But it hasn’t been fun, and it sure as heck hasn’t been real fun.
75% of those surveyed blame Bush’s policies for the deteriorating economy.
The slide continues. With the president’s popularity hovering around the drinking age, a new poll reveals that the American people think things are going to hell in a handbasket, and George Bush is responsible.
Even Republicans are realizing that the blame resides with the guy who they handed the car keys to.
And as long as we’re looking to assign responsibility, Alan “didn’t happen on my watch” Greenspan is saying we’re going into a recession. I guess he’s the last person on the planet to realize that.
The New Yorker has said it all too well. As we continue to privatize health care distribution in this country, as overall costs soar, but coverage continues to decline precipitously, the question is never asked, “How’re we doin’?” Or if the question is asked, the answer never seems to involve results. Or maybe it’s that the “results” that are weighed are unrelated to the effective distribution of health care in this country, nor to the cost-effectiveness of the care that we as citizens receive.
I’ve said many times that the purpose of health care delivery systems in other countries is to deliver health care, while the purpose of ours in this country is to make sure that nobody who does not deserve health care gets it, regardless of how much it costs to make sure this does not happen. Or gets a subsidy. Subsidies are parceled out to the well-to-do, not to the poor, who by the mere fact that they have chosen to remain poor have proven that they deserve no help whatever.
The situation in this country is best illustrated by the situation of the woman who was injured, brain-damaged, and permanently disabled while working at walmart. Her lawyers won a settlement from the insurance company, and walmart’s lawyers have sued her to regain the costs of care they had already doled out. A woman on a forum I post on said that she was “double-dipping”, trying to get paid twice. Excuse me? I don’t think she was doing anything except vegging out in the nursing home where she has no choice but to live, at least until they put her out on the street for lack of funds.
Only in this country is it considered a positive moral imperative to turn people out of a nursing home to die on the street.
I have been trying to find a hook for this for quite some time. It began with the hearings where Yahoo executives “took responsibility” for handing over the identity of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government, which promptly locked him up and threw away the key. First the execs apologized—a lot of good an apology does in a case where damage cannot be undone—and then they paid off the relatives of the incarcerated dissidents. But they’re still in jail, ya know?
It wasn’t exactly an overexposed story, but I wanted to weave it into a commentary on insincere apologies, where people “apologize” for something they knew they weren’t supposed to have done in the first place—something I have observed a lot lately. I feel like shaking them by the shirt collar. “You knew you weren’t supposed to do it in the first place, but you did it anyway, and for sure you’ll do it again next time. Saying you’re ’sorry’ at this point is meaningless. Bogus.”
Anyway, then we moved on to the Scott McLelland book previews. Yet another Republican political insider has left the sinking ship we call the current administration and written a book claiming no responsibility whatever for collaborating with White House lies and crimes. No. It doesn’t work that way. If you had the ability to stand up for what is right and moral at the time—but chose not to—you have no right to assert innocence now.
Now we move on to a bizarre little blog I found called the Mordant Traditionalist. In a little post called “The end of the era of Personal Responsibilty and Accountabilty” the author ascribes to Democrats the end of personal responsiblilty as we know it, completely ignoring that Republicans seem to have been doing more than their share of corrupting and being corrupted during the current administration. Like dogs in a dumpster can full of rotting garbage, they can’t get enough, caught one after another. It boggles the mind.
But amazingly enough, the story linked to has nothing really to do with personal responsibility or Democrats except maybe peripherally. It’s a general story on Congress is considering giving judges the option of relieving oppressive home mortgage terms, in the same way they (apparently) already had the discretion to bail out investors and vacation home owners.
Hmm… We could revisit the subprime mortgage issue. Recall that originally the lending industry was regulated so that people who were not in a position to be able to understand complex financial documents could not be taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders. It’s called “Lending Responsibility”. That’s where you don’t offer a loan to someone who can’t afford it. And you also don’t do things like offering them a loan that they can afford now, but they clearly won’t be able to afford later. You don’t offer them a crappy deal that you know they won’t be able to afford later instead of the standard fixed-rate mortgage that they actually were qualified for, and then lie about it and tell them it’s the best deal you could find them.
There was no such thing as a “subprime” mortgage until after the lending industry realized it would be a GREAT way to end up owning a lot of property without buying it themselves, and lobbied for regulatory changes that would allow them to use these.
The neocon take on this is, of course, that lenders are free to rip off borrowers however they please, and it’s up to the potential borrower to understand and realize that it’s not a good deal. They would have to hire an accounting firm to see if the paperwork is in order. And probably a private detection firm to see whether the operators are legitimate businessmen, shady characters, or Russian gangsters, I suppose.
It’s the lending industry that has dropped the ball on personal responsibility. It isn’t companies that write bad mortgages and pitch them to financially unsophisticated borrowers. It’s people. People who are hiding behind the names of internet lenders and fly-by-night companies that have crashed our housing market with their unbridled greed. To say that we should bail out corporations who were trying to make windfall profits from the housing markets and not homeowners who were outright lied to and robbed—and now face homelessness—is the nadir of personal morality. The bar is so much lower than it has ever been before, and dropping out of sight fast.
I ran across this interesting little graphic showing that the Republicans are, oops, not the party of balanced budgets. We can watch as the national debt goes up with Republican administrations and down with Democratic ones.
So how can that be? On the one hand, the fact is that the Republican mantra since Ronald Reagan has been cutting taxes for the wealthy and pretending to balance the budget by eliminating social services—which made up only a small fraction of the money lost through those tax cuts.
Repubs are also into starting those pesky expensive wars. Hmm… Do you suppose if we eliminate health care to the children of the working poor, it will pay for a new war in Iran? No? Well, dammit, cut it anyway. Those lazy slackers, playing video games after they get home from kindergarten. Rich kids would never be such a bunch of parasites…
