cheesymac.com

Okay, so, the majority of people who know me know I’m a pretty strong core libertarian. Those who don’t, well, you see my opinion of myself now.

So, on a basic level, I support the Occupy Wall Street folks for they are exercising their rights to free speech by staging their protests in a relatively nonviolent way. I certainly don’t agree with any of the mixed messages these folks have been sending, but they still have a right to speak out.

“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” — Voltaire

These groups hold the belief that a simple subset of our population is single-handedly the cause of all our woes right now, that the only reason they have success now is because they are screwing the rest of us, and it is “all their fault.”

Yeah, I’m going to call BS on this one.

“These people are screwing us!” What people? The people who run corporations, which the board of directors hire, and are beholden and representative to the stockholders of the companies, which many times, comes down to regular joes who own mutual funds. Many of our public corporations have a very docile (politically and mentally) plurality of their ownership in mutuals, which means that a lot of us are scooped up in this not-so-nice categorization (boo hoo). But we haven’t used our voices to demand accountability here, where supposedly money talks and tells the people who’ve accumulated a lot of it to just accumulate more of it (or so the protesters might have us believe). We didn’t start asking questions about where all the value was coming from in the late 90′s, and the early naughties (I love this double meaning). We were all fat and happy, and so let our boards run amuck with executive pay, because “these people drove up values in that company by that much, so, they must be able to do it for us, so, we gotta have them, pay them anything, get them, ahhh!!!” See this continued behavior over in the sports world, where one player (and the occasional coach) gets exorbitant money for a team effort. (Sidebar: Funny how the Occupy folks are NOT occupying sports franchises for pissing away money left and right, and really making a statement during the NBA negotiations. Seems like a prime opportunity is being missed here).

No, the reality of the situation is WAY too complex to be characterized as 1% versus 99%. The fact is, through a combination of greed (which, I agree does play a role here), regulation, and lack of responsibility, we now rest on this precipice of economic uncertainty. Yes, banks were lending like crazy, because yes, they want to make money (we all do, even a super majority of the protesters), and so they lent money to buy houses and cars and fund education initiatives. And a time of such low interest rates! Oh the horror! The Wall Street protesters (most of whom are Gen X/Yers) forgot to ask how much interest their parents or grandparents had to pay in order to buy a home in the 70′s and 80′s.

Regulation admittedly helped keep those rates low. The Community Reinvestment Act required banks to expand to both well off and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the actions of Fannie/Freddie to fund low interest loans by purchasing 100% (or more) financed purchases, and further regulations set up an environment where banks HAD to make loans they normally wouldn’t have (for various reasons such as income and unreasonable assumptions of value growth). Banks, like other enterprises, must expand or perish. Grow or shrink. They chose growth, and utilized the backing of Fannie/Freddie to create a market for investors to put money into. But as soon as the value growth stopped in homes, and as soon as people starting losing jobs, those loans, and the investment products Fannie/Freddie created from them, were but slips of paper with little or no value. Who watches over Fannie and Freddie, again? Right, the government. And as a outstanding member of Congress who was to supervise Fannie/Freddie, Barney Frank said repeatedly through the naughties that those institutions were fine, and didn’t need deeper review, and that they must continue their current level of operations to ensure that the American Dream © of home ownership would be available to all.

And then there’s the lack of responsibility. Even now, the protesters are screaming about banks taking away homes illegally, and how the system was a con game. No, the homes are being taken away QUITE legally, and kids, please remember, banks don’t make money owning real estate, they make money by being brokers to large sums of money. Real estate requires upkeep, cash does not (Econ/Biz majors hush, I know even cash has upkeep costs, but let’s not get really complicated here). Real estate COSTS banks money, so they’d rather not have it. They didn’t conspire to own all of these foreclosures, because real estate is uncertain, and uncertainly costs money.  Businesses don’t like uncertainty, and we’ve plenty of that right now.

And the banks certainly did NOT put a gun to every home purchaser’s, car buyer’s, or aspiring student’s head and say “sign here”. No, these folks ALL signed papers on their own accord, they signed contracts (promises) to pay, and if they didn’t pay, then the banks had the right to confiscate the home, the car, or, to declare default and thoroughly trash the student’s credit rating. How did anyone come out of an office signing papers saying “I agree to pay XX or else YY” and somehow expect they could stop paying XX and not have to deal with the YY? HOW?

The fault, ladies and gentlemen, does not lie with 1%. It lies with the 100%, because we all got something out of the arrangement. We all were greedy, and we wanted what we thought we deserved, and nobody was going to keep us from that.

But if anything has been true the last 20 or so years, is that we can’t possibly hold people accountable for their actions, unless a rabid majority thinks they are horrible horrible people and must be vilified. Then we can cut them to watch the blood ooze, burn them alive, and then piss on the ashes. Otherwise, no, that person who made a mistake which they should have known better just didn’t have the education, or the ability to understand that if they didn’t do XX then they’d suffer penalty YY. Or worse yet, that’s it is an unfair burden to suffer penalty YY.  If it was unfair, why did they sign it?  And why did thousands, even millions of others do the same?  Are we that incapable of recognizing unfairness against ourselves? That’s a bit of a stretch.

I’m sorry. If they can’t understand the actions/consequences cycle, then they shouldn’t be playing an active role in society. That includes buying houses and cars and cell phones and figuring out how they can complete their education and then pay off their accrued debt, or, choose not to complete at that time until they have their act together.

No, you’re not going to be an NBA/NFL/MLB/Movie/Rock/WTF star. No, liberal arts, psychology, fashion and art degrees aren’t going to pay the bills all that well. And thanks to health care regulation, neither will medical degrees in a few years (actually already seeing this, but thanks trial lawyers for raising insurance rates – one call, ruins us all).

Got something else you are decent at doing, even if it means it’s not what you love?

Do you think I wanted to be a computer technician, trying to help people deal with the harsh reality of computer logic? Yeah, right. I don’t get along with most people, and having to deal with their righteousness when they are so full of wrongliness is a pretty painful way to make a living. But I’m paying my bills, because I saw my best opportunity to become educated AND pay off my soon to be accrued debts by working this field. But aparently we can’t tell our youth that they can’t pursue their passion in life on borrowed money. That’s too freaking harsh.

But people wouldn’t pay to hear me recite poetry or play guitar either, now would they?

Choices, people. Choices. Freedom AND responsibility. Not or. And.

And this is just us, as a people, with opinions, doing our little bits for the whole Charlie Foxtrot (a commonly used, semi-polite way of saying cluster f_ck).

Then there are our political institutions, which, acting through us, are driving us “forward” by blinding us with manufactured hatred that will very likely lead us to the end of the republic (hey kids, newsflash, we ain’t a democracy – yet), an end to freedoms, and some pretty despicable acts (no matter how you view us now, the next round will be worse).

And it doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat or Republican, because the reality is they’re both calling each other names that are equally well earned. The worst part is that the worst possible name is the most popular on both sides, and is becoming the most correct. Yeah, the N word, and I am not talking racial slur here, folks.

More on that tomorrow.