Re: UNCIVIL UNIONS

>Yes.  Multiple parties have fault.  One side got overwhelmingly
punished.  Traditionally, lenders are responsible to calculate and
carry the risk of default.  The arbitrage is where the poor and middle
class parties lost their money and their credit and their jobs and
their homes, the tax payers paid for stimulus and bailout, and the
reckless financiers made record bonuses.  Heads I win, tails you lose
is a great financial innovation.<

To the extent its relevant the Bible has some pretty harsh things to say to 
those who act like the lenders did in the real estate bubble burst.  They 
enticed, (entrapped if you will), people into many of those deals appealing to 
and manipulating human nature to want something for nothing and convincing 
people they could really have just that.  Of course people bear responsibility 
for their own actions but woe to those who prey on the vulnerable and manipulate 
them for gain.     


I will always be convinced that it was the asshole energy speculators that are 
significant part of the real estate crash.  When gas was $2/gallon people could 
get by on their interest only loans even if they were stretched to the limit - 
they could essentially live beyond their reasonable means and make it work if 
their costs remained level.  But when those scumbags started spinning the 
roulette wheel on energy prices and gas went beyond $3/gallon and higher the 
shit hit the fan.  When you are already stretched to the limit you can't 
withstand any further pull, and if there is some something has to give.  
Mortgages are long term, payments usually once a month.  But you have to buy gas 
weekly if not more, in order to get back and forth to work from the luxury home 
further from work that you never thought you'd be able to live in until mortgage 
rates went so low due to the fed printing machine and default credit swaps being 
turned into AAA rated investment vehicles that swine at Morgan Stanley could 
peddle to their dupes running pension funds, etc, etc,.    Something had to give 
and it only stands to reason that the most precarious, built like a house of 
cards, fraudulent thing is what gave.    



>I'm no sociologist, but the Dept of Health and Human Services puts the
poverty line at $18,530/yr for a family of three, and if anything I'd
say that's perhaps a little low (obviously poverty can also depend on
the region's cost of living and a person's previously accumulated
assets).<

The working poor boggle my mind and probably deserve the most respect of any 
sector of our economy.  Surrounded by takers on both sides they continue to toil 
trying to make an honest living.  I know they are only doing the right thing but 
with so few examples of others doing the same and so many examples of others 
fleecing the system, (of which the working poor are a part of), it is a marvel 
they continue and they should be encouraged.  


Mike F.

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