First, I finally got around to checking out an article that several readers had recommended to me, and boy does it say a lot about the problems with today's world. It is the personal story of New York Times economics reporter, Edmund Andrews, who recounts how he committed all of the irrational mistakes that led to the mortgage crisis. Andrews talked himself into taking out all of the disastrous "liar loans" and "don't-ask-don't-tell loans"—money given to borrowers without making any inquiry about their financial condition. They were the exact kind of loans he had been warning about in his articles for the Times.
What is remarkable about this story is that Andrews does not reveal any sense of moral shame. He seems ashamed of his foolishness in making bad economic decisions, but he attaches no serious moral significance to his actions. By his own account, he had about $2700 in income left over each month after paying $4000 in alimony and child support to his ex-wife—yet he took out $480,000 worth of loans on his house, an amount he could never honestly hope to repay. In effect, he was running a mortgage swindle.
(He's still running it: as of the writing of his report, which was published a few weeks ago, he hadn't paid his mortgage for eight months, but the lender is too overwhelmed with defaults—and presumably too frightened of being targeted by the Obama administration for kicking poor suffering upper-middle-class people out of their homes—to foreclose. In the meantime, your tax dollars are propping up the damaged lenders.)
But there is one passage that is a giveaway that Andrews knew what he was doing.
As I walked out of the settlement office with my loan papers, I couldn’t shake the sense of having just done something bad...but also kind of cool. I had just come up with almost a half-million dollars, and I had barely lifted a finger. It had been so easy and fast. Almost fun. I couldn’t help feeling like a high roller, a sophisticated player who could lay his hands on big money at a moment’s notice.
Of course, it all came crashing down on him six months later, and the rest of us are still paying the consequences.
The byline at the bottom says that this article is based on a forthcoming book about his experiences. So Andrews takes out semi-fraudulent loans, then parlays that into a book contract. Does this give him a "sense of having just done something bad...but also kind of cool"?
This is a dishonesty that begins at the top of the culture and at the top of our political system. Which brings me to Barack Obama's big speech "to the Muslim world" tomorrow. There are already a lot of reports coming out about the speech, with some leaks about what Obama intends to say. I'll wait until he actually says it to give my comments.
But I happened to be listening to NPR earlier today—no, I don't make it a regular habit—when I heard an interview that got me thinking about the fundamental fraud of this speech. The NPR reporter was interviewing an Arab intellectual about what the Muslim world expected to hear from Obama. She replied that they didn't just want to hear vague rhetoric about how the US wants to get along; they wanted to hear Obama address their substantive demands on the really important issues. And the most important issue, dwarfing everything else, she explained, is the "question of Palestine."
The way this is described is an evasion. "Palestine" is not really the issue; the issue is Israel. What she is really saying is that Obama's global Muslim audience wants to hear him announce America's formal abandonment of support for Israel. I should note that the woman being interviewed was described as a secular intellectual who spends half of her time in London, so this is not just the view of an Islamic radical.
The interviewer seemed somewhat taken aback and asked whether the Muslim audience might be more interested in hearing about conflicts in which US troops are directly involved, such as Iraq or Afghanistan. The woman replied that none of these were nearly as important as "Palestine." And my sense is that she is at least partly right. The real substantive issue, underneath everything else, is Muslim bigotry against unbelievers, an attitude written into the core of their religion and made so pervasive that even relatively secular Muslims reflect it. And this is the driving force that will not allow them to accept the existence of Israel.
This is significant because Barack Obama is not going to announce tomorrow that America is taking a new foreign policy that is hostile to Israel. In actual practice, President Obama has taken a stance that is indifferent to Israeli security, and he has substantively reduced US cooperation with Israel. But selling out Israel to the Arabs is not something he has the power to do—the Israelis have too much say in the matter, in terms of their ability to take action on their own—and it is not something he would be politically able to do.
Instead, Obama's big speech will do what all of his big speeches do: make him sound thoughtful and intelligent, to the credulous listener, while he papers over all of the substantive issues. Much in the same way that Edmund Andrews papered over his financial problems when sending applications to mortgage lenders. And the consequences will be the same: the real facts will not go away just because we evade them, and everything will eventually come crashing down.—RWT
What is remarkable about this story is that Andrews does not reveal any sense of moral shame. He seems ashamed of his foolishness in making bad economic decisions, but he attaches no serious moral significance to his actions. By his own account, he had about $2700 in income left over each month after paying $4000 in alimony and child support to his ex-wife—yet he took out $480,000 worth of loans on his house, an amount he could never honestly hope to repay. In effect, he was running a mortgage swindle.
(He's still running it: as of the writing of his report, which was published a few weeks ago, he hadn't paid his mortgage for eight months, but the lender is too overwhelmed with defaults—and presumably too frightened of being targeted by the Obama administration for kicking poor suffering upper-middle-class people out of their homes—to foreclose. In the meantime, your tax dollars are propping up the damaged lenders.)
But there is one passage that is a giveaway that Andrews knew what he was doing.
As I walked out of the settlement office with my loan papers, I couldn’t shake the sense of having just done something bad...but also kind of cool. I had just come up with almost a half-million dollars, and I had barely lifted a finger. It had been so easy and fast. Almost fun. I couldn’t help feeling like a high roller, a sophisticated player who could lay his hands on big money at a moment’s notice.
Of course, it all came crashing down on him six months later, and the rest of us are still paying the consequences.
The byline at the bottom says that this article is based on a forthcoming book about his experiences. So Andrews takes out semi-fraudulent loans, then parlays that into a book contract. Does this give him a "sense of having just done something bad...but also kind of cool"?
This is a dishonesty that begins at the top of the culture and at the top of our political system. Which brings me to Barack Obama's big speech "to the Muslim world" tomorrow. There are already a lot of reports coming out about the speech, with some leaks about what Obama intends to say. I'll wait until he actually says it to give my comments.
But I happened to be listening to NPR earlier today—no, I don't make it a regular habit—when I heard an interview that got me thinking about the fundamental fraud of this speech. The NPR reporter was interviewing an Arab intellectual about what the Muslim world expected to hear from Obama. She replied that they didn't just want to hear vague rhetoric about how the US wants to get along; they wanted to hear Obama address their substantive demands on the really important issues. And the most important issue, dwarfing everything else, she explained, is the "question of Palestine."
The way this is described is an evasion. "Palestine" is not really the issue; the issue is Israel. What she is really saying is that Obama's global Muslim audience wants to hear him announce America's formal abandonment of support for Israel. I should note that the woman being interviewed was described as a secular intellectual who spends half of her time in London, so this is not just the view of an Islamic radical.
The interviewer seemed somewhat taken aback and asked whether the Muslim audience might be more interested in hearing about conflicts in which US troops are directly involved, such as Iraq or Afghanistan. The woman replied that none of these were nearly as important as "Palestine." And my sense is that she is at least partly right. The real substantive issue, underneath everything else, is Muslim bigotry against unbelievers, an attitude written into the core of their religion and made so pervasive that even relatively secular Muslims reflect it. And this is the driving force that will not allow them to accept the existence of Israel.
This is significant because Barack Obama is not going to announce tomorrow that America is taking a new foreign policy that is hostile to Israel. In actual practice, President Obama has taken a stance that is indifferent to Israeli security, and he has substantively reduced US cooperation with Israel. But selling out Israel to the Arabs is not something he has the power to do—the Israelis have too much say in the matter, in terms of their ability to take action on their own—and it is not something he would be politically able to do.
Instead, Obama's big speech will do what all of his big speeches do: make him sound thoughtful and intelligent, to the credulous listener, while he papers over all of the substantive issues. Much in the same way that Edmund Andrews papered over his financial problems when sending applications to mortgage lenders. And the consequences will be the same: the real facts will not go away just because we evade them, and everything will eventually come crashing down.—RWT
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