By Eddie Griffin
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Before the Bailout Rescue Plan come to the table, let me make these recommendation a Homeowner Bailout Plan before Wall Street Bailout.
I APPROVE the proposal to raise the F.D.I.C. limit to $250,000 with an optimistic outlook for incomes and deposit levels of the future. The average American today has nowhere that amount of liquidity. But raising the limit will allow some depositors to escape from risky money market accounts to safe, government-insured havens.
The real solution begins with stopping the bleeding, i.e. the implosion of the housing market. Instead of allowing financial institutions and banks to peel off their non-performing assets, such as foreclosed properties, and sell them to the U.S. government and leave the tax payers stuck with the glut of empty houses, we should utilize the original mortgage bailout provisions, and our equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to relieve homeowner now on the brink of foreclosure by re-financing their loans over a longer period of time, and keep mortgage payment at about the same rate.
This will allow homeowners to save their homes and make their payments. The original mortgage holders will be bought out by the American taxpayer, at current market rate, and not at inflated book value.
Seeing that financial institutions cannot implement the mortgage bailout plan already on the books because of the way mortgage loans are packaged and leveraged, the government is better situated to re-finance homeowners’ loan, because of our ownership of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In fact, it would be better to first buy out the private investors in those institutions. Otherwise, those who created the housing problem would be rewarded by the government equity stake riding the market up, or having the government bail them if it these institutions tank.
Wall Street can pay their executives whatsoever they wish, as long as the taxpayer’s money is not involved or put at risk. With government loans and risk must comes government oversight and new regulations. The more asked, the more risk, the more oversight is necessary, and more equity should go to the taxpayer. Otherwise, let Wall Street borrow from China, or wherever else financial executives have their offshore accounts.
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I am overloaded with heavy priorities.
ReplyDeleteLet's kick back by supporting Obama's policy initiatives, particularly his call for universal health care.
ReplyDeleteMost of us support Barack Obama, but do we support Barack Obama's push for universal health care? Would we go a step further and say that the Government should provide health care, at least when the insurance companies absolutely refuse to do so?
If so, do we agree that if we could get the insurance companies out of the mix (they might just become bankrupt like Wall Street, with everyone's money, and then need a bailout), then getting insurance companies out of the mix and providing care directly would be more efficient and much more cost-effective?
After all, does having "insurance" really "ensure" or "assure" you of very much of anything, except bureaucracy, aggravation and arguments, when it comes to health care? And a mailbox full of letter about what was covered and what was not, and how much you owe in spite of already having paid this "insurance company" ten thousand dollars that was deducted from your paycheck?
If you support universal health care then please post the Afrosphere Action Coalition "National Health Care Now!" widget, which informs and leads your readers to a petition in support of universal health care.
It also shows the insurance companies the "high esteem" we have for them, by proposing a system in which they have no role at all, and never once using the word "insurance" in the entire text. In my opinion, Americans don't want "insurance". They want the assurance that they can access quality medical care when they need it, and they've been told that paying for "insurance" is the only way they can be "assured" of seeing a doctor and getting medicine when the need it.
I would be a rich man if I could find a way to earn thirty cents for every dollar that is spent at American supermarkets. How about "supermarket insurance"? You pay me to "cover you" when you are hungry, and then, if I believe you are hungry enough, I will give you permission to go to the supermarket? And for this you pay me thirty cents of every dollar that you otherwise would have spent on food!
Of course it requires an enormous (and enormously expensive) bureaucracy to review each American's decision to go to the supermarket, but that's what I'm here for! That's why you pay me thirty cents on the dollar for all of the money that could have been spent on food in America!
If that doesn't make any sense to you at all, then please adopt the Afrosphere Action Coalition's National Health Care Now! EasyWidget that takes you and your readers to the Petition demanding National Health Care Now!
Unfortunately, some few "progressive" whites may be reluctant to support this effort because it is led by Black people whom they don't like. Those "progressives" don't realize that unless everybody works together we are never going to get universal health care in this nation. And so, we progressives, Black and white, will be compelled to break the color line, if only on this issue, whether we like it or not.
When you show your support for national health care right before the election, you are reminding people of why it is so important that Barack Obama and not John McCain be elected president. Like the "economy", health care is about 20% of the American economy and it' s really in just as much of a "crisis" as Wall Street.
But because the crises in your wallet and in your child's aching tooth don't have any lobbyists in Washington, Wall Street gets a bailout long before your high blood pressure or mammogram do.
But, isn't it too early to start worrying about national health care, before Obama is even elected? Well, aren't the lobbyists already paying our representatives in Washington to assure that universal health care never happens?
The news media keeps telling us that this election is about whom we most trust to bail out Wall Street. Is that REALLY going to motivate minority and working class voters to go to the polls in November, or shouldn't we also remind them of something that is going to help THEM?
If we want universal health insurance, we'll have to work for it as early and as diligently as the insurance companies and lobbyists who are already rallying to oppose it (or sharpening their knives and pens to carve out an even bigger piece of our economy for their greedy and callous selves.)
Please post a widget leading to the petition.