your boys played one hell of a game, and there was no disgrace in your defeat. it honoured us both.

yep: "pro-lender environment" gives them away, doesn't it. there's no denying who's side they're on.

the "ownership society" (now, who coined that phrase, anyway?) has always been a way to obliquely insult those who are not part of it and to shame them into trying to participate in it..at a price. privately owned property, or perhaps i should say, homeowner equity, has always represented a vast potential for exploitation by those quintessential dealers in intangibles--the commercial castes. what we have just seen is an enormous raid on the middle and working classes' assets, one that went wrong: except for the few at the very top of the pyramid, everybody lost, including many of the parasites responsible for the administration of the scheme.

the source of all wealth is not entrepreneurial machination or financial manipulation, but human labor. all those homes and property (and by extension, mortgages and loans) represented an enormous potential for plunder: the accumulated toil of millions of working men and women over decades, not to mention their promise of future labor. it was only a matter of time before the system figured out a way to tap into that wealth and siphon some of it off, even if it meant the waste and destruction of thousands of homes, property, investment, and families.

no, i don't think a little cabal of evil capitalists masterminded this scheme from some mahogany-paneled wall street boardroom. i am not a conspiracy theorist. this is a purely emergent, unconscious phenomenon, an automatic and inevitable result of the way the system is culturally organized. it is based on an ethos that views those who create wealth, the workers, with contempt, while it lionizes and worships the middlemen and paper shufflers who have metastasized themselves at the nodes of communication and who have a stranglehold on the flow of economic power.

the result is a social ponzi scheme, a cross-cultural scam of global proportions, run by the exploited themselves, who eagerly collaborate in their own eventual destruction; except the dividing line between victim and villain gets higher and higher every year as the monster feeds on its own flesh and devours its own children. eventually, all will be consumed.

personally, i don't see any way out of it. one may recognize the cause and the origin of the corruption, but the solution is still not clear. as long as we insist on seeing this malignant pathology as a social virtue (i.e., the conservative social and political world-view and its resulting agenda), we are doomed. god help us all.