Erika Eichelberger

Reporting Fellow

Erika Eichelberger is a reporting fellow in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She has also written for The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, and TomDispatch. Email her at eeichelberger [at] motherjones [dot] com.

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Expert: Obama's Housing Agency Nomination Is Good News for Poor People

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu May. 2, 2013 7:39 AM PDT

Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.).

On Wednesday, President Obama nominated Rep. Mel Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the organization that oversees the mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Advocates for low-income borrowers are psyched.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), a group that promotes access to affordable housing, says the move means that the agency will finally be freed to assist struggling borrowers. For over a year, the current acting director of the FHFA, Ed DeMarco, has blocked efforts to allow borrowers to reduce their mortgage balances. Prominent economists say principal reduction is the single most important thing the administration could do to revive housing, and even though the Obama administration only recently began to heed this advice, DeMarco wasn't into it. He claimed that reducing Americans' mortgage debts would encourage people to fall behind on their mortgages. And he said a write-down program wasn't worth the cost, even though, according to his own agency, loan balance reduction could help up to half a million borrowers and save taxpayers some $1 billion.

All that would likely change if Watt gets confirmed. The congressman, who sits on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, is known for promoting lending to low-income and minority borrowers. As John Taylor, president and CEO of NCRC, told Mother Jones, "He has a real commitment to ensure that working class people have access to mortgage products... I think he will jump-start that process." Taylor adds that this could in turn give the sluggish housing rebound a bump. "Fannie and Freddie have been in shut-down mode when comes to working-class borrowers... DeMarco ignored the foreclosure crisis and the roll Fannie and Freddie could play in trying to prevent more foreclosures, which is critical to the housing recovery," he says.

Taylor thinks that despite Watt's progressive creds, he has a good chance of being confirmed. "I think he's built up a lot of good will as somebody who has demonstrated the ability to cross the aisle and not personalize disagreements with members of the other party. He has a genuine possibility of going forward." Plus, banks like Watt. Insurers and financial firms are some of his biggest donors.

Still, as Annie Lowrey and Peter Eavis write in the New York Times, "Watt’s nomination will most likely inflame long-running political battles over how much the government should do to make mortgages available and support homeowners." And Taylor cautions, "It may not have to do with him. It may just have to do with Republicans not wanting to support the president in any way." If Watt does fail to win Senate confirmation, the White House has a secret weapon: it could give Watt the job as a temporary recess appointment.

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Study: Budget Cuts Are Making Us Sick

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Tue Apr. 30, 2013 9:38 AM PDT

Leremy/Shutterstock

Two months ago, $85 billion in automatic slash-and-burn spending cuts to federal and state programs kicked in because Congress couldn't come up with a better way to deal with the deficit. Today, my colleague Tim Murphy reports on the ways those cuts are playing out across all 50 states, from shuttered Head Start programs to massive layoffs. If that weren't bad enough, a pair of prominent researchers said Monday that austerity policies are making people sick.

Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Stanford University epidemiologist Sanjay Basu are publishing a new book this week detailing how austerity cuts are causing ill health across Europe and North America by driving up depression, suicide, and infectious diseases, and limiting access to medicines and healthcare. Reuters reports:

[T]he researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression have been diagnosed during what they call the "Great Recession" and its accompanying austerity across Europe and North America.

In Greece, moves like cutting HIV prevention budgets have coincided with rates of the AIDS-causing virus rising by more than 200 percent since 2011—driven in part by increasing drug abuse in the context of a 50 percent youth unemployment rate.

Greece also experienced its first malaria outbreak in decades following budget cuts to mosquito-spraying programs.

And more than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare during the latest recession, they argue, while in Britain, some 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness by the government's austerity budget.

Previous work by the same researchers has also linked rising suicide rates to austerity measures. But they maintain that the bad health effects are not inevitable, even in the worst crises, and point to the Great Depression as an example. "During the 1930s depression in the United States, each extra $100 of relief spending from the American New Deal led to about 20 fewer deaths per 1,000 births, four fewer suicides per 100,000 people and 18 fewer pneumonia deaths per 100,000 people," Kate Kelland writes at Reuters.

The austerity mentality may be on the decline. New numbers show that the US national debt is falling for the first time in six years; an influential study linking high levels of national debt to slower growth has been debunked; some are saying the era of austerity is over. Still, in a press conference Tuesday, Obama reiterated the importance of deficit reduction, so we're not out of the sick room yet.

As Basu told Reuters, "Ultimately... worsening health is not an inevitable consequence of economic recessions. It's a political choice."

Treasury Department: Lew Remains Opposed To Bills That Would Weaken Wall Street Reform

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Mon Apr. 29, 2013 2:03 PM PDT

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that some financial reform advocates were worrying that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was not taking a sufficiently fierce stance against a group of House bills that would weaken Wall Street reform. Similar measures died last year, and with some Democrats and Republicans in the process of reviving them, reform advocates have become nervous, especially since Lew has not yet echoed the strong opposition to these proposals that was voiced last year by his predecessor, Timothy Geithner.

Treasury Department officials, though, say there is nothing to fear. Last week, a Treasury Department spokesman told Mother Jones, "Of course the Treasury secretary would oppose any effort to weaken Wall Street reform," known as the Dodd-Frank law. She pointed to Lew's recent comments on Bloomberg television. "The purpose of Dodd-Frank was to make sure the American taxpayer would never again be in the position where they had to step in when banks failed," he told the news channel. "We are committed to that purpose." Treasury is not condemning these measures yet because, as a Treasury spokeswoman told Mother Jones last week, the bills have not even won approval at the committee level. A Treasury Department official this week reiterated Lew's opposition to the crusade to water down Wall Street reform, but the official noted that the department doesn't want to get into the habit of denouncing all the various bills that are thrown into the hopper on Capitol Hill. The official emphasized that Lew's previous public statements opposing efforts to undermine Dodd-Frank or delay its implementation do indeed cover the set of bills that have been re-introduced in the House. The word at Treasury: if these bills do gain traction, Lew will not hesitate to slam them.

After MoJo Story, Treasury Department Clarifies Its Stance on Financial Reform Bills

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Apr. 25, 2013 8:13 AM PDT

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew

This post has been updated.

On Wednesday, Mother Jones ran a story on how newly-minted Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is reluctant to take a stand against a series of Wall Street deregulation bills now being considered by the House Financial Services Committee. After the story pubbed, a spokeswoman for Treasury got in touch with Mother Jones to clarify its position.

Last year, Geithner slammed a series of seven bills that would have deregulated Wall Street banks. Those bills never made it to the Senate before the last Congress ended, but a spate of nearly identical bills are being considered again. When asked by Mother Jones whether Lew would echo Geithner's opposition to them, Lew's office had no comment, but pointed to recent testimony by another Treasury official warning against messing with the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, the sweeping 2010 law aimed at preventing another 2008-style financial crisis.

Once the story started making the rounds, a spokeswoman for Lew called Mother Jones. "Of course the Treasury secretary would oppose any effort to weaken Wall Street reform," she said. She pointed to Lew's recent comments on Bloomberg television. "The purpose of Dodd-Frank was to make sure the American taxpayer would never again be in the position where they had to step in when banks failed," he told the news channel. "We are committed to that purpose."

Lew's spokeswoman also pointed out that Geithner made his statement condemning the bills last year after several of the them had already moved out of committee, and some had passed the House. "We didn't send the letter until after committee mark up, not while the bills were still in committee," she said. "It doesn't mean it won't happen." Reformers complain that silence—or stalling, as it may be—on Lew's part corresponds with Obama administration's general reluctance to protect Dodd-Frank from attacks on all sides, whether that be in the courts, or regulatory agencies, or in Congress.

The seven deregulatory bills have been presented as technical fixes to Dodd-Frank, but most of them aren't. One bill would allow certain derivatives that are traded among a corporation's various affiliates to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Another measure would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. A third bill would allow big multinational US banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

Financial reform advocates say it's way too early to alter Dodd-Frank, because even though it is technically the law of the land, regulatory agencies have yet to finish crafting it into rules that can be enforced. Whatever Lew's reasons for waiting to denounce lawmakers' efforts to gut Wall Street reform, reform advocates are hoping he'll stick to a recent promise his spokeswoman pointed to: "We have to finish implementing [Dodd-Frank]," he said on CNBC. "I'm committed to using the authority that I have to drive that process forward."

Update: After this story, the Treasury Department got in touch with Mother Jones to further reiterate its support for Dodd-Frank.

Violence on the Home Front

You're more likely to be killed by someone you know than by a stranger, and you'll probably be at home when it happens.

—By Erika Eichelberger

| Thu Apr. 25, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Amy Johansson/Shutterstock

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the wake of the Boston bombings and Newtown massacre, visions of unfathomable crazy mass killers and armed strangers in the night have colonized the American mind. But the danger out there is both more mundane and more terrible: You're more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And you'll probably be at home when it happens.

Between 2005 and 2010, 60 percent of all violent injuries in this country were inflicted by loved ones or acquaintances. And 60 percent of the time those victimizations happened in the home. In 2011, 79 percent of murders reported to the FBI (in which the victim-offender relationship was known) were committed by friends, loved ones, or acquaintances. And in 2009, most of the homicides for which the FBI has location data were committed in the home. Of the 3.5 million assaults and murders against family members between 1998 and 2002 (the last time such a study was done), almost half were crimes against spouses. Eleven percent were against children. But the majority of violent deaths are self-imposed. Suicide is the leading cause of violent death in the United States, and most of those self-killings happen at home.

[Read the full article]