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It's All Your Fault
By David Glenn Cox
It is easy to be angry these days; it could be said that to be an American these days is to be angry. If you’re not angry, maybe you need to stop watching American Idol, put down your cell phone, and look out your car window for a minute as you drive on your $4.00 a gallon gas. I have seen things that I thought I would never see.
People with their belongings stacked on the front lawn, selling them off for grocery money. Hand-painted plywood signs begging someone to buy their home. Shopping centers once full, now half empty; new shopping centers totally empty with no prospects. Sites leveled and prepared, with weeds growing over the signs that lie by saying, Coming Soon! Because they’re not coming soon, they’re not coming ever, at least not in the foreseeable future.
That isn’t what makes me angry. That hurts my heart because I am one of them, skimping by, in debt, defaulted on my credit cards, cheated by insurance companies. Fighting with hospitals too stupid to listen when I try to ask, “Did you send a copy of the bill to my insurance company?” I see these people every day, mothers walking with children because they don’t have money to put gas in the car or even for bus fare. I’ve thought about stopping and offering them a ride, but we are so afraid of each other these days that they wouldn’t dare accept.
That is not what makes me angry. What makes me angry is that the perpetrators of these things blame you, the working class. You’ve fucked up our whole system and now the only fix that will save us is more of the same! I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, the acting President, ha,ha, ha. “I’m here from the government to help you!” Yes, Ronny was going to get big government off our backs. That message had a dual meaning and many didn’t catch on to it. To the wealthy business interests it meant lower taxes; to the redneck middle class it meant going after imaginary, Cadillac-driving, welfare queens.
The true meaning is only now starting to strike home; if you think that your government is such a poor friend, remember this well. Write this down for future generations and teach it to your children! Without the government you have no friends at all, none of any consequence, none that can rescue you and return your dignity. The Reagan reactionary mantra of getting mine and sticking it to fat, welfare mamas flies in the face of We The People. Categorizing ketchup as a vegetable to cheat hungry school children out of a decent lunch so that we can build another missile system demeans a great nation.
But this is who they are! They don’t care about hungry school children; they don’t care about student loans. They don’t care about Social Security because they’ve got theirs. They blame every problem in this nation on you, the working people. I recently watched C-Spin, a.k.a. The Heritage Foundation hour, where their paid shill railed about the bailout plan for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; how their executives draw fat salaries and live extravagantly and use unsavory business practices.
Of course he didn’t mention the Bear Sterns bailout, or Angelo Mazilo of Country Wide taking $57 million a year in compensation from a mortgage company at the center of the Southern California Real Estate collapse. No, no, no, let’s talk about Freddie and Fannie giving campaign contributions, that’s bad! But don’t mention Phil Gramm’s spearheading the Enron exemption, excluding energy trading from regulatory oversight, that got big government off your back. So, how’s that working out for you so far? No mention of the Fed opening the discount window to private banks, either.
I only wanted to ask this twit two questions:
How many sub prime loans have Fannie and Freddie ever originated or even handled in their portfolios?
How many thirty-year fixed rate mortgages were offered to the public before the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938?
The answer to both questions is Zero!
Fannie Mae was set up because private banks couldn’t or wouldn’t offer 30-year loans. Fannie’s purpose is to buy up those loans from banks, allowing the banks to make more loans. Fannie then bundles the loans as long term securities. Fannie works for you! Fannie and Freddie are the best friends Americans have ever had in the guise of a banker. Yet this schmuck maintains that they are evil and should be broken up and done away with.
In 1995 Fannie Mae bought a mortgage for $100,000 on a home in Detroit; in 2001 the same home sold for $130,000. In 2007 the house was foreclosed. There have been no offers made on this property since and it is now offered for just $5,000. Did anyone predict that kind of fall in home prices? Or the rise in energy prices? The free market sure didn’t, but the pundits want to pick on Freddie and Fannie. GM has lost money coming and going on both low-mileage cars and GMAC Real Estate. The pundits want to blame the innocent and let the guilty go free. The house in Detroit has no takers because it’s too far to commute to work; it's 6,637 miles from Detroit to Beijing, China.
The World Bank estimates that the US has outsourced 50% of its industrial base overseas. Surprise! There are other costs associated with that and you and I are expected to pay them, with blood and with treasure, and if need be, with our lives. Who wants to buy a house where there are no jobs? Who can buy a house on a Wal-Mart salary? What we are developing are the economic dead zones of an economy collapsing in on itself. It is because they hate you so much that they will sink their own boat just to drown you!
Reagan rose to prominence by deriding student protesters as ungrateful little snots and cutting social programs as a just response. He tapped into an undercurrent of anger that somebody was getting something for free that you were not. A reverse class war, where the upper classes were deserving of privilege while workers and unions were fat, lazy malcontents. George W. Bush’s error has been his inability to hide his contempt for working Americans. His I-know-better-than-you attitude, and besides, I’m going to do it anyway!
He declares war and you’re going to fight it, He doesn’t care how many of your children die, after all he doesn’t do funerals. McCain can try and distance himself from Bush positions but not from Bush privilege. McCain's campaign co-chair, Phil Gramm, said America is a nation of whiners, and that wasn’t a misstatement. He really thinks this, you just shut up and let your betters do the thinking. What does the McCain campaign say about Obama? He is inexperienced and that they know better! Of course they do, in their minds they know better than everyone. Much has been made by the media of Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience, but do they mention it’s the same amount of experience that George W. Bush had in 2000?
Last week Keith Olbermann reported that CBS News, in an interview with John McCain, edited McCain’s answer by cutting out a gaffe and replacing it with the answer to another question. This was Winston Smith’s job in "1984." Networks are fined for the flash of a woman’s nipple but allowed to push a raging penis of a lie into the faces of the American public. CBS’s response when caught in their lie, “Oops, it was an editing accident.” The McDonalds eating, Wal-Mart shopping, unwashed, Nascar-watching bumpkins will never know the difference.
John McCain says he is willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years and he means it. It's your children, not his! He draws a military pension, Social Security and a Senate salary but offers more of the same crap; less is more but still he cashes his check and calls it disgraceful. They are deserving while you are not. Let the levees fail. Let the walls and bridges fall in and maybe the government isn’t always the answer, but take a good look around at what the world looks like when they’re not your friend at all.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Social Security, Student Loan programs and the GI Bill were developed to give you some sort of floor, some sort of protection from exploitation and from speculation by the people who would treat you like crap. The very people in government today who say that you are crap, you undeserving whiners, just shut up and do as you’re told and remember your place when you speak to your betters! Angry? Damn right I’m angry.
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