Quote:
Originally Posted by lowercountry
If laws were broken they are indeed crooks and should go to prison. The "prey", however, were also guilty in some respects as well. One can really desire something - such as a much bigger house - so much that they can be blinded to the truth, which is what they can afford.
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There is no question that the mortgage companies and banks knew what they were doing. They lied to consumers about what they could afford and immediately sold off the crummy sub-prime mortgages as soon as the ink was dry. Then financial institutions bundled up the crap and deemed them safe AAA securities to fool the investors. It's all
fraud.
It was only a matter of time before everyone lost in the game of musical chairs the financial institutions were playing.
I see lots of posters concentrating more energy on the ill-informed people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford, while not saying a word about the crooks who put the whole thing together.
Well, guess what? Tons of people are financially illiterate - so illiterate they don't even
know what they don't know! Few people have parents who taught them enough about finances because they don't know enough themselves. And forget the schools.
And guess what else? Regardless of
their ignorance, YOU have been affected even if YOU did everything right.
Maybe you were financially sound enough to have a good down-payment and only buy as much house as you could afford. Yet if you bought at the top of the artificially-inflated market, then you have lost equity in your house through no fault of your own. If you sell in the next few years, it will be at a loss and you may even owe money.
Or ... if you bought a home in normal times and have owned it long enough to build equity, you may not be able to sell it when you need to because the market is overwhelmed with unsold stock.
Or ... maybe you did everything right, but you or your family have lost their job in the aftermath of the mortgage meltdown. Maybe you are working longer for less money now.
YOU and/or YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS have been affected by the economic meltdown ... or will be eventually in the form of housing, jobs, or
inflation.
I am lucky enough to own my own business, but right now, I know more people without jobs than I have ever known in my life. NOT ONE of them took a financial risk. These are solid people who had good jobs and lost them because of the economic meltdown.
There is one thing the financially-illiterate sub-prime victims did NOT do. THEY did not flood the economy with excess dollars. All those excess dollars were looking for a place to invest and they found it by blowing up the housing market. You can thank the Federal Reserve for that.
This is the reason more and more people want to "End the Fed". The Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and it's NOT a government entity. It's a secretive private central bank, yet they control the amount of money that floats in the economy and their actions fuel inflation.
As much as the victims of sub-prime loans were financially illiterate, most Americans are just as illiterate in understanding how central banking works and how the Federal Reserve affects everything in their lives.
How many of you know what fractional reserve banking is and how it's been stretched to the limits over time? What do you really know about the gold standard? How is inflation generated? Why don't banks pay enough interest nowadays so that you can simply save your money safely in the bank at a decent return instead of risking it in the stock market?
So, who's the patsy? We all are.
FEDERAL RESERVE INFO:
End the Fed - Ron Paul - Mises Daily
End the Fed
So you can argue till the cows come home about how stupid these consumers were, but in the end, WE ALL are victims of everything that happened.
All this talk about what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are demanding is a bit meaningless right now. You have all these different people who know something has gone terribly wrong converging together in one place.
Some of the media is trying to portray all of them as stupid by cherry-picking the dumbest protesters they can find and airing tapes of them answering questions in a vague fog. Glen Beck put up a video saying the protesters were mindlessly repeating everything a speaker said. This is disinformation at it's finest because the protesters have developed a system of repeating everything so people far away can hear because there are few microphones.
Try looking at You Tube videos instead of the cherry-picked ones. Try looking at more independent reports from people who have visited the protesters. After all, only a few corporations own ALL the major media outlets. Think they might have an agenda?
The protesters are talking to each other. The Wall Street protesters have established a street library that is filling up with books and they are reading them. At least many of them are TRYING to get a grip on what has happened to our country. Who knows where it will lead? It may organize into something cohesive.
Occupy Wall Street Library Blog:
Occupy Wall Street Library | The People's Library at Liberty Plaza
And if you have time, look up Gerald Celente. He runs a group that is hired by Fortune 500 companies to predict trends. He has a newsletter and his record is amazing. He predicted the sub-prime meltdown (as did others). He has been predicting mass protests for a long time. He always says
"When people have nothing left to lose; they lose it."
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