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.