if you bought a house in Puna in the last 5 years

[peteadams]

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I don't remember the realtor or the mortgage company being responsible for my signature on any agreement or contract.

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As a standalone statement attempting to describe the housing crisis we are in, this is a piece of ideological claptrap. Personal responsibility is simply not the only metric of the integrity of a contract. Fraud in the contract, for instance, can negate the responsibility. You might sign a contract for the Brooklyn Bridge but you are unlikely to be responsible for paying for it. We now know that investment and commercial banks and hedge funds treated the millions of housing customers like ATMs in their consistent manipulation of the home sales process. The manipulation was fueled by the frantic flipping of whatever crappy piece of paper they could cobble together, full of obscure legal jargon and overlaid with the hopes and dreams of real people, that were then packaged into investment vehicles that, had the rating agencies not been paid off by those rated, would have been recognized as the junk they are.

We might not feel too sorry for people who overreached on their home purchases, but we have to realize that simply pointing the finger at the millions now stuck in the mortgage morass simply does not begin to describe the structure of the unregulated reality of housing finance of the Bush administration. This is not the same as one individual having buyer's remorse for buying high in HPP and watching it sink low.

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I believe that we really live in a society that truly believes it is our right to have everything we want, rather than our right to work hard to have everything we want. There is a difference.

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Working hard for what you want is great and I'm sure the unearned income crowd, the creditors, will want you to maintain that attitude. We live in a nation that has been structured from the beginning for concentration of wealth for a few and debt as a way of life for most. The enforcement of credit has been central to our laws since the beginning. So much so that we can barely conceive of any alternative. Perhaps living in Hawai'i we might be able to understand different directions.