The Wages of Virtue

So John Andrew sent me this piece about Fannie and Freddie – Mae & Mac respectively, taking democrats like Barney Frank, the “ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee” to task, for their part in the bailout of these (now) federal mortgage institutions in the context of a week and even quarter of bailouts and sell-offs of all shapes and sizes in our current economic crisis. And I’m totally with him. Barney Frank is a loudmouth – a loudmouth I love most of the time because I find he often makes sense – but he IS a loudmouth, know-it-all and inasmuch as this particular crisis is happening on his watch he should bear some culpability. Yes.

What’s bugging me about this current crisis we’re going through is the way the middle class is again being squeezed. We are bearing the brunt of the cost of all these bailouts – any federal expenditure is coming out of our pocket, just as the enormous cost of the Iraq war is “owned” by us. And to get less abstract about it, what bothers me is that I pay my taxes and I pay my mortgage month after month and am generally a responsible citizen—where’s my bailout?

I just had to fill out a short bio at work and for the question “How long have you worked in a finance related job” I answered 19 years. That’s a long time already to have been contributing to the economy and to social security as a tax payer. I generally don’t draw from the federal rolls yet. I use the roads and the post office, yes, but I’ve never collected unemployment or any social security benefit. I’ve never been bailed out nor have I collected on any federal disaster relief. But I DO understand that I’m lucky. I’ve had a job for those 19 years – and most of the time a well-paying job. Some people haven’t been so lucky. And other than a short stint in LA when I survived the ’94 Northridge earthquake, and the brush fires and the Rodney King riot, I haven’t really been on-hand for any significant natural or unnatural disaster. It gets cold sometimes here in NY but that’s it. Oh, and I was in Manhattan on 9/11 but like many people that day I experienced it more as a lovely pre-autumn day and not the horror visited upon so many of my city-mates – again, lucky for me.

So, the mortgage crisis stems from the fact that too many people made bad loans with obviously favorable interest rates being offered by irresponsible banks not caring that they were signing people up for an easy over-extension of their financial viability. The same people, more often than not, are, or were, already living beyond their means with bloated credit card debt. And society IS to blame partly, to be sure, that is, our “culture” of greed and of feel-good, have-it-all-now over indulgence; the desire to be more like Lindsey Lohan than {INSERT UNKNOWN CLOISTERED INTELLECTUAL [UNKNOWN BECAUSE HE/SHE NEVER SHOWS UP ON THE COVER OF ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY FOR HIS/HER PAPER ON THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING ON THE LOBSTER-FISHING INDUSTRY IN RURAL MAINE] HERE}, said desire stemming as it does from the unrelenting advertisement and thematic focus of our entertainment/news/publishing/world-wide-web industr(ies) on the “good life” and on the easy self-congratulation for an essentially effortless sensitivity to the right way of thinking – a sensitivity requiring nothing in the way of actual/real-world physical, economic or even emotional commitment beyond the occasional placing, for example, of one’s used plastic bottle in the recycling receptacle, conveniently-located, as always, necessitating little more than the synaptic impulse to turn off the death-grip on the sugar/caffeine rush promised, sub-consciously at this point by the bottles contents, and to open one’s fingers to drop and release.

Poe said: “The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

So anyway, it annoys me that I don’t default on my loans and I pay my taxes but those who don’t are allowed to get away with it. And the banks that enable these people are given a walk and not required to adequately secure the homes their clients defaulted on and to prevent their swimming pools (the houses’) from becoming breeding grounds for west-Nile-virus infected mosquitoes nor from becoming (the houses "themsevles") crack dens/whorehouses, and destroying their neighborhoods. And the politicians, D & R alike, who create the legal environment, through a desire to satisfy their most-generous constituents, that fosters and nurtures all this negative behavior and how they then pontificate in holier-than-thou press conferences while not even bothering anymore to pitch their simultaneous pandering sotto voce. And we who allow them all to get away with it through our cynicism and our self-imposed helplessness.

“All politics is local,” Tip O’Neill said to me via Dave Wixted. Thus the father reads to elementary school students in a classroom he almost relentlessly fundraises for. (Unfortunately, unlike the sins of the father which seem to magnify on the son [I speak not AT ALL, make no mistake, of the other sons nor of the daughters, nor any of the sons/daughters-in -law], all his virtues seem to wither on the olive branch until all the son can manage is a defiant glare at the Mercedes parked directly over the words “No Parking” spray-painted into the pavement in front of the Ossining Carvel, not realizing how completely the glare’s purpose is emasculated by the deposit of not-so-hot “fudge” on his shirt.) Maybe we change the world by not defaulting on our loans. By shuffling off to the job we’re lucky to have and fiddle while Rome burns hoping some of the bow-moving/arm-flapping will squelch the flames and save part of the city. All I insist on is that if we’re going to fiddle can we at least play Mozart and not Charlie Daniels?