Late Night in America (and voters have a lousy choice)

Like most political geeks, I like a good election in a place where I've no skin in the game. People who know me well will have witnessed this obsession - with local election results in France and mayoral elections in Brazil among other excitements. The Big One, however, is the US Presidential Election - this is the daddy of votes, the grandest and most extravagent of all the world's elections.

And most years the US gets a pretty good choice. We don't have to think much of Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Bob Dole and John McCain to appreciate that all of these men would have made perfectly fine presidents for the USA. Not as good maybe as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama but perfectly OK. It has always been something of a reassurance that the convoluted, over-long and expensive system of primaries, caucuses and straw polls does result in a final contest between two folk who'd make a decent fist of leading the nation.

Until 2016 that is. This year the American voter is presented with a lousy choice. And that's being kind. I struggle to find anything good to say about Hillary Clinton except that she isn't Donald Trump. Hillary is the distillation of the worst sort of crony capitalist, faux-lefty, heart-on-sleeve, crocodile tear liberalism. Rising to the top without any opposition - Bernie Sanders was a joke candidate - Hillary is comfortably the weakest democratic choice for president since Mike Dukakis. Yet she is very likely to win.

Hillary Clinton will win because the Republicans - the Grand Old Party - have lost their collective marbles and selected perhaps the only sort of republican who can actually lose. Not that Donald Trump is, in any recognisable way, a conservative let alone a Republican. It really beggars belief that the Party of Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan has selected as its candidate a massive charlatan, a creature of the corrupt establishment who inherited billions and has contributed nothing except to appear in second-rate reality TV shows and build over-piced New York apartments for the super-rich.

What is worse is that Trump has got this position by appealling to the most venal, bigoted, nasty and selfish negativity in US life today. The Donald's platform is a muck up of racism, protectionism, the poisoned legacy of 20th century Progressives and 19th Century Know-Nothings. A ghastly brew of bigotry, lies and appeals to grievance without an offer of betterment beyond the banal slogan "Make America Great Again". This is the man whose recent political career started with him claiming Barak Obama wasn't an American (or at least not born there) - that most racist and least appealling of Alt-Right conspiracy theories.

It really is a terrible time for the USA. And it will be one of the most depressing elections in a long while. For what it's worth - and I'm no expert - I think Hillary Clinton will win at a canter. If Donald Trump wins more than a dozen states I'll be surprised. What is sad in all this, however, is that the bigoted, racist train crash of Trump's campaign will drag down good Republican congressmen perhaps handing the Democrats not just Clinton as President but control of the Senate as well.

This lousy choice might be an unfortunate lapse in the US system or could presage the country declining into bickering political clans more focused on undermining other people than living in the place Reagan's campaign described in 1984. It's no longer Morning in America, it's a late evening and we're presented with the spectacle of two drunks abusing each other, hurling spittle flecked insults about, shouting at all and sundry. It is a depressing and sad indictment of a great nation's corruption - not the corruption of the ordinary man and women but the corruption of the elite from which Clinton and Trump have slithered.

All we can hope is that this great and wonderful country, once a beacon of liberty, can find its way again, can live through whatever terror awaits over the coming four years under Clinton's corruption or Trump's bigotry.

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It isn't social justice to encourage people to take out loans they can't afford. So why is it Labour Policy?

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You know the housing bubble that was a big factor in creating the mess we're in?

Let's remind ourselves what Clinton and Bush did:

The meltdown was the consequence of a combination of the easy money and low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve and the easy housing engineered by a variety of government agencies and policies. Those agencies include the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and two nominally private “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The agencies — along with laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act (passed in the 1970s, then fortified in the Clinton years), which required banks to make loans to people with poor and nonexistent credit histories — made widespread homeownership a national goal. This all led to a home-buying frenzy and an explosion of subprime and other non-prime mortgages, which banks and GSEs bundled into dubious securities and peddled to investors worldwide. Hovering in the background was the knowledge that the federal government would bail out troubled “too-big-to-fail” financial corporations, including Fannie and Freddie.

And let's remember something about this - it was the political greed of American politicians not the greed of bankers that did the damage. Here's what the Village Voice said back in 2008 about Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, then Housing & Urban development Secretary:

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis. He took actions that — in combination with many other factors — helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded ‘kickbacks’ to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

Put simply, forcing banks to lend to people with high risk of default is a really stupid idea. And all the wiffle about social justice doesn't change the facts. Nor does forcing the banks to use "social lenders" make any difference. Yet the Labour Party are proposing just such a policy:

Labour has published proposals for a policy that it says would force banks to lend more in deprived communities and encourage lending through third sector financial institutions.

In an interview with Third Sector, shadow charities minister Gareth Thomas said that proposals in Open Banking: Building a Transparent Banking System, written by him and Chris Leslie, the shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, would require banks to reveal what they lent in each community and to lend a minimum amount in every community.

He said that where banks did not want to do it themselves, there would be an opportunity for them to lend through credit unions or community development finance institutions.

It all sound so lovely. Let's force the evil banks to cough up for regeneration. They can be forced to lend to poor folk in deprived places and everything will be better!

This isn't social justice, it's not redistribution, it's not reinvestment. It's a morally questionable lottery and anyone who thinks giving soft loans to poor people makes any sense needs his head examining.

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