There is a a virus in our society.

[Javaman]

It hit me like a lightening bolt this morning. I have been trying to put my finger on it for some time, but my brain couldn’t quite wrap my brain around it, fully.

I was casually thinking about the mortgage crisis and how it’s tendrils have basically spread to every corner of the financial system in the US and now the world.

At first, it was the real estate industry using ARM and then people trying to flip homes, then it extending itself to the builders, then on to the people who put together hedge funds, then on to the banks and lenders, will it end? not anytime soon.

First the blame was put on the people who bought the homes without “reading the find print”, then it was put on the people who flipped the homes, then it was put on the investors who wanted to get rich quick via get rich quick hedge funds, banks jumped in seeing an opportunity to make cash on this every growing ponzi scam. All of which are intertwined.

A few got out early, seeing the situation for what it was, most stayed in.

Who is to blame? The home owners duped into wanting a home and getting an ARM? People borrowing on their equity of their homes because they feel they “deserve” to live like they are rich? Those others that bought too much home that was way beyond the reality of their paycheck?
Like my title says, there is a virus in our society. Step back for a moment and look at what is driving all of this very irrational trend. Want of more money? that’s been around since money was invented. Want of status? same thing. The ill conceived concept that owning a home or piece of property falsely translates into some sort of “freedom” or American Dream? That’s at least 60 years old.

Why now? what is it about this time in particular that drove this trend in fiscal irresponsibility?

Several things. A government that willfully instructs it’s population to basically ignore over 3000 deaths on 9/11 and telling the pop to go shopping, a complete break down by our news organization to instruct or properly report the events in our daily lives and be the watch dog on the government, an economy that is driven not by what is good for the average citizen but how much money it can make on societies ignorance.
Yes, indeed a sucker is born everyday, no doubt, but don’t you find it the least bit odd that so many people all at one time were all suckered into this problem?

The only time that I can recall something of similar nature that has occurred in the US is the 1929 stock market crash. Everyone was dealing in stocks, buy millions on margin, thinking they all can become rich with no effort.

The cutting of the string of burden, the easy life, being like the Jones’s, wanting to be a wheeler dealer, or the classic, “money for doing nothing”.
The sad part about this, a side from the flippers that were screwed on the get rich quick hopes, there is a whole section of this crisis, the many people, on this site, casually toss under the bus to explain away the problem; those people are average folks that just wanted to own a home. I’m not talking McMansions, I’m talking basic no frills, starter homes.

But before you attack me, think of this, we as a nation, as a people have gone through a reeducation of sorts since the start of the reagan era. Our schools have been slowly underfunded, the level of requirements for the general population, “the worker bee”, to land any sort of job has been degraded, the once mighty industrial base has eroded to the point of a shadow of what it once was, the media has taken over print, people don’t read nearly as much as they used to.

After Viet Nam, during a time of protest; by possibility the most educated population in US history, the powers that be realized something, “if you keep the general population ignorant and filled with shiny objects to keep them distracted, the government can get away with anything”.
Sadly, that has come true, when recent statistics show that the education system in the US falls to one of the lowest level in the world and it’s health care system is failing us by coming in the bottom 50 percent of the industrial nations of the world, one has to sit back and look at the forest.
Was this done on purpose? Damn straight it was.

I’m sure various members on DU will argue, “but stats show that the people hate the war and want to pull out, that they realize they the average citizen is the one at fault for causing the housing crisis, that our health care system is the awful and that it’s costs are killing the people little by little”, but you have to understand, we here on DU, we purposely educate ourselves; we read, research, sift through, and come to conclusions based upon our curious nature in a quest to find the truth.

DU is but a small portion of the US. Yes, there are many members here and our members try to keep the propaganda from blurring reality, but we can only do so much.

When a population is not required to take civics nor economics repeatedly in elementary school, junior high, high school or even college, are we really to blame the population for our current problems?

The system as been willfully gamed to keep the population from asking the difficult questions.

Many things I have recently read say we live in a new “gilded age”, no, actually we don’t, we live in and age of rampant capitalism.
People buy things for the sake of buying things. Not to be like the Jones’s or the new facade rich, but just to fulfill a need to have things. A shop-aholic society, if you will.

When the nations...pResident*, requires the population only to shop to be “patriotic” something is very seriously amiss.

And when a economic model fails because the population follows this messaged and is lead astray by those in power who actually make the money on that population who spends needlessly to be patriotic, is it really solely the average US citizens fault when the concept of economy responsibility is so woefully inadequate via a systematic method to keep them anything but, breaks down?

We live the virus of economy ignorance, willfully and gleefully. The nation has become that child that is taught that if they whine long enough, they will get anything they want.

Sound like any president* you know?