The VOTE is upon us.

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Date Line October 24, 2008

The bailout was needed to provide "confidence" ... but it is short term ... the money will need to be paid via taxes.in the future. Ideally, inflation will give it less value. But the whole thing was a reward to scam artists who made the NINJA loans which had no honest expectation of being repaid and were unsecured.
On the good side ... the market has reached a support I called for, two years ago, in my newspaper column. The bottom is holding solid (as of noon Friday 24 October) if it breaks, the next support is a DOW 4000 and all the horrors that accompany such a further decline.
We are less than two weeks from ... our children and grandchildren have been saddled with a debt (their futures mortgaged) by poilicies which Greenspan now admits were wrong ... but which known wrong when he proclaimed reduced deficits and debt to be bad.
Greenspan now claims he thought banks would work in their self-interest. They did ... banks are people and people make money independent of the corporate employer ... GOLDEN PARACHUTE and retirement building were the order of the day for aging baby-boom chief executives. They functioned in their own self-interest withing the full knowledge that the corporate entity was expendable.

We have a warped and unrealistic mind-set which grants intellect to entities and ignores the people. IE – Government does not do anything ... the people in Government do the stuff ... they make the decisions and impose the constraints on freedoms, education and health. People, not entities, work in their own interest. Just as Nazi soldiers did what they were told because it meant their promotion, our Government employees and elected leaders do what is in their interest.

Note that the GOP pundits who challenged investigations into rising energy costs are now, like Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, loudly bemoaning the lack of investigation into falling costs. If they really understood economics – or were not really people who understood and lie about things – Limbaugh would be pointing out market forces at work and cheering the propriety of the GOP free market.

But the GOP Right-wing does not believe in market forces – at least not those forces which it can’t manipulate to defraud the public.

We are days from electing a new set of people. Or days from declaring we like people who have taken a growing economy with a budget surplus and reducing national debt and turning it into a society deep in debt. The GOP has built its whole policy structure on BORROW & SPEND ... BORROW & SPEND ... that’s a short term ripoff of people who must pay to fix – replace – that which was ripped off.

We need to reduce debt – if that means (as people understand it, “working more” and government sees as) increasing taxes, we need to do so. The only place to increase taxes is where the money is, and that means tax the wealthiest – those making four times the average family wage. Gee. Is it really that much of a hardship to make only three times the average wage and have a strong nation to protect your assets?

We need to rethink our past. We need to vote for the deeds and not the words. Granted, that is a very “Christian” viewpoint – for it was Christ himself who warned you would know them by their deeds. It is also a worldly realistic viewpoint. Words are meaningless unless backed by actions. The GOP has claimed fiscal responsibility with words, and spendthrift polices with actions.

If your labor is sick, hungry, or homeless, they leave for places where they can improve their lives. Note that immigrants come here from poorer nations – but also that they are choosing, in greater numbers, Europe over America. If you really want to do the lowest of basic jobs, keep attacking, as the GOP would have you attack, immigrants. Become a third world nation. Be worthy of naught but sending your children to die in foreign lands so the Sheiks and despots can live securely in their palaces.

We need to keep our children home and in school. We need to pay them to become the best of the brightest. We cannot keep turning to other nations for our doctors and engineers.

We need to pay for universal healthcare – we need healthy workers to pay the debts the GOP has amassed. To do less is to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. Labor is, after all, the foundation upon which profits and wealth are built.
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Of course, the majority might decide race and gender trump the survival of America. In that case, let them have that which they wish for themselves and their posterity – they can begin by converting to Islam and then move on to learning to speak Chinese.
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