Sunday Reads

The 1% are Still Stealing Our Homes Hat Tip Crooks and Liars Diane Sweet

Following the bank’s instructions, Laura and her partner missed three months of their mortgage payments to qualify for a loan modification. But instead of working with the family, Bank of America put the home in foreclosure, using the highly controversial process of “dual tracking” in which banks simultaneously put families in the process of modifying their loans and put the loan in the foreclosure pipeline.

In Laura’s case — as with so many other homeowners across the country — the foreclosure process won.

Her home was sold at an auction and bought back by the government-owned mortgage giant Fannie Mae — which then allowed a private equity firm, The Cogsville Group, to buy the right to manage her house and collect rent from the family. But when her home flooded this past spring, the company did not help her with clean up, mold remediation or repairs.

100% Of New Power Capacity in US Came from Renewable Energy In November (2nd Month 2013) Hat Tip Crooks and Liars

Here are the full details from FERC on the split for November:

•0 natural gas power plants placed into service = 0 MW
•0 oil power plants placed into service = 0 MW
•0 coal power plants placed into service = 0 MW
•0 nuclear power plants placed into service = 0 MW
•0 waste heat power plants placed into service = 0 MW
•1 water power plant placed into service = 4 MW
•4 wind power plants placed into service = 81 MW
•1 geothermal steam power plant placed into service = 25 MW
•8 biomass power plants placed into service = 108 MW
•14 solar power plants placed into service = 177 MW

Bad news for the GOP and possible good news for average Americans Hat Tip Digsby

House Republicans, including Speaker John Boehner, face a sharp backlash from voters for pushing a budget deal that denies the extension of unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans past Dec. 28, according to a collection of polls being released Monday.

In Boehner’s Ohio district, for example, 63 percent of voters support extending the benefits, 34 percent don’t. As part of the budget compromise and at the urging of the GOP, the benefits were not extended.

Chart ‘o the decade Hat Tip Digsby

Chart of the Decade

Digsby: I’ll just note one little thing and then move along. The 1981, 1990 and 2001 recession recoveries all happened under Republican presidents. And a Democratic congress . . .

Americans Surprisingly Supportive of Unemployment Insurance Hat Tip Washington Monthly Ryan Cooper

With conservatives’ bitter hatred for any government spending on the lower 80 percent or so of the income ladder, and the public’s approval of Congress falling into the single digits, one could be forgiven for thinking that regular people aren’t too concerned with unemployment insurance.
But a small set of polls from PPP shows that is not exactly the case. They took some measurements in four Republican-held swing districts, as well as John Boehner’s district. Here’s what they found:

Support for Unemployment Benefits

How Sotomayor undermined Obama’s NSA Hat Tip Washington Monthly for pointing to this MSNBC article

If Edward Snowden gave federal courts the means to declare the National Security Agency’s data-gathering unconstitutional, Sonia Sotomayor showed them how.

It was Sotomayor’s lonely concurrence in U.S. v Jones, a case involving warrantless use of a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, that the George W. Bush-appointed Judge Richard Leon relied on when he ruled that the program was likely unconstitutional last week. It was that same concurrence the White House appointed review board on surveillance policy cited when it concluded government surveillance should be scaled back.

“It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties,” Sotomayor wrote in 2012. “This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”

Health Care Is Expensive In This Country Hat Tip Atrios

The NYT’s perpetual pity party for its affluent readership is genuinely annoying.

And, yes, Obamacare isn’t perfect and the subsidies aren’t generous enough. But here are the options to make it better:
1) Nationalize the health care system (or much of it) as the NHS was, at least before the Tories started wrecking it.
2) Have a single payer insurance system in which the government doesn’t run the medical system, but essentially sets the rates (and is empowered to do so).
3) Increase the subsidies in Obamacare, so that the not-quite-rich-enough also have taxpayers pay for at least part of their insurance bill, and the insurance companies can continue to take their pointless cut.

1) and 2) will help to control actual costs if done right, while 3) will just spread it around differently.

This Is the Golden Age of Deficit Reduction Hat Tip Daniel Gross at The Daily Beast

As Washington chewed over the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget deal, the Treasury Department announced a walloping drop in red ink. Turns out government didn’t need a “grand bargain” to get its fiscal house in order.

The Murray-Ryan budget deal was anti-climactic. After all this—three years of failed grand bargain talks, the sequester, a shutdown—we have a deal that will cut deficits by a grand total of $22 billion over ten years. No wonder the Tea Party crowd is incensed. Yet the outrage over the federal debt—$17 trillion and rising—won’t stand in the way of this deal. That’s because, thanks in part to the sequester; but thanks largely to the miracle of sustained growth, the annual deficit is shriveling.

Homeless Couple Gets A Home On Christmas Eve, Thanks To Innovative ‘Occupy’ Group Hat Tip to Think Progress – Scott Keyes

run75441: I raised my family in Mad-City, Wisconsin, a liberal enclave amongst a sea of conservatism. We always found a way to do something positive in the city. Red vested Gov. Dreyfus once described Madison, WI “Madison is 30 square miles surrounded by reality.” It appears there are still some innovative minds in Wisconsin in spite of the Governor Scott Walkers.

“For many couples, the thought of living together in a 96-square-foot house sounds awful. But for Chris Derrick and Betty Ybarra, it’s a Christmas miracle.

That’s because Derrick and Ybarra have spent the better part of a year braving Madison, Wisconsin’s often-harsh climate without a roof over their head.

They’ll spend this Christmas in their own home, thanks to more than 50 volunteers with Occupy Madison, a local Wisconsin version of the original Occupy Wall Street group in New York. The group, including Derrick and Ybarra, spent the past year on an innovative and audacious plan to fight inequality in the state’s capital: build tiny homes for the homeless.”

Scott Walker makes Wisconsin No. 1 — in jobless claims The Cap Times – Editorial

How’s this for a 2016 presidential campaign theme?

“‘Under Scott Walker, Wisconsin led the nation in first-time unemployment claims.’

That’s not the narrative Walker wants as he plots his run for the Republican presidential nomination. But it’s the one that has developed.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 4,420 Wisconsinites filed initial unemployment claims in the final week of November. The next two highest states combined — Ohio with 2,597 and Kentucky with 1,538 — couldn’t match Wisconsin’s total. And what’s particularly notable is that these numbers come at a point when states such as California, Texas, Florida and Michigan are seeing significant declines in jobless claims.

Walker ran for governor on a promise to create 250,000 new jobs.”