Pat Dollard | Young Americans

FNC’s Neil Cavuto makes Common Sense … doesn’t want to hear about any damn Congressional Hearings on this mess:

Democratic Congress May Adjourn, Leave Crisis to Fed, Treasury

By Kristin Jensen

The Democratic-controlled Congress, acknowledging that it isn’t equipped to lead the way to a solution for the financial crisis and can’t agree on a path to follow, is likely to just get out of the way.

Lawmakers say they are unlikely to take action before, or to delay, their planned adjournments — Sept. 26 for the House of Representatives, a week later for the Senate. While they haven’t ruled out returning after the Nov. 4 elections, they would rather wait until next year unless Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who are leading efforts to contain the crisis, call for help.

One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that “no one knows what to do” at the moment.

“When you rush to judgment, you usually make mistakes,” said Sherwood Boehlert, a former Republican congressman from New York. “This is something you can’t go on forever without addressing, but Congress in a short span of time is best served by going home.”

In 2002, after accounting scandals forced Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. into bankruptcy, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley law, setting new corporate-governance rules. While the measure passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House, it has since become a target of criticism from some Republicans, including presidential candidate John McCain, and from many in the business and financial worlds.

“There’s a huge danger that needs to be guarded against — that we’ll have a tremendous overreaction in regulations,” former Treasury Secretary John Snow said in an interview.

Reid’s `Despair’

Still, the Democrats opened themselves up for attack with Reid’s comments. The Republican National Committee pounced on the Nevada lawmaker for his “despair,” and Senator Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, said his remarks are “not a way to inspire confidence or begin to turn the tide.”

And there were some calls for at least a bipartisan show of leadership during the crisis, which has resulted in the collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, investment banks Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos., and insurer American International Group Inc., among other companies.

Unless party leaders on both sides of the aisle join with President George W. Bush to endorse a solution, there’s little Congress and the president can do in the near term to restore market confidence, said Chuck Gabriel, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners LLC, which advises investors on politics and Washington.

White House Lawn

Wall Street would respond positively “if the president and Treasury Secretary Paulson and a couple of Cabinet members and the Republican and Democratic leadership all went on the White House lawn and said that we are resolved to taking additional measures in the coming weeks despite the elections to ensure that confidence is restored,” Gabriel said.

“But the odds of that seem very, very low.”

Some committee chairmen have scheduled hearings and promised better oversight.

Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will hold two days of hearings on Oct. 6 and 7 “to examine what went wrong and who should be held to account” at AIG and Lehman Brothers, which filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15.

Waxman’s committee summoned Lehman Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, AIG CEO Robert Willumstad and former AIG chiefs Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and Martin Sullivan to speak.

`Work Will Continue’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the decision of Congress to adjourn. Lawmakers can always be recalled to Washington “if there is a need to do so,” she told reporters yesterday. In the meantime, House and Senate committees will hold hearings and the financial crisis will be studied by Congress, she said. “Our work will continue even if we are not still on the floor,” she said.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said Congress could give the Federal Reserve authority to pay interest on bank reserves sooner than originally scheduled.

“They already have the authority; it’s just a question of moving it up a couple of years,” Frank, of Massachusetts, told reporters yesterday. “We’re trying to work that out.”

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said the Fed also has the power to buy and dispose of bad debt stemming from the subprime-mortgage crisis.

“The Fed has the authority to move in this area,” Dodd told reporters in Washington.

No `Quick Fixes’

Creating a separate agency to take on bad debt, akin to the Resolution Trust Corp. set up in 1989 to absorb losses from savings-and-loan associations, would take about a year, he said. Instead, the Fed should use its own authority to act.

Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican active on housing issues, scoffed at suggestions that lawmakers postpone adjournment to rewrite laws governing the financial markets.

“The last thing you need,” he said, “are 535 people, not many of whom are that well-versed in financial markets, trying to do quick fixes to a market correction that’s one of the more significant that we’ve ever seen.”

(Bloomberg)

Hard Times Have Tent Cities Rising Across the Country

RENO, Nev. — A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared — people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a “tent city” — an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.

Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they’ve experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group says the problem has worsened since the report’s release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.

“It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have increased,” said Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition. “The economy is in chaos, we’re in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future.”

The phenomenon of encampments has caught advocacy groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up.

“What you’re seeing is encampments that I haven’t seen since the 80s,” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an umbrella group for homeless advocacy organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore. and Seattle.

The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans. The city of Fresno, Calif., is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood. In Portland, Ore., and Seattle, homeless advocacy groups have paired with nonprofits or faith-based groups to manage tent cities as outdoor shelters. Other cities where tent cities have either appeared or expanded include include Chattanooga, Tenn., San Diego, and Columbus, Ohio.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported a 12 percent drop in homelessness nationally in two years, from about 754,000 in January 2005 to 666,000 in January 2007. But the 2007 numbers omitted people who previously had been considered homeless — such as those staying with relatives or friends or living in campgrounds or motel rooms for more than a week.

In addition, the housing and economic crisis began soon after HUD’s most recent data was compiled.

“The data predates the housing crisis,” said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for HUD. “From the headlines, it might appear that the report is about yesterday. How is the housing situation affecting homelessness? That’s a great question. We’re still trying to get to that.”

In Seattle, which is experiencing a building boom and an influx of affluent professionals in neighborhoods the working class once owned, homeless encampments have been springing up — in remote places to avoid police sweeps.

“What’s happening in Seattle is what’s happening everywhere else — on steroids,” said Tim Harris, executive director of Real Change, an advocacy organization that publishes a weekly newspaper sold by homeless people.

Homeless people and their advocates have organized three tent cities at City Hall in recent months to call attention to the homeless and protest the sweeps — acts of militancy, said Harris, “that we really haven’t seen around homeless activism since the early ’90s.”

In Reno, officials decided to let the tent city be because shelters were already filled.

Officials don’t know how many homeless people are in Reno. “But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember,” said Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city’s redevelopment agency director.

Those in the tents have to register and are monitored weekly to see what progress they are making in finding jobs or real housing. They are provided times to take showers in the shelter, and told where to go for food and meals.

Sylvia Flynn, 51, came from northern California but lost a job almost immediately and then her apartment.

Since the cheapest motels here charge upward of $200 a week, Flynn ended up at the Reno women’s shelter, which has only 20 beds and a two-week limit on stays.

Out of a dozen people interviewed in the tent city, six had come to Reno from California or elsewhere over the last year, hoping for casino jobs.

“I figured this would be a great place for a job,” said Max Perez, a 19-year-old from Iowa. He couldn’t find one and ended up taking showers at the men’s shelter and sleeping in a pup tent barely big enough to cover his body.

The casinos are actually starting to lay off employees.

“Sometimes I think we need to put out an ad: ‘No, we don’t have any more jobs than you do,”‘ Royal-Goodwin said.

The city will shut down the tent city as soon as early October because the tents sit on what will be a parking lot for a complex of shelters and services for homeless people. The complex will include a men’s shelter, a women’s shelter, a family shelter and a resource center.

Reno officials aren’t sure whether the construction will eliminate the need for the tent city. The demand, they say, keeps growing.
(AP)