I am so, so sick (and tired) of watching and hearing the buyers and borrowers being blamed for the financial crisis, not only in the local and national news, but here, in what by all accounts is a liberal venue.
C'mon, people, smile on your brothers, everybody get together and try to love one another right freakin' now.
The alternative is ass-kicking. -- Dopo Il Popolare
(Beware, I massively overuse the word "freaking" and its variants. If that disturbs you just pronounce the "rea" as a "uc", Rahm-style. I do.)
There sure seem to be a lot of people hanging around here who buy into the wingnuts's social Darwinism. Maybe not the majority -- I hope to hell not the majority -- but it is a consistently loud minority.
Buyers are all speculators, anyone facing foreclosure was a greedy irresponsible jerk who lied about their income, we shouldn't have to pay for their bad judgement/outright fraud out of our tax dollars.
Come on people! Why are so many so freaking eager to buy the crap the Santellis and Ormans are putting out?
Many are acting like everyone who bought a house that was more expensive than their parent's in the last 10 years was trying to defraud everyone, that the idea that home values wouldn't crash was stupid and they are better than, smarter than, and more ethical than the evil speculators who saw an opportunity to put down some freakin' roots, in a neighborhood, to be free of the tyranny of knowing the landlord could put you on the street anytime they wanted to, on a whim (and don't tell me that doesn't happen, it's happened to my family before) or "inspect" your apartment anytime they felt like it.
The point was made, on the National Mainstream News Outlet of your choice, that considerably less than 10% of mortgages are in default. That's a huge and scary number anyway, but --
If the system itself wasn't flawed, if thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of people hadn't rigged it or ridden along knowing it was rigged and made a buttload of money while things were riding high, 2 or 4 or 6 or even 8% defaults would not put the Entire. Freaking. Economy down the rathole, would it?
Analogy time -- you have a job. You get a 10% pay cut. If your finances are anywhere even close to healthy, does this put you in bankruptcy in a year? It might make things a little tight, it certainly would make you cut back on the luxuries, but the only way that losing 10% of your income puts you in the ditch is if you are already living at the edge of or beyond your means.
The financial industry has been living paycheck to paycheck, and more and more, the blame is getting laid on the little guy. On the citizen. On the people that we, as Democrats, should be standing up for. The person who has been living, well, paycheck to paycheck.
I saw a comment today to the effect that people in a bad spot now think they should just get their house free gratis. If your mortgage has been so abused that the Corporate Entity throwing you out of your home can't find the piece of paper entitling them to do so, then who is the irresponsible one?
I bought my house with an 80/20 mortgage -- the 20 being a home equity line that acted as the down payment.
My father bought his house 50 years ago the exact same way -- only back then, they said the 80 was for the house and the 20 was for the land.
It did not look like an exotic.
Today on the news there was a story about homelessness in Minneapolis expanding well past the ability of services to help. Earlier this week was a story about business owners in the area buying foreclosed homes for 40 cents on the dollar and using it for storage, because it was cheaper than warehouse space. What The Freak?
People are saying that home buyers who thought they were becoming homeowners should just have kept on renting. Now let me get this straight. Someone who buys a house and gets turned out of it for whatever reason, sickness, job loss, inability to make house payments because of other economic factors that put a bigger bite in their budget are speculators and undeserving of sympathy, but landlords who buy houses for the sole freaking purpose of making money off them are responsible and worthy?
Landlords have investments, and in the case of foreclosures, lose their income and their credit, while their renters lose their home. Landlords are speculators, and saying that they are more deserving than people who bought a house in order to make it a home makes me physically ill.
Complaining that your tax money shouldn't be used to bail out people who made choices that, in hindsight, were bad, is turning into the modern version of Reagan's "Welfare Queen".
In a nation on the edge of disater, with all of our systems collapsing, is this the time to blame anyone -- other than the people who precipitated the problem. The people who made huge profits on the backs of the masses.
Hindsight is 20/20 -- but it saddens me that it's making good Democrats sound like John Stossel.
(instant update -- I know this is like totally not the only diary on the subject. That's OK by me if it's OK by you.)