If you've missed previous opportunities to tell FHFA Director Mel Watt to make it easier for underwater homeowners to modify their mortgages, then Color of Change still helps you do that. I brook no silliness about how the folks who now owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth are entirely to blame for their predicament, as if the people who sold them the mortgages and lied to them about how well the mortgages would fit their finances are somehow blameless. Our sick, immoral, and decadent society spends far too much time blaming the victims while excusing the real evildoers -- usually, in my experience, because "evildoers are always going to be with us," as if civilization has ever advanced out of such abject complacency. I also brook no silliness about mortgage modification being a "moral hazard" -- after all, Our Glorious Elites have apparently decided it's not a "moral hazard" for folks who own more than one home to cram down the mortgages on their second homes, which they can already do under the law. And, at the risk of repeating myself: where's the "moral hazard" crowd when the banksters use complex "financial instruments" to crash an entire economy? I'll tell you where: they're telling us that's just the nature of the free market. And they're wrong about that, too -- in a Libertarian "free market," banksters would not rely on big government handouts the way they do.
Meanwhile, the House still hasn't voted to gut the school lunch nutrition standards the USDA just put in -- partly out of shame, I hope! -- but that doesn't mean they won't vote to gut the standards when they think we're not looking, so Moms Rising helps you tell Congress you're watching and you want them to take care of childrens' health before their own twisted priorities. And their priorities are twisted -- the USDA standards don't make it hard for schools to comply, not when 9 out of 10 school systems already comply and the rest can get subsidies and training, and if Republicans want to make a big fiscal statement, why aren't they going after bigger targets, like the oil corporations and their handouts? Or the banksters and their handouts? Or the big health insurance corporations and their handouts? I'm just kidding; these questions all pretty much answer themselves. (Hint: it's the money!) But we have a choice: we can keep the junk food out of our schools and get our kids to eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and make them into healthier adults who don't suffer from obesity and diabetes and heart conditions and who thus won't cost our economy a whole lot more money in health care and missed work -- or we can let school districts continue to pound out pizza and french fries and hold their kids back from being the best they can be. Like a lot of moral choices, it really ain't that tough.
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