@dance you monster
https://deadlyclear.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/chapter-8-foaming-the-runwa...

Neil Barofsky gave up his job in 2008 as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money… TARP – the program American homeowners thought Congress and President Obama had constructed for their rescue. Wrong.

The New York Times book review describes Mr. Barofsky as “the idealistic alien sent in an emergency to Planet Washington, where he does battle with the self-important, self-serving powers entrenched there or simply taking a spin through its revolving door to Wall Street. He is SIGTARP (in Washington-speak, the Special Inspector General for TARP). But ultimately he is outmatched, and evil triumphs over good.

Mr. Barofsky writes early on that “I had no idea that the U.S. government had been captured by the banks,” and at another point describes his strategy to use the press to get the attention of Congress, and by extension an obstreperous Treasury: “Our message was simple: Treasury’s desperate attempt to bail out Wall Street was setting the country up for potentially catastrophic losses.””

It’s hard to put the book down – it is definitely a page turner and mind burner. Certainly, Chapter 8 – “Foaming the Runway” vindicates every homeowner and foreclosure defense attorney and we should all shove this book at the foreclosure judges and tell them to read it first and THEN we’ll discuss the modification abuses, emotional distress and damages! Right after we closely examine their Financial Disclosure statements.

We knew there was an intended systemic abuse with the modification programs. Too many people told the same stories. However, we didn’t know why the government and our President and Congress would allow such abuses but after you read Chapter 8 – it becomes quite clear. Geithner was saving the banks – not America

Specifically your title.

You present this the way everyone does: the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. And that argument has gotten us nowhere in terms of policy changes, which in recent decades have only increased the disparity. It's gotten us nowhere in terms of mass communication, which follows the bidding of its filthy-rich owners. It's gotten us nowhere in politics, when the "solution" that working Americans or Europeans choose is Donald Trump or Emmanuel Macron. It's a framing that says this is happening to someone else, not us. That it's something wrong, but not immediately, viscerally urgent.

The thing is, it's not just the poor getting poorer but almost everyone, all but a teensy handful of oligarchs and their tippy-top paid professional lackeys.

At a time when Social Security is destined for the chopping block, reducing or outright eliminating any reliable common safety net for seniors, . . . when we're advised that any other secure annual retirement income should only draw down 5% of the total savings one has (meaning you need twenty times annual income saved up), . . . the realization that "Four out of five working age individuals have retirement savings less than one times annual income" means that at a minimum 80-plus percent of Americans will starve in their first year of retirement. Not suffer from inadequate health coverage (though that'll happen, too), but starve. They won't reach a second year. And that's if you assume the one-fifth that's better off have saved up much more than four times their annual needs. They haven't. So that last graph shows that well more than 90% or 95% of Americans are getting poorer, much poorer, life-threateningly poorer, the second they step into retirement.

So, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the moderately comfortable are getting poorer, and even the near-rich are getting poorer. Occupy had it right: the 99% are screwed. And that's the framing, the metric, that changed the conversation. It's the metric that everyone knows in their heart is correct. Frame it as anything less than that genocide and you will die.

@dance you monster

The thing is, it's not just the poor getting poorer but almost everyone, all but a teensy handful of oligarchs and their tippy-top paid professional lackeys.

I wince every time I hear someone talk about how the current system is harming "the poor". I can almost hear people tuning out and not listening further. (I don't mean people here at C99, but in general.)

It's accurate, but it doesn't go far enough. It's usually is said within the context of an attempt to wake up the 99% to the awful situation we're in. But putting it in terms of the "poor" is not the best way to reach the majority of people, because it excludes (at least for now) the majority of people.

First of all, how many people think of themselves as "poor"? I know many, many people who are struggling, but the vast majority do not (and do not want to) think of themselves in that way. They want to believe that if they put in enough effort, pinch pennies and work 3 jobs, things will eventually be OK for them. So when they hear "the poor are getting poorer", they think, "Yes, that's sad, but what does that have to do with me?"

Secondly, as you said, the damage being done is not limited to those people whose income is below poverty level. We are all being harmed, every darned one of us in the lower 90%. If things don't change, the damage is going to increase exponentially for all of us. So I agree; we need to word our message to make that clear right up front: the message is for all of us.

Specifically your title.

You present this the way everyone does: the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. And that argument has gotten us nowhere in terms of policy changes, which in recent decades have only increased the disparity. It's gotten us nowhere in terms of mass communication, which follows the bidding of its filthy-rich owners. It's gotten us nowhere in politics, when the "solution" that working Americans or Europeans choose is Donald Trump or Emmanuel Macron. It's a framing that says this is happening to someone else, not us. That it's something wrong, but not immediately, viscerally urgent.

The thing is, it's not just the poor getting poorer but almost everyone, all but a teensy handful of oligarchs and their tippy-top paid professional lackeys.

At a time when Social Security is destined for the chopping block, reducing or outright eliminating any reliable common safety net for seniors, . . . when we're advised that any other secure annual retirement income should only draw down 5% of the total savings one has (meaning you need twenty times annual income saved up), . . . the realization that "Four out of five working age individuals have retirement savings less than one times annual income" means that at a minimum 80-plus percent of Americans will starve in their first year of retirement. Not suffer from inadequate health coverage (though that'll happen, too), but starve. They won't reach a second year. And that's if you assume the one-fifth that's better off have saved up much more than four times their annual needs. They haven't. So that last graph shows that well more than 90% or 95% of Americans are getting poorer, much poorer, life-threateningly poorer, the second they step into retirement.

So, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the moderately comfortable are getting poorer, and even the near-rich are getting poorer. Occupy had it right: the 99% are screwed. And that's the framing, the metric, that changed the conversation. It's the metric that everyone knows in their heart is correct. Frame it as anything less than that genocide and you will die.