I am not going to spend much time writing this rant. I am posting my "first draft." But this is something that has been building in my gut for weeks now.
The bottom line is that I am getting irritated at ME and a host of other liberals who have targeted the blame of our economic mess almost entirely on Wall Street and the greed of the rich.
I believe that the majority of our economic problems today have to be laid at the feet of the rich and greedy. You will get no argument for me on that. I have loudly joined that chorus. Many times. There is no defense for greed and lying to the public. None. But we helped them to it, big time.
There is no defense for the middle and working classes for listening to the lies and believing them.
If we argue that there was no way we in the classes below the rich had no frigging idea that we were making bad decision after bad decision then we are saying that the vast majority of us are just plain stupid. And maybe we are.
But if we are then how can we lay it all on Wall Street's greed and stupidity?
During the housing bubble there were dozens of people saying that this is a house of cards. The collapse of the housing bubble was not, as so many like to say, unforseen. Go back and read about it before it happened. Many people predicted it. Nobody was listening. Why? Greed. I'll get mine now and let tomorrow fend for itself.
Now I know that we all can cite individual examples where normal people made bad decisions and truly did not know that they were making them.
But are we going to say that the entire nation is that stupid?
Regardless, the entire nation has been on a feeding frenzy:
of cheap credit,
maxing out credit accounts,
buying now and assuming you can pay for it later,
buying houses that the shysters said you could afford when in your gut you knew that you could not,
getting ARM mortgages that there was no chance you could ever hang with the payments when they increased,
refusing to settle for sound, lower paying investments when the big money was in the hedge funds, internet stocks and high risk mutual funds,
assuming that the market and jobs and supply and demand would always increase together indefinitely when that has never happened in history,
unwillingness to defer buying almost anything on credit when you knew that you had absolutely nothing saved,
mortgaging your children's future to a wide screen LC hi def TV and a monster SUV when you should have been putting money aside for their education,
assuming that you were the most valuable employee and that no matter what happened you would never be let go,
assuming, therefore, that you would always have health insurance,
working on the assumption that your 401K was something to play the stock market with instead of realizing that, while it is a poor substitute for a pension, treating it like the pension it is would mean investing in unglamorous but safe investments.
These are just a few that come to mind instantly. You can add dozens more.
Add to that the incorrect assumption that there is no real connection between Wall Street and Main Street and failing to recognize that Main Street has its own "mini-me" developers, speculators and fools who do stupid things like buying up property and converting it into condos assuming that someone will buy them, when the demographics said they would not.
The rich get richer in part because the masses who can do something about that don't try. We are trying now but we have elected a President who wants to change the system very much, but who also put in charge of the change the people who were part of the problem in the first place. That will go down as one of President Obama's greatest mistakes.
And even when working and middle class people do try to change the system, they are simultaneously buying into the current system of buy now, pay later. They are talking one game and living another.
The 95 % never wake up until its too late, and maybe not even then.
Frugality and savings are still dirty words. Buying it when you can pay for it is something too many of us think only fools do.
Instead, having several credit cards and maxing them out even though they carry interest rates from 15 to 30% somehow is the norm.
Deferred gratification is one of the most sophisticated concepts that man has ever devised for living a fruitful and satisfying life. Being able to say no to instant gratification in order to have a greater gratification down the road is an art that we all have lost.
So, bottom line, Wall Street is the blame for much of what has happened to the economy. But we need to take a hard look not only at Wall Street and Main Street but also at the person that looks back at us in the mirror when we get up in the morning.
Monte
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