RealityBucket

55?

*headdesk*

That link takes you to a nice concise explanation of why it’s a bad idea, btw.

I’ve got no idea why anybody would be puzzled by the reluctance of folks who are behind on their mortgage to just call their lender and try to work something out.

When you just can’t pay, what good would it do?

And even if you could pay something, the prevailing image of lenders of all types is that they aren’t willing to take that. Perhaps that is incorrect, or perhaps things have changed, but my impression has always been that you’d do better talking to a wall, and it’d be less humiliating. If that impression is incorrect, they might want to publicize the fact.

This one.

Thatisall.

You wouldn’t have to worry so much about how much of your money they’re taking and who they might be giving it to if you could see that they have no true right to do so.

You vote, you “legitimize” their theft, and then you complain that they don’t conduct the raids to your specifications.

You sound like children, and not particularly bright ones.

test

Obama’s apparently talking about kicking the credit card folks where it hurts.

Good. A pox on all those usurious motherfuckers.

And before you make some sort of protest that cites the free market, what we’ve got now? Not one. Not even close. For crissake, if you’re going to be a socialist, be an honest one. And then take the entire industry out and shoot it.

I can talk all day about the abstract issues behind all of this, but try just looking at my life:

We’ve fallen a bit down the economic ladder. Extended unemployment, yadda, yadda, yadda. In an effort to keep a roof over our heads, I’ve taken a job at the Mega Lo Mart, stocking stuff and stuff accessories. My choices this November will be between Fellow A and Fellow B.

Fellow A is the representative of Party R, which has a reputation for celebrating the awesome force that is the American worker while showering hate on the same. Last time I checked, Party R was thoroughly convinced that people in my situation don’t exist, and that if we do then those are the just wages of our own irresponsibility. The party-line talking-point blah blah blah says that nobody even attempts to support a family on minimum or near-minimum wage jobs, and that the other party is misguided in its attempts to meddle with the minimum wage because it only affects a few teenagers with their first jobs anyway (when really, of course, that’s not the problem with it at all, but bear with me, here). Also? I was supposed to know that I’d someday suffer misfortune *before* I had sex with my husband, because I clearly didn’t have the resources to support those kids if I’m having trouble supporting those kids. There’s no such thing as bad luck in Party R.

How am I supposed to vote for that?

Now Fellow B, he’s from Party D and he talks a real slick line. But Party D? *They’ve* got a reputation for looking at folks like me and deciding that we need to be helped. And how do they help us? By taking money away from *other* hardworking folks and giving it to us, of course. After we grovel appropriately and prove our worthiness by completing mysterious rituals designed to humiliate. When they’re done taking the hope out of you, those same folk then get to point to you as an example of just how damned hard it is to lift oneself out of poverty and they justify their jobs thereby. Few note the irony. Actually managing a climb out of this pit of despond results in that money that you worked for being taken to give to someone who hasn’t escaped. Now that’s an incentive program!

How am I supposed to vote for that?

Seriously. Does a body even *need* a philosophical basis to avoid the whole mess? A choice between two brands of authoritarianism, both of which wish to use my life and my hard work as political chess pieces…what the hell kind of choice is that? And why am *I* the one being reviled for saying, neither, please?

The world truly has gone mad.

I solved the mystery of my anemic blogging today: it’s just too damned depressing. My first thought when reading an article about renters facing eviction because the owners of the properties they rented were being foreclosed on was, “and somewhere there’s a blogger blaming them for renting.”

I was so much happier before I knew that there were actually people who think that way.

Was this woman on some morning show yesterday. I was sitting in a waiting room waiting to give someone a urine sample so that I could prove in advance of employment that I have not violated one of the many Politicians’ Full Employment Acts of the last half-century, and they introduced this lady who’s lost 100+ pounds so that they could all bow down before her awesome ability to starve herself.

So over an aural backdrop of brave tragic music, they had a recording of her stiltingly and scriptedly telling her tale of woe. Her mother? Fat! And an inadequate cook! And this daughter always swore that she’d never wind up like her mother, who partook of the bypass-gastric. So when the scales tripped a magic number she joined a gym, and now has a marginally socially acceptable body AND got the joy of showing the nation exactly how much she hates her mother.

I did not ooh or aw or sigh at the appropriate points. *This* is the pinnacle of morality? *This* is what we are to idolize?

Not me. Not in this lifetime or the next or the one after that.

But I think Steve Verdon’s got this one pretty much dead right.

On top of all that, I generally like to point out the irony of the same folk who want people to stay in Mexico making it prohibitively expensive for them to do so by fucking up the entire world market for grain so they can feel better about their SUVs. It adds a nice touch to the whole issue, I think.