Harvey Milk Day or Milktoast Milk Day?

Graphic, Queerty

I was glad to see California celebrate the first Harvey Milk State holiday on Saturday, May 22, but, by the end of the day, I felt like I'd been through the first Milktoast Milk Day--not a day honoring the revolutionary Harvey, who as he himself said, was far more than a gay politician:

"I understand very well that my election was not alone a question of my gayness but a question of what I represent. In a very real sense, Harvey Milk represented the spirit of the neighborhoods of San Francisco. For the past few years, my fight to make the voice of the neighborhoods of this city be heard was not unlike the fight to make the voice of the cities themselves be heard." --Harvey Milk, San Diego, The Hope Speech, 1978

Pirate Cat Radio's League of Pissed Off Voters' broadcast, often my favorite radio hour of the week,  appropriately featured District #8 candidate Rafael Mandelman, who, of the candidates running for Harvey Milk's seat, would no doubt be Harvey Milk's choice over Scott Wiener, and Dan Nicoletta, one time employee of Harvey's at Castro Camera and acclaimed photographer of Harvey, with fond memories, but they didn't share any of Harvey's own words.

Then KPFA's Saturday Evening News segment featured Mark Leno, an Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club Dem, not a Harvey Milk Democratic Club Dem:  

               Click to play KPFA Radio News on the first State Harvey Milk Day Holiday

Leno has, endorsed the Alice Club's candidate, Scott Wiener, rather than the Milk Club's candidate Rafael Mandelman.

KPFA News reporter Cameron Jones isn't gay, and doesn't live in San Francisco, so he probably doesn't know the difference between Alice Democrats and Milk Democrats, or realize that Leno is an Alicecrat.   And, since the legislation making May 22nd Milk Day was Leno's legislation, Leno's account of how he got Governor Schwarzenegger to sign the bill, after the movie "Milk" became a box office hit, was indeed news.   

However, despite being an openly gay politician benefiting from the ground Harvey Milk laid, Leno is hardly a bearer of Harvey's legacy, having joined his D8 candidate, Wiener, and Senator Dianne Feinstein and State Assemblywoman Fiona Ma in opposing a D.C.C.C. resolution calling on Nancy Pelosi to co-sponsor  H.R. 2404 requiring the Secretary of Defense to submit to Congress a report outlining the government’s military exit strategy of US forces participating in Operation Enduring Freedom, a.k.a., the War in Afghanistan.   Harvey Milk marched against the Vietnam War, and said, at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade:

"What standards? The standards of the rapists? The wife beaters? The child abusers? The people who ordered the bomb to be built? The people who ordered it to be dropped?  The people who pulled the trigger?  The people who gave us Vietnam?  The people who built the gas chambers?  The people who built the concentration camps, right here in California and then herded all the Japanese-Americans into them during World War II.   The Jew baiters?  The nigger knockers?  The corporate thieves?  The Nixons?  The Hitlers?  

What standards do you want us to set?  Clean up your violence before you criticize lesbians and gay men for their sexuality.  It is madness to glorify killing and violence on one hand and condemn the sexual act . . . " 

Leno has also been a devoted advocate for the South Florida-based Lennar Corporation, an industrial homebuilder and predatory lender whose reckless building and lending has in recent years both built and destroyed communities whole all over California and thus played a major role in ravaging both City and State budgets.

Harvey Milk instead stood for neighborhoods and community:

"The American Dream starts with neighborhoods. To sit on the front stoops--whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city--is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color. . ." --Harvey Milk, City of Neighborhoods Speech, 1978

More vintage Milk:

"I don't think the American Dream necessarily includes two cars in every garage and a disposal in every kitchen. What it does need is an educational system with incentives. To spend twelve years at school---almost a fifth of your life---without a job at the other end is meaningless." --Harvey Milk, City of Neighborhoods speech, 1978

". . . I'm tired of the conspiracy of silence. I'm tired of listening to the Anita Bryants twist the language and the meaning of the Bible to fit their own distorted outlook, but I'm even more tired of the silence from the religious leaders of this nation who know that she is playing fast and loose with the true meaning of the Bible. I'm tired of their silence more than of her Biblical gymnastics." --Harvey Milk, That's What America Is Speech, Gay Freedom Day Parade, 1978

"The Blacks did not win their rights by sitting quietly in the back of the bus. They got off! Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. . . We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!" --Harvey Milk, Gay Freedom Day Parade, June 25, 1978

All quotations can be found in the Appendices of Randy Schilt's biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, online in the Google Books version, and a record of Harvey in his voice ad his own words and voice, in the "Hope Speech," on the Youtube, which Milk Club President and District #8 candidate Rafael Mandelman posted to his Facebook page this weekend:

Hulu has made the full length doc, The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, available online. Great film, though still not quite equal to the best of Harvey in his own words:

Et tu, San Francisco, and California?

Budget strapped San Francisco, and California, bail out Lennar, an ailing subprime lender

At the close of 2008, and throughout 2009, we watched the federal government reward the reckless multinational financial sector with trillions of dollars for causing the worst hardship since the Great Depression.

San Franciscans and Californians joined in the agony but few understood that both San Francisco and California have come up with their own bailout for one of the major players in the meltdown, the South Florida based Lennar Corporation, thanks to Proposition G, followed by State Senator Mark Leno's Senate Bill 792, which legalizes the transfer of 23 acres of pristine waterfront parkland to Lennar.

Lennar is not just a big industrial homebuilder; Lennar is also a big mortgage lender.  Like D.R. Horton, Pulte, and all the rest of the big builders, Lennar has its own mortgage lending subsidiary, Universal American Mortgage Company (UAMC), which makes loans to sell its own properties.

UAMC's top competitors, according to Hoover's, are Bank of America, D.R. Horton's DHI Mortgage, and Pulte Homes' Pulte Mortgage.

During the years leading up to the subprime loan meltdown, home builder mortgage operations plied customers with incentives far beyond the common 1% for one month teaser rate.   On 10.13.06, Marketwatch reported, in "Home builders up ante to lure buyers," that:

"The NAHB found 55% of companies were offering home-option items such as granite countertops and landscaping at no charge, up from 37% the prior year. About 43% were offering to pay the closing costs on the buyer's previous home. . . "

Forty-four percent of builders were reducing home prices, 4% were including a new car with the home, and 5% were offering a free holiday trip."
 
Marketwatch also quoted Lennar CEO Stuart Miller on the increasing use of incentives and price cuts, and Lennar's need to keep cash flowing, at whatever cost, even in October 2006.
Why?  Because Lennar had overbuilt, way beyond new housing demand, and had to keep overlending to keep moving it.

Less than a year later, in "House of Cards," published in Builder Online, 08.07, John Caulfield described the pressure Lennar had put not only on borrowers, but also on UAMC managers:

Another source, who worked 2 ½ years as a manager for one of Lennar's UAMC offices in Nevada before she was laid off in October 2006, says the pressure to approve buyers for loans was “overwhelming.”  That pressure came directly from Lennar's divisional president, "who told us the relationship between the builder and the mortgage company was ‘master and slave.'”   When this source says she got tougher about qualifying buyers, Lennar removed several communities from her loan office's territory. When asked why Lennar would sanction its mortgage subsidiary to approve loans for buyers it knew would not be able to pay them, this source replies, “Lennar wasn't thinking long term; it's a publicly traded company that's judged on how many homes it closes.”

Never mind how many UAMC mortgages were bound to go bad.

Never mind that the prices of Lennar properties, even after deep discounts, were artifically inflated by UAMC's approval of buyers for more than they'd be able to pay.

Never mind that financially unsophisticated borrowers would eventually drain any and all resources that they and their families could earn or liquidate to keep up with negative amortization payments, adjustable rates, and/or balloon payments.

Never mind that these borrowers would be left trying to talk to distant "loan servicing" bureaucrats, who would have no memory or concern for the borrowers, or the negotiations that had led to the loans.

Never mind that the loan servicers would demand payment and/or threaten foreclosure, but refuse to reveal the names of the new "lenders," those who had bought their mortgages from UAMC on the secondary mortgage market, even though they, the new lenders, were the only ones who could have agreed to renegotiate loans.




Investment banks, the master subprime puppeteers

Much has been written and said about the Machiavellian machinations of investment banks like Deutschebank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, who bought megamillion dollar bundles of loans from Lennar's UAMC and all the other reckless builders and mortgage lenders, then turned them into securities that could be bought and sold speculatively, insured themselves against losses they well knew were coming, and sold "pass through certificates," a.k.a., income strips, on securities that they themselves were selling short.

Pension funds and municipalities that bought income strips no longer producing income are still scrambling.

The results:

-a staggering upward transfer and concentration of wealth, long before the bailouts,

-global recession far worse than capitalism's usual boom and bust cycles,

-hardship, and despair from Australia, where mortgage and credit card debt now exceeds even that of Americans, to D.R. Congo, where the crtiical mining contract review was finally abandoned under World Bank, IMF, and recession pressures, and,

-ongoing waves of foreclosures and layoffs, and new tent cities,

-falling home values, property and income tax revenues.

Reagan redux

Throughout 2009, city, county, and state legislatures, battled over what to cut next, health, schools, arts, or public transportation, as federal trillions flowed into financial industry coffers, all in the name of Reaganite trickle down economics.

And nobody knows where it went, only that that it hasn't trickled down.

Lennar and the other overbuilders and lenders stepped up for another $33 billion handout in the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009, which became law on 11.06.2009, prompting NY TImes financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson to ask "would it be so terrible if some builders that lost their heads during the housing mania ceased to exist?"

Lennar, the most aggressive overbuilder/lender, spent $240,000 lobbying for its share,
spent $240,000 lobbying for its $250,000,000 share, proving yet again that politicians offer an astounding return on investment----a 1,041.66% return for Lennar on this one.

Et tu, San Francisco?   Et tu, California?  

At the San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors, in the San Francisco Bay View, National Black Newspaper, and on the phone to Mark Leno and other Sacramento legislators, I keep asking why cash strapped San Francisco and California are rewarding Lennar/UAMC for all this, and, urging them on, with more "public private partnerships," and "title transfers," a.k.a. land grabs, including 23 acres of pristine waterfront parkland at Candlestick Point? 

This corporation has not changed its ways.

When foreclosed properties flooded the market, competing with its new properties, it launched an ongoing ad blitz to buy new, asking, "Why take the risk and buy a used foreclosed home or a short sale when you can afford a brand new one?"

Indeed.  Especially if it's a foreclosed Lennar Home, quite likely built with toxic Chinese dry wall, or, on top of a bomb test range with live ordinance still underground, or any number of the other toxic dumpsites Lennar specializes in building on, like San Francisco's Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard, the hugely contaminated home of the now shuttered Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.

Lennar's marketing team even produced a newly aggressive video argument for exhausting the planet's resources, "Why buy new?"

Last spring Lennar's Southeast Florida division announced a weekend sale, "THIS BAILOUT'S FOR YOU":

PR Log (Press Release) – Apr 14, 2009 – LENNAR CELEBRATES ‘THIS BAILOUT’S FOR YOU’ SALES EVENT THIS WEEKEND IN SOUTH FLORIDA   MIAMI, Fla. - Corporations should not be the only ones benefiting from bailouts. This weekend April 18 and 19, the Southeast Florida division of Lennar, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, is bailing prospective homebuyers out with incredible prices, incentives and interest rates that make it simple to buy a new home in today’s current real estate market.

As with the war, if we can't stop it locally, I don't know where we can.