Hennessy's View

Homes for the Rest of Us is my response to the mess that is the finance industry. 

The Harvard MBAs screwed up the whole finance thing. So how are people supposed to get houses?
We’ll just have to take care of ourselves.  And each other.

I don’t know exactly how this will work, but I am pretty damn sure we can make it happen.

There’s this great program called Kiva.org that allows people to make micro-loans to entrepreneurs, mostly in emerging or plain dysfunctional economies. These entrepreneurs use the loans to buy baskets for their laundry business or seeds for their half-acre “farms.” They pay back the money the best they can.

This is America, though. Comparatively, we’re rich as all-get-out. We can give much bigger “micro” loans to people who can’t get mortgage financing any other way. And, besides, have you read paper? The whole world is a dysfunctional economy.

So here’s what I’m looking for:

* Some honest lawyers who know what kind of non-profit corporation we have to set up
* Some honest lawyers to help us (volunteers)
* Some finance or banking people (volunteers)
* Some lenders to get the ball rolling (volunteers, sort of)
* Some borrowers who need money to buy a home (these shouldn’t be difficult to find)
* Many passionate people who want to help in any way they can

We’ll need to create some basic rules and set some return rate. The loans will probably very high risk, but the interest rates probably won’t reflect the level of risk compared to other investment options. That’s okay, though. People are good and want to help each other.

I don’t want to put banks out of business–they have their job in society. But I think it will take a generation of grad students before we really trust that group to finance home mortgages again. And I know a lot of people who don’t want to wait that long.

If you want to help, forward the link to this site to everyone you know. Just getting some eyes on the page and ideas on the forum will help.

Great movements start with tiny actions, and this is about the tiniest action I could think of. So it will have to work.

Who says conservatives won’t help their fellow human?  Did I mention that this is a non-profit?

Popularity: 1% [?]

It’s time to knock off the niceties about Barack Obama and race. 

Barack Obama has a college education, political office, and a name because he black and from a broken home.  He happened to hit college age when it was still vogue to promote minorities through the education system, including Harvard Law, regardless of their abilities. 

As a result of the misguided, dangerous attempts by guilt-ridden liberals to right a wrong they did not commit, America is on the brink of electing a mentally deficient Marxist president.

Thanks, you lefties.

In our private lives, we’ve all run across the affirmative action hires with affirmative action degrees.  We’re just not allowed to talk about it.  It’s the woman or black man who doesn’t really speak the language at a level expected of a white male.  It’s manager or vice president in an organization who can’t understand the simple financial formula, and the “complexity” of the formula, which it’s his or her job to understand, that becomes the center of the discussion rather than the strategy the formula’s result indicates.

I won’t go into the virtues of affirmative action, because it has none.  Promoting individual members of a group beyond the level of their capabilities simply because it makes a white man feel good is racism, plain and simple.  Dumbing down schools, both inner-city elementary and prestigious university, to alllow more favored minorities to “pass” has damaged our society and economy for 30 years.  Now it threatens to end America’s experiment with democracy.

Barack Obama, like the good child of affirmative action that he is, knows how to game the racial political correctness system like no other.  In six months, he has smeared Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Geraldine Ferraro, John McCain, and Sarah Palin as racists simply because they oppose turning the White House into another affirmative action set-aside.  In this he has shown himself to be post-partisan:  anyone who opposes him — regardless of party — does so because Omama is black and the opponent racist. At least in Obama’s feeble little mind.

Further, our sickening political correctness demands silent stupidity.  We are expected to understand that by accusing Obama of learning his hatred of capitalism and his embrace of communism from a white terrorist and white communist, we become racists. Not anti-Semites, mind you, but anti-black.  We are not allowed to question the self-appointed truth police on the matter.  Because the accuser is black, we must not point out the ignorance of his idiotic comments.  Don’t want to hurt the poor fellow’s feelings.

ENOUGH!

John McCain has an obligation, if he truly puts his country first, to point out Obama for what he is:  an ill-educated neo-Marxist whose credentials were bought solely on the color of his skin and with glaring disregard for his flawed character and inferior intellect.  And it’s high time blacks who EARNED their stature–men like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, J. C. Watts, and millions of others–stood by McCain and explained the matter.  Giving away degrees to blacks on the premise that blacks are too stupid to earn them like everyone else is the lowest form of racism that ever existed.  Yet it is the official policy of Barack Obama’s party.

Popularity: 1% [?]