Is Housing Crisis Suppressing Voter Turnout?

The answer is yes, a large number of the block of people who are deemed “likely to vote” are unlikely to cast votes this November. How many of these would have voted one way or the other is up for debate, but my guess is that many would have voted for democratic candidates. If my theory is right, that explains why Republicans are not saying anything about the housing crisis, which is the elephant in the living room. Until we fix housing we can’t fix the rest of the economy.
So perhaps that explains Republican apathy to the plight of homeowners and former homeowners PLUS the usual computation that renters vote less than homeowners, and renters usually being from the lower end of the economic spectrum see Republicans as the problem, not the solution.

But that doesn’t explain why the Democrats have gone dark on this issue. The article below suggests that since the millions of displaced homeowners might be hard to register to vote, that they are not voting anyway and so the Democrats have made the calculated gamble that since they are not voting anyway, why should Democrats put forward proposals likely to inflame Republicans and perhaps sway independent voters away from the Democrats if they put some concrete proposals on the table. And then there is the old problem that Wall Street is giving money to both sides, which corrupts the voters’ ability to choose anything different than current policy.

Romney, as usual, has at least been consistent — he has been on every side of this issue too. He has offered the conclusion that the free market will make the correction and that the housing market should be allowed to hit bottom — but then he says that he and Ryan have a plan to fix the housing crisis. The ignorance of politicians in both parties is understandable considering the complexity of devious ruse called securitization of mortgage debt. But the Presidential candidates have staff, advisers and analysts to help them understand the issues. At this point, they must know enough to know that the foreclosure crisis was manufactured out of thin air and that the banks are running the show.

But I must admit that listening to Obama and Romney, neither one of them seems to have a clue. Both speak of the market “bottoming.” Any economist or analyst worth his or her salt will tell you we went through the floor and now we are in the basement digging ourselves a deeper hole. The ability to manipulate the information we get about the “recovery” is not an acceptable substitute for actual policy to start a real recovery.

Because the crash of the housing market and the economy that went down with that ship affects people of all classes and political ideologies, I have the advantage of speaking to a wider audience than a candidate running for political office. I am running for my country. And in my surveys of people from all political spectrums, it is clear that more than 75% of the country’s likely voters are intensely aware of the threat of another crash arising from the unwillingness of regulators and law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice and force restitution back to investors and homeowners who were tricked into this scheme.

I think both Obama and Romney are miscalculating if they think that housing problems are not going to play a major role in this election. I do see signs of life with administrative actions against the banks and each of the “largest settlements” ever recorded; but the truth is that these settlements are large only when compared with the wealth of the average citizen individually — not the wealth stolen from all citizens collectively.

Many people think I am out for justice, as though anyone has a workable definition of that term. Or that I am attempting to bring due process back to the courts. Of course I want “justice” and due process but that isn’t the point. I want the country to recover from the economic crash beyond avoiding the edge of the cliff we were at when Obama took office. OK, give him applause for backing away from that cliff and give him credit for turning a marketplace that was losing 750,000 jobs per month into one that is producing 100,000 jobs per month. That is a million job swing and it deserves at least some kudos.

But it is true, like anyone in any job, that Obama could have and should have done better. It’s also true that we have no evidence that Romney could have or would have done better. He just won’t say which of the programs he would have kept and which ones he would eliminate and what programs he would propose to get us out of this mess. Each of the die-hard Republicans and Die-hard Democrats thinks they know the real strategy after the election is over. The truth is they don’t know and one of the things that nobody knows is what else will happen that will cause another bump in the road. Both candidates have been presented with a laundry list of real likely risks to the economy and national security that neither one has mentioned.

My answer is simple. If you steal something, you get punished and give back what you stole. That includes “intangibles” like ID Theft, which is routinely practiced by Wall Street now at both ends of the securitization spectrum — the investors and the the homeowners. What is it going to take to get people to notice that the banks have taken over the marketplace? When your bank asserts that it has a right to “borrow” that TV you bought with a check, will that start you wondering?

In a normal economy financial services — i.e., trading paper back and forth to hedge real transactions — made up about 16% of our gross domestic product. Now the government reports that the same sector accounts for around 50% of all transactions counted in gross domestic product. That means we are substituting a lot of meaningless derivative trading for actually making things, selling them, and providing services that people want. We need to stop listening to slogans and start thinking about the world we want to leave for our children and their children.

SEE http://www.businessinsider.com/president-2012-candidates-are-ignoring-housing-2012-8

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