I certainly would not wish to grind anyone under my heel. And they are subprime borrowers, not subprime people. I was trying to avoid repetition but realise how it looks now.
Greedy bankers are an easy target and often deservedly so. Some of the grinning posturing idiots paraded across our TV screens and newspapers are prime examples and deserving of all the misfortune, such as it is, heaped upon them. However, as can be seen from the 1999 article, Clinton put Fannie Mae under pressure to help poor voters buy houses they couldn't afford. THe shareholders of Fannie Mae encouraged this lending AND the repackaging of that debt into products that the banks helped create in order to boost profits. Investors such as pension funds and life companies bought this cr@p under pressure from THEIR investors ie you and me, to boost returns, hedge funds borrowed further against this cr@p to leverage THEIR returns which were demanded by THEIR clients ie those self same pension funds. Meanwhile the bankers took a fee for creating products for which there was strong demand. So in short, everyone was to blame.
Actually I have been poor and cut my cloth accordingly, lived in a sh1tty flat when i'd have rather lived somewhere nicer, and i don't mean as a student, driven a 10 year old car when i could have taken out my own subprime loan to get something better. I've also been inarticulate, still am sometimes. And who knows, I may yet lose my job and house.
I certainly have the imagination to put myself in another's place - I often imagine what it must be like to be Warren Beatty, Napoleon, or God. In fact I'm having one of those episodes as I type.
I can also imagine what it must be like to work very hard for 25 years and at the end lose your job and see your savings vanish, or to work for 50 years at a grindingly poor job and equally have nothing to show for it. I don't dismiss anyone as witless or stupid without overwhelming evidence to that effect and I can be quite humble and empathetic.