The Blame Game: Irresponsible Homeowners Edition
I may have to make this an on-going series...
Yesterday I read something where a highly educated, financially secure anti-poverty activist described her financial and educational levels as "capital" that "mitigated" the impacts of bad choices she'd made in her life. The word "mitigate" - to reduce the severity or pain of something - really stuck with me. It's such a perfect word choice to describe the taken-for-granted comfort those of us with money or status or a good job or a fancy education have that life will generally work out alright, that our chances of success or satisfaction won't be diminished much by the occasional acting out or reckless spree or even miscalculation on a new job or new partner or new home. For the less well-off, they have no such insulation - their personal choices are for some reason our fair game, predicated on the erroneous assumption that the poor are living off our taxes. They should be so lucky!
I kind of went to town on a commenter last night in this post, as she dissed potential homeowners who might benefit from Obama's foreclosure proposal in a spat of resentful moral righteousness about her own hardship. I guess the woman in the video got a new kitchen or something. She should obviously have her citizenship revoked, living so recklessly as to cause our collective personal downfall. I mean, how dare she???
You all should know by now, I just can't tolerate that kind of attack on fellow Americans' personal choices. Tyro, a commenter over at Ezra Klein summed up my sentiment pretty well:
And honestly, with the numbers we're talking about, how the he** do we know who's deserving and who's not? C'mon. It's logically impossible to be judge and jury for every American homeowner, not to mention beneath us. For every one of us, there is someone who does not approve of our lifestyle and perhaps would even like to legislate away our rights if they could. Not only that, but there is fraud in every system, but it's usually - usually - negligible. When the state of Louisiana launched its Road Home program to help homeowners rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, it could barely get the program off the ground for the first year because it was so laborious merely in anticipation of fraud. In 2008, a woman was convicted of receiving over $200,000 in aid - out of $7.5B in recovery monies. She's going to prison for up to 30 years. Meanwhile, the company running the program, headed by Friends of Bush, could collect over $750M in management fees. But clearly the lesson here is we should never have spent the recovery monies on anyone for fear of the few like Barbara Simmons Dowl. Good plan!
Jame Hamsher writes about Rick Santelli:
Rick Santelli is just the explosive Id of CNBC, saying what everyone else thinks. Somehow it's not the pervasive institutional rot, the criminal malfeasance at the highest levels, or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve telling Americans over and over again that housing prices would never go down. They have convinced themselves that the real problem is once again people at the absolute bottom of the economic scale. If they'd only used appropriate "judgment" and lived within their means, we'd all be fine.
My emphases. With economic crisis comes a dangerous thread of populism, in which us self-appointed do-gooders single out the enemies within us - from the financiers to the immigrant workers. It's a high-risk, often violent approach to solving our collective problems, and one I wouldn't recommend. Those of us who care about poverty and live in it are surely to be pilloried as commies and welfare queens by the truly deserving among us.
Photo by Florian.
