On Responsibility

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I’ve been sitting back, taking in as much of the facts about this economy meltdown as I could stand.  I’ve also sat reading conservatives who, after voting election after election for candidates who gave Big Business whatever they wanted, now lament how it must have been some racial thing that brought our country to collapse.  It would probably take a legion of psychologists decades to deduce the reasons for this denial in conservatives.

In my last essay, I took my state newspaper to task for their idiocy.  In this essay, I really wanted to just generalize the entire failure of the conservatives to take responsibility for voting for candidates, election after election, who gave us this meltdown.  However, once again, the head “idiot” at my state newspaper decided to give me a clear, precise, example of exactly what I’m talking about.

You see, first of all, almost every family had to have credit cards.  You couldn’t buy a car outright.  You couldn’t buy a house outright.  In fact, many times, you couldn’t afford much outright, so, you had to use credit.  This is not, nor has it ever been, a white or black issue, it’s a class issue; poor people had to rely on credit.

Apparently, this happened in part because as a nation we decided that everybody ought to have a mortgage, whether they could afford one or not. That sounds really nice and egalitarian and everything. It also sounds just like the arguments I hear from the payday lending industry – that they have to exist because everybody needs to be able to take out loans, and you don’t want to be all paternalistic and tell them they can’t afford it.

That’s right.  We decided that everyone, regardless of race, needed to have their loans based on fairness in lending practices, not simply race.  So, because we, as a society, stated that, it explains how our lending institutions went hogwild!  But, here is the money quote…

But I’m of the paternalistic school, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. For years, I was on the local Habitat for Humanity board, and we didn’t sell those houses to just anybody. We made sure that while the families were low-income enough to need our service, they had enough income to make their payments. We provided counseling. We required that they pile up sweat equity by working to build other people’s houses before their own foundation was laid.

Those hurdles existed to keep the unwary from getting into debt over their heads, just as Paul’s bank once required certain demonstrations before I could have that card.

And now, apparently the whole nation is being sucked into a vortex of bad decisions chasing each other ’round and ’round.

And to me, that just doesn’t make sense. But that’s because I don’t understand credit. Not anymore, anyway.

You see, how can people who voted year after year for conservatives who allowed these institutions free rein to charge whatever interest they wanted, to market bad loans to people who couldn’t repay them, to merge companies together time and time again so they could monopolize markets, how can they ever understand that it was their votes who helped bring about this crisis?

I lived during, and remember, the 1970’s crisis.  I remember how gas prices rose.  I remember interest rates so high that my parents barely got by.  I also remember that we probably couldn’t have made it without living on a small farm where we raised animals for meat, chickens for eggs to eat, and had a garden where we grew much of our own produce.  In our house, we blamed President Carter for it all since he was presiding over our economy at the time.  My father was a career military man and social conservative.  He voted Republican because if he wanted a pay raise, you voted Republican.  In the 1980’s, when I could vote, I was also active duty military, so, naturally, I too wanted to vote Republican.  Then, something happened; President Reagan.

Many don’t remember that it was under President Reagan in 1985 that we got the Graham-Rudman-Hollings Act.  That was the start of the base foreclosures.  Sure, we in the military got a slight pay raise every year, more than we would have under a Democratic President, but, there was a hatchet taken to our military.  It was also under President Reagan that our veterans got the real shaft; no more free health care for retiree’s and their families.

It was also during President Reagan and then President Bush Sr. that we had the first major failure of our financial system which began in 1985 and culminated in the massive bailout.

In short, the ideological differences that defined Republicans and Democrats ended with President Reagan; a Republican President.  So, how did we get here today after President Clinton left our government with a surplus and low unemployment?  It was “the base”, GOP operatives and Republicans in Congress.

Maybe that is why I am so pissed off; the pure hypocrisy.  The “do as I say not as I do” mentality.  The I’m “holier than thou” because I say so attitude.  The “I’ll vote against my family, my children, my wages, my benefits, and all that our country means because…”  Because why?  I don’t know, but, they still do it.  Election after election.

I had credit cards, as well.  Did I live outside of my means?  No.  I made sure to get credit cards with a fixed rate, usually at 9.9% APR or lower.  And, like many people, you hit times you just didn’t count on, like divorce, or medical bills.  Like many people, I accrued a lot of debt, but, I was still fine and could make my payments.  Like many people, it wasn’t that I took out too much credit, it was that suddenly, my interest rates jumped from 9% to 14% and then to 25%.  Why?  Because, suddenly, the regulations were gone and the companies saw they could gut the customer for all they were worth and they did it any chance they got.  THAT is what caused me, and many families like mine, to really get crunched.  I finally paid off all of my debt and will never, ever, get another credit card.

I have a mortgage.  I have refinanced it twice.  Each time I refinanced my mortgage I made sure it was at a low fixed rate.  Since the regulations were wiped away, my mortgage has been sold twice, each time without my knowledge or approval (yeah yeah… it’s in the contract in fine print).  Each time, I wound up having my mortgage sold to a company I had previously dealt with, who I loathed, who practiced predatory techniques, and who I had finally gotten out from under, only to be shoved back under them.  Am I supposed to be responsible for that company having the ability to screw me, and many families like mine, AGAIN because I had my mortgage sold to them?  I left those companies and had no decision in being forced back under them.

These are the concepts that idiots like Brad Warthan just don’t get;

1) Once regulations were wiped away, responsible people got screwed by ballooning interest rates.

2) Once regulations were wiped away, companies that would normally have gone under got the ability to buy up mortgages and force customers to use their substandard services against their will.

And now that these companies have totally failed, we the tax payer must bail them out so they can continue these practices with no downside to them.  Here’s what else these idiots don’t get;

1) Without a job you don’t paid.  When the economy tanks and companies are laying off thousands, in a market with already high unemployment, good luck finding a job making above minimum wage IF you can find that.

2) Even with a job making minimum wage, inflation in every area eats that money up until you can’t afford even basic medical services if you needed them.

3) And, under Republican rule and thought processes, companies should be able to pay workers even less than they currently make!  Good luck getting a health plan.  Good luck finding a retirement pension now.

Yet, every election, these people go to the polls and vote for exactly that, then, when things go bad, when people can’t eat, they want to sit there dumbfounded going “but, but, it can’t be MY fault”?

Yes, it is their fault.  It is their fault because they pulled that lever and voted for people who gave us this mess.