Opinion

Constitutional Revenge

Published in Tuesday March 5th, 2013 In Opinion

The Hungarian government is now seeking revenge for the various defeats it has suffered by introducing into the Parliament a 15-page constitutional amendment that reverses its losses. The mega-amendment is a toxic waste dump of bad constitutional ideas, many of which were introduced before and nullified by the Constitutional Court or changed at the insistence of European bodies. The new constitutional amendment (again) kills off the independence of the judiciary, brings universities under (even more) governmental control, opens the door to political prosecutions, criminalizes homelessness, makes the recognition of religious groups dependent on their cooperation with the government and weakens human rights guarantees across the board. Moreover, the constitution will now buffer the government from further financial sanctions by permitting it to take all fines for noncompliance with the constitution or with European law and pass them on to the Hungarian population as special taxes, not payable by the normal state budget.

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Rebuilding on Their Own

Published in Wednesday February 27th, 2013 In Opinion

Since 2007, Gratz has owned a home in New Orleans, and she was giving me what amounted to a tutorial on her next book subject: the rebuilding of the city post-Katrina. “Look at this,” she said, gesturing to storefronts. “This is one of the longest shopping streets in the country. There are residential and commercial buildings, and local stores and chain stores. Very little was done for streets like this because the big money went to the tourism districts,” she said. “This grew back organically.” Which, she believes, is the way it always happens.

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What Mortgage Relief?

Published in Monday February 25th, 2013 In Opinion

A year ago, when the nation’s biggest banks settled with state and federal officials over claims of foreclosure abuses, the public was led to believe that the deal would allow millions of hard-pressed borrowers to escape the threat of foreclosure. It still hasn’t happened.

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The Global Farmland Rush

Published in Friday February 8th, 2013 In Opinion

OVER the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for agriculture. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their people are in danger of losing their patrimony, not to mention their sources of food.

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Austerity may be hitting many in the UK, but it’s the homeless suffering most acutely

Published in Monday January 28th, 2013 In Opinion

From the mid-90s until 2010, following a concerted effort from national government, the numbers of people sleeping rough steadily declined. Thousands of men and women were helped to find social housing or private rented accommodation, often subsidised by housing benefit. But from 2010 onwards the effects of the economic downturn has slammed all this progress into a dramatic reverse.

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Don’t Skimp on Sandy Aid

Published in Tuesday January 15th, 2013 In Opinion

New York Times Editorial
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made an impassioned pitch on Monday to his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote on Tuesday for almost $50 billion in Hurricane Sandy disaster relief. “New Jersey does not expect anything more than what was done for Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi in Katrina, and what was done in Joplin, Mo., what was done in the floods in Iowa. We don’t expect anything more than that, but we will not accept anything less,” Mr. Christie said.
It is now more than 11 weeks after the hurricane severely damaged a huge swath of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, yet these states are still waiting for enough federal aid to repair and rebuild housing, businesses and transportation systems that were destroyed by the storm.

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The Foreclosure Fiasco

Published in Tuesday January 15th, 2013 In Opinion

It’s been five days since Jessica Silver-Greenberg’s article on the latest bank settlement was posted on The New York Times’s Web site. I’m still shaking my head. Her “story behind the story” of the $8.5 billion settlement between federal bank regulators and 10 banks over their foreclosure misdeeds illustrates just about everything that is wrong with the way the government has handled the Great Foreclosure Crisis. Shall we count the ways?

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Progress on Mortgage Regulations

Published in Friday January 11th, 2013 In Opinion

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued long-awaited rules on mortgage lending that should help protect home buyers and the global financial system from a repeat of the subprime disaster. But the rules, which were announced on Thursday and go into effect next year, include some features that could hurt lower-income borrowers.
Predatory lending was a leading cause of the housing bubble, the spike in foreclosures and the failure of large financial institutions. It saddled borrowers with too much debt and left investors with big losses. Congress created the consumer bureau in large part to make sure all that never happened again.

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Still Waiting for Sandy Relief

Published in Thursday January 3rd, 2013 In Opinion

Republicans haven’t made it easy for the Northeast to get the $60.4 billion in aid it needs to recover from Hurricane Sandy. They have objected to the amount — which is considerably less than the $82 billion requested by the region’s governors — and tried to slash it. They have demanded that $3.4 billion of the aid for flood control be offset by spending cuts in other programs. And in the Senate, as on virtually all bills, they filibustered the aid package proposed by President Obama.

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Green belt housing gamble in England – a bet too far?

Published in Thursday January 3rd, 2013 In Opinion

Watching two of the better-known rightwing thinktanks prime their intellectual cannons and bombard the same target is an impressive, if stomach-churning, sight. In the past week the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and Policy Exchange, both of which have the ear of No 10 and No 11 Downing Street, have taken aim at the UK’s planning laws.
The IEA opted for a straightforward bombardment of the green belt. It argued that property developers should be allowed to give incentives to local communities to free up otherwise sacred ground. In other words, if developers see a profit in building on certain land, most likely in the London commuter belt, and the local parishioners can be successfully bought off, then what right does anyone have to intervene?

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