The Obama nation

Taking from the rich and giving to ... the rich

By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times

The tidal wave of home foreclosures is still rolling across the United States, devastating families and entire communities. By most reports, there are over a half-million homes sitting vacant, and more on the way.

A blog site that could only have been written by an Obama administration flack laments this “bleak” situation, but gives America the “good news” of the future.

“The Obama administration and independent federal regulators are formulating plans to sell government-controlled foreclosed properties to investors who would bring them onto the rental market. The aim is to reduce the number of vacant homes which depress housing prices and burden the economy while meeting an increasing demand for rental homes.”

In other words, having dispossessed millions of Americans of their homes and futures, and having purchased these homes at above market values from the fraudulent banks that held the mortgages — in order to rescue the 1 percent — the Obama administration, Congress and “independent” regulators will now sell these same homes back to the 1 percent at below market rates, so that the 1 percent can in turn rent them back to the 99 percent who lost them.

Welcome to the Obama nation: government of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, and the continued redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy.

For 60 years home ownership has been the hallmark of the American middle class, and has set America apart from almost every other nation in the world. That’s over. Now, America will be ever more like the feudal Europe our forefathers kissed off — a nation of renters, their paychecks devoured in rents paid to the 1 percent.

It wasn’t enough that African Americans and other minorities were reduced to handouts on the federal plantation. Now, in the Obama nation, the entire middle class can be reduced to the status of serfs on the Wall Street manor.

It gets better.

As I reported months ago in this column, the administration is preparing legislation to provide rental assistance to those who need housing.

In other words, those who still have jobs and a home will be taxed to support “home rentership,” to make sure that the 1 percent get paid for the homes they effectively stole and will now rent back to the 99 percent.

Who will, of course, have little left in their paychecks or unemployment checks to maintain those homes rented from suburban slumlords.

Kiss your neighborhood goodbye, Morrisville and Lower Makefield. The Ozarks are moving in. Is there an alternative. Yes.

Cities and counties from California to Michigan, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and even nearby Reading, are moving to use public funds — the common wealth — to form partnership banks that can not only get critically needed affordable credit flowing in local economies, but can also take vacant homes by eminent domain, and work with community banks, homebuilders, skilled trade workers, realtors and housing authorities to maintain these properties and put people back in them on affordable terms as owners, and rescue their communities from the pending Obama nation.

Every county in the Philadelphia metropolitan region has more than sufficient resources to capitalize a partnership bank capable of doing what the president and Congress will not. Now is the time to begin.