[Politics_CurrentEvents_Group] Homeowners Bailout Banks, Oil Spill, Vietnamese Revolutionary Memoirs

 

Homeowners Bailout Banks, BP Oil, Vietnam Revolutionary Memoir
September 1st, 2010

I don't feel much like writing today. Too many medical procedures or something. Here are three things I have picked up from the internet. 1) Story about How the Treasury Department is helping the banks on the backs of mortgage holders. 2) Scientists say three quarters of oil is still in Gulf from BP. 3) New Translation of Book by Vietnamese Non Stalinist Revolutionary.

AlterNet / By Zach Carter

Treasury Makes Shocking Admission: Program for Struggling Homeowners Just a Ploy to Enrich Big Banks
The Treasury Dept.'s mortgage relief program isn't just failing, it's actively funneling money from homeowners to bankers, and Treasury likes it that way.
August 25, 2010 |

The Treasury Department's plan to help struggling homeowners has been failing miserably for months. The program is poorly designed, has been poorly implemented and only a tiny percentage of borrowers eligible for help have actually received any meaningful assistance. The initiative lowers monthly payments for borrowers, but fails to reduce their overall debt burden, often increasing that burden, funneling money to banks that borrowers could have saved by simply renting a different home. But according to recent startling admissions from top Treasury officials, the mortgage plan was actually not really about helping borrowers at all. Instead, it was simply one element of a broader effort to pump money into big banks and shield them from losses on bad loans. That's right: Treasury openly admitted that its only serious program purporting to help ordinary citizens was actually a cynical move to help Wall Street megabanks.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has long made it clear his financial repair plan was based on allowing large banks to "earn" their way back to health. By creating conditions where banks could make easy profits, Getithner and top officials at the Federal Reserve hoped to limit the amount of money taxpayers would have to directly inject into the banks. This was never the best strategy for fixing the financial sector, but it wasn't outright predation, either. But now the Treasury Department is making explicit that it was—and remains—willing to let those so-called "earnings" come directly at the expense of people hit hardest by the recession: struggling borrowers trying to stay in their homes.

This account comes secondhand from a cadre of bloggers who were invited to speak on "deep background" with a handful of Treasury officials—meaning that bloggers would get to speak frankly with top-level folks, but not quote them directly, or attribute views to specific people. But the accounts are all generally distressing, particularly this one from economics whiz Steve Waldman:

The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with "the system," "the economy," and "ordinary Americans."

Mike Konczal confirms Waldman's observation, and Felix Salmon also says the program has done little more than delay foreclosures, as does Shahien Nasiripour.

Here's how Geithner's Home Affordability Modification Program (HAMP) works, or rather, doesn't work. Troubled borrowers can apply to their banks for relief on monthly mortgage payments. Banks who agree to participate in HAMP also agree to do a bunch of things to reduce the monthly payments for borrowers, from lowering interest rates to extending the term of the loan. This is good for the bank, because they get to keep accepting payments from borrowers without taking a big loss on the loan.

But the deal is not so good for homeowners. Banks don't actually have to reduce how much borrowers actually owe them—only how much they have to pay out every month. For borrowers who owe tens of thousands of dollars more than their home is worth, the deal just means that they'll be pissing away their money to the bank more slowly than they were before. If a homeowner spends $3,000 a month on her mortgage, HAMP might help her get that payment down to $2,500. But if she still owes $50,000 more than her house is worth, the plan hasn't actually helped her. Even if the borrower gets through HAMP's three-month trial period, the plan has done nothing but convince her to funnel another $7,500 to a bank that doesn't deserve it.

See the full article on Alternet.

This is from The Weekly Spin

Playing Hide and Seek With Oil
Source: University of Georgia News Service, August 17, 2010

A new report authored by five prominent marine scientists provides a powerful contradiction of the government's recent report that only 25 percent of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster remains in the Gulf of Mexico. On August 4, the government issued a news release that stated, "The vast majority of the oil from the BP oil spill has either evaporated or been burned, skimmed, recovered from the wellhead or dispersed using chemicals — much of which is in the process of being degraded." The group of scientists who authored the contradictory report estimate that 70 to 79 percent of the oil that gushed into the gulf still remains. Samantha Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia and a co-author of the report, points out that the huge amount of methane that also gushed into the gulf has been completely ignored. Charles Hopkinson, professor of marine sciences in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences says, "One major misconception is that oil that has dissolved into water is gone and, therefore, harmless … The oil is still out there, and it will likely take years to completely degrade. We are still far from a complete understanding of what its impacts are."

The complete Georgia Sea Grant/University of Georgia Oil Spill report is available online at http://uga.edu/aboutUGA/joye_pkit/GeorgiaSeaGrant_OilSpillReport8-16.pdf.

Figures from the report are available at http://uga.edu/aboutUGA/joye_pkit/GeorgiaSeaGrant_OilChart.pdf.

This is from the Bureau of Public Secrets a new book by a Vietnamese Revolutionary who was not a Stalinist.

Ngo Van
IN THE CROSSFIRE
Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary

Preface

"The only historians I trust are those who risk getting their throats cut" (Pascal). Considering the present "Socialist" Republic of Vietnam and its official history, which is uncritically accepted virtually everywhere, I cannot read this maxim without a strong sense of how narrowly I managed to survive.

In Vietnam 1920-1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale, I attempted to rescue that period from oblivion — a period that was marked not only by the struggle against colonial imperialism, but also by movements striving instinctively for an internationalist social revolution, movements that refused to subordinate themselves to the dictates of Stalinist Russia. In the present text I am going to speak as a direct witness of that period. Most of the others who took part in that struggle, if they were not massacred, imprisoned or sent to the penal colonies by the French colonial regime, or forced into exile, ended up being murdered by Ho Chi Minh's "Communist" Party.
Scarcely eleven years had elapsed since the October 1917 revolution in Russia when I became fully aware of the oppressive reality of Indochinese society and fully determined to revolt against it. For me, like so many others, the Russian Revolution was a hopeful sign of possible liberation. Yet even then, during those early years of my apprenticeship in life and revolt, the rare news that reached us from Russia sometimes contained disturbing features. Oppositionist revolutionaries were being hunted down and Trotsky had just been forced into exile. Through the Third International, Stalin was imposing a totalitarian policy that seemed to us to betray the internationalism integral to every revolutionary struggle. Under these circumstances, confronted with the emergence of a regime whose full horror became glaringly evident with the Moscow Trials, it was natural that our critique of Stalinism was initially oriented around the ideas and partisans of Trotsky.

Since my departure from Indochina in 1948, if the hope and conviction of the necessity of overthrowing the despicable world order never left me, they were nourished by new reflections on Bolshevism and revolution. In France I found new allies in the factories and elsewhere, among French people, colonized people, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 — anarchists and Poumistas who had gone through a parallel experience to ours. In Vietnam, as in Spain, we had been engaged in a simultaneous battle on two fronts: against a reactionary power and against a Stalinist party struggling for power.
These encounters, along with rereading Marx (illuminated by the work of Maximilien Rubel), discovering the 1919 workers councils in Bavaria and the 1921 Kronstadt revolt in Russia, then seeing the resurgence of workers councils in Hungary in 1956, led me to investigate new revolutionary perspectives and permanently distanced me from Bolshevism-Leninism-Trotskyism. I developed a total distrust of anything that might turn into a "machine." The so-called "workers' parties" (Leninist parties in particular) are embryonic forms of the state. Once in power, these parties form the nucleus of a new ruling class and bring about nothing more than a new system of exploitation. "The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery" (Marx).

Orwell rightly noted that those who control the present control the past. When history adopts the discourse of the victors, concealing and dissolving all past struggles with a simplistic Manicheanism that obscures what was truly at stake, the present reality seems inevitable and inescapable. The future of human societies thus depends on our capacity to wrest this past from the cold grip of the present masters. Voices have been lost. We must try to bring them back to life; to rediscover the living traces of the relay of rebellion that traverses time; to restore them and to pass them on.

NGO VAN
Paris, 2000

Preface to Ngo Van's Au pays de la Cloche fêlée, translated in In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (AK Press, 2010).

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