Thank You For Your Service

Any serious analysis of our current economic condition requires a point of origin wherein all sides can agree. Right? Okay, then: In this day and age there can be no lower forms of life on Earth, microbial or otherwise, than banks.

Marie, a cosmetologist by trade, served in the United States Air Force during the Cold War. She worked on the air conditioning units for the vaunted A-10 Warthog, serving overseas in the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was rattling his saber at the Evil Empire on nearly every public occasion.

Marie left the Air Force in 1988 with an honorable discharge after having attained the rank of Staff Sergeant. Along with her DD-214 came a VA loan guaranty, which she filed away, content to let it ride until she needed to buy a home.

All through the housing run-up, she rented whatever place she wanted to live in, with her commute to work being the primary factor in her decision-making process. That made sense, what with mortgages skyrocketing to $2,500 a month or more, and gasoline prices going absolutely (and unnecessarily) nuts last year.

Now, in a more realistic housing market, Marie's interested but she's having a hard time finding any lender willing to service her VA-backed loan. They have other loans, sure, but the idea is that the government vouches for her, which should open things up as far as interest rates and down payments are concerned.

One lender wanted to charge her fifteen hundred bucks to process such a loan. Real estate agents won't deal with her at all if she mentions the VA guaranty. They all try to steer her in a different direction (one that surely must be more profitable for themselves).

And aren't these the same people who are responsible for our current economic crisis, the ones who spent the last few years giving over-inflated loans to anyone with or without a pulse, whose foreclosures are now dragging down our property values? Lately, those same banks have been slurping up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, and still haven't righted their own ships.

Even Marie's credit union (supposedly a less nasty breed of banker) refuses to grant her a loan under the terms she wants, that she fought for. So the priveleges of membership don't seem to mean any more to those slugs than does her service to our country.

(She requested that I not name her credit union online, but if you e-mail me, I'll happily tell you which one it is.)

I'm sure it would take about five seconds to elicit, from any white-collar finance guy, an expression of support for our troops. Hoo-ah. They just won't grant them loans that they've earned through their service to our country. Nationalizing the banks, then, doesn't sound all that radical but rather like a long-overdue step in the right direction.

Again - because we all agree this stuff matters - Marie was discharged in 1988 with full honors, as have been millions of other good Americans. All they want to know is why they are being dishonored by the lowest forms of life on Earth.

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