With all the skill and empathy of Lord John Russell devising a new twist on the Poor Law for the starving Irish peasantry, George Bush presents a package to aid and comfort the working-class Americans facing the loss of their homes. They should be particularly grateful for the $150 million for education in financial literacy. (Maxim 1: vote Democrat.)
Note this attempt at humour:
See, it’s easy for me to stand up here and talk about refinancing — some people don’t even know what I’m talking about.
That’s right. The poor are poor because they are stupid, not because they are unlucky, cheated, and abandoned by their elected government.
There’s a thread at Crooked Timber on the bizarre proposal to enrol “mortgage service companies” in preventing the foreclosures which it is their daytime job to carry out. Noting an expert view that this will not work, commenter doug hits the nail on the head:
“Feature, not bug”.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web
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