Economic Mess

I don’t usually get excited about politics, but the current economic mess and who is responsible, has me excited. The natural assumption is that George caused this mess as it came to a boil under his watch. That is blame easily transferred to McCain, as he is Republican. Presto! He trails by a whopping margin in the last month since this all boiled over.

My problem is that this all started many years ago as a basically good idea: How do we get the banks to lend to poor people and minorities so more people can have the American Dream…..their own house. Kind of like Habitat for Humanity, but with a different tactic and for a larger group. At that time, banks had semi-secret maps with red lines drawn around neighborhoods where they would not lend inside the lines. It was called “redlining”. It was discrimination, pure and simple.

The democrats, to their credit, under Carter and later, Clinton crafted legislation that seemed to allow for this to happen. The Community Re-investment Act was born (we used this to “convince” our local bank to lend money to the Civic Center, then guess what happened? The bank lost about $500,000). What started as a benevolent, philanthropic idea, got perverted into a disaster by greedy bankers who learned that the government would guarantee risky loans at high interest rates, thus making them huge profits. This was never the intention of the democrats, I believe they were high-minded (although the idea of affordable housing for the masses sounds a little liberal to me). Where their fault comes is when alarm bells started to sound, their knee-jerk reaction was to suspect the republicans of trying to wreck their program and keep the poor in the housing projects. They dug in their heels and suspected, then fought any republican effort to regulate the abuses……a natural partisan stance. They pooh-poohed any real problem with the system.


Trouble is, they were wrong. By this time, unfortunately, those becoming rich saw the danger and began lobbying (bribing) those in power. That would be mostly democrats. Here is where the darkness starts. The democrats fought attempted regulation, ironically from the Bush administration several times, and successfully. Millions of dollars changed hands under the table. And now we have this mess.


I feel it is wrong to hang this on Bush, and also McCain. Nancy Pelosi, in her recently famous speech to congress seen repeatedly by millions of voters claimed the blame was “on * years of the failed economic policies of the Bush administration”. I think that is totally bogus bullshit, but it will unfortunately probably turn this election into the lap of the people responsible for the mess. How tragically ironic!

Uncle Hans