By Joe Bageant
There seems to be no end to the media mediocrity we must suffer in this country. Now we have the Obama Guns, God and Bitterness shit storm, with the shit pouring forth from the same media scuppers (scuppers are outlet sewage blowholes on the sides of ships) as usual: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, the Associated Press, Fox News, Reuters, Politico, the Lou Dobbs Show, Hardball, Olbermann's Countdown, The Atlantic.com, The DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo.
And all because Obama mentioned something we've known for at least a couple of decades now: That the government has been fucking over the nation's heartland towns and the "little guy" Americans inhabiting them.
To quote Obama:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. ... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."
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A friend in the mortgage business tells me he gets calls every day from
people who want their house repossessed -- people want to walk away from
those monster-bellums in which they have zero equity, thanks to the
interest only and zero down loans the industry pushed in an effort to
blow up the housing balloon for all it's worth. "Hell, I tell 'em to
sit tight, stay there, because we are six months behind in repos and
besides, we may be able to sell them on a negative amortization loan.
Let 'em pay what they can and we refi the difference. In other words,
their debt just gets bigger as they pay, but they stay in their houses
and their kids stay in the same schools."