DEMONSTRATIONS AND SHOES GREET HILLARY IN INDONESIA

It's 3:00 am and your friendly neighborhood Hippie can not sleep. Maybe it's the stress of following all that goes on in this world , but occasionally I find myself wide awake in the middle of the night scanning through the news channels brought to me by my satellite dish. While flipping threw the stations, I caught the very end of a story on Hillary Clinton's trip to Obama's boyhood home of Jakarta, Indonesia. Like most people, I haven't paid much attention to Hill's trip because it was assumed that it would be a friendly venue. After all, it's Barack's boyhood home and the people over there celebrated Obama's victory as much as the American Democrats did. Surely this would be just a lovefest.

But that wasn't the case.

Much to my surprise, there were demonstrations and a small riot. I was blown away. Then they showed a group of people pelting a effigy of Hillary with shoes. Not just one or two, but a cache of shoes that would make Emelda Marcos proud. I sat up and my jaw dropped, "Wow, the press is going to have a field day with this!" I thought to myself. quickly I scanned the other networks. Nothing, nothing, and nothing. "Well," I thought, "Tomorrow I'll catch up on all the details."

The next morning I went to work trying to find out why they were throwing shoes at President Obama's Secretary of State. Through the Web I surfed, to no avail. "What the Hell?" I began to ponder. I couldn't find anything anywhere. Finally, I found a story out of Jakarta itself. With the help of Babelfish (a great site for translating and one of my little tricks) I managed to find the story. I wasn't dreaming, they really were throwing shoes! A little more work and I unearthed a story out of Canada on it but still no major network out of the U.S.. Now a couple of questions occurred. If it was such a big story when G.W. Bush had two shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi Journalist, why is it a non-story when Hillary has demonstrations and a cache of shoes thrown at her effigy in a country that is supposed to be a friendly venue? And why were they throwing shoes at her effigy, (supposedly a huge insult in Muslim countries)?

The first question is easy. Our media has been on a day and night quest to destroy G.W. for at least the past 6 years. Not that he didn't help them by being one of the worst Presidents in history. They used the shoethrowing occasion to further slander Bush in a way that only the Left-bias media can. Hillary on the other hand, is the left's female martyr and they are not going to say one negative thing about her unless forced to. But why did the demonstrators hurl the shoes? I have to thank my friend Andre for the answer. Andre reminded me that the U.S. press, while doing Hillary's dirtywork, had released a photo of Barack in Kenya dressed in Muslim regalia. Another story had also been leaked about his attending a Madrassa (school) in Indonesia as a child. Hillary had tried to make the connection between Barack's Muslim ties in Indonesia with his being a closet Muslim. Which she made sound like a very bad thing. For the law-abiding, peaceful Muslims in Indonesia, this must have been quite an insult.

For all of my readers; This is a good example of the kind of bias our media demonstrates nearly every day. I though this would be a great time for all of you to ask yourself a question that you should be asking yourself a lot. Why are some stories huge while others are ignored? Is my media fair? The real lesson here is that even if your one of the few people who has a broad range of media outlets, you never have enough. H.C.

W.W.R.D.

Right-wing conservative talk show hosts like Laura Ingraham and Shawn Hannity have a bad habit of referring to President Obama as "The Messiah". It's a tongue-in-cheek reference to how Liberals believe Barack to be their savior. Then, usually in the same segment, they will make a reference to "What Would Reagan Do?" ala the popular Christian phrase "What Would Jesus Do?". I guess the message is it's O.K. to associate Jesus with a Republican, but not a Democrat. So, since the Reps believe their Messiah has all the answers, I thought it might be worth our time to look into "What Reagan Would Do?"

According to the Messiah Reagan, the quickest route out of our financial mess is tax cuts for the wealthy, lower prime interest rates and less regulation on Big Business. Apparently, all we have to do is allow Wall Street to create even more false assets and financial bubbles and POOF! all our troubles will be over. This is a tried and true solution in their eyes. Obama's consumer-sided economics therefore seems to them to be doomed to failure.

I have a slightly different take.

First of all, I believe that economic downturns are cyclic in nature and will turn around pretty much by themselves. The Republicans have simply been taking credit for something that would have happened anyway. It's human nature to overspend when we believe times are good (because we believe they will never end), and to panic and shed all our luxuries when times are bad. This is also true in the corporate world. Most successful corporations believe that they will continue to prosper and therefore spends more than they should, hires more than they should and expands more than they should. When times are hard, they withdraw to survive. They shed those extra employees, cut back on those luxuries, stop that planned expansion and become a leaner running machine. The leaner machine makes less profit, but it needs less money to make that profit. Soon the profit is enough to take back some of the luxuries and the process starts over.

Now, I know I've been a tad negative about our economy lately. And for damn good reason. However, there are some silver-linings to consider. Since the last major recession was in the waning years of Jimmy Carter and supposedly cured by the Holy Ronald Reagan in the early 1980's, I thought it would do us some good to look back and see if there were any lessons to be learned.

The recession of the late 1970's to early '80's was the worst times I have ever personally seen in our economy. When it started I was a young carpenter who was making a good wage and on the path to becoming a full-fledged union journeyman carpenter. Journeyman carpenters made big bucks, lived in big houses and usually ended up being well-off contractors who sat on their fat-asses barking out commands to little wannabes like me. I hoped to end up one of them. Within two years of Jimmy Carter taking office, I had lost my job and was working at Burger King. By the end off Jimmy's term, I was on welfare. Carter's price controls, inflation controls and his attempts to control lending through the Federal Reserve lead to stagflation, a deadly combination of rising unemployment, interest rates and inflation. At the climax of this recession in 1982, inflation was at 13.5%, unemployment was at 10.8% and the prime interest rate was at 21%. Compare these numbers to our current numbers of; prime rate=0% to .25%, inflation for 2008=3.85% and unemployment at 7.6%. It's pretty easy to see that things aren't nearly as bad.

So let's look at the Reagan solutions and see if they can be effectively applied.

First off, there is nothing we can do to the prime interest rate to help. The rate set by the Feds for lending money to banks and other lending institutions is at an all-time low and short of paying institutions to take our money, there's nothing left to do. This is especially disturbing since controlling the prime interest rate is one of the major tools we have used effectively to lessen the impact of past recessions. Secondly, I doubt there is a single person of any consequence in the U.S. ballsy enough to say at this moment in history that we need less regulation when it's the dismantling of regulation that got us into this mess to begin with. This is a prime example of one of my two chief complaints about our two main political parties. Democrats trust despots and dictators too much and Republicans trust CEO's and Wall Street too much. Thirdly, Tax cuts. On this one I'll agree with the WWRD crowd. Putting money back in the pockets of the people is the surest way to stimulate the economy. However, I think it's time we tried middle class tax cuts instead of upper class tax cuts. President Obama has the right idea but he didn't put enough bite in it. In his effort to be exactly the kind of Democrat that drove me out of the party the first time, Barack and his fellow Dems have loaded the Stimulus Package with all kinds of Progressive Ideology and hand-outs to the poorest among us. Morally, I have no problem, but this is handing money to charity and ideology while your in danger of losing your house. To be effective, this Stimulus needed bigger tax cuts than the predicted $8 a week. Green technology subsidies, hand-outs to States, funding for liberal causes, and all kinds of throw-ins have reduced the effectiveness of the tax cuts to almost nill.

In short, take heart, people. I believe that the economy will turn around even if we did nothing. The question is how long and how bad. Some of the ideas that Barack has thrown out there have some merit. I'm very happy that it looks like any additional handouts to the financial institutions have come to an end. Obama's right to direct his attention to the core problem of house valuation and foreclosure although I promise a scorching article if he follows through with his plan to bail out those in default on the backs of those who made sound and rational financial decisions. Rewarding bad behavior is wrong on Wall Street and wrong on Main Street. In the end I have to admit I'm not sure if any of these stimulus packages are going to do any good, but you can rest assured both sides will try to take the credit when the turnaround comes. As for "What Would Reagan Do?", after realizing two of his main tactics for saving an economy are shot, I'm guessing he would scream "Tax Cuts!" but probably not for you and me. H.C.

HOUSE OF CARDS

O.K. I'm scared. It's not that I scare all that easy. I've been at the wrong end of a gun more than once and I've had to use my own guns to fend off criminals twice in my life. I've been beaten up by several people at one time. I've watched people die. I've seen childbirth three times (more scary than being at the end of a gun.) and I've seen my share of hard times. But I've never seen anything that scared me as much as what I've been witnessing over this past year.

What's got me so spooked is watching my government, a government that pledges itself to be "by the people, for the people" abandon it's creed for greed and ideology.

It started with something I saw once before in the late 1980's during the S&L Scandal. Corporate greed and corruption run amok. With the destruction of safeguards designed to protect the people, thieving bastards sold worthless bonds to unsuspecting victims. My government, the people we entrusted to protect us from the powerful, sold out it's virtues to the highest bidder. The end result was 160 billion dollars funneled off to a few shady insiders. The main villain was a man named Charles Keating, and he, by himself, stole nearly a billion. But Keating was a smart man, he didn't keep all of it to himself. He spread it around to groups and people like the Christian Coalition, the Vatican, and even Mother Teresa. With the help of other powerful people with the same ideology, he managed to keep a healthy part of his theivery and only do a paltry 16 months in jail.The punishment was weak and the rewards were too great. I assumed the American people would never allow this to happen again.

I was wrong.

The mistake we made is that we didn't get to the root cause. The overwhelming influence of money on politics. Sure, there were token attempts like the recent McCain/Feingold Campaign Finance Reform. Unfortunately, it only tried to limit the effectiveness of grassroots organizations like the NRA and the Service Employees International Union but left the door open to Corporate money bundlers and 527 organizations who's agendas are their own ideological or monetary gain. The fact that McCain/Feingold failed to restrict their influence is in the record amounts being raised.

With this path laid out for huge sums of money to be funneled into the hands of Congress, corporations and advocacy groups struck a deal. Deregulation in return for access to money for people who couldn't afford the loans. Shady loans were given out, then bundled and sold. Refinancing created a stream of money to people who believed the value of their house was skyrocketing. New cars were bought along with laptops, cellphones, x-boxes and every luxury a person could think of. Even people who were in "poverty" drove new lease cars and owned computers. Local governments played along and over valued the houses in return for higher property taxes. Mortgage companies sold and resold the risky loans for a quick buck with no concern for tomorrow. The stockholders raked in the record profits. CEO's wrote themselves fat contracts with golden parachutes and since everyone was gaining, no one cared.

But it was a house of cards. We spent tomorrow's money today and soon it became tomorrow, so we borrowed and borrowed until paying it back became unlikely, if not impossible. And the bubble burst.

Now, we find ourselves in our day of reckoning. And the answer is not taking our medicine for our indiscretions, or paying down our debt. The answer it seems, is to borrow even more. Trillions more. This time from our children's future. The companies who acted the most irresponsible are using their money strings on our puppet politicians to get more and more money on our future's credit card. We reward the bad actors while ignoring the less powerful responsible actors. We assure that the companies who are "to big to fail" survive even as they cut their payrolls, go on junkets, and flat out run off with the cash. Small companies who can't afford the lobbyists die, guaranteeing the big companies will be even bigger and harder to let fail. Unemployment grows and with it the dreams of the average person is destroyed to assure the future of the people who created this atrocity to begin with. Our politicians, fat on greed and their own ideology, can't seem to resist spending on pet projects even in the face of a Depression. The working class has been forsaken. Like a giant game of Monopoly, the end is near and the average guy can't stop landing on someone else's property. A vicious cycle has started. We bailout the select few while the rest lay off people. The more people lose their jobs, the less they have to spend. The less they spend, the worse companies do. The worse they do, the more they pump lobbyist money into politicians for more bailouts. The more we bail them out the further we go into debt and the dimmer the future is for everyone except the big companies, lobbyists and politicians.

Yes, my friends. I'm scared. H.C.