Mr. Bush, Come Tell the Ghosts in Queens Your Financial Plan

As our lame-duck President began his televised speech about the financial meltdown Thursday in lower Manhattan, accountant Barbara Beaubrun sat in her house in southeast Queens, shaking her head in disbelief.

"He's in the wrong place," Beaubrun screamed. "He should be out here helping homeowners, not on Wall Street."

"Here" is Linden Blvd. near 146th St., a black working-class neighborhood that is Ground Zero in the city's mortgage crisis.

Stopping Foreclosures With the Right to Rent: One More TIme

Politicians often prefer complex solutions to simple problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the long list of complicated and convoluted proposals to address the country's foreclosure crisis.

Millions of people face the loss of their homes over the next few years. While the politicians in Congress have developed a wide variety of complex schemes in order to hold back this flood of foreclosures, including one passed into law last summer that provided up to $300 billion guarantees for new mortgages on homes facing foreclosure, none have had much impact thus far.

Lust for Leverage

As America continues to struggle with the single most dangerous economic crisis to occur since the invention of television, television news operations have been unforgivably lame and late in telling in a cogent and compelling way, the story of how and why this has happened to us. Lots of stories about how afraid and worried people are, but not much about the how and why. Perhaps this is because the underlying subject is economics, and it's hard to make "the dismal science" seem sexy, or even violent enough for TV. I understand that part.

Ordinary Americans Left Out of Bailout

Mark Seifert tours reporters around streets more reminiscent of Baghdad than Cleveland, Ohio. They are deserted. The homes are boarded up, covered in graffiti. Once residential neighbourhoods, they are now hangouts for drug dealers.

At the end stands a nice little ranch with a kept garden. It's the home of an elderly couple who have lived here for decades. Their mortgage is paid off but the value of their home has depreciated by half. They cannot sell. They have nowhere to go.