Reply #95: Well maybe yes, and maybe no. [View All]

[Tansy_Gold]

I'm not quite ready to give up hope yet, so I'm working from the basis that there is still a possibily of turning this runaway train around.

Here's the problem for the oligarchs --

For far too long they've posited home ownership as the route to financial independence. Upton Sinclair used it in "The Jungle," so this isn't a new, post-Reagan strategy. The aristos employed a lot of different tactics to do this. There were the old days of deed restrictions that kept neighborhoods "safely" white, so white folks would invest their money and pay their mortgages and their interest and their taxes. There were GI bill mortgages. And so on.

Now, some will say that private home ownership and the debt it involves is antithetical to personal financial independence. But private property is part and parcel of the capitalist (and even part of the socialist) ideology.

(Charlie Keating discovered that being a developer and making all the tons and tons and tons of money from selling houses was less attractive financially than being a hotelier, because then you maintain ownership of the asset while generating income from it. And that's the true aristo attitude.)

But the question then becomes, how do the current oligarchs safely switch course? How do they suddenly dismiss home ownership -- remember boooosh and his "ownership society"? -- as the foundation of the American economy without pulling down their own curtain and revealing the little bald man behind it?

I don't think they can come right out and throw all those homeowners over a cliff, even if they'd like to, because I think they know it will backfire on them. They don't really care about the peons, the peasants, the serfs and other little people, but they do care about avoiding armed insurrection.

Maybe they will go ahead and retroactively protect MERS and the banks and let middle- and working-class homeownership fade from the American scene. But if those people don't have a living room to sit in while they watch DWTS or Idol or whatever other mindless drivel passes for mass entertainment these days, then those people might be sitting around campfires and talking about how they got thrown out of their homes while the greedy banker pigs got bailed out.

Maybe.


TG, NTY