Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the state legislature are seeking to use millions of dollars intended for struggling homeowners to pay for prison construction and tax cuts instead, echoing a policy put in place earlier this year in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker.
Remember the $26 billion foreclosure settlement, the one agreed upon by the five biggest banks and 49 state Attorneys General? As one of the hardest hit states, Arizona is getting $1.6 billion, as well as an additional $97.7 million to be overseen by the office of Attorney General Tom Horne, to be used for “housing counselors, legal aid, hotlines, and to help stressed homeowners with their payments.”
Two main things to understand about these funds: they are wildly insufficient given the scale of the problem, but all the same they are extremely crucial. In March, Arizona had the highest foreclosure rate in the country, according to RealtyTrac, with 9,497 foreclosures. If any state needs all the help it can get when it comes to homeowner education, assistance, and relief, it’s Arizona.
Even so, Governor Brewer and Republican state legislators want to siphon $50 million from those funds to “relieve pressure on the budget.” So in other words, use money intended to help homeowners for…other things.
Lawmakers say the money amounts to a pricey outreach and education fund. It won’t hurt to take half of it, House Speaker Andy Tobin said.
“We’re using the funds to relieve the pressure on the budget,” said Tobin, R-Paulden. Those stresses range from a push to replace welfare dollars lost to federal budget cuts to prison construction, he said.
How is this justified? You can thank a loophole in the settlement language, which says the funds can be used “to compensate the state for costs resulting from the alleged unlawful conduct of the defendants.” Arizona lawmakers like House Speaker Tobin are claiming that since foreclosure fraud hurt homeowners, which in turn hurt tax revenues and by extension the state budget, they can use the money for whatever they damn well please.
They can make this logical jump without acknowledging a.) that the big banks committed any actual fraud, or b.) that maybe Gov. Brewer’s $538 million tax handouts to businesses has anything to do with budget problems.
In February, Walker and Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen decided to use $25.6 million of Wisconsin’s share of the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug holes in his state budget. For justification, he used the very same loophole in the settlement language:
“Just like communities and individuals have been affected, the foreclosure crisis has had an effect on the state of Wisconsin, in terms of unemployment. . . . This will offset that damage done to the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said.
A week later, Missouri followed suit, taking $40 million from their share for the state’s general fund. Ohio decided to allocate $75 million meant for homeowner assistance to actually demolish vacant homes. South Carolina legislators insidiously pushed for using $31 million of settlement funds for corporate tax breaks.
Of all the horrific policies that have come out of the offices of governors like Walker in the past two years, this is one of the worst – and the most under-reported. With Walker and Brewer giving out huge tax handouts to businesses, cutting services and education, and then dipping into foreclosure fraud assistance to pay for their bad decisions, they are no different than a modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Robbery in multiple steps is still robbery, even if you’re a governor.
Today, voters in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Indiana will go to the polls to nominate candidates and make their voices heard on certain issues. All three states have unique races that will reverberate far beyond their borders.
North Carolina. Voters will choose Democratic and Republican nominees for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Treasurer, and other statewide positions. With Governor Bev Purdue retiring after her first term, former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory is expected to become the Republican nominee, while the Democratic slot is between Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton and former-Rep. Bob Etheridge.
But the most interesting development is actually a ballot amendment, known as “Amendment 1,” which would add a ban of same-sex marriage to the state constitution. North Carolina already has a ban in state law, and Amendment 1 goes further to bar the state from recognizing any legal domestic union other than marriage.
Director of Personnel Linda Coleman is seeking to succeed Dalton as Lt. Governor, and State Treasurer Janet Cowell is running for reelection.
Indiana. Hoosier voters are expected to make history tonight in the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate. Six-term incumbent Dick Lugar is trailing Tea Party primary opponent Richard Murdouck. If Lugar loses, he’d be the first six-term incumbent to lose in a primary since 1952.
Some are also looking at this race to gauge if the Tea Party will be as big a factor in the 2012 election as they were in 2010. Democrats are also watching: polling shows that a (relatively) moderate Lugar would easily beat any Democratic challenger in the general election, while a Tea-flavored Murdouck nomination would result in a tied race with expected Democratic nominee Rep. Joe Donnelly. So who will win – the Tea Party firebrand or the safe pick?
Wisconsin. And now, our feature presentation. After Wisconsinites turned in nearly a million signatures to trigger recall elections, May 8 was the date set by the state’s elections board to choose the Democratic nominee to take on Gov. Scott Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and four of their allies in the State Senate.
As we wrote last month, the Wisconsin Republican Party decided to “protest” the recalls by running “Fake Democrats” as primary opponents. Scott Walker has not expressed any disapproval about this tactic, even though it ends up costing taxpayers more money. Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate Majority Leader and recall target, even suggested to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Republican voters should crossover just to meddle in the Democratic primary. “There’s nothing to keep the Republicans from messing around,” he said.
The race to take on Walker is largely between Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk. Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the Wisconsin Association of Firefighters, is expected to be nominated as Democratic challenger to Lt. Gov. Kleefisch. Firefighters and police officers gave a boost to the Wisconsin revolt when they joined the historic protests in Madison against Walker’s collective bargaining ban, even though they had been exempted from it.
Meet Viviette Applewhite, the new face of the nationwide, corporate-backed assault on voting rights.
Applewhite is 93 years old, and she has voted in every election for the past 60 years. She even marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Georgia. But under Pennsylvania’s new voter suppression law HB 934, championed by the radical Rep. Daryl Metcalfe with a strong assist from ALEC, Viviette Applewhite cannot exercise her right to vote.
Applewhite doesn’t drive and her purse containing her identification card was stolen. She’s been unable to obtain an identification card since because officials can’t track down her birth certificate.
Applewhite is one of the plaintiffs in ACLU-PA’s legal challenge to the voter suppression law, which Gov. Tom Corbett signed in March. And while her situation is quite specific, there are hundreds of other ways in which the law effectively disenfranchises Pennsylvania citizens, as shown by the suit’s other plaintiffs:
Other plaintiffs in the case include a transgender man…a 89-year-old resident who initially couldn’t get a driver’s license because her marriage certificate is in Hebrew and another 93-year-old woman who has limited mobility and trouble getting to the polls.
They aren’t alone, either. As voting rights activist Faye Anderson told the Philadelphia Weekly, one of the groups most affected by this new law are divorced women:
“If a woman wants to change her name to vote, she has to produce her marriage license,” says Anderson, noting many newlyweds often forget to change their name on their driver’s license. “It’s possible that we can have a situation in which a voter in Pennsylvania without ID, a married woman who is now divorced, will have to stand in four separate lines to gather the documents that she would need to show voter ID.”
In addition to the many women and seniors disproportionately affected by this policy, there are the usual targets of voter suppression: minorities and low-income voters, who are more likely not to have state-issued ID.
The biggest joke of the Pennsylvania voter suppression law? It seeks to prevent a practice that largely does not exist. Supporters of the law try to conjure up fear of old-school city machine-style politics, like the “walking around money” once given out on the streets of Philadelphia, or the “dead voters” in Chicago. But those practices, to the extent that they exist, are not affected by HB 934:
But the law’s main provision, requiring the state’s 8.2 million registered voters to produce drivers’ licenses or other official forms of photo ID, appears to target a kind of fraud that by all accounts hasn’t cropped up in recent years in the city or state.
“The phrase used is voter impersonation, where John Doe pretends to be Henry Jones in order to cast a vote,” Harvey said. “No one has identified any such cases, certainly in Philadelphia, in my time frame.” Harvey is 75.
Remember again, HB 934 costs the taxpayers $6 million – while cash-strapped schools across Pennsylvania go wanting.
We agree with the ACLU: not only is HB 934 unconstitutional, but Corbett, Metcalfe, and their allies never sought to address any actual problems by pushing the law. Their goal is to keep enough voters away from the polls to remain in power and keep champions of working families out of office, so that the coffers of their corporate backers can go unscathed by closing loopholes, a fairer tax system, or any sort of accountability.
In Wisconsin, a permanent injunction is keeping that state’s voter suppression law from impeding the will of the voters in the June 5 gubernatorial recall. Hopefully, the ACLU suit will succeed and a legal injunction will keep this disgusting law from disenfranchising thousands in November.
In Ohio, over 482,000 homes are “underwater,” meaning the value of those homes is less than the amount owed to the bank in mortgages. The values of those underwater homes total a whopping $14,943,488,000, or almost $15 billion.
Even though it rarely breaks through the noise of national debate, the mortgage crisis continues to be an enormous drag on our economic recovery. AlterNet estimates that homes in the U.S. lose $500,000 of value every hour, and there are thousands of foreclosure actions taken every day.
In the Cleveland area, there was recently some controversy about a foreclosure prevention event planned for the summer. An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer detailed the disagreements between the various organizations involved, but skipped over the enormity of the crisis facing homeowners in Ohio and nationwide.
I don’t know anything specifically about the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America (“Out-of-town foreclosure aid group has local critics,” Thursday), but I do know the importance of having real help for struggling homeowners. I believe the housing crisis is a significant stumbling block to real economic recovery.
As a small-business owner, I certainly felt the crush of the economic downturn. Although there has recently been a slight pickup in business, the sustained slowdown meant I fell behind on my mortgage payments. I was contacted by a group supposedly trying to help; of course, they required money up front but failed to do anything tangible. I ended up on the brink of foreclosure and accepted a loan modification that added thousands of dollars and 25 years to my mortgage — on a house worth half of what it was worth prior to the recession. I’m still not sure how I’m going to make it.
I am more scared now than I was while serving in Vietnam. We need real mortgage relief for people in my situation — not the drop in the bucket of the recent settlement. Groups that actually help struggling homeowners, not take advantage of them, are critical, too. Otherwise, the housing crisis will continue to weigh down the U.S. economy.
Since he took office in January 2011, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has spent a great deal of time out of state, in part to raise money for the impending recall election in June. Also during that time, Wisconsin has led the nation in job loss, with at least six straight months in the red in terms of job creation.
Well, as expected, Walker’s many fundraising trips have paid off. His campaign announced that they raised $13.2 million since the beginning of 2012, with two-thirds of that sum coming from outside Wisconsin.
Unlike some of the third-party groups supporting him, like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, Walker’s campaign has to disclose where donations over $1,000 come from. Here are some of the highlights:
Bob Perry, the wealthy Texan right-wing donor behind the disingenuous 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and a close ally of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (no relation), gave $500,000. Perry is the owner of the Houston-based development company Perry Homes.
Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway and owner of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, also gave $250,000. The DeVos family, particularly Richard’s wife Betsy Prince DeVos, has been on the forefront of the school privatization agenda across the country.
Sarah Atkins and David C. Humphreys, both of the Missouri-based roofing giant Tamko, gave $250,000 apiece. Atkins was head of Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, which is now called (ready?) Americans for Prosperity. Stanley Herzog of Herzog Contracting, another Missouri building protects corporation, kicked in $250,000 as well. (More on the $750,000 Missouri connection.)
We could keep going. Trevor Rees-Jones, Texas oil industry, $100,000 to Walker. Bruce Covner, New York hedge fund industry, $100,000 to Walker. John Childs, Massachusetts private equity firm, $100,000 to Walker. This continues the terrible trend we’ve seen as the 2012 election approaches – that big donors will have more say over our elected officials than we will.
In the world of politics, these fundraising numbers are staggering. Walker’s fundraising is on par with that of a presidential campaign.
But we get this news while we are seeing other staggering numbers. While Walker has been gallivanting from state to state, shaking hands and taking checks, working families back home have been experiencing the brunt of his ideological crusade and his negligence toward the jobs crisis.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that between March 2011 and March 2012, Wisconsin lost 23,900 jobs. This isn’t a case of “the economy is bad” – Wisconsin is the only state in the country to have experienced statistically significant net job loss over this period.
This also isn’t a fluke. For six straight months, Wisconsin has experienced a net loss of jobs while other states recover. Wisconsin has dropped to 42nd place on Bloomberg’s Economic Evaluation of states index.
Remember, Scott Walker promised during his 2010 campaign to create 250,000 private sector jobs by 2015. When he cut collective bargaining rights for thousands of public workers, and when he took federal money meant for struggling homeowners to plug holes in his budget, and when he effectively hiked taxes on working people by eliminating the state earned-income tax credit – his ultimate justification was that this would somehow help create jobs and spur the economy.
Walker and his legislative allies aren’t under threat of recall because just a couple people are mad at him. They aren’t under the threat of recall because of his treatment of union workers alone. These elections are happening because Walker and his friends have very specific, narrow, ideological priorities that run contrary to those of Wisconsin families, and they have raised this money by getting in small rooms with super-wealthy individuals who share those priorities: Adelson, DeVos, Koch, and Perry among them.
Voters should pick our leaders and decide our priorities, not big donors. Walker is an example of what you get when only the super-wealthy have a say.
