The housing crisis offers an excellent opportunity to bash Corporations, Free-Marketism, and Wall Street. Because homeowners are a crucial voting block, there's also a lot of pressure to hand out various forms of bailouts, rate freezes, etc.
Most of these proposals are Really Bad Ideas, but that's not the point of this Diary. I want to make sure that we don't let this "teachable moment" slip by...and that we don't let the Corporate-Owned Media (C.O.M.) and the right out-frame us! More below the fold:
We need to keep the focus on:
A) Punishing Corporate Criminals: Brokers and Corporations who lied and stole need to be hunted down. Where are the perp-walks of Bankers and Loan Salesmen? This mess is a huge Corporate Crime issue and needs to be addressed as such.
B) Housing Affordability: Let’s not get stampeded by those who wail that price declines ("crash" is the meme being pushed by the Corporate Media) are necessarily bad. Many prudent working-class families chose to sit out the bubble and not buy overpriced real estate that they couldn’t afford. Lower prices mean more homeowners in the long run. This is what we want, right?
C) Protecting the Middle Class: Anecdotes abound of families who were "forced" into taking a home equity loan to pay for Medical Care, College, or to support themselves because they got laid off. We must not let anyone confuse this issue. The problem is not the loan – it is the lack of Universal Healthcare, Education Funding, and Job Security in America. These are core Progressive issues and we must not let them be hidden behind the "sub-prime crisis".
D) How "The Market" Failed...Again: Once again, we have yet more proof that loosely-regulated "Free Markets" are train wrecks waiting to happen. The blame for this rests on the faith-based economic policies of the Ayn Rand/Alan Greenspan/Club-for-Growth set...and we need to call them on it. For starters we should remind voters to be thankful that we stopped Bush and McCain from "privatizing" Social Security...if you think a Housing Market bust is painful, imagine if we had let "The Market" wreak havoc on our Retirement as well...but I digress.
Solutions: We need to target relief to fraud victims and working people only. Any support of the Housing Market should be done by subsidizing poor people to buy homes, rather than rewarding those who overextended.
This crisis is a chance to make changes for the better, and we need to step up with long-term Progressive solutions rather than a short-term Bailout Mentality.