Thursday, March 20, 2008

America's First Refugee Camp

The large scale banking failures that rocked the entire financial sector has forced many American's out of their homes and into foreclosure. Forclosure, eventually leads to forced eviction and homelessness. California has had a terrible time in relocating families.

Some families having no relatives to live with, or any other plan became part of a growing trend called "Tent Cities." The video below is of not chronically poor, menatlly ill, lazy or indignant people, but rather common American's like me and you that once had good jobs, a home and a stable lifestyle. The only mistake they made was to fall victim to a banking scam many have labled "Predatory Loans" or loans that go from very affordable payments to re-adjusted un-affordable payments.

How did this happen many may ask? The simple word is "Greed" the real-estate market took a straight-up seemingly endless appreciation year over year. This was accompanied by low interest rates and the idea that every American can become a home owner. Most believed their mortgage brokers and took the deals they were offered, banks counted on the continued gains of the real-estate marked and sold loans to other banks on Wall Street on the open market. Everybody expected to get rich, what they did not know is what eventually would hurt us all, and that is the real-estate market was a "bubble" that still continues to "burst."

There is one irony in this story that most American's will not like. That is the story about the Federal reserve and it's private owners. Some not so discreet but many are big banks, the same banks that gave the predatory loans to common Americans. The Federal Reserve has saved all of it's friends and owners by letting them keep their billions in bonuses, and handing them hundreds of billions more in cash printed off the public press.

The moral of the story is the "crooks" got saved, you and me the "little people" got our stock portfolios robbed, others put on the street, and the rest of us pay through inflation on all the money the bankers printed for their friends. Perhaps Thomas jefferson was correct when he said:

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)


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