What the Sub Prime Mortgage Fiasco Really Says….


By now, the fallout of the Great Sub Prime Housing Disaster has ricocheted and reverberated down through the lowest rung of the middle class.

And what’s happened?

A big fizzle. It’s like we have become so inured to bad news, we can’t seem to muster the gumption to do anything about it except to hunker down.

And hunkering down is something we seem good at it; otherwise, we would be boiling this administration in boiling oil.

Again, the Middle Class has displayed its amazing resiliency, the ability to be trod on and abused regularly and still come back for more. Like one of little Abner’s knock-down/bounce back dolls.

What must the Europeans think? B y now, they would be blowing up their governments if they had tried to pull half the stuff that our government has gotten away with..
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Don’t think about what a Frenchman might do if the government raised the price of a loaf of bread one centime…. It would be War!

Our willingness to tolerate almost anything is probably the most remarkable thing about the average citizen who seems to be in denial about escalating costs, nonexistent policies, budget cuts for the rich, global warming and disappearing jobs.

Is it likely that we are so unthinking, demoralized or beaten that we simply buy in the message of George W. that suggests we are running into a little “rough patch?.”

But glory of glories, it doesn’t end there.

And now we are treated to how these abuses are translated at the upper level as we shockingly accept the news that not only has there been nobody out there to look out for me and for you, something much worse is going on.

We don’t have a policy to not only keep the economy on an even keel, we don’t even have a way to deal with an absence of government policy either to govern greed, self interest, corruption or just recognize plain stupidity for what it is….
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If we had believed that those who lead us are some kind of intellectual gurus of finance and wisdom, now we know the bitter truth; they’re no smarter than we are and certainly more corrupt. .

As a result, we all suffer—at least those of us who consider ourselves “middle class”==whatever that means today.

It seems rather amazing how our learned legislators have managed to remain above the fray and remove themselves from what has been going on—giving the banks and other financial institutions free reign do their best to profit at the expense of the people.

Aside from obscene, it appears that we are one step removed from chaos where the difference is being decided by government bail-outs.


Let’s look at the ugly truth.

Merrill Lynch, one of the oldest investment firms is being bailed out by Singapore. Singapore mind you. And not from investors but the government of Singapore.

Same old, same old for Citibank who many years ago let its investors knew that we were small potatoes to them and closed most of its service branches as if thumbing their noses at the middle class. They were the purebreds going for the big bucks. Sorry suckers! Today, they are being bailed out by the government of the oil-rich Sheikdom on the Gulf Coast. And they may not come out of the arrangement intact.

And just yesterday, Bear Sterns, one of the largest private investment firms who’s executives earn million dollar bonuses and thought that the rest of us who did not qualify for such extravagant incomes had to be beneath even perfunctory consideration, had to be saved by Morgan through an agreement with the Fed. It was the ‘wink-wink’ deal of the year!.....

All because of greed and corruption in the matter of sub prime mortgages.

If one had any out doubts about where this government’s loyalties lay, they now surely know that its not with the people; otherwise, why not bail them out from these inflatable mortgages that have put more than one million homes into receivership in the last few months.

One wonders how such prestigious companies with such successful managements could have gotten themselves into such a mess and the only answer I can come up with is greed.

But to make the mess look better, instead of punishing the abusers who had little regard for the necessary supervision and monitoring needed to keep a sound economy on course, we reward them with bail=outs that come from foreign countries.

Did these companies not anticipate that the people they were giving inflatable mortgages to would not be able to pay back after the loans ballooned up?

Or did greed clutter their thinking?

And if that is the case, why are we rewarding the guilty when it’s the poor home owner who needs to be bailed out?

Were their actions not affecting every other segment of the market virtually one could almost forgive these greed merchants for what they’ve done. But they do affect so many more aspects of our economy, that forgiving them would be unthinkable.

The unconscionable mortgage decisions, not only affected people’s ability to pay, they have virtually wiped out not only the housing market but the credit markets as well and with fleeing jobs rationalized, our increasing foreign debt, and the self-aggrandizing perspective of self-centered, insensitive decision-makers, this government is going to be left poorer than anyone might have imagined.

It will, as a consequence of their disdain and negligent management, fall upon the next government, to put things back into balance—and that will be no easy task for the chances are that these very same people who have decided badly will still be around blaming democrats for everything that managed to do to bring down our country.

I am sure that Dante would have relegated a very special place in Hell for the whole pack of them…. In the meantime, the middle class, or what’s left of it, suffers on and pays the price.

Who would ever have imagined it would come to this….

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

One can’t vouchsafe democracy from the supine position.

The Committee for Positive Change