The following is a thesis paper I had a friend turn in for me annonymously to a class she was taking a few weeks ago. I'm not enrolled in the class, I just did it for shits and giggles. Enjoy
Throughout the early months of 2009, many Americans are struggling to understand exactly what is going on in our country. A lot is happening in our nation today, and topics that are too complex in nature for the common man to grasp are a nearly common occurrence. It’s no secret: Shit’s fucked. Ask a passerby on the street why he thinks the nation is in a recession and you’re likely to get a blank stare, or recite some long-winded piece they memorized from an article in a publication from their favorite political media assclown parading around as an ‘investigative journalist’. Between the recession, prison overpopulation, overzealous religious fanatics (Read: Idiots), the housing market collapse, the auto industry taking a shit and crime rates unnecessarily skyrocketing, American’s have a lot on their plate…or so they’re told. So it is my intent, here in this thesis paper, to touch on a few of these topics for those who obviously can’t get their heads out of the asses in which they are firmly placed.
The recession plaguing our nation has been in the making a long time, though most really never saw it coming. American’s today seem to be so consumed by their own trivial everyday lives to even bother notice when the economy starts tumbling down like a retarded kid at cheerleading tryouts. The lack of regulation in place signifies two things:
1. Our government was completely happy not monitoring or regulating companies that manipulated loopholes and people for pure profit and
2. The average person is so stupid they couldn’t even question why a family that breeds knee deep in Budweiser cans in the back of a rusty Toyota truck bed 7 times can afford a loan for a $600,000 house and still have leftover cash for a carton of Jacks, a 6-pack and the 200 channel Nascar Super package from DirecTV.
When you attempt to take out a loan, the bank runs through their magic number-crunching process and determines if you are eligible for a loan. This is usually determined by your FICO score, or credit rating. The lower the rating, the less eligible you are for a loan. Those who met the requirements for a loan were ‘prime’ candidates. Those like our aforementioned friend bubba, who do not meet the requirements, are turned away…or at least that’s how it USED to work. Now they’re considered ‘sub-prime’, and even though they are more likely to default on their loan and not pay money owed to the bank, the bank stamps the seal of approval on the loan anyway. This gives people like bubba a better chance at being a homeowner, at the risk of the bank (and now the taxpayer, ala federal bailouts). Oh, but it gets better…
Several years ago after fed chairman Alan Greenspan lowered the interest rate to 1% as a result of September 11th and other factors, investors looking for a safe investment and wanting a better return stopped buying from the fed and decided that it would be a good idea to get connected with homeowners. A mortgage lender would sell the mortgages to bankers, who would sell the individual mortgages to investors who would then get the mortgage payments from homeowners. It was a great deal for them at the time, they had hundreds of homeowners paying their mortgages directly to them and lining their pockets, but they wanted more mortgages. So the mortgage lenders sent out their brokers and let them give loans to consumers considered ‘sub-prime’ because the prime candidates who could afford to get loans and own homes already did.
After some time, the ‘sub-prime’ homeowners would default on their mortgage. No big deal for the investors, they owned thousands of them and were still getting cash flow from other active mortgages. Unfortunately over time most of the homeowners eventually defaulted, and the price of houses began to fall so fast, prime candidate homeowners were left wondering why they were paying for a $500,000 mortgage when the house was only worth $60,000. So they got smart and ditched it for better prospects. The investors stopped buying the mortgages, the banker got shafted with the mortgages he couldn’t sell off, and the lenders couldn’t sell what they had left over leaving everyone with a ton of debt that no one could pay off. The misconception is that it was a good idea in theory. The truth is that you’d have to be a mental fucktard to even think about taking part in a scheme like this. How can you give thousands of dollars to someone you KNOW isn’t going to pay it back? It all backfired and kick-started the recession and our government sat back and watched it all happen. It was only after everything collapsed when talks of regulation started and now the taxpayers are paying for it in the form of bailouts and stimulus packages.
The first question you should be asking yourself is “How did I not see it coming?” The media has been making things so complex that the average American is audibly familiar with the terms ‘sub-prime mortgages’ and ‘default credit swaps’ but have no idea what it really means. You may as well be shouting Cantonese. The second question you should ask yourself is why any person would take out a loan they couldn’t afford. Just because you get approved for a loan doesn’t instantly make it a good decision, especially for people like bubba. No one spoke up, no one read further into it, and no one seemed to mind giving or taking the loans from the start of this sloppy affair. The housing collapse, and the start of what would become the recession, is your fault.
Well now that we’re knee deep in the recession, what of the auto industry? Simply put, we don’t want their shitty fiberglass gas guzzlers anymore. The cars being made now aren’t like the cars of old. Cars used to be built with solid steel frames, solid engines and decent fuel economy. Now we have SUV’s and Hummers made of cheap, brittle fiberglass rolling around like they own the road sucking down 6 gallons of gas per inch, all so some guy with penis envy can feel like a real man again. Even the so-called ‘green cars’ are only green to the manufacturer’s marketing division.
Although you would love to believe that this green revolution in the auto industry has something to do with companies taking bold strides in the right direction for the future of our species, but since we’re dealing with slimy, scumbag corporate types, it’s just profiteering at the behest of demand. Take the Prius for instance. In Japan the Prius gets 66 miles per gallon, here in the states, it gets 42. Even though it’s a hybrid, the fuel economy standards have hardly been touched since recently, as they were last adjusted to 27.5 miles per gallon in 1990. Everyone started buying these cars to save money on gas and get decent gas mileages not even realizing a better, more efficient type of the exact same car was already built in another country. In addition, There was an attempt in California to crack down on the emissions standards for vehicle manufacturers, lobbyists pressured the state emissions board to scrap the idea (and happened to vanquish GM’s precious EV-1, the mildly successful Electric car…though GM would never admit to an ‘success’ the car may have had). Auto manufacturers tried afterwards to push for Hydrogen Fuel Cells, but the facts about the technology make things worse for the consumer than ever before. It’s expensive to manufacture and therefore more expensive to purchase, you have to have a refueling system in place before the cars go out on the market that would cost billions and quite frankly, the technology to mass-produce these vehicles isn’t quite here yet. The cost of the fuel would cost more than gasoline in the summer of 2007, when gasoline reached record prices across the country. Not to mention the corporate heads at the oil companies make too much money to just abandon their flagship product, they are looking for a product that can be sold at the same rate as gasoline, if not higher, instead of just abandoning it (and their profits). Hydrogen cells seem to fit this description.
Even now, as the auto industry struggles to meet the demand of those wanting green, fuel-efficient cars, we can trace the problem right back to the EV-1. It was a fully-functioning electric car. It was endorsed by celebrities including tom hanks and Mel Gibson, and was driven on the road by commoners until the lease ran out. When the leases were up General Motors, fearing the car was becoming too popular, decided not to renew the leases on the vehicles and took the perfectly good, functioning cars and crushed them to dust at their testing facility in California. Where was the green movement then? Where was the big push for fuel economy and better living and driving standards when General Motors decided there wasn’t enough ‘demand’ for the car and scrapped every last one of them. Where was the talk of our addiction to foreign oil from news networks and political pundits? No one spoke up. After seeing the fuel spike in 2007, most people would love to have electric cars, and the EV-1 debuted in 1996! The technology could’ve been made widely accessible by now. Battery technology has come so far now that the car could have tripled its driving distance and would have been a perfect car for those who care about the environment and their wallet. But, according to GM, the ‘demand’ wasn’t there. Why is the auto Industry failing? Why are so-called ‘Green’ cars unavailable or nonexistent on the showroom floor? It’s your fault.
Not that it would matter much. After buying your shiny new ‘green’ car, some punk at a red light is likely to smash your window and throw your hippie, tree-fucking ass out on the pavement and steal your ride. Our society has its own head stuffed so far up its own ass people can’t see what’s right in front of them half the time, or at least what’s important. Information is distorted and packaged, making cases of fear out of trivial events and spouting opinion as facts. Since the fairness doctrine was abolished in 1987, and since the arrival of the post-September 11th 24 hour news networks, news is biased, packaged, and sometimes blatant lies that media consumers gladly eat up like Rosie O’Donnell at a buffet on half-price Wednesday. No one ever asks where the solid evidence is contained in a news story that is presented to them; it’s just “the news”, it is to be trusted. Now because of the ignorance of the common man, and the will of news media to manipulate them, our country is harshly divided between the right and left, the red and blue. Words like ‘socialism’, and ‘Marxist’ are thrown around on a daily basis, but like the terms in the housing market, people have not the slightest idea what those words mean, just that they are being used to paint a negative picture of political figures and agendas…how can you know if a political figure is doing good for your country if you’re calling someone a term you don’t know the definition of? We could delve further into this particular situation, but it really doesn’t matter. The matter at hand is that the opinion of others is regarded as fact, simply because it’s on the television and people are stupid enough to believe it without looking at the evidence. This makes the masses uninformed, vapid, loudmouthed, mentally challenged twits who think their opinion is absolute and incorruptible when they really only got those opinions from someone else distributing opinion as the truth (rendering their opinion false and irrelevant because it isn’t their own opinion to begin with). A news network is different from an opinion network. How can a network have a slogan like “fair and balanced” or “the most trusted name in news” when there is no system in place to give equal time to the opposing side of ANY story? If police did this, and didn’t look at the hard facts and evidence, you could get locked up at any time or place for doing nothing, just because someone had a negative opinion of you. Scary, isn’t it? Whatever happened to the hard-hitting investigative journalist, out to get the big scoop and deliver ‘just the facts’? They are nonexistent in our society. What does that tell you about the way we handle news in this country?
What’s even worse is that what is considered newsworthy these days is laughable (especially overcompensating loudmouth dickheads like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Jim Cramer). Extended coverage of parades, high-speed car chases, petty thefts and other such nonsense takes up more space than important issues like poverty, laws and bills being passed by the government and especially the men and women overseas dying while at war protecting our right to freedom (as the media likes to say) while simultaneously disregarding the right to know the whole story. They ask for ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ in court for a reason, not ‘your side of the truth, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing, and you can throw in a bit of misleading information too’. Wouldn’t you want the same qualities in a news organization?
The fact that those idiotic and exaggerated stories like celebrity breakdowns and vengeful couples take up more time than important events just undermines the true meaning and relevance of more important stories, and because of this the news networks are slowing down the progress of our society. Think about that for a second. The news networks are a roadblock on the path of societal evolution and are blocking the path forward towards prosperity. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? But, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, it’s my opinion and you’ll take it and spin it around as your own and tell others how things are and should be…naturally it’s all your fault.
I could go on and on about issues infecting our nation with plight and unrest, but the details would make this paper drag on and on about things the common person (yourself included) wouldn’t be interested in hearing. The importance of details has eluded us. We never look at the fine print; it’s always sign on the dotted line. Health care, homelessness, hunger, poverty, education, unemployment, crime rates, financial instability, who runs our government…even the details of our own constitution and bill of rights that details our liberties as Americans are overlooked, guessed, distorted, misrepresented and forgotten by everyday people like you and I. the fact that they are overlooked is troubling, not because people become blissful ignorant fools by just expecting “someone else to fix it”. They are troubling to those who are unaware because the people that are aware take advantage of these people, and to a certain degree those people deserve it. But just like a festering disease, this infection is spreading to the brain of our nation and smothering it. Instead of playing the infinite blame-game, why not admit that everything that is wrong with our country you ALLOWED to happen. Admit that it is your fault; admit that you’ve done nothing until now. Don’t settle for what others tell you, stand up and be counted. Demand solutions, our elected officials are at your command. Become aware, make others aware. There are many issues that require the attention of all people in our country, and as it stands things look like shit. But it can be fixed, you can fix it…after all, it’s all your fault.
