Vote!

Vote, Tuesday November 4th 2008

I don't think that I ever voted for a president that I was really happy with. I have voted in a few local elections that I have been totally happy with, and the candidate that I supported won and did a good job.
Unfortunately when someone is running for President of the United States, they feel that winning is so important that they will tell you anything just to get your vote. I guess you just have to decide who is the worse liar and vote for the other guy. I think that even the most astute student of politics must realize that what the candidates say, just can't happen, so they hold their nose and vote for who they think might be the better of the two evils. Do I sound Cynical? Good! I wish that enough people were cynical, so that we would band together and clean up what is wrong with our electoral system.

Hardly anybody wanted to bailout Wall Street. It was something like 82% against the bailout, but “Big Money” demanded a bailout, and got it. In about a year we will be right back here talking about another bailout. I’m not above saying that I told you so, so look forward to it. Even the politicians know that America needs an economic base to survive, and I don’t see the politicians bringing that many jobs back to America to stimulate the economy that fast. So, next year will be bailout II, look for it.

Did government do anything to help the family farmer? No they let the big corporate farmers take them over. After all of the farms were in the hands of the stockholders they came up with a ridiculous plan to grow corn to make ethanol to fuel cars. The corporate farms are doing great now that the families have been pushed out. If you don’t know what is wrong with ethanol, you haven’t been paying attention. Hint: cost of production is twice that of gasoline, and the fermentation process releases the dread CO2 into the atmosphere.

But I digress. The next thing that they did to the American worker is take his job away from him and give it to a twelve year old Chinese peasant girl, that is willing to work twelve hour days for practically nothing. Instead of insisting on enforcing balance-of-trade laws, our politicians threw them out the window and told us to deal with it, “We live in a World economy now!”. That means that the wall street investors and company CEO’s are making millions on cutting you out of your old job.

Then the politicians decided to give the young and the unfortunate people a chance to buy housing. They made sub-prime (Meaning “Not the best”) loans to people with marginal incomes. They made buying a house sound great. They told them that they would be paying rent anyway, so they might as well be paying for a house. They let them in the door with low payments, and told them that when the higher interest rates kicked-in in a couple of years, that their house would be worth way more that they had paid for it, and they could use the equity that they had built in their home to parlay a new “low interest, fixed rate loan”. It sounded great to the people that had no other choices anyway, they needed a place to live. Unfortunately (I use that word a lot) what really happened is the fat cats were making so much money selling housing to sub-prime buyers that they over built the market, and housing prices dropped instead of increasing. So instead if renegotiating the loans to reflect the new value, they took people homes away, and paid managing companies to maintain the foreclosed houses. Many of which were destroyed by the former owners on their way out. After all they had nothing to lose, they already lost their house and investment.

What is worse, is that the corporate companies that sold the homes to sub-prime home owners, turned around and sold those loans to Fanny May and Freddie Mac. So, the rats that sold the homes to people that couldn’t afford them had nothing to lose, and the wall street investors pocketed the profits off the home sales. Beginning to smell a rat?

Then the final straw was when all of the wealth had been drawn away from Wall Street, because there is nothing “real” left to invest in, wall street started to collapse. Instead of letting it collapse, our politicians decide to bail them out.

You know who is going to pay Wall Street don’t you? It will be those farmers that lost their farms to the corporations, It will be the people who lost their houses to the corporations, it will be the factory workers whose jobs were sold overseas, it will be all the people trying to get by, while the Wall Street raiders are busy figuring out how to put that $700,000,000,000.00 in their pocket. But, because we have no real economy in the United states anymore, and we have no real product to sell off-shore our “bleed” will keep draining our country dry. And the wall street fat cats will get their skim.

They will have it all pocketed in less that a year, and we be back here to hear me say “I told you so!”

So, go ahead, hold your nose and vote, It may be the last thing that we have any control over. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to decide for ourselves who we might like as candidates, without mainstream media and big money telling us who we “need”?