The Financial Times’s Shahien Nasiripour reports that the Obama administration is quietly telling activists that it will replace Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac regulator Ed DeMarco if the president is re-elected.
DeMarco is the Bush administration holdover who has blocked the president’s (belated) plan to reduce mortgage principal to help keep borrowers in their homes, remove some of the drag on the economy, and save the government money. Republican obstructionism has been a big part of preventing this, naturally, but failing to recess-appoint someone else is an administration own goal.
In 2010, Senate Republicans opposed Mr Obama’s choice to replace Mr DeMarco and have since said they would be unwilling to support other candidates who support principal reduction schemes. Administration officials have argued there are few qualified candidates willing to take the demanding position. Some borrower advocates have argued that the White House has kept Mr DeMarco in office in part because it provides the administration with an easy excuse when questioned about why they have not done more to prevent millions of home seizures.But in the past few weeks, Obama administration officials - including Gene Sperling, director of Mr Obama’s national economic council, and Jon Carson, director of the White House’s office of public engagement - have told Democratic groups that they hope to oust Mr DeMarco in the coming months, most likely by replacing him via an appointment while Congress is not in session, according to people familiar with the matter.
What took so long? One of my big questions in this post a couple of weeks ago was why Obama hadn’t replaced DeMarco. Its answer doesn’t wash: The administration says it couldn’t find anybody to take the job. It’s hard to believe that’s true unless it wasn’t trying very hard.
— Read this interesting Paul Carr rant at Pando Daily on the cab app Uber and “The creepy, dangerous ideology behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption.”
Uber’s business is a mobile app that connects cab drivers with fares and promises no more running around in the rain and snow with your hand up trying to get back to Brooklyn. Problem is, it’s illegal for yellow cabs in New York to pre-arrange fares, and Uber’s business almost certainly violated the law.
Uber, however, does not profit from compromise. Kalanick is a proud adherent to the Cult of Disruption: the faddish Silicon Valley concept which essentially boils down to “let us do whatever we want, otherwise we’ll bully you on the Internet until you do.” To proponents of Disruption, the free market is king, and regulation is always the enemy.
The pro-Disruption argument goes like this: In a digitally connected age, there’s absolutely no need for public carriage laws (or hotel laws, or food safety laws, or… or…) because the market will quickly move to drive out bad actors. If an Uber driver behaves badly, his low star rating will soon push him out of business…
The truth is, what Silicon Valley still calls “Disruption” has evolved into something very sinister indeed. Or perhaps “evolved” is the wrong word: The underlying ideology — that all government intervention is bad, that the free market is the only protection the public needs, and that if weaker people get trampled underfoot in the process then, well, fuck ‘em — increasingly recalls one that has been around for decades. Almost seven decades in fact, since Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” first put her on the radar of every spoiled trust fund brat looking for an excuse to embrace his or her inner asshole…
And there’s the rub. Given their Randian origins, we kid ourselves if we think most Disruptive businesses are fighting government bureaucracy to bring us a better deal. A Disruptive company might very well succeed in exposing government crooks lining their pockets exploiting outdated laws, but that’s only so the Disruptor can line his own pockets through the absence of those same laws.
It’s a rant, as I said, so it goes a little over the top. But he’s on to something there. For more on the libertarian underpinnings of the tech revolution watch Adam Curtis’s “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”:
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As an aside to the libertarian tech revolution, which has made much of our work automated and enabled lightspeed communication to offshore that which isn't, here's Mr. Leonhardt
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/us/politics/race-for-president-leaves-income-slump-in-shadows.html
"Taxes and government spending. Health care. Immigration. Financial regulation.
They are the issues that have dominated the political debate in recent years and have played a prominent role in this presidential campaign. But in many ways they have obscured what is arguably the nation’s biggest challenge: breaking out of a decade of income stagnation that has afflicted the middle class and the poor and exacerbated inequality...
One of the more striking recent developments in economics has been economists’ growing acceptance of the idea that globalization has held down pay for a large swath of workers. The public has long accepted the idea, but economists resisted it, pointing to the long-term benefits of trade. “That is starting to change only in the face of very strong evidence over the past decade,” said Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In particular, job growth and wage growth have been weaker in sectors exposed to global competition — especially from China — than in sectors that are more insulated.
Automation creates similar patterns. Workers whose labor can be replaced by computers, be they in factories or stores, have paid a particularly steep price. The American manufacturing sector produces much more than it did in 1979, despite employing almost 40 percent fewer workers."
We're making a lot of omelettes here. Breaking a lot of eggs.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 25 Oct 2012 at 10:54 AM
Computers are a double blaided sword in this day and time. Americans want things cheaper and this comes with a hidden agenda. As far as the housing market (houston we have a big problem). A domino effect has has pushed the home values to less than half and that's a fact and a problem. For Americans that want to keep there homes or Americans that want to sell there homes, there is a no win situation here. Modification only puts a small bandage on a very big wound. The problem has to be fixed at the root. Just like when there is canker in the orange trees, they all have to be cut down and start fresh. Americans need a fresh start with their mortgages. What ever the property would be sold to someone else it should be offered to the original owner as well. How can we get along with other countries when we can't get along with ourselves. Why do we have to be so selfish. No one is going to live forever so why can't we make it right. ALopez Florida speaks out........
#2 Posted by adrianna, CJR on Thu 25 Oct 2012 at 01:42 PM