Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs' New Permanent Underclass
• Good news, America! We’re finally building equal opportunity ghettos! Now that 1 in 15 Americans are considered the “poorest poor,” we’re making sure they live in underserved neighborhoods; “geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990.” But it’s a rainbow of poverty! Red and yellow, black and white!
• And we’re making sure they don’t get to bust out. Because few of them can afford to have cars, they can’t go to school, improve their lives or take their children to programs. A entrenched and segregated underclass!
• But it’ll be a mobile underclass, that moves from poor area to poor area, when it can, because home ownership, which was a terrible idea bought by many people, is shrinking: “Through the 12 months ending mid-2011, the Census Bureau reported a net increase of 1.4 million households that moved into rental housing.” Meanwhile, for those still entrenched: “The percentage of those who are late by 90 days or more on their monthly mortgage payments was virtually unchanged at 3.51 percent in the July-September quarter.”
• And so, relatedly, today at noon, Occupy Wall Street is marching on Goldman Sachs’ headquarters. Even though it dumped and wrote off its (allegedly) mortgage robo-signing holding, there’s plenty of good reasons to do so. Plenty of reasons to march on the White House too.
Photo of Occupy Oakland yesterday by James Martin.