For his part, Mr. Bush, in a verbal tour of the current economic scene, was eager both to calm the markets and knock down the Democratic calls for the administration to intervene, predicting that the turmoil in the housing sector would end with a “soft landing” and would not damage the larger economy.
“I believe that markets ultimately look at the fundamentals of any economy,” Mr. Bush said. “And the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Inflation is down. Real wages are increasing. The job market is a strong job market. People are working. Small businesses are flourishing.”[1]
With more and more Americans facing the real possibility of losing their homes our President decided to give some verbal comfort to those who may soon be homeless. The President wants you to know that the hedge fund crowd will not be damaged by your misfortune so keep your chin up. You won’t have to worry the Wall Streeters will not be inconvenienced by your misfortune; just keep packing there is no need for panic.
So, as this crisis continues to force people from their homes this administration has decided that the most prudent thing to do is nothing. So long as it is not affecting the big money boys, let the poor and middle-class fend for themselves. According to Mr. Bush the problem is too much loose money, we have been giving too many loans for homes to “marginal” borrowers. Of course it has nothing to do with the money made off of all that loose loan money by his hedge fund cronies. No, once again it is the poor and middle-class that don’t know how to manage their money. So, I guess when it is just a bunch of average Americans losing homes its ok, nothing to be alarmed about folks.
The real message that Mr. Bush was sending was not to the general public, it was to the bankers and large investors and the message was don’t worry we are not going to try and leverage these loses. In other words what happens when a home is foreclosed? Usually it goes up for auction at a discount, well if the majority of Americans are just making ends meet who will have the money to purchase these homes? So not only do we have the profit from the original loan, but now we have a discounted property and a new loan, everybody wins. Everybody of course, except the poor families that have lost their homes, they won’t be winning. But not to worry they will be fine, because the President says, “…real wages are up”. I don’t know where he is getting his information, but from everything I read and see they are down for the average wage earner. Oh, I’m sorry real wages are up for CEO’s, Congress, and the hedge fund managers, forgive me what was I thinking.
Sometimes I wonder how these guys can say the things they say with a straight face, but that’s why they get paid the big bucks. I couldn’t do it. How can you screw so many of your fellow citizens and have it not bother you? The “soft landing” that the President is talking about, try telling that to the family that just lost their home. Every year foreclosures continue to rise and yet this is not newsworthy, because for the most part we don’t want to know how precarious our positions really are. It’s like the woman juror who has to believe that the rape victim did something to bring about her rape, because she does not want to accept that any woman, at anytime can be the victim of such a heinous crime.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York who is chairman of the housing subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee, said that if these agencies did not act, it would lead to a collapse of the market for sound mortgages, not just the deeply troubled subprime loans that were sold to new homebuyers and people with less-than-sterling credit.
“We need to allow Fannie and Freddie to put more credit into prime lending,” Mr. Schumer said. “This is favored by most Democrats and a good number of Republicans.”
But Mr. Bush appeared to resist that idea, saying that the agencies needed to overhaul their own practices after experiencing accounting scandals before jumping into the current crisis. “Let’s get them reformed first,” he said.[2]
There is an assault on the working class people of this country and if we don’t begin to strike back this country will begin to resemble those “banana republic’s” we were so good at creating. You know the ones where you have two types of people, the very rich and the poor. The assault is to keep us so afraid of losing what little we have that we accept anything that the corporations do, because after all we are lucky to even have jobs. So long as we continue to be herded along by fear and divisiveness, the wealthy will continue to say, “Let them eat cake”.
Stumble It!
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