While we are talking about the American people being duped again, let's cover the ever growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. As wages remain stagnant and the cost of living, food, oil, health care, and everything else continues upward on an almost daily basis, more and more of the former middle class find themselves joining the great unwashed in their inability to achieve the American dream of home ownership.

So, as a cruel tease, our government sets up, for pure political self-interest a set of conditions allowing those who never before thought they could own their own home to borrow enough to get into, if not the home of their dreams, at least a home of their own. Unfortunately, the poor saps who fell into the trap either out of ignorance or desperation, now find that, not only are they not able to afford their home, but that the very home that was to lift them out of the doldrums of permanent tenancy, is now the source of their financial ruin. Their marginal credit score from before has now been devastated by a foreclosure, not to mention the sense of personal failure and ignominy that accompanies having to move one's children out of their home and school and back into circumstances worse than before they achieved their "dream".

So it goes. The poor not only get poorer, they get their noses rubbed in it as well, while the wealthy not only get richer, they get to buy the foreclosed homes at auction, while the taxpayers, including the poor saps who got fooled, pay to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

To paraphrase Yakov Smirnov in Brewster's Millions, "America, What a country!"