]

• Hennepin County, Minnesota (Minneapolis) reports a 20 percent increase between the first 10 months of 2008 and the comparable period in 2007 in the number of homeless families in emergency shelters.[5]

• Los Angeles County reports a 12 percent increase between September 2007 and September 2008 in the number of families receiving welfare assistance who are known to be homeless.[6]

Read the full report from CBPP here.

On Sort-Term Stimulus and Long-Term Change

Where Did the Money Go Then?

WPA spending, via Crooked Timber.

Revisiting the New Deal

A terrific overview, by historian Eric Rauchway.

Now What?

Welfare reform and economic collapse.

A Poor People's Lobby?

from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

. . . . Anyway, Samuelson's argument in today's column is that poor people have powerful advocates just like rich people, and then suggests that the techno-wonks at the CBPP have the same kind of clout as, say, the Club for Growth. This is indeed laughable, but Larry Bartels tells us that it's even more laughable than you think:

I know of two systematic attempts to measure the relative influence of affluent, middle-class, and poor people on government policy. One is in the next-to-last chapter of Unequal Democracy, where senators’ roll call votes are moderately strongly affected by the preferences of high-income constituents, less strongly affected by the preferences of middle-income constituents, and totally unaffected by the preferences of low-income constituents. That’s the more optimistic view. My Princeton colleague Marty Gilens (in a 2005 article in Public Opinion Quarterly and a book-in-progress) has a parallel analysis focusing on aggregate poilcy shifts over two decades. He also finds no discernible impact of low-income preferences, but argues that middle-class people also get ignored when they happen to disagree with rich people.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein weighs in.