Does Personal Responsibilty and Accountability Exists in the U.S.?

The economy has tanked and the media wants show how much gloom and doom is happening around the country and mostly – until the inauguration – blaming the Bush Administration for allowing this to happen. As seems to be typical with main stream media they like to place the blame on what they do not like versus those actually responsible. If they don’t like who is actually responsible you might get a hint of truth in their reporting but you will be hard pressed to find any actual objectivity in their reporting. It amazes me how they know the truth but refuse to publish it.

These banks have made horrible decisions in who they give out loans to. I won’t put 100% of the blame on them though. Government responsibility exist from when the Community Reinvestment Act was revived by Clinton revived during his administration to force banks to give out more loans by “affirmative action” means to low income earners and provide loans to revitalize poor inner-city ghetto neighborhoods. Banks had government regulators audit them and ensure they were reversing the accused policy of being “racially discriminatory” when providing loans. Banks then gave out over 1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000.00) in high risk loans because the government was forcing them to, hence the banking community’s insistence that the government now bail them out. Senator Phil Graham called this “a vast extortion scheme against the nation’s banks”. In addition to this most of the money was funneled through left wing organizations and community activist groups that you can bet were taking more than their fair share. All of this knowing it would one day end up in disaster.

The banks themselves also had the responsibility of ensuring that loans could be paid back, but for greed it was a numbers game. Loan out at much as possible, whether we can back it or not, was the mantra during the boom days. Deregulation of the banks caused banks to merge across state lines swallowing up small town banks nationwide and all these risky loans being lumped into an oligarchy of banks holding most of the nation’s mortgages, their assets barely worth the paper it was printed on. Then of course you have the John Thain’s of the world who are so out of touch with reality that they see nothing wrong in giving out $4 billion dollars worth of bonuses when the company was loosing $15 billion dollars and can decorate his office with $1.2 million dollars of trinkets. His defense, we need to pay for good people. Strange how nobody told him if he is loosing $15 billion it is unlikely he has $4 billion worth of good people. These type of people are qualified at most to be Wal-Mart greeters (no offense to the Wal-Mart greeters meant) and if hired for that position need to have a restriction to not be allowed with in 20 ft of a cash register. They are nothing more than greedy little pond scum thieves.

The persons who signed on the dotted line to receive the loan also had a responsibility of knowing if they could afford the loan or not. I am not talking about the person that has been paying for the past 10 years without any problems and lost their job and is now in trouble. I am talking about the majority of these loan holders who knew going in that on these variable schemes they would be able to afford the payment for the first year and nothing else. All so they could live in a much bigger house than they could actually afford, and also bought the fancy cars while the first years’ house payment was low. The debtor’s prison system should be revived for these people.

We have taken away responsibility for this mess from all of these entities involved. If we bailout the banks we are basically saying they can loan out whatever they want again. We allow the greed and corruption to continue if we do not punish the people ultimately in charge of the banks. If we don’t hold the government accountable they will continue to grow more corrupt, and much worse force us to march more towards socializing banks and other private industries where they will gain ultimate control over us, we already have a welfare state where far too many people rely on the government. Government is here to protect us from our enemies, both foreign and domestic, ensure fair trade with other nations, protecting our rights, and ensure laws are enforced. They should not be responsible for banking (they can’t even balance their own budget), distribution of wealth, or controlling production and resources of this country. Of course there are many gray areas between there, but the bottom line is responsibility and accountability need to return to society before there is no reason for responsibility or accountability because we are told every move to make by the government.