Mend A City

Regular readers will remember that Dredd Blog recently discussed that it is a matter of law now that we live in a culture of falsehood: mendacity is our capitol city, the bubble district is where the money is, where the bailed-out banks are, and that the language of our government is mendacious, which generates a lot of illness and death.

Some tip-of-the-iceberg news reports touch upon the subject:

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at Guantanamo -- a feature of the Bush-Cheney constitution which he once had explicitly deplored -- and recently went out of his way to defend the Guantanamo-like abuse (compulsory nakedness and sleep deprivation) inflicted on an American prisoner, Bradley Manning, in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico. One had come to think of "X must go" assertions by Obama as speculative prefaces to a non-existent work. His words, in his mind, are actions. When he speaks them once or twice, he has done what he was put here to do. If the existing powers defy his wishes, he embraces the powers and continues on his way.

(David Bromwich). The religionists pray on a word, the comics play on a word, but MOMCOM just preys with words.

The fundamental sacred sacrament of The Virgin MOMCOM is the act of war, yet the sermon is about Mend A City, Mend A State, and Mend A Deficit, while doing none of the above.

Meanwhile, the cities, counties, and states are increasingly in danger because the "home land" is losing its homes, and is morphing into the "homeless land":

The mortgage crisis in this country doesn't get much attention in Washington these days, but it's huge. It's so huge, in fact, that it dwarfs most of the economic issues that have Washington in their grip. It's so huge that it's dragging down our entire economy. It's so huge that the numbers can be difficult to picture ...

The scale of the crisis is, in a word, staggering ...

How big is the mortgage crisis? Pick an adjective: astronomic, colossal, enormous, gigantic, ginormous, humongous, jumbo, mammoth, massive, monstrous, mastadonic, monumental, prodigious, tremendous, vast, very big, very large, whopping. Here's how big it is. Let's assume that you're reading these words one day after I wrote them. That means that:

By the time you read this, there will have been approximately 8,500 foreclosure actions in this country -- more than one thousand every hour during the working day.

By the time you read this, homes in the United States will have lost more than $13 million dollars in value. During a 24-hour day, this figure comes out to more than $500,000 an hour.

By the time you read this, homeowners will have paid $750 million in mortgage payments for non-existent housing value -- that is, the amount on their mortgages that disappeared when the bubble burst -- according to our estimate.

By the time you read this, the nation's bankers will have earned nearly $400 million, of which $56 million will be bonus money. Bankers like to say they work 24/7. (They don't, but let's say they did.) That means they will have collectively earned more than $16 million in salary and more than $2 million in bonuses during each and every one of the 24 hours hours before you read these words -- morning, noon, and night.

And all of these figures for the last 24 hours will be reached again during the next 24 ...

Here's a fact for you: The amount of wealth American homeowners have lost over the least three years is much larger than this year's entire Federal budget.

(RJ Escow). In the series The Graphs of Wrath - 2 we looked at the issue from a higher altitude, but noted that it does not look good up there either.

While there is a way out of here, the powers that be are in too much denial to take that path.

So they start another oil war as if to say "yeah, that's the ticket".

UPDATE: They started a war with a nation The Federal Reserve ("The Fed") loaned billions and billions to, and at cheaper rates than Americans can get from The Fed (if they could borrow any at all):

“It is incomprehensible to me that while creditworthy small businesses in Vermont and throughout the country could not receive affordable loans, the Federal Reserve was providing tens of billions of dollars in credit to a bank that is substantially owned by the Central Bank of Libya,” Sanders said.

(Washington's Blog). They choose mendacity over Mend A City every time.