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.
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