Way back when, somewhere early on in the first W. term, our President launched a feel-good effort called "The Ownership Society". It was to be his big domestic legacy. His administration would promote home ownership among all Americans. Even those who had never been able to afford a home before! It seemed like a good idea on paper...
Regulating agencies saw their staff and budgets cut way back. Leniency was the word and a favorable wind blew from Washington to support the nifty but incomprehensible and intractable financial manipulations that promoted sub-prime mortgages, and their sales into securities, and these sales into other securities, and loans, and packages, and more etc. etc.
Of course, the chickens have come home to roost, and will live with us for quite some time. So pardon me while I pull a McCain and suspend my disbelief for a moment. We're all owners of everything now. We will own everyone's mortgages. We will own their insurance, too. Soon we will own the nation's banks. And your credit cards. Next will be everyone's automobiles. Further down the list: spring strawberries, cable TV, and mexican food. If we can finally own the Chicago White Sox, maybe it will be worthwhile...
An earlier post mentioned the mid-80's predictions of economist Pete Peterson. Yesterday, there appeared an article by the great sage Kevin Phillips. A fascinating guy, Phillips was responsible for Nixon's Southern Strategy. He wrote a book called "The Emerging Republican Majority" in 1969; it accurately foretold the red-blue state dynamic of today, and the Reagan Revolution.
Kevin Phillips (political commentator) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He's been bashing Bush and the modern Republican Party for a while now. Since 2002, he's said that W. is the worst thing that could happen to our nation. Right again. It's tough to be right so often. Anyway, like Pete Peterson, he's been warning us about the shift of our economy - from manufacturing to financial services and its Debt/Credit. Here is as succinct a rendering of our dilemma and its causes and consequences as any I've read:
Kevin Phillips: The Bungled Bailout (Or the Perils of Paulson)
The disease has metastasized. It spread throughout our national economy's corpus, and has been transmitted throughout the global economy corpus. And now the symptoms have manifested.
And now for some levity: here is a video taken in the parking lot of the Strongsville, Ohio campaign rally of McCain and Palin a couple of days ago. The auteur is clearly partisan and provocative and probably should have had his nose poked... but the footage yields some great moments of H.L. Mencken's "Booboisie":
YouTube - The McCain-Palin Mob
And the Quote of the Day:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H. L. Mencken
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