My Mortgage

Thanks, but no thanks.

That is what I should have told the high pressure mortgage lender when buying a new home two years ago. I should have known then that the payments were more than I could afford over the long run. The high-pressure selling tactics and earnest assurances that the mortgage was right for me overcame me. I took the mortgage.

Unlike millions of other homeowners, however, I will keep my home. I am lucky not to have gotten in over my head. Lack of understanding did not get me into deep financial trouble.

Lack of understanding, however, just got those same mortgage lenders who pressured me an enormous bailout for the loans they sold people who could not afford them. "Oh," Wall St. pleaded, "we just didn't understand what we were doing!" So, Bernanke, Paulson, Bush and the entire Congress feel for this pleading of ignorance and paid for their mistake.

But what about the poor homeowners? Where will they go? How can the families recover from the high-pressure sales tactics of unscrupulous mortgage lenders who should not have qualified them for loans? Well, these poor people are left with no help. They are like the victims of a the financial equivalent of Katrina: alone, uncared for and living in tents or cardboard shelters.

Why didn't Congress act to turn these "bad mortgages" back over to homeowners on terms they could afford? Put people back in their homes, Bernanke and company, not out on the street. Why don't we all march on Wall St. and take back our lives from those who control them at such a cost to us?