Did this guy rant back when we were throwing billions at our “privately owned” banks? No?

29 replies on “Meanwhile In the Unreal World”

  1. If some rich guy gets a break, how does it affect me? Some day I’m going to be rich, too. Now if that asshole I work with, the one who never throws in for the tip when our department goes out for lunch, gets a break on his mortgage . . . that pisses me off!

  7. I have to admit the guy leaves something to be desired, but I think there is a point there. Despite all the pressure from lenders, I did not seek a mortgage because it seemed clear to me that many of these were risky ventures and I could be putting myself in a bad financial situation in the future. I had many friends who thought I was being far too conservative. Now I am going to have to pay all those who took those risks even though I made the responsible decision? Isn’t this punishing me for being responsible?

  8. read the bill. You are not going to be paying for irresponsible borrows. It would help you when you get laid off soon, and can not pay the mortgage.

  11. “It would help you when you get laid off soon, and can not pay the mortgage. ” Psst #8 that’s the problem ain’t it. You can no longer afford said home, so the rest of us are taxed to help you pay your mortgage. I’d rather take my chances with my money and reduced home values than part with my money as I have little of it.

    I bought my $800K home in good faith. That EVIL bank told me a lie and my $35K a year job just laid me off. I can’t make the mortgage payment or interest payment only, any more. Will the rest of you please step up to the plate and help me make the payment? Thank you.

    That is the argument, it does not have to be complex because it is not complex. And as others have said, it seems a tad unfair.

  12. @11, not all people that can’t afford their mortgage are ne’er-do-wells that took advantage of the system.

    My partner and I, who have a non-ARM mortgage and borrowed responsibly, can barely afford ours, because I work at a company that’s put salary freezes in place for the past two years, and my partner works in retail. His salary made up a little more than half our combined income, and it’s dropped to zilch. Even two years ago, our mortgage made complete sense. Now both of us could be jobless in the next year, and there’s not a thing that we can do about it.

    We are not asking anyone to make our payment. We are both strugglers that have worked our asses off through good times and bad. We both have credit scores over 750, because we didn’t buy shit we couldn’t afford, and did not take out risky loans. But the fact is, the economy is fucked right now, and I’d prefer to not be homeless, which is looking more and more like a possibility. We are not your enemy. We are hard-working Americans caught up in something that we didn’t cause.

    BTW, our retirement funds are down to like 70% of our original investments… that feels really good to look at that every day.

    Sincerely,
    Your fellow American

  13. There are people who made irresponsible decisions who will be helped by this plan, yes, but given a choice between helping them and forcing them on to the street I’ll choose to do something now and sort through who should or should not be punished later. Doing nothing will make the situation much worse.

    No one–NO ONE–is unaffected by this crisis. At first I thought I was immune since I rent, I pay off my credit card bills in full every month, and my job (for now) is safe. Then I opened my retirement savings and like #12 discovered that I would have been better off keeping my money in a mattress. I finally understand why my Depression-era grandma kept envelopes filled with cash hidden away in various places around her house.

    People have been whining about where their tax dollars are going since time immemorial. Boo Hoo. I didn’t like my tax dollars paying for the Iraq war but I dealt with it like an adult. You can too.

  14. Really, when the whole fucking country’s economy is grinding to a halt, people are seriously going to make the argument that anyone who’s losing their livelihood has only themselves to blame. Ultimately this blame the victim mentality is just fear: you’re looking for reasons it couldn’t have happened to you. Therefore, everyone less fortunate must have done something to grease the wheels of their own downfall.

    Cretins.

    Look, next time your house catches fire, you shouldn’t expect society to send any emergency vehicles. Why should we pay for your inability to keep your house not on fire?

  15. Re: Mac @ #7

    I have much appreciation for those who were smart enough to avoid desperately-lent credit. Once upon a time, long before this mess, Discover called me and offered a pre-approved credit card with a $2,000 limit. I told them to check their numbers again, what I was being paid per hour, and where I work. They figured it out pretty fast. But yes, I had to lay it out for them, even then: You don’t want to give me credit! It’s a bad move!

    But this is America, and not everyone is going to go that far. Even among people you find respectable, you’ll find the “fuck ’em” crowd. The people who think cheating long distance calls isn’t stealing, for instance. Remember that? Hell, among the people I find respectable, media piracy is rampant. Such is America.

    So the idea that an undereducated, working-class person, when offered something ridiculous, like a $600k NINA loan, is necessarily going to decline? P’shaw, as the older generations would say. (See This American Life #355 for more on those loans.)

    And of course other people fucked up. But we also had well-educated, calculating businessmen from Harvard devising these schemes. If they can’t—or won’t—figure it out, how do you expect the guy with a high school diploma or Clover Park voc/tech certificate to do better?

    (What? Call me elitist, but if the allegedly smartest people can’t put two and two together, why should we expect those who allegedly aren’t as smart to do better?)

    The thing is that yes, this is America. Which is part of the world. And all I mean by that is that we’re part of society. Back in the ’90s, when the GOP so strenuously objected to midnight basketball as part of crime prevention: Why should you and I pay for what happens in Los Angeles? After all, it’s LA’s problem, right?

    Except when the LA gangs export their products and styles. Yeah, we get more crack and heroin. And we get more violence from our bolstered local gang scene. And, hey, I do drugs, so I get sick of crappy dirtweed coming up from LA, mucking up our local market. So if something reduces the soulless criminality of gangs in LA, yes, it helps me up here in Seattle.

    And with the present economic clusterfuck, I’m hard-pressed to understand why people are still so fixated on figuring out who they think deserves what. Does Wall Street deserve a bailout? Most definitely not! So why do it? Because that money has much to do with our employment picture. What about the Big Three? No, they don’t really deserve a lot of help. So why do it? Because their core industry, plus the satellite, auxiliary, and cottage sectors it supports, touches some ten percent of the nation’s workforce. There is a lot more at stake than what you or I think someone else deserves. We might take some moral satisfaction seeing certain idiots swing in the wind, but sooner or later the putrescence of that decay will come home to us.

    If we get past our own judgment of other people, we will find that the consequences of various actions we did not partake in ourselves still affect us. And if abstractions like general human dignity or the “American dream” aren’t sufficient to spur us to action, perhaps the monstrous rockslide coming at us will.

    Remember: the rich don’t care if everything goes tits-up. GM could close tomorrow and Rick Wagoner will still be rich. Ford could die on Monday, and Alan Mulally will still be rich. How can these guys, or Vikram Pandit, afford to work for a dollar? They’re rich. If the collapse of their companies costs them a house, they still have a couple to spare. In the meantime, there are plenty of people who went to work every day and performed their jobs admirably, who will be laid off because of corporate mismanagement and shenanigans, and they might end up losing the only house they have.

    And when their kids steal your car, or break into your house and steal your television and PS3 or PC, what are you going to do? Just shoot ’em and smirk to yourself? Scream at your local politicians for more police and more money?

    Our recent bizarre crime wave (pet store robbery, random shootout, &c.) aside, yeah, there are difficult times coming that nobody has accounted for.

    In the meantime, on a personal note, it is my opinion that if we have to cough up a trillion dollars for something, I’d prefer it be to save our economy than empowering the rich to send our soldiers abroad to kill brown-skinned people.

    What did the dead Iraqi child do to deserve it? Aside from being Arab, Muslim, and in the way of our oil, nothing.

    And what did I do to deserve to judge, anyway? I have few credit obligations. Hell, I don’t have a job. And I don’t take any public money. But, at the same time, I didn’t take to the streets against the Bush administration, the war, the credit schemes that I’ve recognized nearly fifteen years ago are keeping our economy afloat. I don’t like them, but aside from casting a vote and occasionally writing a vapid commentary like this, nothing. I didn’t create it. But I saw it coming, and did nothing. And I’m not particularly unique in that.

    So it’s not about who deserves what, but rather what we all need in order to keep this clusterfuck from completing itself.

  16. @15: Right on. You have said perfectly what I keep vaguely feeling when people start talking about “redistribution” or “socialism” regarding the government response to economic response. So, thanks.

    Just to reiterate: when the fire is about to spread through the entire neighborhood, the question of “who started it” is only really relevant after the fire’s been put out.

  18. The Welfare State is collapsing.
    Those who look to the government to solve all their problems aren’t going to make it.
    A New (and better) world is coming.

  19. The economy is imploding.
    The administration is asleep at the wheel.
    Miring us deeper in Afghanistan and ignoring the financial meltdown.

    Feb 1 Dan gloated that Bush wouldn’t be President all of February.
    He failed to mention that Obama wouldn’t either.

  20. This too will pass.

    The economy will recover, people will go back to work.
    I think it will happen surprisingly soon. The modern economy is amazingly elastic.

    That said, I think we will reset to a lower standard of living. And that’s not bad. The past two decades or so have seen low credit standards.

    Translation: People with $30k jobs won’t be driving $50k cars. And they shouldn’t be.

    More on topic: Here’s a way this is helping: I’m refinancing. My wife and I bought in Seattle two years ago, took a responsible 30-yr fixed loan. Now we’re going to lock in 5% or so. That will save us >$500 a month. THAT is effective monetary policy.

    That money will go right back into the US economy though spending and investment.

  21. The American Psyche, as portrayed by our media at least, is so ugly and whiny. Like a table of nasty people in a restaurant who are constantly looking around at the other tables to make sure nobody got any more food than they did, and complaining loudly about the service while chewing with their mouths open – something I used to see fairly regularly in my food service days.

    Mr. Vel-DuRay and I have a “responsibile” mortgage. We pay it on time. We will probably not lose our jobs (although one never knows) yet we’re not complaining about helping others out. It’s a tough world out there, and people need help. I’m not going to ask how they got in whatever mess they’re in.

    It’s like when I worked with the Bunny Brigade, and we’d take Easter baskets to Bailey-Boushay. In the later years, it wasn’t exclusively an AIDS hospice, but everybody got an Easter basket anyway. A “community member” (i.e. a bitter drunk queen in a bar) suggested that we were misleading “the community” by not being selective in our distribution of the 35 easter baskets that cost about five bucks each to assemble. As if we were going to stand in the doorway in each room and demand to know what disease the person had before we’d decide whether they got an Easter basket.

    We need to rise above our collective urge and media message of “always be an asshole” and recognize the good for society. Aside from the uber-wealthy (Gates, Buffet, etc) any of us could find ourselves destitute surprisingly quickly.

  25. @8: You need to go read the proposal. There is no attempt to direct aid toward “deserving” homeowners in this proposal. This is all about people who were more responsible bailing out those who were less responsible, and reality-based liberals admit that. For reasons of solidarity or macroeconomics, that may it may be the right thing to do, but that really is what is proposed. Santelli did not, as Gibbs slimely attempts to imply, misunderstand the poposal.

    @12: You were probably more responsible than most, but I’d think twice before holding you up as a picture of deserving, responsible homeowner hit by a storm you couldn’t have forseen or prepared for. What about buying a house you could afford on one income? What about having an emergency fund that could pay your expenses for six months on zero income? What about putting at least 20% down so that (unless you are in FL or CA) you could pay off your loan and return to renting?

  26. Rick Santelli is a douche bag. That sack of shit already got bailed out during the Bush administration, but when it comes to the little people, he wants to screw ’em. I really hope that there is something in Obama’s plan to help tools like him get a clue. Too bad there isn’t a ‘you suck, Rick Santelli!’ provision in the stimulus legislation.

  27. Actually, that was totally dickish of me – I don’t know Mr. Santelli, for all I know he spends all of his free time helping children with cancer. However, I am completely taken aback by the moral outrage expressed at the housing plan by the very people who benefited from the bailout of the financial sector. While I want to believe that all of these measures are necessary and will help correct our economic problems, its hard not to get caught up in the ‘moral’ discourse of all of it. What makes it makes it more moral to bailout our a bunch or irresponsible bankers and not irresponsible homeowners? We’ve already gone down the bailout road, folks – let’s finish the job and spread the joy a little more, okay.

  29. Rick Santelli also opposes using the Fire Department to fight fires caused by smoking in bed. We don’t want to promote bad behavior after all.

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