What Do Republicans Read To... Well, To Make Them The Way They Are?

Yesterday's widely read, though Murdoch owned, NY Post ran a story by Stephen Meister about how the big bad Democrats are bullying the poor banksters. If only!

If Democrats get their way, we'll soon have a nationwide freeze on home foreclosures -- imposing vast new losses on mortgage lenders and taxpayers, sidelining panicked homebuyers and pushing off a housing-market recovery for years. You can thank bullying politicians, from President Obama on down to most state attorneys general.

I have yet to see news of a single borrower coming forward to say the bank foreclosed on his home when he wasn't in default on his mortgage. On average, one of every three homes being foreclosed on is vacant, and the borrowers haven't made a single payment for a year and a half.

Yet millions of pending foreclosures will now be halted. This is a massive overreaction to technical faults in affidavits.

Sure, banks cut corners in dealing with a never-before-seen flood of millions of foreclosures. That's not right-- but it's also not right that 18.9 million homes are vacant and millions of homeowners aren't paying their mortgages.

The lending industry should fight back-- but it's too fearful of being demonized by opportunistic pols.

This doesn't only fit in with the wall of sound from Murdoch's vast broadcast empire-- thanks for that, Bill Clinton-- it also fits in with an e-mail chain letter reaching millions of deluded right-wing voters from coast to coast. It's all about the old children's story-- that goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks-- of the hardworking ant and the profligate grasshopper.

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. 

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. 

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. 

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE OLD STORY:

Be responsible for yourself! 

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. 

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. 

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. 

CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. 

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? 

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, It's Not Easy Being Green...

ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, We Shall Overcome.

Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper's sake. 

President Obama condemns the ant and blames President Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight. 

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share. 

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. 

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government GreenCzar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it. 

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood. 

The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it. 

MORAL OF THE STORY: 

Be careful how you vote in 2010.

I've sent this to you because I believe that you are an ant-- not a grasshopper!

Make sure that you pass this on to other ants.

Don't bother sending it on to any grasshoppers because they wouldn't understand it, anyway.

Yes, that's what makes them the hateful, racist, willfully ignorant, paranoid assholes they are-- and what makes them such ready foot-soldiers in the class war... against their own families. Everyone is screwed... except the dung beetles.



UPDATE: I Hope You Liked The Video-- And Now A Message From Alan Grayson, The Guy Fighting To Stop The Dung Beetles

"The banks," Grayson said in a note yesterday, "have gone wild." He sent a letter to the Director of the FBI and to Central Florida's U.S. Attorney asking them to prosecute banks that foreclose illegally on homeowners.

Over the last three months, I've been bombarded with stories of banks committing foreclosure fraud to take people's homes. Foreclosure fraud happens when a bank decides that it wants to take someone's house, but it doesn't have legal title to do so. So it forges paperwork to show the court that it can take a home. Judges often agree to a foreclosure, because most of them can't believe a bank would simply falsify paperwork. Since the foreclosure fraud story was exposed, however, Bank of America and JP Morgan-Chase have suspended foreclosures in 23 states, including Florida. Judges are getting more skeptical and demanding paperwork.
 
But this isn't stopping the problem fast enough. JP Morgan Chase was just caught hiring a contractor to break into a woman's home and change the locks, while she cowered in a bathroom and called 911. Then the bank claimed it was a simple mistake, as she wasn't even in foreclosure.
 
Last month, I called for the Florida Supreme Court to halt these illegal foreclosures. The Florida Supreme Court declined, saying it had no authority to do so. I also asked Fannie Mae to stop working with law firms under investigation for falsifying paperwork. They have not responded. I recently sent a letter to the Treasury Secretary and our national bank regulators asking for a national moratorium on foreclosures while authorities assess the scope of the problem. I have also taped a 7-minute YouTube video explaining the whole situation.

Here at DWT we're doing all we can to Get Grayson's Back and we're encouraging people from across the country to help with phonebanking this weekend, an effort we're partnering up with DFA and PCCC for.