Eviction day in Manassas

Several of the comments above are absolutely shameful. Recession, depression, whatever…we're *all* in deep doo-doo! The question is, How can we *all* help one another escape from the doo-doo? Surely not by trampling and blaming one another, but by offering a helping hand to all our fellow citizens.

Any rational adult will focus on identifying political philosophies and policies that work vs. those that don't work. Looking for scapegoats is irrational, juvenile, totally unproductive, and insulting to the intelligence. We're talking people's lives here, not some frigging computer game!

The victim is at fault for her or his own victimization!?! Regulation bears greater blame than deregulation!?! Representatives of the political party identified with supporting regulation bear greater blame than representatives of the party identified with fighting tooth and nail to remove regulation!?! Give us a break!

Look! We don't need competing demagogues preaching to their own partisan congregations. We need legitimate willingness of the congregations themselves to reject the demagoguery and engage in rational civic discourse.

Specific example? Imagine that you're a working class or lower middle class family seeking to realize the American dream of home ownership. You've worked and scrimped and saved your entire life to achieve that dream. Being responsible as well as hard-working, you acknowledge that you lack the education, experience, and specific expertise to understand matters like credit-worthiness, property values, mortgage conditions, and long term economic trends.

So you trust the experts. They offer you a loan they claim you can afford. However, turns out they've given bad advice. You've lost, not just your life-savings, but your lifelong dream--and you and your family have been dumped on the street. Now, on top of everything else, you're being blamed for acting responsibly and being victimized by others?! Such accusations are way, way beneath contempt.

Who bears greater responsibility? Honest, hard-working Americans aspiring to the American dream? Aspirants who trust the putative experts? The putative experts themselves, who have trusted super-ordinates and promoted standards set by management? Management? Executive boards and CEOs?

Countrywide goes south; their agents and local managers are laid off; their corporate leadership bail out (landing softly thanks to their golden parachutes) after selling the whole shop to BankAmerica. And you want to blame this whole fiasco on the hopeful working class families victimized by Countrywide?

This isn't about some trivial playground game. This is about the lives of honest, hard-working Americans who have trusted their leaders to help them achieve their dream… and have been betrayed.

You want to set aside justice, humanity, and rationality and just focus instead on petty partisanship? OK. From that perspective you can argue policies legitimately. But you'll be ill advised to argue individual responsibility. That would be like tossing rocks from within a glass house at an opponent secure within a granite-solid fortress.

This is still sad.

I remember a friend telling me about six months after 9/11 that a banker had told her that they would own many of the homes in my county. Houses were being sold the first week they were on the market. So many people had signed balloon mortgages or mortgages with adjustable rates - all they saw was the bottom line of what they would be paying that day instead of what the real story was going to be. It wasn't until this last year that I heard about banks denying escrow because they didn't think the house was worth the asking price. Worse still are the people who had the foresight to get the right mortgage for them, who made their payments, then lost their jobs.....it's a tragedy any way you cut it. If anyone ought to be getting bailed out, it's those guys, not the big businessmen.

This is very sad. It's even sadder that we have to watch Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the two people in power most responsible for this fiasco along with the Bush Administration's incoherence, chair the House and Senate committees responsible for monitoring our response to the crisis. It makes me sick!

The people who are being foreclosed on arent necessarily innocent, many took loans that they could not afford and never looked into their own assets...... The loan companies did sell it to them very well, but we are no longer a nation of intelligent purchasers........The sad part is how so many other people got caught in the crossfire with the economy going to shit......There are no jobs out there unless you have a degree or 2-3 yrs experiance........and if you do construction your fucked.....

This is really sad. :(