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Friday, December 7, 2007

Bush Slow to React to Housing Crisis

President George W. Bush has consistently demonstrated that he is slow to understand even the most black-and-white issues of our day.
This week he announced a five-year freeze on certain subprime mortgage rates in a long-awaited effort to help vulnerable homeowners from losing their homes.
As with the Iraq War, as with Katrina’s victim, as with the horrific state of public education for people of color, Bush continues to display that he is dangerously stupid.
The Mortgage Bankers Association issued a report this week stating record home foreclosures numbers in the July through September period. That translates into hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to pay for their mortgages anymore.
This is not news, however. For the past year, the whistle on the looming danger has been sounding from coast to coast. Originally, Bush said there was nothing the government would do to assist vulnerable homeowners. This, despite that the government he heads has approved all kinds of trick pony policies to entice people to buy homes far above their pay grade.
You can’t lure someone to reach for the shiny object and then change the price tag at whim. It’s not only morally corrupt, it is economically dangerous.
The housing crisis is the sole factor that taking the nation to the brink of a recession. The very same housing crisis that Bush did not see a need to manage.
No, instead what we have gotten from this president is two wars, a city more aptly described as belonging to Katrina than the United States, a protracted all-consuming White House chatter on steroids in professional sports and another stupid attempt at closing down Social Security so we would all become Wall Street investors, even those among us who do not understand the first thing about the cornerstone of our economy.
But the slowest wait of all belongs to those of us counting down to January 2008, when Bush finally has to move off the world stage. Those of us who knew from the get-go that this man wasn’t presidential, that he was propped up caricature of moral righteousness to offset the nation’s fury at the previous president, Bill Clinton, who had consistently shown a lack of understanding that the White House is not a bordello, are counting the days.
But at least American soldiers weren’t dying in wars, overt or covert, nor people losing their homes, either as the result of government negligence after a hurricane, or government negligence because of political storms caused by stupidity.