Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Hear, hear, Mr. Smith!

This "home ownership" shit is a true secular religion, replete with a Papacy, priests, and a deeply implanted worship of non-existent Higher Ends.

At the most airy level, it serves to sanctify the concept of "ownership" while also fooling the midlings into equating themselves with property owners of a different kind.

At level of ordinary filthy lucre, the dogma serves to squelch simple self-interest. Who among the midlings right now is objectively better off fighting to scrape together year 9-of-30's mortgage payments on a hyper-inflated house that may, like almost all other mass commodities return to its simple cost-of-construction value than paying a less-inflated rent and retaining some actual savings?

At the Levitt Plan was also the conjoined twin of the equally huge subsidy to the auto-industrial branch of the overclass.

As such, if this God had not been invented, He would have been invented 5 minutes later.

It will be entertaining (and perhaps quite deadly) to watch it slide down the post-peak-oil slope...

Wow, there, Smiff; you're starting to sound like me.

Yeah, man; just toss it onto the pile there with the double-digit unemployment, the $20/gallon gas, the resumption of the draft, the nuke strike on Iran...(yeah, too bad about Iran).

I was out of the country with the DW when this all first broke out last March -- ironically, practicing being retired in Puerto Vallarta -- and, after doing the happy dance at the thought of all those mortgage bankers and house-flippers, I tried really really hard to have some sympathy for some of the "ordinary people" who bought houses with those mortgages they advertise on cabletv at 3am...and I couldn't. I just couldn't.

As usual, whether at home or at a festive tropical locale, the DW just has to have her CNNMSNBCFOX, and so we were treated to some interviews with these decent common folks, and all I could think was p'wahh ha ha hah, ya' greedy suckers! One couple was in their late 20s, no kids, who'd taken out a mortgage that came with a CD of the Jaws Theme on the biggest goddamn' ticky-tacky McMansion On The Hillside you could imagine -- and here they were on CNN, whining about how ordinary homeowners are being screwed. Idiots.

(I guess the silver lining here is that it won't just be the poor and the black that'll be thrown into the streets. The mobs filling the streets this time will have plenty of folks in them who are educated professionals, who'll know how to actually organize the actual roiling masses -- unlike the current group-consensing-til-they-drop, Gandhi-fetishizing post-Seattle faux anarchist crew we've got now.)

...goddamn, wotta shame about Iran. There goes our friggin' draft riots...)

(I guess the silver lining here is that it won't just be the poor and the black that'll be thrown into the streets. The mobs filling the streets this time will have plenty of folks in them who are educated professionals, who'll know how to actually organize the actual roiling masses -- unlike the current group-consensing-til-they-drop, Gandhi-fetishizing post-Seattle faux anarchist crew we've got now.)

There's hardly a distinction to be made between the educated professionals and the Gandhi-fetishizing faux anarchists, unless those educated professionals have been reading Marighella's Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla on their middle-class lunch breaks. What's going to happen is that there might be some sign-waving, placard-holding pickets, along with letters to Congresspeople and maybe the creation of a few 501c3 nonprofits, none of which would change anything (and in the case of 501c3 nonprofits is arguably designed never to change anything).