When Harry Met Fannie

Harry is a friend of mine. He’s 41 years old, married, three kids, occupation: data processing. Doesn’t really care all that much about interest rates or credit swaps, but being of the engineer background, he can calculate a mortgage payment given a rate of interest. In 2005 Harry bought a modest four bedroom house in an inland neighborhood called Port Saint John, Florida. It’s nowhere near the beach, it’s a normal, middle-class Floridian family community. Harry is not a financial analyst, but he’s not stupid either. If the mortgage broker who landed him the deal had explained his loan could jump 5 or 6 points, his payments almost doubling, in a matter of a two years, he might have bought a smaller home or looked for a cheaper lender. But the broker didn’t, and Harry did.

Harry now works two jobs. He works right beside me from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Then he drives across the street and works from 5:30 to 1:00AM. Even so he can barely keep up with the mortgage payments, and health insurance, and daycare, etc. The following is Harry’s plea to a government he thinks doesn’t give a hoot about him, and frankly, I think he’s right:

All I want is the government to help me lower my interest rate. I can’t afford it, I need a normal rate. But when I tried to get one the FHA, FNMA, they all told me no, my house isn’t worth what I owe on it. All the banks said the same thing. I couldn’t refinance without a huge down payment. And I’m stuck. Then I heard the government was going to bail out the people who created this mess with 700 billion dollars, it made me real angry. I can’t get a few hundreds dollars a month of help on my own home for my family, but the richest people in the world who got a bunch of people like me over the barrel are going to get 700 billion dollars of our tax money? Disgusting.

Now, some people will rightfully point out that Harry should have read the fine print. He should have been more circumspect with his finances. He bought too big a house, or had too little income. That in short, it’s mostly Harry’s fault and therefore mostly Harry’s burden to bear. A few weeks ago I might have agreed. But 700 billion clams later, well, that’s a much harder argument to make, huh?

Because the same rules of responsibility and personal judgment that apply to Harry don’t apply to the Wall Street prodigies and brilliant bankers who live and die by correctly predicting a single basis point change in the Treasury yield curve. If Harry the data entry clerk deserves an ounce of blame, don’t those investment bank wiz kids that took Harry’s mortgage, traded it back and forth a few dozen times, then tacked on credit default insurance just in case Harry’s loan failed for some odd, totally unpredictable reason that no one could possibly ever foresee, and then proceeded to trade that default insurance derivative right up to heights of speculation that would make a 1999 DotCom day-trader run away for their life, deserve a whole pound?

As a blogger I’m not supposed to be at a loss for words. But for the virtual life of me, I’m stumped. There’s just not strong enough words of condemnation for this cesspool — odoriferous, smells like crap, stinks like vomited up egg-laden sauerkraut? Yeah, I can’t quite hit it. Because, instead of any measure of blame at all, the same clowns that screwed up so mightily are going to get cash, our cash, by the freaking kiloton, while Harry works two jobs for the next ten or twenty years.

And by kiloton, I mean, literally, kilotons of cash. If it were printed up, it would weigh over 15 million pounds–or almost 8 kilotons–in $100 bills by my math. Harry’s share of paying off that bailout will be about $6,000, same for every member of his family — and yours also. That’s not counting the interest, interest his three young children, and yours, will pay to Communist Capitalists and Sunni Monarchs, from their first part-time, after-school job paycheck to their last final retirement distribution the month they die, everyday, every week, every year, for the rest of their lives.

God-dayamn! We all knew Bush had at least one more giant screw-up in him, but this is truly remarkable. You have to measure the money in tons to really get a feel for the magnitude of this one. What a titanic, totally massive Republican clusterfuck this is. It makes Iraq look like a bargain. Reducing regulation and staffing the corpse of what’s left with unqualified cronies or industry lobbyists, hmm, doesn’t sound real good on paper, eh? But apparently, to conservatives, it looked like some kind of brilliantly, rapturously, intoxicating Nobel-winning formula for success. It really brings to mind harsh punishment. I’m sure there are some who fantasize about the next Republican mouthpiece on cable news that prattles on about their superior economic ideology being taken care of on live television like the “made-man-in-the-bar” scene in Goodfellas, but I’d settle for just watching them get laughed off the screen.

And while we’re on the subject, for our own Democratic Party, Christ Almighty man, do we have to stamp on your head Do Not Trust Republicans? Calling you spineless worms is an insult to intestinal flukes; there are entire invertebrate phyla whose larva learn to avoid pain quicker than you do. You are more a herd animal, the kind that panic and stampede on cue like trained cattle right over whatever cliff Bush has picked out for you. Some of you leave us utterly dumbfounded with your brainless, timid stupidity. The good you could have accomplished with 8,000 tons of hundred dollar bills. The Harry’s you could have saved. It’s beyond heartbreaking. No, you’re going to just hand over 700 billion taxpayer dollars to a crew that couldn’t make money selling crack.

Well, crap. What can we say we got for our 700 billion? What did Harry learn, what did We the People buy? One thing we know, now, empirically, as in its a historical fact: conservatism doesn’t work. Conservatism is such a miserable heaping failure it belongs in the ideological landfill alongside feudalism and Stalinism. We learned these conservative extremists must never be allowed anywhere near the levers of power again. For God’s sake, the grumpy-as-shit, senile GOP Presidential nominee thinks it’s cute that he doesn’t know how to use a godddamn e-mail account. And he’s the smart one. His pretentious, effervescent, whack job of a side-kick proudly brags she’s been ritually immunized against witchcraft and thinks cavemen rode dinosaurs. If that was a story-board for an episode of Robot Chicken, it might have some potential. But it’s not. It’s real. These people are the dangerous, incompetent, deluded, incredibly expensive, freaks, who will run the nation if the GOP wins. We’d just better hope enough people have learned this lesson and learned it real well. At these rates, guys like Harry can hardly afford another semester’s tuition.

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