One Nation Underachieving

I pledge allegiance to the bailout of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands—one nation underachieving, indecisive, with liberalism and social justice for all.

Who needs terrorist attacks when we’re destroying ourselves from inside?

Election Day may have given us Obama as our next president, but Peggy the Moocher is our REAL leader now, and she was right all along—we won’t have to worry about our mortgages, our bills, or anything else, because Obama will take care of us.

Of course, Obama isn’t doing it alone—Congress-critters have gotten a head start on him with proposed bailouts for everybody and everything. People, businesses, and whole industries are lining up with their hand out, and even changing the nature of their businesses just to fall in line with bailout requirements to make them more eligible. It’s welfare taken to the ultimate degree.

It’s bad enough that we’ve come to this point, but what did it take for us to stoop so low? We lowered the bar, the supports, the grounds, and the bleachers, and still are handing out trophies just for showing up.

We’re rewarding failure, and as an unintended consequence, people and businesses are failing ON PURPOSE just to get some sort of reward. People went from accidentally or unknowingly getting in over their heads, to PURPOSELY getting in too deep because they now know somebody in Congress will make a law that will bail them out in some fashion. Obama will save them.

So what’s to stop anyone at all from marching out RIGHT NOW and securing a million-dollar mansion (with adequate FICO score), buying top-of-the-line cars, commissioning custom-made furniture, designer clothes, starting a business (good or bad), and getting 5, maybe 6 credit cards? Nothing—especially when they KNOW it’s all short-term, and have no way at all to pay for any of it! Hope Now (or whatever the final mortgage bailout program will be named) will rescue us from our mortgage debt, and the bankruptcy laws will take care of the rest until a new bailout package can be designed by Congress to take care of the rest. Heaven forbid should anyone have to suffer or lose! As we speak, there are people working on their SECOND mortgage default--they were early to sign up for a Hope Now workout, and have consequently let that new payback plan fail too.

Tell me what's to stop us all from simply giving up and going for the easy rewards of a discounted mortgage, and debt forgiveness for our car loans and credit cards--the precedent has been set for us by Peggy, the financial industry, and Hank Paulson.

Why are we failing to pay our bills in the first place? Because we don’t make the money to support the debt—we’ve either lost our jobs due to our own inability to recession-proof our positions, or we’ve bitten off more than we could chew in the first place trying to get our piece of the pie. Tell me something: does Peggy the Moocher look like she has a job that’s recession-proof, or is surrounded by things in her life that are extravagant compared to her income? I doubt it.

What Peggy (and all the other Peggys of America) likely DOES have is a lifestyle built upon failure and the backs of other hard-working people, making her pretty much recession-proof, fool-proof, and success-proof.

This is how low we’ve sunk as a culture and as a nation.

The rewards for failure have been happening for a long time—the most notable to me was when Carly Fiorina got millions for running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She is heralded as being one of the most powerful women in America, but I see a rat that left one sinking ship (Lucent) for another, only to cause the new ship to sink too. But we’re supposed to give her a pass because she’s a woman, right? Wrong!

In my mind, she even managed to help sink John McCain’s campaign with her stupid remarks about Viagra and birth control pills, and why one is covered on health care plans while the other isn’t. I actually wrote to the McCain campaign explaining that Viagra is actually a heart medication, and that a pleasant side-effect was over-marketed to the point that it was commonly thought to be the main reason for the drug. Marketing—Carly should know a thing or two about it, because she came from Lucent’s marketing division.

Let’s not forget about Enron, Adelphia, Dynegy, and all the other companies of that particular time—ones that got run into the ground while we stood around the edges of the hole and barked. More recently, banks and other financial institutions, individual small businesses, home builders, and retail chains are heading the same way (or are already there), and once again, all we can do is bark at the hole.

So what can we ordinary people do to solve this crisis, besides throwing money art the problem? Obama was briefly on the right track, but dropped it in favor of some other charismatic expediency: personal responsibility. Add some character to it, and you’ve got a winning recipe for success without cost to the taxpayer.

If each of us, regardless of status or position, showed a little more personal responsibility and character, we just might be able to help our incoming president AND ourselves from ever having to endure this again. Let’s all work to make Peggy the Moocher a myth in the future, because all the green jobs, infrastructure spending, and re-alignment of the auto industry isn’t going to stop the root cause of this fiasco—individuals being EXPEDIENT by acting in ways that will get them rewards without the hard work that usually precedes it.

And lastly, once personal responsibility and character are learned about and achieved, each one of us must teach one more. Each one teach one to avoid coming back to this spot in the future.