Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
- The neo-liberal trees may have honestly thought they were feeding the 99%, but in fact they were starving them. A case in point, which has never been adequately accounted for, is the fall-out of the American mortgage crisis. The fact that, on the day of the election, 3.2 million families were still underwater in their mortgages—paying more each month to a corrupt banking system than their houses are worth, unable to sell, unable to move to make a new beginning and find a new job, constantly threatened with a downgrade in their credit rating, unmotivated or unable to make repairs or upgrades, living in neighborhoods blighted with empty windows and unkempt yards—the magnitude of that reality alone should have suggested there might be a lot of voters not much interested in maintaining the status quo. The fact that the neo-liberal Obama-Clinton coalition, from day one of the Great Recession, didn’t understand (or simply ignored) the devastating and insidious impact the housing collapse was going to have on the lives of the American middle class is still, from my perspective, one of the greatest miscues of modern American politics.