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legal proof that it actually owns their house.”
     
    “Isn’t that the height of irresponsibility?” Wheatley hammered back. “Rewarding people for not living up to their obligations. For taking out loans they couldn’t afford, for living beyond their means.”
     
    “You mean like irresponsibly giving out loans to people they knew couldn’t afford them and pocketing thousands of dollars in fees for each one? Like slicing and dicing those loans into little pieces, repackaging them, getting corrupt ratings companies to sign off on them as Grade A investments and pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars more in profits? Like then betting against the garbage they just sold and pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars of more profit? Then finally, when they crashed the world economy and ruined the financial future of millions of Americans, taking billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and, instead of lending that money back, used it to do the same things that got us into this mess in the first place. And to pay themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses, and buy senators and congressmen and even a president like Las Vegas hookers to make sure there’s nothing to prevent them from doing it all over again, a year, two years, ten years down the road. You mean that kind of irresponsibility?”
     
    “That’s not the kind of irresponsibility I mean,” Wheatley barked. “I mean the irresponsibility of people buying new cars and big-screen TVs and taking fancy vacations, and now they’re crying for someone to bail them out.”
     
    “I don’t think I like the implications of what you’re saying, Chuck. The productivity of the American worker is the highest in the world. We work longer hours with fewer vacations, fewer benefits, fewer protections than workers in any first-world country you’d care to name. Yet over the past forty years the wages of the average working man and woman have been stagnant, while at the same time salaries for people at the top have increased hundreds of times over. They’re spending more on birthday parties than most Americans make in a year; buying second, third and fourth homes; living in luxury most of us can’t even imagine. But for all our work and all our hours and all our productivity, when the average American wants a slice of the pie that he and she helped create—maybe a newer car, a bigger TV, a nicer vacation—all of a sudden we’re greedy and irresponsible? I don’t think so.”
     
    Wheatley bore down. “You still haven’t answered my question. Is it or is it not irresponsible to encourage people to walk away from their mortgages or refuse to fulfill their debts when they have the ability to pay?”
     
    “It is not. Not at all. As you know, it’s a common practice in business. Companies do it all the time. It’s called ‘strategic default.’ Didn’t Morgan Stanley give five office buildings in San Francisco back to the lender because they were only worth half of what they paid for them? Surely you’re not saying Morgan Stanley didn’t have the ability to pay. So why shouldn’t people have the same rights as corporations? After all, the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same rights as people.”
     
    “But the Supreme Court said nothing about violence, about armed men attacking police officers trying to enforce the law.”
     
    “If you’re referring to the incident in Ohio involving Julie Teichner, as you already pointed out, no one was attacked, no one was injured and the situation was resolved peacefully. And let’s look at this thing called ‘the law.’ It’s not the Word of God engraved on stone tablets and handed down from the heavens. It’s a hash of elements cobbled together by men—many of them corrupt, duplicitous, working only in their own self-interest. ‘The law’ could allow people like Julie Teichner to declare bankruptcy and maybe keep their homes. But that law was changed to make it more difficult. ‘The law’