Elephants and asses sitting up on a hill,
Want to make me swallow
a bitter and costly pill
They stammer and they stutter
Then frustrated, they shout
'You fool, if you don't the world will crumble'
But, I try to spit it out.
They played their hand, ran the table
and now they're out of trumps.
Why should I pay for their folly?
For their riches now defunct?
I'm a single middle class working mother
And nobody gives me a break
I'm left to eat chili daily
while the fat cat's eating steak
10 hours a day, no health care, the mortgage payments due
There's no gas for me to fill the the tank
Yeah, they've played me for a fool
So, why should I try to keep afloat
A system that didn't work for me?
That left me to pull up by my boot straps
and was fueled by simple greed?
700 billion dollars
For the wealthy man's payday
In the end I know they'll tax me
and there's little I can say
My short stick keeps getting shorter
It's a bitter pill for sure
The saddest part is knowing
It's just a stop gap, not a cure.
'Cause the illness that we really suffer
is "them that's got shall get"
and nobody's willing to upturn the cart
to really fix it yet.
Take good care...
7 comments:
Your words refelct my sentiments, exactly! I would like to post a link to this on my site, so others can see your powerful words, if youi give me permission. Be well,
J.
Gayle,
Well said, and poetically too. Bravo.
Thanks for your kind words on my blog.
I was living with my family (second child had just arrived) in Clarksville Tenn. when under Pres. Jimmy Carter, the price of gas went from .35 cents a gallon to well over a dollar. I remember driving home to NY and having to make sure my license plate number matched the even days because those were the only days I could buy gas. We had to stay in a no-tell-motel which we could hardly afford because we didn't have enough gas in the tank to make the last 200 miles.
Since then I've never voted for a main stream candidate. I've voted for Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.
I agree with most of your points in your last two posts. My one exception is: I do think we need the average joe/jane, who knows how their compatriots in the small towns and villages are suffering to make ends meet, to help us out of this mess
It's the Harvard, Yale, Princton grads who've gotten us to this point and they haven't got it right yet.
I was a two term small town mayor and a two term school board president. I know first hand about accountability.
We think because the problems come with a gazillion dollar price tag we need a genius to solve the problem. The problem is the same for a household making $30,000.00 with a mortgage, credit card debt of $10,000.00, a car payment, ten miles to drive to work in a car that gets 17 miles to the gallon and gas at $4.00 a gal. The problems are the same and so are the answers in my humble opinion.
I'll support either candidate, whichever one gets elected. That's where the healing will start.
Take good care,
rel
Gayle,
A correction, since in my head I combined the "73 oil crisis under Nixon and the '79 2nd "oil crisis" under Carter.
It was during the "73 crisis that we lived in Tenn.
Sorry,
rel
In 1973 the shock produced chaos in the West. In the United States, the retail price of a gallon of gasoline rose from a national average of 38.5 cents in May 1973 to 55.1 cents in June 1974. Meanwhile, New York Stock Exchange shares lost $97 billion in value in six weeks.
Your poem made me think this:
There's enough blame to go around. It's true that investment banks that were not defined as banks did pretty much what was done during the great depression. They were not subject to the regulations put in place by FDR after the GD, and therefore were in position to allow wild speculation and obscene profiteering. But responsible parties who caused the disaster in front of us today are made of many individual people, most of them go to work 10 hours a day and maybe eat chili too.
Some of the people involved were the investors who stopped investing in our debt. Some were CEOs, hotshots and stockholders.. wall street types trading other people's money on the market with no vested interest in the money they traded or creative financial hotshots devising complicated instruments that eventually no one was buying. Ssome of them were mortgage companies who sold the junk mortgages that became the debt that no one wanted to buy anymore.
But most of the people involved were the ones who bought property they couldn't afford...the regular joes who eat chili and refused to crunch their own numbers and the regular joe property speculators who hoped it didn't matter that they bought junk mortgages because they'd make profit before they would have to default.
I'm not inclined to give any breaks to them either. We know to blame the guys trying to get rich on wall street.. and of course we all blame anyone who is already rich. But, why give a pass to regular joe who didn't do his homework, who didn't face his facts, who didn't buy within his means?
I'm all for holding all those fat cats responsible... but the fat cat and the poor righteous people is a myth we sell ourselves to avoid the portion that is our own. This society is made up of our choices.. and the aggregate of individual choice is the real engine. Nothing happens without us. The regular guy who willingly suspended reality for fantasy, who acted out of greed is just like the fat cat... that guy and the many like him are why we're paying off the debt with our tax dollars and with resources that should have gone into our health care,infrastructure, education system. if we say he's not responsible, we're just quibbling with scale. We're denying that regular guy adult status... we are essentially saying that the regular guy is not qualified to buy his house and by extension, run his affairs or comment on the affairs of state. In that case, society would be better run by the smarter, richer people who aren't such dumb asses. We just have to regulate them.
I can't say that. I say see all the players clearly... and regular joe doesn't get a pass on this one.
Jorge - Of course you can link to my post! Thank you for the honor of the request.
Rel - I don't trust the average person to be able to understand the complexities of the problems we face nor the interdependencies of them. That doesn't mean I think you need to go to Harvard or Yale; I just think you need to be, at the very least, extraordinarily smart. That's my bias and I admit to it and embrace it. I tend to like gravitate towards smart people. No problem with the mix-up in the time reference. I was in high school and remembered the time well.
Audrey - You are right, the everyday person must bear some responsibility and, certainly, we will. The problem as I see it is that we will bear MOST of the burden unless the deal is struck to progressively tax those for whom the deck was favorably stacked.
To say that each of is responsible is fine but to expect the average person to understand the intricacies of the mortgage markets is naive. I am a researcher, no longer a Wall Street analyst. Had I never had that experience I suspect I would understand even less than I do.
I sat down at a table with a mortgage lender (when I bought my home 11 years ago) who tried to convince me that I could afford $100,000 more in a mortgage than the one I have. She ran the numbers several different ways for me. She assured me that I could do it and proposed the strategy of staying in my home for about 5 years and then trading up (which is what many have done and then, subsequently been hurt).
What kept me from making the huge mistake was that as a consultant I knew my monthly numbers fluctuated wildly and I decided to be very conservative. Had I taken her advice, believed her numbers, I'd be living in an apartment with a foreclosure on my credit report.
I don't believe the average person could have stood up under her assault. Call it greed if you like (and I don't doubt that that is part of it - the desire for the biggest, nicest house, car, etc. - we are all subject to it at one time or another) but ignorance plays a part, as well. As I said in my earlier blog, if you set a table full of only deserts then yes, I must take responsibility for eating an eclair, but how much of a choice did I really have?
In hindsight, it is easy to blame everyone (and since we are a collective we are always responsible in the collective) but, as I have argued many times before, there are forces that influence and limit individual decisions and choices and those forces are often controlled by those who control the markets, laws and the production of goods.
30 years ago Supply-side economics was introduced to Americans. Until that point it was generally understood by economists that the market requires balance. If it becomes unbalanced, it will adjust and bring itself back into balance. Pretty basic right? But, supply-side economics said one should focus on making the supplier strong and that strength would trickle down to the consumer in the form of jobs and general prosperity.
The practice of deregulation, lowered corporate and individual taxes for those with the highest incomes has brought us to the position we face today. We have legislated our way into large, short-term benefits at the expense of long-term health. The average person didn't do that to themselves. They didn't structure the marketplace and I strongly believe that did not understand the consequences of their actions. I cannot say that about Wall Street. Each of the friends I maintain from that time of my Life have been aware for sometime that the markets would have to re-adjust and do so in a powerful way. Wall Street was not ignorant.
In the end, who is at fault won't matter. Nor will it matter that I didn't take that larger mortgage because I will pay anyway. And for that I am pissed.
"And for that I am pissed."
okay... yeah... me too.
I sat down at a table with a mortgage lender (when I bought my home 11 years ago) who tried to convince me that I could afford $100,000 more in a mortgage than the one I have.
We had the same deal, but knew better than to be tempted and it was tempting... however, as you say, we'll still pay and yes, that does make one pissed.
fyi- I traveled here via the black box.
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