"as wall street titans grabbed bonuses based on illusory, short-term paper profits, so regular americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. the nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash. this debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the marie antoinette antics of a schwarzman and a thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like bravo, a&e, tlc and hgtv produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called subprime pornography. some of the series — 'flip this house,' 'flip that house,' 'sell this house,' 'my house is worth what?' — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness."
frank rich, "no time for poetry"
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