And Another Thing!

Our current financial morass has roots in President Nixon's disconnection of the dollar from a peg to gold in August of 1971. President Peanut's (er, Carter's) Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and its revisions in 1995 (under Clinton) allowed lending institutions extreme (and unregulated) latitude in creating and valuing their portfolios of questionable debt (not yet called sub-prime mortgages at that time).

Things got worse under Reagan, during which time the very first Credit Default Swap instruments were created -- these simply ballooned under Bush I and Clinton.

The Savings & Loan fiasco of the late eighties and early nineties added a trillion dollars to the national debt through accounting gimmicks and congressional bailouts of their buddies, placing this future debt directly onto the backs of American taxpayers.

W (Bush II) and his administration has done nothing more nor less than any of his predecessors about our growing problems such as the inflating money supply, the massive increase in national debt, not holding Congress to its responsibilities for oversight of the financial industry, waging war against other nations to further "American interests," using fear-mongering to advance government control and invasion of our privacy on a massive scale, or promising far more than it can deliver.

So while I don't disagree that Bush has not been a stellar leader of our nation, I just want to point out that for what it's worth, We the People have allowed our leaders to pull this c*r*a*p on us for many, many decades. We have not found an effective way -- the political voice -- to "throw the bums out."

Americans are afraid to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" -- even though there's ample evidence that the "baby" is going to grow up and kill us all. I think Americans are afraid to $hit-can all their leaders, because "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't."

People reading and writing about this stuff within the various Internet communities are not the problem. We've got to help the rest of the 98% of Americans "grow a pair" and not be afraid to effectively excise the heart and soul of our biggest problem -- our non-leaders -- our endemic and all-pervasive lack of ethical leadership in the executive and legislative branches.

We need to encourage new leaders, ethical leaders, to step forward.

Support Ron Paul. Get him "written in" at the Republican convention. Throw out every incumbent, every time. Destroy the "continuity of corruption."