I'm absolutely disgusted by how much the Newtown shooting last month has been co-opted for political gain in this country. The sad fact is that it was a horrible tragedy, but the school did everything it could have. They had a security camera system, they had intruder drills, and they had locked the doors by the time the shooter arrived. They evacuated the school according to a rehearsed method into a pre-arranged meeting place, and everything they practiced went through according to plan. It just wasn't enough. They did everything right, and it might have saved more lives than we know, but it didn't save the 26 people he got to before the plan could be put into motion.
What we don't want to hear is, under the circumstances it couldn't have gone any better than it did. This simply couldn't have been prevented any better. What we are hearing is that if only the shooter hadn't been able to get his hands on the guns, it wouldn't have happened. That if only there weren't any guns he knew about anywhere between New Jersey and Connecticut, he wouldn't have been able to come up with some other sort of plan and would have gone about his business like everyone else that day.
There are people in this country who want guns outlawed no matter what it takes to make that happen. I acknowledge that guns are responsible for a lot of deaths, and more importantly they don't have any other purpose. Guns were invented to make it easier to kill things, and every improvement and modification to them over the years has been to make them even better at it. They're not useful for anything else. But I really don't buy that if the shooter had been unable to get his hands on a gun that day he would've just climbed in his car and driven to work. He had snapped. He was going to do something that day, and there really wasn't any stopping him. Blaming the tool he used to do it is a stretch. It just so happens that it's a stretch some people were already trying to make anyway.
On a different subject, do you know how the current recession started in this country? I can remember the first market crash in the spring of 2007 because I was a senior in college at the time. One of my friends who was about to graduate with a finance degree was watching the international reports and told me the markets had just crashed in China and we needed to sell most or all of our stock immediately because it was about to happen over here too. He was right. By noon that day, the markets had plunged about a thousand points and kept falling all week. It seems that a lot of the banks backing the market had been counting on that not happening, because they didn't have any other source of income because they were overburdened with loans people weren't paying.
The story of the bad debt begins a lot further back though, in the late 1990s. Prior to that, there were some really stringent laws about what constituted a bank, what sort of bank it was, and what it could do. Savings, lendings, checking, and credit were all treated quite a bit differently than they are now. Your local bank where you had a savings or checking account couldn't also issue you a credit card, for example, and businesses didn't have their own financing divisions. Nowadays you can get a credit card from department stores and gas stations. That was illegal twenty years ago. The change in the law meant that credit was a lot more available than it had been. The result was that people used it a lot more.
The other change in the law at about the same time was in regard to loan approval. Basically, banks used a person's credit rating to determine how likely they were to be able to pay back a loan, and set an interest rate and assessed a monthly payment based on each individual person's record with debt. Somehow, the government decided that this process was discriminatory against particular races. I don't want to make any claims about skin color having anything to do with ability to pay back loans, but the result was that banks were basically forbidden from denying people loans, even if a person's credit indicated there was no way they could pay it back. What's more, the banks weren't allowed to tell people that they didn't think they could pay a loan back and maybe it wasn't a good idea for them to get one. The only thing they were allowed to do is charge whatever interest rate seemed fair based on the person's credit. This ended up producing the now-dreaded adjustable mortgage. In order to allow for the increasing number of people out there who couldn't pay off their mortgages, and still basically forbidden to refuse one, they had to charge higher and higher rates just to keep enough money on hand to make the next loan.
After the first market crash in 2007, it became more and more obvious that the banks couldn't keep up with the staggering number of defaults. Mortgage companies in particular were selling their loans to whoever they could just to try to keep their own companies open, and even repossessing the houses they'd lent the money on wasn't helping anymore because nobody could afford to get another mortgage to buy the house back from the bank. Then from somewhere, we got the idea that all this had happened on purpose. We got the image of the greedy banker, sitting in his office, smoking a cigar and drinking brandy and making plans to get everyone's houses by loaning them money.
Who is a banker? Is the teller at the window a banker? She's just a low-level employee, like me. Her boss, the branch manager, is no different than the manager of a McDonalds or Payless Shoes. They don't make the rules. They're just in charge of making sure everyone else there follows them. What about the middle managers who balance all the accounts and make sure there's enough money in one area to cover all the debts the banks in that area have? They're salaried people, but they're still just paper-pushers and don't get any more money when the bank records a higher profit. So it must be the top-level executives. After all they're the ones that get the huge bonuses all the time. They must be the ones who pushed all the loans onto the public. If you know anything about high-ranking executives, you know that it's all numbers and long-term management. Although they set the policies and procedure in place, they're only carrying out what they've been told to do by their board of directors, who are in turn looking at the stock price and trying to protect the interests of their shareholders. Their bonuses are awarded for how closely they follow their instructions, which, if developed correctly, should mean increased profits. So it's those greedy shareholders at the bottom of everything, huh? Who are those guys?
Holy crap, I'm one of those guys!
Seriously, I own stock in Citigroup, effectively making me one of the people responsible for the price of the stock and the decisions that people make to keep it up. Am I a banker? Am I the guy everyone hates? I'm just an assistant manager in a gas station. I wasn't trying to take anyone's house. I don't even own one myself.
The problem gets a little clearer - what's happened here is that we the public borrowed a bunch of money we couldn't pay back from a bunch of banks that weren't allowed to say no, and then when it all went to pieces we were quick to blame a fictional construct for it so we didn't have to face the reality that it was our own fault. Guns similarly make a good scapegoat beause they're inanimate objects.
We've blamed all our problems on things that either don't really exist or aren't alive so we can face the reality before us secure in the knowledge that it's not our fault and we don't have to change anything to fix it. We're the victims here, which means it's not our responsibility to fix our lives. It's the responsibility of the bankers to quit demanding their money back and the guns to stop firing bullets at the things we point them at.
It's true AIG made the embarrassing decision not to re-schedule their conference in the Bahamas. After all, the tickets were already bought and the rooms were already rented. That money was already spent. It looked bad that the conference fell about two days after they got their bailout money from the government. But that was one bank, making one bad decision, that wasn't all that obviously bad until after the fact. Most of the rest of the idea that greedy corporations were out to plunder all they could take from the American public remains a fictional construct. Why does it exist? So we can keep irresponsibly pouring all our money into those corporations and screaming about victimization when we go broke.
The scary thing about this new level of scapegoating is that we didn't find something to blame our problems on so nobody noticed while we fix them behind the scenes. What we've moved on to is continuously blaming them on things that aren't real so we don't have to try to fix anything.
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