Ownership Society

Remember the "ownership society," fixture of bush's speeches for the first four years of his presidency?

"We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004.

Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent.

And little wonder.

It will no doubt be a major part of bush's failed presidential legacy. Just another nail in his coffin. Just another failure on top of the shit heap that is bush's presidency.

The idea was simple: if working-class people were put in a position to own their own home as opposed to renting, they would flock to the banks offering the sub prime loans in droves. And they did.

But this was only an illusion of ownership as proved by the current mess of what happened when those subprime rates adjusted.

Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"-an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s-their piece of the stock market-to pay their mortgage.

The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. We are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. And what is bushs solution?

Bail out the banks and fuck the former homeowner.