Friday, March 6, 2009

The Problem With Americans is....

Americans!

We are Consumers....

....and our need as consumers has left us easy prey to those we blame for the plight of our economy. Were it not for our insatiable hunger for things, mortgage bankers would never have been able to sell us homes we can't afford; and there wouldn't have such a thing as sub-prime loan rates, or mortgaged back securites. Were it not for our sense of entitlement to every item flashed before us on TVs, web sites or the pabulum we ingest from slick lifestyle rags or those boxes of free news on street corners, we never would have run up the credit card debts most of us now suffer.

....And We Have Now Consumed Ourselves
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Yes, the financial institutions are predatory with their ever ready fees to charge us when we make the slightest slip (and don't they help us to slip as much as possible). Equally predatory are the real-estate institutions willing and waiting to give us mortgages with high default risks and then take that pool of high risk mortgages and auction its value off on the stock market in the form of Mortgage Backed securities until we were trying to extract twenty gallons of water from a five gallon jug. However, for every predator, there needs to be a prey and we made ourselves the prey through our needs -- Needs? Perhaps there came a point where we allowed us to believe our desires were actually needs.

If we hadn't had such an obsession to acquire and to limit our possessions to what we could afford, the whole credit industry would have remained a tamed pet it was in the seventies. Remember when you only purchased those truly big items, such as a home on credit. Even big-ticket items were thing we saved for. If it hadn't been for our need to have things now, the whole predatory lending industry never would have been fed enough to grow into the the beast that now mauls our economy.

We now have an economy based on credit. We've willing let manufacturing franchise our economy to other countries because we were so dazzled by the parade of things we could purchase, consume, that we didn't care how that parade was formed. We turned a blind eye to the fact that manufacturing hasn't paid taxes for over a decade, taking those tax breaks meant to keep jobs here, but off-shored them. As long as we were hypnotized by bright shiny objects and only had to consider our personal cost once a month when we glossed over our credit card statements, we didn't care that our economy left our country

We have a chance for change:

Well things have decayed and now we have the opportunity to undo our trend to consume until we have consumed ourselves. We can live within our means, quit feeding the dragon of credit fees and debt, spend only on the things we need. We can demand, through our purchases, that the bulk of money we spend to purchase any given items be backed by jobs, not to line the pockets of stock holders It's time to quick blindly consuming like a herd that will graze away it's own source of food simply because it in front of us and we can have it now, while paying for it tomorrow.

Well, tomorrow is here. Time to pay for the fact that we may have eaten our own young.

Erich Fromm had it right. We have escaped the burden of freedom and let others lead us by our desires for things as if it were rings in our noses, to line the pockets of the very rich. Remember when we had a viable middle class in this country? Wasn't that long ago, just over a decade. But, the cost of maintaining freedom is having to make choices, including the choice to delay gratification.