Dday,
My question is what are the homeowners refinancing from and to? Are they stuck in an adjustable rate mortgage, where it is historically low rated now, but will eventually soar upwards pricing them out of their home in the future? I have one of these, and would love to be granted the opportunity to change to a fixed rate. Are their any mortgage adjustments going on with these refis, or are people still stuck with inflated values?

It is not in the best interest of any bank to give 30 year mortgages at 2.75%, because there is no history of loans staying at that rate over that time period. I would think the banks would stall until rates go up, after the promised 2015, hoping most homeowners will continue to pay their existing adjustable. Then when rates go up, wait until the tipping point where homeowners are not quite ready to default, but their income will not allow continued rises in their monthly mortgage. Then the banks will really have them over a barrel in rates and fees.

Ah, “The rich get richer.”

Now, DDay, what do you imagine is the underlying “mechanism” that allows, permits, or ensures that “pattern” … of the rich getting richer?

Might it not be the “essence” of the current economic “system”, itself?

Would it be worthwhile to consider and even debate those questions?

Or, must such questions remain “off” of the table?

What do you think?

Is it a minor “aberration”, just a momentary out-of-kilterness … or is it the fundamental and basic “nature” of the “system” which “replaced” feudalism?

Forgive me for raising such uncomfortable ideas, as I know every “thing” will be hunky dory any day now … right?

;~DW

Well, bittersweet, in your spot-on exercise in “looking forward”, you’ve given away the longer-term “game”.

That is not fair, nor is it “balanced”, as you have deliberately neglected to call the process “Gawd’s work”, and made it seem to be deliberate, cynical, and sociopathic “intent”.

;~DW

Oldest trick in the book. Never sell low, hold out until the price rises.

When I was 29, I went to Best Buy to replace my 12 inch B&W TV with their advertised $100 color TV. I got it home and the cable connection was broken off the back. I returned it to find that the next set had a broken channel switch. I went back and examined the boxes, and all of them appeared to be re-taped, implying recently returned.
Well, that was the bait. Now I really wanted a new color TV, even though before the advertisement, I was neutral in my desire. I bought a $200 TV, that had a factory sealed box, knowing full well I had been had.

The banks could undoubtedly “school” Best Buy.

It may well be one of the oldest of “tricks”, turned, bittersweet, yet it is one that seldom fails … especially if considered “business-as-usual” and and a practical “exercise” in “pragmatic efficiency” … even by those who pay through the nose … or with other parts of the anatomy …

Clearly, you’ve the spirit of the “debate” I have in mind.

Call it the “What is going on, here?”, debate.

Should not inquiring minds wish to understand … and, perhaps, even contemplate the necessity of changing such thinks?

;~DW

The problem, of course, is exactly capitalism. It’s not the people; it’s the system. But there is virtually no substantive discussion of this anywhere on the left.

As soon as one acknowledges the problem is capitalism, the logical question regards solutions. How should an economy be organized? What results to we want to attain? How should workplaces be structured? How should allocation be accomplished? How should consumption rights (remuneration) be determined?

I actually love Dayen’s work. But the problem with unwillingness to really dig into the systemic machinations of market economies and examining alternatives goes far beyond Firedoglake.

I think the fundamental unwillingness of the left to discuss solutions rests on the lefts unwillingness to do honest class analysis. Marx was a genius, and he got a lot of things right. He’s correct that owners and workers are two classes in the economy. But Marxism misses a class — people like doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, professors. People who do not own the means of production, but who run them on behalf of the owners. People whose jobs give them wide latitude over their own work lives and the work lives of others. The coordinator class.

To use the analogy of chattel slavery, the overseers were neither slaves nor plantation owners. They constituted a separate group, with interests separate from those of either owners or slaves. So too the coordinator class in advanced economies. There were no capitalists in the former Soviet Union. The ruling class was the coordinator class.

The left is a coordinator-class left, not a working-class one. It seeks (without realizing it) its liberation — coordinator-class liberation — not working-class liberation. Back to the chattel slavery analogy, the left is the overseers. It wants the slaves to help it push the plantation owner out of the plantation house, so that it (the overseers) can take over the cotton-growing operations for itself. But it wants to retain its working-class slaves to continue doing the real work of picking the cotton.

Real working-class liberation cannot involve the overthrow of capitalists and simply replacing them with coordinators. Workers will not fight for this, which is why the working class generally avoids the left. The left isn’t interested in working-class liberation — again, it’s interested in coordinator-class liberation.

Whites did not (and still do not) wish to see their racial privileges. Men did not (and still do not) wish to see their gender privileges. But the feminist and civil rights’ movements did bring about a certain amount of consciousness raising. Spell checkers actually know the words “racism” and “sexism.”

Not so, “classism.” Not only do spell checkers not know the word, neither does the left. This is not the fault of Dayen or FDL. The problem goes much deeper.

The left’s understanding in 2012 of class relations is comparable to the left’s understanding in 1812 of race or gender relations. Class is that poorly understood.

I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem where we neither have chickens nor eggs. The left needs a working-class movement to push it to broaden and refine its understanding of classism. But workers need a left to help educate it in the way to truly transcend classism through new organizational structures.

I do not know how this problem is to be overcome. I know the ultimate solution required to bring about worker-class liberation (participatory economics), but I don’t know how we bring it about, because I don’t know how we compel coordinators to acknowledge their class privileges.

Well said, Eric.

At some point … the discussion (after the cussing) must be “joined”, else NOTHING can or will change.

And we know, if the discussion is NOT joined, that the exploitation of those who produce, will continue, with simply another “set” of exploiters at the “helm” …

Capitalism, as Richard Wolff brilliantly explains was intended to replace feudalism with “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity”, however, because the French people did not realize that they had NOT changed and confronted the nature of exploitation, they, and everybody else, really got none of those things.

Just as the Russian peasants did away with the Czar, and failing to understand the nature of the exploitation, simply replaced the Czar with Commissars …

Americans, today, are too frightened, and too brow-beaten it seems, to even consider the nature of their exploitation, foolishly “believing” that they can, somehow, simply “vote” their way out of an ironfisted, jack-booted oligarchy …

Ah, well … another ten years of suffering might open some eyes and minds, yet I would not “bank” on it … unless serious efforts at shared understanding are made and engaged.

DW

Again, Eric, very well and thoughtfully said, excepting that the class you mention view themselves, properly or not, as “self-employed”. However, you are correct, that class must come to acknowledge how they benefit from the corrupted and exploitative “system” in which they operate.

Marx may well not have anticipated all permutations, as none of us can, and it falls to us to further, as both Wolff and Southern Dragon, here at FDL, have long sought to do, the discussion and contemplation.

Your willingness to discuss these things and thinks is much appreciated, even if many, even here, are not yet prepared to engage fully and openly in that consideration.

DW

I agree that suffering alone won’t bring about social change. People die. Death is inevitable. Nothing can be done to prevent it. So people accept it as a fact of life. People don’t seek to change the fact they’re going to die, because it would be utterly futile.

People see capitalism and larger institutional structures the same way they see death: as something immutable and unchangeable. If you went to the doctor, and the doctor told you you had some horrible disease that would kill you, and then proceeded to tell you all the bad things it would ultimately do to you before it killed you, at some point, your natural question would be, “Okay, what can I do to either fix it, or at least ameliorate the suffering?”

If the doctor proceeded to answer your question by once again telling you how bad everything was, how long would you stick around? If the doctor says to you that your life sucks now, and it’s only going to suck worse later, and never says anything further, at some point you’d get pissed (or dejected) and leave.

This is the left. It never says what solutions are. And, when it comes to capitalism, it really doesn’t even understand the problem. It means well, but it is so steeped in classism that it cannot even see.

I don’t know how to fix this. If Dayen (just to use him as an example) started writing about the coodinator class, he’d lose his gig at FDL, whether he realizes this or not. You can’t do it. The left won’t permit. You can’t discuss the coordinator class and get paid (except in the rarest of circumstances).

The ease with which those on the left refer to workers as stupid, or trailer trash, or whatever, would astound me if I didn’t understand why it happens. If women or nonwhites were referred to in comment threads the way workers routinely are, people would (rightly) be apoplectic. But when insults are hurled at people who work with their hands and punch time clocks for a living, it’s not even noticed.

Except by workers, who for the most part avoid the left like the plague.

You raise most salient points, Eric, across a range of interrelated topics.

I thank you for your courage and willingness to do so.

At this point, the “dialogue” is self-constrained by the “left” and plays right into the hands of the ruling classes.

Suffering alone will, of course, not suffice, but historical perspective, and Marxian class analysis, if generations of unreasonable and unreasoning assault upon such analysis might be overcome … COULD make the critical difference.

Keep on keeping on, the day is coming when your thoughts and ideas will be welcomed by more than the few who do dare think outside and beyond the conventional purview.

DW

I understand exactly what you are saying, however I think some of the answer may lie in “marketing”. Let me explain.
The US has zero education in political Science in the K-12 years, and little in higher education. However, since WWII, people have “known” the evils of “communism” and “socialism”. I can not count the number of “educated” people I have spoken with, that do not know the difference between Hitler and communism. It is as though they just associate “evil” with the entire era. So people accuse Obama of being a socialist, and they have absolutely NO clue what that means, besides “bad”. They simply do not know these words mean, but it is something bad, and they do NOT want to be associated with it.
I actually think that the Occupy movement was smart to label themselves the 99%, which included everyone. This totally avoided the messiness of virtually everyone considering themselves “safely” part of the “middle class”.
All the above is intended to back the notion that the discussion needs to avoid Marxian references, as well as Democrat, Republican or union. We need to develop a modern way to state similar ideas, in order to appeal to broad swaths of the American public. “The banks got bailed out, we got sold out”, is also brilliant. However, most people do not really know how much of their personal wealth was given away, or why they can not pay their mortgage.

Most people see themselves as “good” and “honest”, and “responsible”. They also like to consider themselves “smart’ and well reasoned. Few people walk around saying “I’m too dumb to vote”. If we want to have a discussion with masses of people, which changes the way they view the political world, then we have to find a way of speaking about it that doesn’t evoke references they have been trained to hate. We need to find a way to talk such that we use the vocabulary that they associate with “good”. The easiest example of this is, “it is easier for a rich man to fit through the eye of a needle than to enter the gates of heaven”. It is a righteous religious reference, but must somehow be updated to 20th/21st century speak.

Something like, “You do not have time to pay off your mortgage before you retire. Your retirement/pension is worth less than it was before. Now there is talk by both political parties about trying to lower your Social Security benefits. How are you going to live when you get too old to work? How come the rich people appear to be getting richer? Do they have some of your money? Do you have time to get your savings back before you get too old to work? Is anyone looking out for you? Are the”job creators” trying to get your savings back? Are the “job creators” creating jobs that pay as well as your old job? How come every time someone gives you a “middle class tax break”, it ends up meaning only a few hundred dollars? How is a couple of hundred dollars going to replace what has been taken from you? How is “getting the economy going” gonna replace all of the savings you worked your whole life to save? I hear a lot of plans in Washington to save the economy. Does anyone have a plan to save you? You worked together with your friends and neighbors to build your life. Maybe you can join with the same people you trust to build a better future.
Sorry for the length.