Month: October 2011

Sesame Street introduces poverty-stricken, hungry Muppet

A sign of the times:

A new poverty-stricken Muppet will highlight the issue of hunger struggles on an episode of “Sesame Street”, the show said in a statement on Tuesday.

Pink-faced Muppet Lily, whose family deals with food insecurity, will join Big Bird, Elmo and other favorites on a one-hour prime-time special featuring country star Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams Paisley called “Growing Hope Against Hunger,” to air Oct 9.

The new Muppet will bring awareness to the ongoing hunger struggles that families face in the United States, the show said.

This is a good reminder that culture is deliberate. Whether it’s creating prominent gay characters who have real romantic relationships (with actual kissing!) or a Muppet that highlights how many American families are starving, television show and film writers make conscious choices about what story lines to include. These things don’t just happen on their own. So when these writers and producers make choices which will influence our national culture and create awareness and, hopefully, equality, they should be celebrated. Good job, “Sesame Street”!

Report: government new of mortgage modification failures and did nothing

Paul Kiel at ProPublica reports on the failures of the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program to conduct oversight and hold banks accountable for following the program’s rules. A snippet:

Documents obtained by ProPublica — government audit reports of GMAC, the country’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer — provide the first detailed look at the program’s oversight. They show that the company operated with almost no oversight for the program’s first eight months. When auditors did finally conduct a major review more than a year into the program, they found that GMAC had seriously mishandled many loan modifications — miscalculating homeowner income in more than 80 percent of audited cases, for example. Yet, GMAC suffered no penalty. GMAC itself said it hasn’t reversed a single foreclosure as a result of a government audit.

The documents also reveal that government auditors signed off on GMAC loan-modification denials that appear to violate the program’s own rules, calling into question the rigor and competence of the reviews.

Some of the auditors’ mistakes are “appalling,” said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. “It suggests the government isn’t taking the auditing process seriously.”

Via Atrios, who points out “the Obama administration had total control of this.”

Durbin blasts Bank of America

Good stuff from Senator Dick Durbin on Bank of America’s recent decision to add a $5 fee for debit card users.

“It is particularly hard to believe this fee would come from a bank with a track record like Bank of America. After helping to drive our economy off the cliff’s edge in 2008, Bank of America was happy to accept a $45 billion federal bailout for their stupidity, their greed, and their stupidity and it was just as happy to take that money and hand out $3.3 billion in employee bonuses in the same year 2008.”

While I appreciate Bank of America getting ripped apart, Citibank has also added a $15-20 fee and other banks have added $3 fees. All of these banks are gouging their customers to preserve profit margins that they have no intrinsic right to maintain.

Whichever politician really steps out and tries to stop these banks from gouging debit card users will likely have a tremendous amount of support from the pu

Chris Christie & the confused Republican Party

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

If there’s one dynamic that has yet to be resolved within the Republican presidential primary, it’s the tension between the demands of the radically conservative Tea Party base and the 51% of Republicans who do not identify as or support the goals of the Tea Party. Presumably a large part of the Republican establishment and media talking heads fall into the 51% that don’t swing the Tea Party’s way. As a result, you get repeated expressions of dissatisfaction from both the far right and the slightly further right for candidates which better fit their ideological vision. Rick Perry was pitched as a savior, yet once he entered he was exposed both as more of a bumbling fool than any non-Texan would have thought and is being damned from the right for his completely sober and responsible notion that if we can stop teenage girls from contracting a virus which causes cancer, we should do it.

Over the last week and a half we’ve seen both Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie discuss entering the primary to fill this void. Most Republicans already know what they’d get with Huckabee – an extremely conservative member of the religious right who also displays some economic populist notes while being slightly to the left of Attila the Hun (and therefore unacceptable) in his immigration stance.

Christie is a different story. While he’s burnished his Republican credentials by aggressively seeking to bust public worker unions in New Jersey, he holds a number of other positions which are anathema to the Tea Party base. Specifically, all the Republicans clamoring for Christie to enter the race fail to recognize that he will have a problem for believing that climate change is real and humans contribute to it. And I shudder to think how the mouth breathers will react to seeing him rip apart the anti-Muslim bigots who oppose Chrisite’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the NJ state bench:

https://www.youtube.com/v/y83z552NJaw?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0

As a progressive, I worry about Christie entering the race. He’s smart, affable and a powerful communicator. But while he may not pass muster with the Tea Party crowd, he’s a radically conservative politician who would seek to destroy workers’ rights and make business unaccountable to the public.

At some point, I wonder if the Republican primary will hinge around electability. But until then, it will focus on the candidate who comes closest to complete ideological purity with the Tea Party base. Christie may get in. Huckabee may get in. But I doubt either will be sufficiently crazy to please the base and win the nomination.

Barofsky on TARP’s Third Anniversary

Neil Barofsky, former Special Investigator General of TARP, is highly critical of the program on its third anniversary of TAR:

“While successful in helping to prevent financial Armageddon, on TARP’s third birthday it is apparent that Treasury has failed to deliver on the other core promises that it made to Congress and the American people – that TARP would ‘restore lending’ and ‘preserve homeownership.’ Perhaps even more concerning, the inevitable moral hazard that followed Secretary Paulson and Secretary Geithner’s repeated use of TARP funds to back up their pronouncements that they would not let the largest banks fail has not been adequately addressed by regulatory reform. …

“As a result, the TBTF banks are even larger and more dangerous than ever, and could still hold the taxpayer hostage once again in the next financial crisis. Finally, TARP’s most enduring legacy may be the HISTORICAL DISDAIN with which the American people now hold their government, which I believe has been fueled by Treasury administrating TARP with insufficient transparency and with undue deference to the largest financial institutions.”