There has always been a Mugabe-wing of the Democrat Party. In fact, we can lay the entire housing and mortgage crisis at their feet. What's distressing, of course, is that the Mugabites take a good deal of wind out of conspiracy theorists' sails about the housing and banking meltdown having been intentional. For you see, Mugabites, (until now), never get an outcome they intended to get. They wrote to book on "unintended consequences".
     But this is not to say others in the party, close to these crises, did not see a great opportunity and rushed into the breech, thereby being able to grab away large parts of the US economy, at the same time keeping themselves out of jail for their roles in the original heist. (Pretty ballsy, huh?) You see, we here have portrayed the housing and banking crises to have been the "windfall" of a rather petty heist of the treasury that veered rather unintended.
     What's important to note is that all this took place while Barack Obama was still little more than a gleam in the electorate's eye.
     But still there is a Mugabe faction in the Obama camp, and their fingerprints were all over the mortgage crisis too, and they have been around for a long time. By this I mean ACORN.
     No matter, we believe the Obama wing of the Mugabites, through ACORN, will play a key role in future actions in the community, only hereinafter, we believe you can dispense with the "unintended consequences" of the outcomes.
     
     Now you may be wondering just what it means to be Mugabe-ized.  Our predictions for American suburbs (below) should answer that.
     You see, the Democrats have a big bill to pay to environmentalists whose various wings want "urban sprawl" not only to cease, but recede. They want to see those houses come down, the basements filled, the concrete overturned and crushed, and the ground returned to nature. Millions and millions of acres. Their mass transit wing and global warming, anti-automobile wing want to see created communities of high density, multi-family dwellings (having done so well with Cabrini Green you can see why they would cling to this ideal), that are more suitable to the themes of mass transit.
     Close your eyes and you can see how this will play out. Or, if you prefer, just get off the plane in Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, Skopje, Warsaw, Moscow or any Russian city, even Prague and take a cab to the center of the city and you will see how this works out...where you will see hundreds upon hundreds of Cabrini-like complexes, in various states of external repair. The American theory is that Cabrini Green won't be replicated because a higher class, er, a middle class citizenry will be living there, everyone with jobs to go to every day. These will not be housing for the poor. Indeed.
     Inside the buildings this may all be true, as citizens from the former Soviet empire live immaculate lives indoors. My first image there, in 1991, was of a woman standing stalwart by the door, with a broom, daring a drop of dirt to sneak inside...her 1100 sq ft flat a castle of two bedrooms the size of walk-in closets, sleeping four grown ups, a kitchen the size of a bathroom, a bathroom the size of an outhouse, and a dining room table, where she entertained, also serving as the coffee table in the living room, where she served tea when guests came to call.
    But the common areas, the stairwells, the elevators, the landings, and the outside walk-ups are as filled with graffiti and the dank smell of urine and feces as any project you've ever visited on Chicago's south side. The grass is uncut, weeds up to two feet, only, unlike the sparse days of communism, they are now filled with discarded products paper wrappers, bottles and cans, the latter which gypsies will come and fetch once everyone is asleep. Under the Commies there was nothing to throw away because there was nothing that could be bought. (I once told a senior embassy official in Sofia that the best aid money we could give Bulgaria would be buckets and buckets of paint, (they have their own scaffolds) and maybe three or four roaming teams of Mexicans with weed-whackers and lawn mowers to go to each of these "projects". After a quick in and out, maybe the locals would catch on. He looked at me as if I had asked permission to kiss him.
    This is how I see the new urbanization in America turning out, but hey, who'll have a choice here?
    But first, what to do with all the houses already sitting out there in suburbia? There are millions of them. And what to do with the people living in them? The idea of course, is to drive (er, invite) them out and invite them into these new concrete behemoths that some lucky companies, serving as the new Housing indicators, will build. After all, we aren't Stalinists. We can't just go round 'em up with a bus and forcibly move them out. This is a kinder, gentler, and more subtle, socialism.
    (Note: We've already put you on notice that there is no intention in the White House...I'm not sure all of Congress gets it yet...to bring the economy back around as it once was. President Obama has been very clear, actually from the beginning, that if you are ambitious and smart, the MBA is probably not your best career track. <For entirely different reasons going back to the 1970s, we tend to agree.> What will happen with Wharton and Stanford and Harvard Business? Can't say.
    (But likewise real estate. As already revealed by this administration, I cannot see new housing starts as being a leading indicator of economic health in another five-to-ten years. That's just not in the crystal ball of the environmental agenda. Private, suburban, one-family housing has to constrict...a lot.)
    The short answer is you Mugabe-ize the neighborhoods.
    In fact, thanks to ACORN and the first rounds of extortion loans going back some years, inner cities like Detroit have already been Mugabe-ized. As a kid I used to spend a lot of time in Highland Park, just a short walk away from the trolley and a short ride to River Rouge. Most of those were duplexes. But the single units are now down to about $1 each in Detroit. Eventually, the only remedy will be the bulldozer...which I believe was always the plan.
    But until Mugabe-ization reaches the 200K-300K houses it won't be complete. It's the middle class families they want to relocate.
    If you will recall, when Mugabe took over in Zimbabwe, and finally decided to nationalize the farms, thus running the remaining white farmers out of the country, he then handed those farms over  to friends and family, none of whom could grow a potato in a window pot. That those working farms which once exported food all over the continent are now lying idle amidst rampant starvation was an unintended consequence of Mugabe-ization.
    But that those farm houses and other buildings that once housed fine families and hundreds of staff and workers now all look like the Rolling Stones had just spent a weekend there probably is not. Not even Cuban soldiers would squat those buildings now. The farms are now uninhabitable knee deep in chicken crap, awaiting only a bulldozer. The land may still be fertile but farming, but if it is ever to begin again, it must begin anew, from scratch.
   So imagine that $300,000 colonial in the cul de sac down the street, and imagine one day to wake up to see goats and chickens in the front yard. Then a smell. Then a very bad smell. Then suddenly, after maybe a year, the goats and chickens are gone, as by now so is all the grass, and so are some of your neighbors, glad to get half of what they paid for their house just to get out. They've just moved to the new high rise down town. Then one day they come in with bulldozers to take the condemned mansion down.
   You've just been Mugabe-ized....and it is not unintentional.
VB