Mortgage Mess. Should There Be A National Investigation?

Opinions, opinions. We’re all equal. We’ve all got opinions. Because we’re all equal all our opinions are worth exactly the same. And because we’re free no one is going to take them away from us. Hell No!

So, on important issues like the financial crisis and where it has come from and is going, there are probably as many opinions as there are those of us expressing views. “It happened already,” “It hasn’t happened yet,” “It isn’t going to happen,” “It’s unstoppable,” “Only a revolution will work,” “Just let the banks take care of it,” “Get the politicians involved,” “Keep the politicians out of it.”

Surely opinion is a whole lot better than fantasy or imagination, but opinion is more fickle than belief, and for sure it is not knowledge, for it cannot account for the causes and principles of its own existence.

One way of organizing a consensus among people with different opinions about important things is to have an investigation to determine what the truth is, reconcile different accounts, and come up with an account, or accounts, and proposals on what should be done. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a good example of that kind of process. Tutu presents Commission report.

There have been other efforts, in other countries where horrible things happened. The South African one seems to provide one of the richest veins of experience that can be mined by those looking for resources to help put things right. Other commissions.

The South African commission’s organizers were much more effective than the secretive 9/11 commission was in the U.S. because they were working to get things into the public domain and to get the public involved with what they were doing at every level. They created circumstances in which it became clear what non-collaborators were protecting. They worked in sunlight not in the shadows.

I’m just mentioning this because there does seem to be a kind of ground swell emerging that there should be some kind of accounting for the mortgage mess. This came out today from Conde Nast’s Portfolio and it provides a summary of what has been going on, and what the precedents are in the history of US financial debacles, and there have been a few. Investigate Mortgage Mess.

It would be a worth while effort to study how the South African commission was organized and how it carried out its mandate, because it would be a good way to tying together all the threads that are unraveling with the financial mess.

“How come the world’s most powerful nation, which supposedly has the most productive farmers, can no longer feed itself?”
“How come the country can no longer produce its own clothing or shoes?” “Why do toys for children have to come from China?”
“What do our people have to do to be treated as citizens again, and not drones or worker and soldier ants?” "Why are we subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry to produce overseas?"

“How is the impoverishment of the country related to financial fraud and rip-off?” “Why is the dollar being wrecked to destroy people’s living standards and save the banks?” “Who is responsible?”

We’ve probably all got different views on that, but might perhaps be able to get together to figure out what’s true and what isn’t, on a strictly non-partisan, non-sexist, non-racist basis of course. It might even be quite educational in a certain kind of way. What do you think?