On occasion, I listen to our reps in Congress grill a banker or businessman about their practices and I'm always struck by the bizarre line of questioning. Inevitably at some point in the testimony, our representative asks the businessman what he would do to change regulations so that they worked better. This assinine question was even asked to the representative of the Swiss bank that was being questioned yesterday. The bank representative, unable to play along in this strange American game (and perhaps thinking he had misunderstood the question), politely said that he didn't think about such things. Why would he? It's business's job to make money. It's Congress's job to regulate. Congress should be telling, not asking.
A similarly inane remark appeared in the Wall Stree Journal the other day. We were informed that Bernanke was "angry at AIG." What the hell are these people talking about? AIG is a corporation--it's a "fake person." People can be "angry at AIG" all they want. It isn't going to matter. If we were serious about change, we'd revoke the status of corporations and make all these fat-cats repay their bad loans the way the rest of us do. Of course, with the billions lost, this would involve their families working as indentured servants for the next thousand years, but this seems much fairer than screaming at this fake entity called "the corporation" and letting the fatcats run off with billions that will enriched their families for the next thousand years.
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It seems these problems run rampant throughout all levels of government. In my town, we have a landlord board that decides whether the landlords are in compliance with the law. It's staff with landlords and no matter how bad the property, the landlords always win. We have laws that were written to protect our neighborhoods, the landlords got to give their input on the drafting of the legislation and now we have laws full of loopholes for the landlords that are unenforceable to protect the neighborhoods. Rentals are a multi-million dollars enterprise in my town and the landlords control the politicians and the government. We've been working for the last 4 years to change that. We've got 2 good people out of 5 on City Council and another good guy in the running for Mayor. Slowly but surely, I hope.
I've seen this elsewhere as well. A friend of mine once took his landlord to court in a case where he had meticulously documented evidence and the judge simply cut his settlement in half. In most places, it's in the landlord's favor to be as miserable as possible and to never pay anyone a dime of their deposit back. Landlord's basically have nothing to lose. As you consider legislation, you should require any landlord who requires renters to show a credit report and references to do the same. We should be able to see the references of the last three renters before we rent a place.
"References from the previous renters" - That's a novel and excellent idea. Now I'm going off to ponder how to draft legislation to that effect and all the tricky ways landlords might find a way around it. Hmmmm.
I like the idea of having an indentured banker getting his lily white ass over here to do my laundry.
As Jared Bernstein, now the chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden, wrote in the preface to his book, "Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)":
"Economics has been hijacked by the rich and powerful, and it has been forged into a tool that is being used against the rest of us."
Bob Herbert in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/opinion/10herbert.html
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