If You Are Already Angry About the Bailout, Don’t Read This

The argument that welfare recipients, the working poor, disadvantaged and so called minorities toppled Wall Street is beyond specious.

All those continually named as culprits in this mess are meant to obfuscate the reality of things.

Any default on loans prevented the investment industry, as it engaged in leveraging and trading to convert their imaginary money into cash, from skimming from the pot of the commercial banking system.

All other elements mentioned are symptoms of the disease, not naming the disease, which is the investment industry, which indulged its predatory nature, allowing the so called 'free market' to do mostly what it chose to do, creating and trading worthless paper, until such time, during their machinations, it was allotted them the ability to loot the pockets of the mostly average Americans and citizens of the world.

Pointing fingers away from the investment industry, Wall Street, and all of those responsible for creating all of the 'exotic' items wielded and traded, is like saying, when a bomb is dropped on a building and the building catches fire, because there was a can full of gasoline on the roof, it was the gasoline can that caused the building to catch fire.

The building caught fire because the heat and explosion of the bomb ignited/detonated the can of gasoline.

Joelle,

"The Blame Game is Lame." Please seek anger management.

I can only laugh when I see what a frothy lather you've worked yourself into over something you have chosen to interpret from your own closed-minded paradigm. You've made a very complicated situation into an over-simplified and self-serving argument. You also sound like an elitist in the process, which certainly is not very becoming. I am certain that in every other way, you're an absolutely lovely person.

True prosperity and wealth is not measured by yours or any other individuals definition of "work" or "saving" or ability to "act responsibly" - it is measured by a persons ability to think objectively, to be gentle and to live to their own highest sense of right. If you're highest sense of right is to angrily point fingers, then I fear you are truly poor. Maybe the Dems can create a social package for the likes of you?

Only when the citizens of this country can think for themselves clearly enough to give diplomatic credence to every angle of a challenge, can we possibly expect our government officials to give us tangible solutions to our problems.  We cannot selectively build up an individual position on a problem, avoiding the culturally or politically distasteful elements. If any thinking person were to thoroughly investigate the economic mess we find ourselves in, we would find that everyone is to blame. Going back in time as long as 25 years or more. In the end analysis, a degree of "blame" cannot be placed on any single entity because the result is ultimately the culmination of everything that came before the crisis.

It's important to remember that from a purely economic standpoint - it's in the best interest of the wealthiest of us to support the poorest and especially those in the middle. Without the working classes to do the work of the wealthy people, we would have no economic system at all. History shows this without regard to recent political affiliation. Do a little poking around. You won't have to look long for an historical precedent to the situation today. I suggest you start with the "Industrial Revolution of the West" beginning in the mid 1850's until about the 1930's.

In your story, you've effectively just transferred America's middle class into a social distinction well below that of the "actual" middle class. If you honestly tie the programs meant for the poorest and most disenfranchised Americans to the collapse of the mortgages in this country, then you are saying that all of those middle class home-buyers are in need of social programs to help them. That is entirely not the case.

The bulk of the problem we are facing now results from the failures of the middle class and sometimes upper-middle class to actually keep up with the Jones’. Culturally, we want more and more for less and less. It is not due to the poorest of our people straining our social systems. It's due to the misinformation and greed of the corporations who colluded to artificially prop up home values and hedge those rapidly inflating values against world financial interest in our spectacular, but imaginary growth - and to the gullibility of the American people to buy into the idea that they too could expand the American dream into new and uncharted territories. The combination of consumer complacency and corporate greed was simply too toxic to sustain in the end.

Internationally reselling or offloading the paper-values of our imaginary growth to the next highest bidder compounded the problem. Given current banking regulations,  the banks themselves are entirely responsible for their own failures. They neglected to factor in a contingency for a deflation or pop of the bubble they helped to create. Either they didn't think ahead enough to monitor the exponents of the bubble they created, or worse - they knowingly moved forward expecting that a possible outcome was implosion, possibly not to the degree to which it has - but nonetheless knowing a widespread bubble burst was extremely dangerous.  If our government is to blame, it is not for it's incentives to buy homes, but for it's lack of regulation of a greedy industry that marched dangerously into uncharted waters, without an exit strategy.

To lay responsibility for complex problems such as these on any single entity (liberals or the middle class) is simply self-serving drivel. I strongly encourage you to investigate further every aspect of this dilemma, and if possible - keep your personal opinions out of the information-gathering process until you have as much information as you can possibly collect. An objective person will inevitably conclude that there are too many factors involved to blame large-scale problems on a particular faction.

Polarizing and inaccurate commentary such as this is not constructive, and may have even been one of the many facets contributing to the problem in the first place. As long as there is lopsided intolerance of any kind, as long as there is closed-mindedness of any kind, as long as there is a marked lack of pluralism within our society, we will continue to endure struggles such as these. Your argument only serves to worsen the problem. Therefore you may count yourself among the small percentage of bit players that lead to the total collapse of our economic systems and way of life down the road.

Arbitrarily blaming the economic collapse, or social ills on the people or policies most removed from our own day-to-day lives is certainly "the easy way out." We must always endeavor to objectively and calmly understand the positions and conditions of rich and poor alike - Republican, Democrat and Independent alike - the combinations of factions can continue indefinitely.

When will people ever learn to give as much energy to looking for shared, constructive solutions to problems as they do to pointing fingers?

Joelle, it is even difficult for me, as I write this - "not to" position my commentary in a biased way. I understand completely that it's not easy to be broadminded and diplomatic. It's a real struggle for all of us to be so. Disturbingly, it's far easier to simply blame someone else and to spin the decisions of others into your own point of view - good or bad. I implore you, and others like you - please, search your mental record (of a lifetime of experiences) and wrench forth a smidgen of objectivity.  When you do, your argument will not appear to be the ranting of a disgruntled, marginally wealthy, white woman. Instead, you may be seen as someone with a point of view that constructively evaluates situations and then offers solutions or perspectives worthy of peoples intelligent attention.

Until then, I will actually kind of feel sorry for you. I know that soon, the social classes and government leaders you so deride, and blame for situations like this - will soon be in control. Then we will all begin the slow process of healing your brand of unintelligible and intellectually bankrupt point of view. Facts will be allowed to rule - and untinged and useful information will begin to freely flow. We'll make better decisions as a whole, and prosperity will return. I'm talking true prosperity, not just financial properirty. Our mall mindedness and bias will have no choice but to give way to the loving and intelligent people we all have inside. It seems for some of us, that innate sense of good is closer to the surface than it is with you.  If an agenda is ever forced upon you, I hope it will be the golden rule. Would that be so terrible?

Please. Think.  –Everyone.