Iraq War Effects Missing from Coverage of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Troubles

Libhomo blogs at Godless Liberal Homo. His article today is spot-on in my humble estimation. ~Dusty

This New York Times article ( “U.S. Weighs Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants” - 7/10/08) is typical of how the corporate media omit underlying causes in reporting on current economic difficulties.

You can see how the Iraqtastrophe is impacting events, but you have to think very carefully while you read. Here’s one example, a sentence starting the second paragraph:

The companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Let’s review three of the ways that the war on Iraq has contributed to this foreclosure crisis.

- The resulting increase in oil prices has pushed some people who were near default on their mortgages over the edge.

- The rising oil prices and increased budget deficits have slowed the overall US economy down. Newly unemployed people are much more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure.

- Higher oil prices have increased trade deficits. Those deficits, along with growing budget deficits, have resulted in a falling dollar. A weak dollar is unattractive to foreign investors, including risk tolerant ones that otherwise might be interested in buying heavily discounted US mortgage paper.

Now, let’s review a paragraph later in the article (bolding mine).

The companies are by far the biggest providers of financing for domestic home loans. If they are unable to borrow, they will not be able to buy mortgages from commercial lenders. In turn, that would make it more expensive and difficult, if not impossible, for home buyers to obtain credit, freezing the United States housing market. Even healthy banks are reluctant to tie up scarce capital by offering mortgages to low-risk home buyers without Fannie and Freddie taking the loans off their books.

One of the reasons capital is so scare is that the Bush regime is borrowing so much money to pay for their colonial occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been borrowed to feed this fiscally voracious war, money which is unavailable for home and commercial credit.

Obviously, Iraq isn’t the only cause of our economic difficulties. Financial market deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and other policies which shift wealth from the middle class and the poor to the super rich all are important as well. Yet, how can we have an informed political debate if so much of what is ailing us is kept off of the metaphorical table?

Some opponents of the war say that the vast majority of Americans are not sacrificing anything to the war in Iraq. It certainly is true that military members and their families make much larger sacrifices than everyone else. However, all of us are sacrificing for this unpopular war. We are just being lied to about it.

Iraq is a proverbial “elephant in the living room” of American economic discussion. Our nation better start talking about it.

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The NCMR is meeting starting today..

The NCMR is the National Conference for Media Reform..and we all know we need some of that.

Bill Moyers will speak..and I will post up that video when it becomes available. But until then, check out the link above..for some good folks that want to bring back the 4th Estate and remove it from the death grip of the Corporations.

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The American Media-Bought and paid for?

There was a time in our history when America’s so-called mainstream media kept us informed on important issues and events. We have to look no farther than the recent past, a little more than thirty years ago, to give them a few well-deserved kudos. I refer specifically to the Pentagon Papers and Nixon’s Waterloo that came to be known as Watergate. Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers was a global as well as national turning point in the Vietnam War. The investigative work of the Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began the unraveling of Nixon’s White House. Both events transpired in the early 1970’s and ended with President Nixon’s resignation from office on August 9, 1974. Both of these watershed moments in our history could not have happened in this decade, I would bet my last devalued dollar on that.

Sunday morning, as I perused my emails, I focused on Salon’s Glen Greenwald’s piece entitled; The US establishment media in a nutshell. Glen has his panties in a wad about how little our MSM gives us on the Iraq War and how much baloney it does manage to slop we the hogs, with. With a simple NEXUS inquiry based on a 30 day news cycle, Mr. Greenwald provides us with the following big ticket items:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

 

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

 

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

 

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

 

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

 

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

 

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

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NBC uninvites Kucinich to the Vegas debate

This is the media’s attempt to marginalize Kucinich and it’s wrong on every level. Thank You Corporate media..you are running true to form.

NBC un-plugs Kucinich from Presidential debate
Re-writes criteria to exclude candidate with ‘dissenting’ positions

Less than 44 hours after NBC sent a congratulatory note and an invitation to Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich to participate in the Jan. 15 Democratic Presidential debate in Las Vegas, the network notified the campaign this morning it was changing it announced criteria, rescinding its invitation, and excluding Kucinich from the debate.

NBC Political Director Chuck Todd notified the Kucinich campaign this morning that, although Kucinich had met the qualification criteria publicly announced on December 28, the network was “re-doing” the criteria, excluding Kucinich, and planning to invite only Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards.

The criteria announced last month included a fourth-place or better showing in a national poll. The USA/Gallup poll earlier this month showed Kucinich in fourth place among the Democratic contenders.

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The 14 Characteristics of Fascism continued..

PART VI: CONTROLLED MASS MEDIA

“Our Wonderful Corporate Media.”
By PraeterOne and BibleBelted

Warner Brothers Pictures, Morgan Creek, New Regency, Warner Brothers Animation, a partial stake in Savoy Pictures, Little Brown & Co., Bullfinch, Back Bay, Time-Life Books, Oxmoor House, Sunset Books, Warner Books, the Book of the Month Club, Warner/Chappell Music, Atlantic Records, Warner Audio Books, Electra, Warner Brothers Records, Time-Life Music, Columbia House, a 40 percent stake in Seattle’s Sub-Pop Records, Time Magazine, In Style, Martha Stewart Living, Sunset, Asia Week, Parenting, Weight Watchers, Cooking Light, DC Comics, 49 percent of Six Flags Theme Parks, Movie World and Warner Brothers parks, HBO, Cinemax, Warner Brothers Television, partial ownership of Comedy Central, E!, Black Entertainment Television, Court TV, the Sega Channel, the Home Shopping Network, Turner Broadcasting, the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks, World Championship Wrestling, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, New Line Cinema, Fine Line Cinema, Turner Classic Movies, Turner Pictures, Castle Rock Productions, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNN/SI, CNN Airport Network, CNNfi, CNN radio, TNT, WTBS, and the Cartoon Network:

Those, according to Eric Alterman, in his 2003 book, What Liberal Media, are companies that were acquired by AOL when it acquired Time Warner.

Between AOL-Time Warner and the likes of Disney, Bertelsmann, the News Corporation, General Electric, Viacom, and Disney, the vast majority of everything we see and hear n the supposedly “liberal” mass media comes from only six–that’s right, six–mega media corporations. As I have suggested in previous posts and comments, this is why the media should be independently owned. All too often liberals believe that conservative media owners directly order journalists to cover or not to cover certain stories, when, in fact, the truth is a little more complicated than all that.

In the first place we need to understand that journalists have very little in common with your typical welfare recipient or elderly person who may need energy assistance to survive a northern state winter. According to sociologist David Croteau, “95 percent of elite journalists earned more than $50,000 a year, and 31 percent earned more than $150,000.” On other words, this often puts journalists in the same economic class as the right wing free market politicians who they are supposed to be covering.

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