Quote of the week
- Former president Bill Clinton, to David Letterman
Clinton says the Occupy Wall Street movement reminded him of the early days of the tea party fighting "unaccountable power."
"The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, ‘I'm unemployed and the people that caused this have their jobs again and their bonuses again and their incomes are high again. There's something wrong with this country. This is not working for me’," Clinton says. "So I think it can be a good positive debate."
But conservatives have dubbed the movement "the flea party".
Earlier in the week at the Chicago's Chase Auditorium Clinton spoke at length on the housing crisis: "This is killing us." He told a Chicago Ideas Week event in a one-on-one talk with the former president and Time managing editor Rick Stengel that he couldn’t understand why devalued property was being dumped into a depressed market throwing Americans out of their homes.
He stressed that mortgage interest rates or leasing options should be made available to home owners who face foreclosure. The priority should be eliminating the bad debt that collectively sinking American home owners, Clinton said.
"If you live on a block where someone else's home has been foreclosed, your home went down in value too. It's affecting everyone."
Clinton said an economic boost would only require getting foreclosed homes off the market by offering cash-strapped home owners leases on their own properties with the option to deal back into mortgages later. "We've got to clean this debt up."
