How Hope can Change

The economic trouble that our Country is now experiencing can be tracked back into the 1990's and really, even before that. Two balls set in motion years back have been rolling toward the pins and are now making strikes. The first was Ronald Reagans amnesty program (1986) that made a mockery of our immigration laws and opened the door for the future waves of illegal immigrants and those who wished to use them as a foundation building block for our economy. The second was Bill Clintons banking deregulation that set the stage for the concurrent waves of speculation and greed. This was not just a Clinton Administration effort but a bi-partisan accord that was definitely at the core of the sub prime mortgage meltdown. It just took a few more years and some more de-regulation to achieve the final results.

Update: After some diligent research it has become clear that regulation not de-regulation has been the cause of all these woes. The Federal policies of people not qualified to buy homes that were encouraged to step into sub prime loans to access the American Dream have instigated the credit freeze and financial institution capitalization crisis. It is social engineering and political manipulation that created the unequal playing fields that fueled the instability we have now.Let US never forget that an offshoot of liberalism is at the heart of the housing bubble. The Government forced the lending institutions to lend to people (low income/ minority) who could not afford to pay the terms back, meaning well but forgetting about the basic weaknesses of human nature. And the real possibility of an economic downturn. Greed set in and everybody thought their assets were worth more than in reality they really were. When the bubble popped everything it had obscured became exposed.

And now Barack Obama will take this as a last chance to appeal to our hope for change. The only way Obama can win is if our economy is in so much trouble that the people will turn to the snake oil salesman in utter desperation. And Obama would rather win and Govern through a depression than lose and graciously say the right things to calm Americans fears about where our economy is heading. There is no doubt that if you continually talk something down it will become ingrained where it is heard. For years we have been hearing the lament on the sour economy, but if those stories had been tempered with a plea for personal responsibility from the borrowers and lenders maybe we could have avoided some small portion of this mess. I believe the Bush administration was naive to think that an ownership society could ever take place where so many are simply willing to walk away or run away from their bad decisions. And how companies are allowed to offer deals that border on Loansharking. The lender should take some responsibility in what they are doing to their fellow man, and the borrowers need to be honest and make every attempt to pay back their debts. But people should not be ruined by things that are out of their control. And conversely we need to walk away from the instant gratification mentality that is poisoning the well. There will be a reckoning and it would be wise for all of US to remember from where we came.

In the end we all must take the responsibility of what our actions have caused to come into being. We buy things at the dollar store or Walmart that are made in China, or anywhere else that have no human ethical standards. We should buy American first whenever possible to keep our money in our own country. We should invest in our own energy first for the same reasons. And if all of our own people would be willing to work, and work hard we would not have to look to other countries for our labor 'shortages'. Now we have a job market that is tight and millions of illegal aliens pushing the wages even lower. That is the lesson I have pulled from all these spirals, It never goes up high enough and fast enough to offset the speed at which things deteriorate and and fall apart again.

And these are not Liberal or Conservatives exclusive problems, they are not Republican or Democrat, they are human problems and the solutions are not so simplistic.