A new report from RealtyTrac, Inc. predicts that lenders may foreclose on one million homes this year (via). In the spirit of accuracy, I should write “at least one million Americans,” since more than one person undoubtedly lives in a majority of those doomed residencies.

Nearly 528,000 homes were foreclosed in the first six months of 2010. As lenders work through a huge backlog of borrowers behind on their mortgages, even more home repossessions could occur before the end of the year. According to RealtyTrac, Inc., a foreclosure listing service, the number of households facing foreclosure in the first half of the year climbed 8 percent when compared to the same time frame last year. In June, 1 in every 411 households received a foreclosure filing. The fastest growing group of foreclosures involved homeowners with good credit who took out conventional fixed-rate loans. Many of these borrowers have fallen behind in their mortgages due to unemployment or reduced income. It takes about 15 months for a home loan to go from being 30 days late to the property being seized and sold. Between January and June of this year, about 1.7 million homeowners received a foreclosure-related warning. At the time of this writing, more than 7.3 million home loans are in some stage of delinquency. The states experiencing the highest foreclosure rates are California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona and Nevada.

As Susie Madrak and Atrios have been saying, HAMP was a total failure that actually ended up prolonging the agony of homeowners. Additionally, Congress has thus far failed to extend unemployment benefits, which will result in more waves of foreclosures.

The White House rushed in to add more misery with its latest brilliant idea: cutting food stamps in order to pay for education programs. The Obama administration is proposing this drastic maneuver in order to save the jobs of 200,000 local government employees, many of them teachers, who face the chopping block this year.

The Washington Independent’s Annie Lowrey correctly points out that food stamps are already less than generous (she calls the cut proposal “horrifying”). As of June 2009, the average monthly benefit was $133.12 per person, which comes out to about $4.44 per day. One in eight Americans and one in four children are using food stamps and the program rate is growing at 20,000 people a day, so this proposal would have tremendous negative impact on millions of Americans, who are already broke, unemployment, starving, and increasingly, homeless.

It’s important to stress that these kind of insane proposals all occur under the banner of deficit hysteria. Chris Hedges Hayes wrote a great article over at the Nation that I highly recommend be read in its entirety because it serves as a helpful reminder of where this deficit came from, and how we can begin to reverse it without killing the poor and eating their corpses.

Nearly the entire deficit is from the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. It’s not from poor people using food stamps. A good way to thwart the deficit would be to end these stupid, wasteful, pointless wars, and allow the tax cuts to expire.

Of course, rich people don’t like being taxed (even moderately,) so people like Pete Peterson and the cat food commission would much rather see poor people lose their Social Security. And their homes. And their food stamps. While we’re at it, why don’t we just strip naked the poor and sell their clothes? No one has the God-granted right to be clothed, you know. I worked my ass off for every pair of jeans I own.

Hayes points out that the cost of the unemployment extension is $35 billion. The bill would increase the debt by less than 0.3 percent. Deficit hysteria isn’t, and never has been, about saving money. If that was really the goal, Congress would have voted to end the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations years ago.

The U.S. totally has enough resources to extend benefits, but the recession affords a valuable opportunity to the austerity pirates. This window of opportunity permits the rich to hack away at the welfare state – the bane of their privileged existences – and a prize they have been eye-humping for decades.

This elite-led crusade is thoroughly undemocratic because a majority of Americans actually want to help the unemployed – probably because so many of them and their neighbors are jobless. Hayes writes:

According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans support “additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy,” with 38 percent opposed. A Hart Research Associates poll published in June showed that two-thirds of Americans favor continuing unemployment benefits. There is also very little public appetite for “entitlement reform,” aka cutting Social Security.

There’s little support for Social Security cuts now, and there was little support for it when Bush and his pack of idiots tried it the first time, but that didn’t stop them from trying. If they’re defeated this time, they’ll be back five years from now to try it again because the oligarchy has always resented social programs. They feel poor people — not blessed with old money last names, unable to afford ivy league schools, and forced to take minimum wage jobs to survive — are lazy leaches upon the state. Thus, if they are unable to fend for themselves, that’s just tough luck.

When they start to die en masse on city streets from exposure, that’s really just the circle of life at play. Natural selection, really.

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About author Allison Kilkenny is a radio host and political humorist, a fancy way of saying writer, who makes shitty world news funny. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Beast, 236.com, and Alternet.org's Wiretap Magazine. Her work has also appeared on The Nation and she is a regular guest on SIRIUS radio.



She doesn't care if you're offended by anything she has written. Further articles can be found at: Allison Kilkenny is a radio host and political humorist, a fancy way of saying writer, who makes shitty world news funny. She is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Beast, 236.com, and Alternet.org's Wiretap Magazine. Her work has also appeared on The Nation and she is a regular guest on SIRIUS radio.She doesn't care if you're offended by anything she has written. Further articles can be found at: www.allisonkilkenny.com Allison's radio show, Citizen Radio, can be found here: Citizen Radio fan page . Citizen Radio is on every Wednesday over at Breakthru Radio