To all posturing American politicians and anyone who is misguided enough to agree with them

[fpb]

Thanks very much for destroying our stock exchanges and our financial institutions with toxic debt invented and marketed by you (there is no subprime mortgage crisis in continental Europe, let alone Japan, China or India, but all their institutions are paying for your and Britain's insanity) and then refusing to do anything to stabilize the situation. Evidently, to you the world ends at the bottom of your garden. Except of course when you need help cannon fodder for Iraq or Afghanistan.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This is an angry reference to the American request for military support in Iraq and Afghanistan. I for one am in favour of supporting you lot, but you should not remember that you have friends and allies only when you need people to expose themselves to enemy fire, and then forget it when it is time for congressmen to parade their own ideological hang-ups. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the bail-out, its reversal has done immense damage outside America, and not one congressman or commentator seems to have noticed that small fact.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

OK.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

I would like to take umbrage at your suggestion that the financial crisis is an evil plot imposed on the rest of the world by American masterminds who somehow tricked or coerced innocent bystanders into buying into their schemes. Not to mention the unconnected slam at our foreign policy.

...I would like to take umbrage, but unfortunately doing so would align me with a political class that has just comprehensively failed the most important test put to them since the end of the Cold War. "Posturing" is far too kind a description for both ends of the legislature, and it even fits the executive. (Not to mention both presidential candidates.) Politics carried to the point of solipsism, and now we'll all have to bear the results.

I offer whatever cold comfort you may find in the realization that Americans are going to suffer too.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have many, many American friends, and I am as concerned with them as with myself. And the weakening of America would be a political disaster of the first magnitude. And I do not say that there was an American plot: all I say is that American politicians trying to do something about a disaster that is largely if not wholly made in American have been acting to their own gallery without even beginning to think that what they do affects billions of people beyond their borders.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

If you expect any group of democratic politicians -- or, for that matter, any demos -- to consider global interests when they're worrying about local & national interests, I'm afraid you're going to have a long wait ahead of you. Especially for Congressman and similar figures, whose concern is supposed to be their own constituents. The most you can expect is the odd dependent clause, recognizing harm done to America "and the world." Politicians in other countries might possibly use different rhetoric, but I don't for an instant believe their actions would be guided any differently.

Surely it's enough to blame them for being idiotically short-sighted.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't buy that. If the congressmen who gathered on Friday to deal with the situation did not realize that the problem was global, and that the rest of the world looked to them for global leadership, then they are too stupid to live. Any newspaper, heck any TV news, would have told them.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Not a question of lack of understanding. Congressmen think it's their job to look out for their constituents and their country -- usually in that order, although they would admit the theoretical point that it should be reversed. It is not their job to look out for the rest of the world.

I do not believe that democratic representatives in any other country are different. Nor do I think that the populations they represent feel any differently. Can you give me a counterexample (of action, not just words -- global rhetoric is a great deal more popular in some places)?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As a matter of fact, I could, but I can't be bothered to look it up now. The Italian Parliament has several times voted in ways that contrasted with Italian national interest but were necessary for European or international reasons. And if what you say were true, there would be no such thing as international aid voted for by parliaments and paid out of taxation; there would never have been a Marshall Plan, and the world as a whole would be considerably poorer and more unstable. You should read your Burke: the job of a representative is not to blindly seek the immediate advantage of his electors at the expense of everyone else, but to seek the best he honestly can see for his nation (any parliamentary representative is an official of the nation as well as of his electors) and for his nation's friends. And beggar-thy-neighbour is never sound politics.

[becomethesea.livejournal.com]

I am no historian, but I understand that our finances have been beyond the point of no return for some decades now, long before I was born, at least.

I'm sorry my country is full of morons who would sooner give millions to unworthy executives when there are children starving in my town, and around the world. This is some idealism peaking out... I don't know whether to be sad or angry at all this. I can do nothing but watch it all and hope we come through it well enough.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I try not to judge, but when I must, I'll weigh what people do far more heavily than what they say. Congress did a heap of nothing for the past decade, and is continuing the pattern. They might as well cut every taxpayer a check for $300,000 for all the good this bill would do. No rules were going to change - they were just going to give the people who gambled away their the last bankroll a credit card.
I just hope we have a grassroots "vote them all out" movement. None of them deserve to go back - Obama and McCain included.

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

You know, I worked for a law firm that did foreclosures in 2001, and the people who had these subprime loans were the poorest and most ignorant people, and their loans were with the most predatory lending companies out there(actually, most of them are now defunct). The lawfirm's business was going gangbusters. I was appalled at the ignorance of the defendants, but even more appalled at the greed of these companies that profited from their ignorance. I didn't know it then, but that was some early indication of what was to come. I had no idea what was ahead.
I still have no idea what is ahead, but I am really afraid.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What you tell me agrees with what affablestranger does. (affablestranger, in a previous incarnation, used to call himself Patchworkmind, and you may remember him as the person who turned out to be from the same parts as you were and to share some acquaintances.) He too did some time in the housing finance business, and states that the people who hawked subprime mortgages were regarded as the lowest of the low, exploiters of misfortune and ignorance.

From this point of view, probably the best thing all the remaining borrowers of subprime loans could hope for is that the federal government manage to buy up all the "toxic debt" in which their mortgages are bundled. That would effectively make the Government their landlord and debtor, and while the government may be many kinds of cruel and stupid, its survival does not depend on squeezing its clients dry. If they remain in the hands of private corporations, on the other hand, those same clients will be pursued ruthlessly for every penny they can pay.

WHOOOOPS...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

...for debtor, read creditor, of course.

[expectare.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

!