Venting on the economic news September 23, 2008

• I’m tired of hearing about how the housing crisis is the fault of lower income borrowers who should have known better than to borrow more than they could repay. How dare you talking heads and partisan hacks sitting there in comfort and safety and swimming in privilege question why some one who may not have been able to pay their rent under Bush’s economic policies would jump at the repeated TV commercials and direct mailings that offered them the money to buy a house. How fucking dare you blame the greedy excesses of Wall Street and the folly of Washington fatcats who were bought by the wealthy in exchange for deregulation on the people who are now loosing their houses while you worry about the current dent in your fucking stock portfolio? If you’re in a hard spot financially and some one offers you the money to help your family, you take it and hope for the best; you don’t turn it down because you should have known Bush would get reelected and the financial sector would keep screwing you and you wouldn’t be able to pay it back. You take the money and put your family in a safe house in a decent neighborhood. The people who did so should never even be mentioned in the same breath as… *period, doublespace, new sentence* …the rich fuckers who made the bad loans and knowingly sold the bad debt and then didn’t fucking pay any taxes on it and hid the profits in offshore accounts and may not be able to summer in the Hamptons this year, boohoo.Victim blaming is wrong in any context and to bail out the Capitalists while point fingers at the Proletariat is fucked up.

• Also, one third of households rent, they don’t own. So the Republicans want to help the top third with bail outs and the Dems want to help some of the middle third by lowering rates and offering middle class tax cuts, but as usual, no one is even thinking about the bottom third. One third, as in 100,000,000 people (a one followed by eight zeros).

• The other thing I’m tired of hearing? Anything about conservatives or Republicans being good with economic matters. It isn’t true now and never has been. Any one having even cracked a history book can see that the facts just don’t support it. Supply-side or trickle-down economics doesn’t work. It causes recessions and makes the class divide more stark than ever.

• And, oh yeah, if you’re writing about McCain and the Bush tax cuts and you keep repeating how Clinton also lowered taxes on the highest 20% more than the lowest 60% and you don’t ever mention that this was a compromise with the Republican-controlled Congress who wanted FIVE TIMES higher cuts for the rich, that’s a lie of omission and you are a goddamn liar. Plain and simple. You can’t blame a party getting a decent compromise from their opponents for the bad result of their opponents’ agenda. The Greedy Oligarchs and Plutocrats filibustered like mad and shut down the entire federal government when Clinton didn’t give them their way and you blame everything on him? Fuck that and fuck you for repeating the Right’s talking points.

• Seven hundred billion dollars ($700,000,000,000; a seven followed by eleven zeros) are about to be handed to rich white men on Wall Street, with no oversight from Congress or the courts, in shady backroom deals between cronies with financial firms as advisors, by ex-IMF, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street insider Hank Paulson, while ordinary taxpayers get left holding the bill and regular people continue to lose their jobs and houses and their pension plans go kaput. When control of a war-mongering, increasingly authoritarian government, like our current situation, is taken over by the corporations, this is the definition of FASCISM. Mussolini’s regime also began with laissez-faire (free-market) policies, cutting taxes, deregulating and lowering trade restrictions, racking up a massive deficit. And a few years later the economic decisions were being made by Italy’s National Council of Corporations. Does this sound familiar? Did it work out well for Italy? Were they doing OK going into the war? Does any one have any cogent arguments to make that this will be a good thing for us in the end?

• I usually blame people for being stupid and not knowing what’s really going on, but I consider myself very informed and I don’t see any one, right or left, telling the whole story on economics right now. It’s scary. We’re going to be living with the results of all of this for, well, certainly the rest of my lifetime. As an unemployed, broke, queer woman I’m pretty pissed about how all of this is playing out, but, you know, I’m still white and college-educated (i.e. pretty damn lucky), so a lot of other people should be way more pissed than me and I hope they’re registered to and will vote.