Bail Me Out

I feel your pain.

In ways you cannot imagine.

Your pain is generally a temporary kind, whereas the pain for those of us living on Main Street, U.S.A. is full time, full contact, in - your - face sort of pain.

While the sub-prime mortgage debacle is now washing its filth over the pristine shores of banks and brokerages in ways that are most unpleasant, those of us living in places where those now empty houses that never should have been sold are seeing first-hand what happens when risk overwhelms good sense.

I understand the American dream. We want to be successful and have the trappings that come with it. But American dreaming has become an opiate addiction of greed manipulated by power brokers who care little for those trusting souls who lose everything on the roll of the dice as they place their trust and their money into the care and keeping of people who play the market like a red eyed craps shooter on a weekend pass in Vegas.

It's not THEIR money, so they don't get the pain sensation - until now.

But there is one group, tethered to golden parachutes not available to the great unwashed, who NEVER feel any pain at all.

They got theirs and you got nothing and they do not care. Not one night of sleep is lost and not one luxury car or home in the Hampton's is repossessed.

But they should be.

The financial guru's who steered the national debt into overdrive by lending money to people with no visible means of paying it back should now forfeit their PERSONAL holdings to pay back part of the debt they HELPED people to incur.

I am no financial planner, and I don't play one on TV, but dang it - I know someone making 35K a year cannot possibly pay off a 235k house even with a low, low, low subprime interest rate.

The payments would mean that they couldn't have furniture, groceries or anything else - yet they have all of the above.

CREDIT.

INTEREST.

COMPOUND INTEREST.

When anyone borrows money, there is a credit process that goes on. The borrower has to show sufficient resources to pay back in a timely fashion all that was borrowed plus interest for the use of the money.

Interest never sleeps and compound interest is an insomniac gorilla waiting to pounce on people who are not mindful of just how important it is to learn how to use the tool of credit.

Sadly, it seems the brokers, the bankers and the lenders skipped the lessons on how to use the tools and went right to the project stage.

Now, the sad truth is, the mighty are fallen and begging for the lowly to save them from their folly only to repeat the cycle all over again.

I believe in mercy because it benefits everyone, but I also believe in justice because we have to be held accountable even when it is personally uncomfortable.

The CEO's of the failed companies should lose all they have just like the people who trusted them have. It might be a really good lesson to them to learn to say, "Do you want fries with that?"

Increasingly, that is all that is left to those who have been hurt by the stupidity and greed that has harmed the ability to dream let alone to sleep for most Americans.

Just one question though . . . when did it become alright for people to seek a bail out when they drilled the holes in their own ship in the first place?

If I don't do well in a performance review - I don't keep the job.

If they don't do well, they get millions of dollars as a parting gift.

It's time some of the corporate decision makers pick up the tab personally and divest themselves of what they stole by capricious lending decisions that hurt us all.