Back in November, Mr. Philip J. Berg, a real live “Philadelphia Lawyer”, filed a federal court case against President-elect Barrack Obama, in which he claims that Mr. Obama is not a natural born American citizen, and thus is not eligible to become the President of these United States according to the requirements of Article II Section 1 of our Constitution. Mr. Berg claims that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya, and is thus a Kenyan citizen. He further states that Mr. Obama is the adopted son of an Indonesian citizen, and thus is a citizen of Indonesia. Since Mr. Berg’s writ was filed, numerous other lawsuits (something like forty-four at last count) making similar claims have been filed hither and yon across the land, making this a rather confusing legal issue at best! While the circumstances of Mr. Obama’s parentage, birth, and childhood are somewhat unusual, they really wouldn’t cause so much as a raised eyebrow in this country today, much less become a case to be brought before the Supreme Court. However, the fact that Mr. Obama has been selected to become the next President of the United States raises this case to what I think would be national news headline status. Then too, given the vitriol of the recent campaign, and the apparent political division in this country, this entire legal mess really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
The case arose when democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama was asked to provide a certified copy of his birth certificate, which would be legal proof that he was indeed born in this country, and thus eligible to be elected president. Mr. Obama’s father was a Kenyan citizen and an official of the Kenyan government, with the family living in Kenya. It’s claimed that his mother traveled to Hawaii to be near her parents when he was born, and so that he would be born an American citizen. Here’s where things start getting sticky. The Obama political organization provided only a “Certificate of Live Birth” issued by the state of Hawaii. Under the laws of Hawaii in effect from 1911 until 1972, a person born overseas could be given a “Certificate of live birth”. I understand it’s quite common for children, and in some cases adults, to have had such a certificate issued them even though they were not born in Hawaii. The certificate however is a far cry from being a legal birth certificate. Effectively it gives the name and race of both parents, the child’s name and birth date, it names wherever he says he was born, and little else. It does not give the name of the hospital nor the name of the attending physician or any other evidence, so about all it really does is state that “Yeah, the guy was born… someplace or other”. Apparently Mr. Obama’s aides don’t have their facts straight either, as they say he was born in two separate Hawaiian hospitals, either Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children, and/or Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, and nobody seems to know the name of the Doctor. Some document experts also claim that the certificate of live birth was altered, and that it was actually issued in the name of his half-sister. Adding to the problem is the fact that Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, Sarah Obama, during a taped interview at her home in Kenya, attested that "Barack, Jr. was born in Mombosa, Kenya and I was present during his birth." Reverend Kweli Shuhubia further attests that "Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., the United States Presidential candidate, was born in Mombosa Kenya". "Kenyan Officials with the Provincial Civil Registrar stated there were records of Ann Dunham giving birth to Barack Hussein Obama in Mombosa , Kenya on August 4, 1961." Making the issue even more convoluted are the arguments brought by one Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, New Jersey, who filed a case with the New Jersey Supreme Court claiming that Barrack Jr. is a British citizen, based on the idea that Barack Obama's father was a citizen of Kenya and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of Obama's birth, which would make Barack Jr. a British Citizen by birth, even if he had been born in the United States! Continuing with this exciting tale and confusing the issue even more, Barack Obama Jr.'s mother, Ann Dunham, divorced Barack Obama Sr. in 1963 when Barack Jr. was two years old. Some time later she moved to Indonesia where she married an Indonesian citizen, one Lolo Soetoro, who acknowledged Barack H. Obama, Jr. as his son by adopting him. Barack attended school in Indonesia where his first grade school records state that his name is (or was) Barry Soetoro, and his citizenship Indonesian!
So, the questions demanding answers are, where was Barack H. Obama Jr. born? And is Barack Obama, Jr. a/k/a Barry Soetoro a natural born American citizen, an Indonesian Citizen, a citizen of Kenya, or is he a British subject? For that matter what is his legal name?
Following all this, if it is determined that Barack Obama is not legally qualified to be our president, what happens next? Obviously George Bush can’t continue on in the White house, so does Joe Biden move into the job? Do we have another (probably somewhat rushed) election? Or does the DNC just “appoint” someone to the office? Will congress attempt to amend the Constitution to allow someone born in a foreign land becoming president? (I’ll bet Arnie Schwarzenegger would just love that idea!)
The election may be over, but certainly not the controversy. It seems that the Obama camp is trying their best to ignore the whole thing, or loudly denying that there is anything amiss, while the Hillary fans are probably waiting with baited breath. Those of us trying to ride the fence are watching with a raised eyebrow and waiting for the Supreme Court to do something. The radical right on the other hand is quite upset with what on the surface appears to be a clear violation of the provisions of our constitution. And of course our “fair and unbiased” national news media isn’t making any headlines of a story that might sully the spotless reputation of the anointed one.
Whenever there are controversial political issues, stories and rumors (either true or false) abound. There have been so many issues raised over the years that it’s hard to determine who or what to believe anymore, and this case is certainly no exception. For the time being the charges against Barack Obama have been brought before the highest court in our nation. Now the court is supposed to be deciding whether or not to even hear the case. They certainly should hear it I’d think, as the Supreme Court does have the responsibility to enforce the provisions of the U. S. Constitution, so who better to look at the evidence and determine what is true and what is not? If for some reason the court declines to hear the case and sweeps it under the rug, we will once again be awash in accusations and conspiracy theories. No matter how effective or ineffective the incoming administration proves to be, they’ll be left laboring under a dark cloud of disbelief and suspicion.
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of the 2008 American Presidential Soap Opera!
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Robin Hood
It does not follow that because there are some souls timorous enough to doubt the validity and effectiveness of our ideals and our system, that we must turn to a state controlled or state directed social or economic system in order to cure our troubles.
Herbert Hoover
In popular culture Robin Hood and his band are usually seen as happy highwaymen living a life of leisure in Merrie Olde England’s Sherwood Forest, enjoying the fruits of the land with the assistance of the poor downtrodden serfs, and all the while quite happily driving the gruesome twosome (the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John that is), completely nuts! Robin Hood is best known to our modern era of TV and Hollywood movies for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor”… sort of a tax collector in reverse I guess. Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late-12th century British King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's evil brother while the king, returning home from bashing heads at the Third Crusade, was taken captive by the French King and held for ransom. As I remember the story, Prince John and the Sheriff were happily taxing the ever loving daylights out of the population, to pay ransom to the French and hopefully get King Richard back in one piece, or so the story went. Things are sort of foggy as to whether they really wanted the King back or not. I’m quite sure that the gentle reader will make the tenuous connection between mythology and the present day. We to are burdened with outrageously high taxes, along with an unpopular and seemingly unending crusade in the mid-east, while our whole nation seems to be held for ransom by foreign creditors. So, with that I will ask the obvious question… Where is our modern day Robin Hood when we need him?
Taking a leaf from Robin’s book, Franklin D. Roosevelt “defeated” the 1929 economic slump by doing much the same thing, stealing from… err… (Oh Yeah, that’s it, taxing!) Taxing the rich and giving to the poor, thus managing to turn a long and painful recession into a major depression that took nearly ten years and a world war to end. But he did get himself re-elected three more times while “saving us” from the hard times. Today we have President-elect Obama preaching a somewhat similar agenda, that of taxing the rich so that the nation’s wealth can be “redistributed” among the poor and underprivileged. Will it work? Well, we shall see I guess… Roosevelt’s idea was to tax the rich folks and use the money to pay for any number of work projects all around the country, and we did get the Golden Gate Bridge as well as some flood control and hydroelectric dams to show for it. (We also got the TVA which we’re still stuck with.) But most of the work projects were “busy work” that served no real purpose other than to give the impression that folks were working for their paycheck rather than merely being handed a welfare check. (Back in those days, most folks still had some pride.) I don’t know how Obama plans to distribute the redistributed loot today, other than perhaps adding it to the welfare checks.
Nearly every scheme history has cooked up to redistribute the wealth that I’ve ever heard of has ended in failure… often times disastrously so. Mexico, Central America, and some up-and-coming parts of South America used to be owned by a small group of ultra rich families that ran things. Everybody else either worked for those families or pretty well went hungry. Along came a few social reformers who insisted that the system was designed to take care of the rich folks at the expense of the peons (it was), and that it was time to throw a revolution, kick out the Patrons, break up the Estancias, and let everybody in the country own their little piece of land! Viola! Instant civil unrest, major revolutions, and a whole lot of death and destruction. Today most of those countries form a big part of the Third World, are struggling to survive, begging the World Bank for billion dollar loans, and strangely enough are still owned by those ultra rich families. “OH!” the reformer shout, “But the people own the land now! They’re not peons anymore! The wealth was redistributed!” Yup, now they’re landowners well enough, struggling to feed a family on the produce of an acre or so of second rate dirt, paying a crushing tax load imposed by some pretty shady governments, and of course are still supporting the Patrone’s. I seriously question if they’re any better off now than they were, considering just how many of them are busy slipping through our rather leaky southern border each day!
What’s all that got to do with the United States? Well, how much of our nations wealth is controlled by a few somewhat reclusive families in this country? According to a report released by the US Government a couple of years ago, 35% of America’s wealth is controlled by just 1% of our population. They owed 70 percent of bonds, 51 percent of stocks and 62.3 percent of business assets in the country. After the richest one percent, the government found that the next richest nine percent of U.S. families held another 36.1 percent of the countries net worth in 2004, while families in the upper 50 to 90% held only 27.9 percent of our total worth. I gather from all the campaign rhetoric that these are the people whose wealth is supposed to be redistributed by the incoming regime. Somehow I rather doubt it will happen that way. Face it, these folks have been playing “catch me if you can” with the tax collector for generations, they know most of the tricks, and they aren’t going to pay any more than they have to! Nor do I blame then one bit, considering that they’re already paying the lion’s share of the nations annual tax load! By the way, that leading one percent… Those are the folks that pretty well own or control the big banks the taxpayers are currently bailing out.
But now we have our own social reformers shouting “CHANGE”, or so we hear on the evening news, and from the looks of things we’re certainly going to have that! We still have an unpopular war going on in the mid-east, our economy is deep in a meltdown mode, we’re another trillion or so dollars deeper in debt, and despite the temporary lull, petroleum prices are forecast to go through the roof in the not to distant future. Our nations “middle-class” is rapidly going broke, while our poorer folks are rapidly reaching the homeless stage. Our politically correct educational system is more or less useless, and our morality is nearly nonexistent, to the glee of Hollywood, drug dealers, and the ACLU. It’s not all caused by the democrats or republicans either, but rather by the steady, “big government” induced erosion of the thrifty American work ethic we’ve seen ever since socialism got its foot in the door back in 1933. Now we’re going to try even more socialism, to “correct” all the problems… that socialism started in the first place! We don’t need change nearly as much as we need a few words of advice from our nation’s founders, and strangely enough those so badly needed words can be found in our nation’s constitution, and not in the collected works of Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.
Herbert Hoover
In popular culture Robin Hood and his band are usually seen as happy highwaymen living a life of leisure in Merrie Olde England’s Sherwood Forest, enjoying the fruits of the land with the assistance of the poor downtrodden serfs, and all the while quite happily driving the gruesome twosome (the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John that is), completely nuts! Robin Hood is best known to our modern era of TV and Hollywood movies for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor”… sort of a tax collector in reverse I guess. Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late-12th century British King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's evil brother while the king, returning home from bashing heads at the Third Crusade, was taken captive by the French King and held for ransom. As I remember the story, Prince John and the Sheriff were happily taxing the ever loving daylights out of the population, to pay ransom to the French and hopefully get King Richard back in one piece, or so the story went. Things are sort of foggy as to whether they really wanted the King back or not. I’m quite sure that the gentle reader will make the tenuous connection between mythology and the present day. We to are burdened with outrageously high taxes, along with an unpopular and seemingly unending crusade in the mid-east, while our whole nation seems to be held for ransom by foreign creditors. So, with that I will ask the obvious question… Where is our modern day Robin Hood when we need him?
Taking a leaf from Robin’s book, Franklin D. Roosevelt “defeated” the 1929 economic slump by doing much the same thing, stealing from… err… (Oh Yeah, that’s it, taxing!) Taxing the rich and giving to the poor, thus managing to turn a long and painful recession into a major depression that took nearly ten years and a world war to end. But he did get himself re-elected three more times while “saving us” from the hard times. Today we have President-elect Obama preaching a somewhat similar agenda, that of taxing the rich so that the nation’s wealth can be “redistributed” among the poor and underprivileged. Will it work? Well, we shall see I guess… Roosevelt’s idea was to tax the rich folks and use the money to pay for any number of work projects all around the country, and we did get the Golden Gate Bridge as well as some flood control and hydroelectric dams to show for it. (We also got the TVA which we’re still stuck with.) But most of the work projects were “busy work” that served no real purpose other than to give the impression that folks were working for their paycheck rather than merely being handed a welfare check. (Back in those days, most folks still had some pride.) I don’t know how Obama plans to distribute the redistributed loot today, other than perhaps adding it to the welfare checks.
Nearly every scheme history has cooked up to redistribute the wealth that I’ve ever heard of has ended in failure… often times disastrously so. Mexico, Central America, and some up-and-coming parts of South America used to be owned by a small group of ultra rich families that ran things. Everybody else either worked for those families or pretty well went hungry. Along came a few social reformers who insisted that the system was designed to take care of the rich folks at the expense of the peons (it was), and that it was time to throw a revolution, kick out the Patrons, break up the Estancias, and let everybody in the country own their little piece of land! Viola! Instant civil unrest, major revolutions, and a whole lot of death and destruction. Today most of those countries form a big part of the Third World, are struggling to survive, begging the World Bank for billion dollar loans, and strangely enough are still owned by those ultra rich families. “OH!” the reformer shout, “But the people own the land now! They’re not peons anymore! The wealth was redistributed!” Yup, now they’re landowners well enough, struggling to feed a family on the produce of an acre or so of second rate dirt, paying a crushing tax load imposed by some pretty shady governments, and of course are still supporting the Patrone’s. I seriously question if they’re any better off now than they were, considering just how many of them are busy slipping through our rather leaky southern border each day!
What’s all that got to do with the United States? Well, how much of our nations wealth is controlled by a few somewhat reclusive families in this country? According to a report released by the US Government a couple of years ago, 35% of America’s wealth is controlled by just 1% of our population. They owed 70 percent of bonds, 51 percent of stocks and 62.3 percent of business assets in the country. After the richest one percent, the government found that the next richest nine percent of U.S. families held another 36.1 percent of the countries net worth in 2004, while families in the upper 50 to 90% held only 27.9 percent of our total worth. I gather from all the campaign rhetoric that these are the people whose wealth is supposed to be redistributed by the incoming regime. Somehow I rather doubt it will happen that way. Face it, these folks have been playing “catch me if you can” with the tax collector for generations, they know most of the tricks, and they aren’t going to pay any more than they have to! Nor do I blame then one bit, considering that they’re already paying the lion’s share of the nations annual tax load! By the way, that leading one percent… Those are the folks that pretty well own or control the big banks the taxpayers are currently bailing out.
But now we have our own social reformers shouting “CHANGE”, or so we hear on the evening news, and from the looks of things we’re certainly going to have that! We still have an unpopular war going on in the mid-east, our economy is deep in a meltdown mode, we’re another trillion or so dollars deeper in debt, and despite the temporary lull, petroleum prices are forecast to go through the roof in the not to distant future. Our nations “middle-class” is rapidly going broke, while our poorer folks are rapidly reaching the homeless stage. Our politically correct educational system is more or less useless, and our morality is nearly nonexistent, to the glee of Hollywood, drug dealers, and the ACLU. It’s not all caused by the democrats or republicans either, but rather by the steady, “big government” induced erosion of the thrifty American work ethic we’ve seen ever since socialism got its foot in the door back in 1933. Now we’re going to try even more socialism, to “correct” all the problems… that socialism started in the first place! We don’t need change nearly as much as we need a few words of advice from our nation’s founders, and strangely enough those so badly needed words can be found in our nation’s constitution, and not in the collected works of Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Bailout
Somebody at Sodom-on-the-Potomac has lost their pea-picking mind! Or perhaps I should say a whole lot of somebody’s have lost their collective minds! Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash of JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, (being certain to inform us that we could hold a garage sale of the junk). According to their website, JP Morgan Chase has assets of $2.3 trillion, and as of December 1st will pay a dividend of 8.625% ($239.58) per share of preferred stock! Now I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know very much about investment banking, but that hardly seems “nearly broke” or bankrupt to me! When I checked, the Goldman Sachs website didn’t say anything about current dividends, but with a few billion dollars in assets they don’t seem broke either! Interestingly enough, Paulson was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs just two years ago, and now as Secretary of the Treasury he wants to bail his old crony’s out of an apparently embarrassing situation.
When the subject of the investment banking bailout was first brought up, congressional conservatives rebelled. They acted as the American people demanded (at a ratio of about a hundred to one) and promptly killed the Wall Street bailout. With that, the Dow sank another 1,000 points. Then, charged with “irresponsibility” by the Wall Street elites, the GOP backed down, reversed themselves, and rescued the bailout plan. The Republican rank and file were left seething, most of the countries Democrats were understandably upset, and a lot of GOP candidates were pretty well wiped out on Nov. 4. That’s the first time I ever heard of anyone committing voluntary political suicide just to save their rich buddies from loosing a few bucks! Now we hear from Mr. Paulson that the $700 billion bailout will not be used to buy all that bad paper. Instead, some banks are using their cut of the loot to buy other banks! The American voters are quite right to be upset as we’re victims of what is probably the biggest bait-and-switch scam in political history!
Now we have yet another bailout situation playing in the aisles of Congress. The “Big Three” automakers are presently asking for something like twenty-five billion dollars in bailout funds as well, over and above the $700 billion banking bailout and the $300 and something billion in pork barrel bribes already promised. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Congress is turning a more or less cold shoulder to the pleas of Detroit. 55 percent of Americans favor federal loans to save the auto industry, 64 percent back President-elect Obama's resolve not to let the U.S. auto industry go under, 78 percent believe the U.S. auto industry is highly or extremely important, and 90 percent of Americans believe the death of the U.S. auto industry would do great damage to our economic future. So now the GOP is playing cute with this potential economic disaster! If they block these loans and the industry dies, they can forget about Ohio, Michigan and the industrial Midwest in the next election!
We bailed out the New York and D.C. city governments. We bailed out Mexico. We bailed out public schools that have been failing us for 40 years. We bailed out (thru the IMF and World Bank) assorted Third World regimes. We bail out Wall Street elites and big banks. But now the GOP “questions” the value of saving the US auto industry, the showpiece of American industrial capability and the envy of the world?! If we consider all the workers, execs, engineers, dealers, salesmen and suppliers, the Big Three employ 3 million people who contribute $21 billion a year to Social Security and Medicare, and another $25 billion in federal income taxes. Include all the nations businesses that are auto industry dependant, and we’re talking about one-tenth of the U.S. labor force (roughly another 20 million people), potentially out of work. There are another 850,000 retirees and their families depending on pensions and health care plans from the Big Three. We’re already in the ballpark of having 7 to 8 percent of our working population unemployed, and if those three companies go under we could expect to see nearly twenty percent of our nation’s workers unemployed. The monetary burden of that would fall on our shoulders, and our already strained pocketbooks. It’s not a pretty picture.
Harvard economics Professor Martin Feldstein says that bankruptcy might be needed for GM to get out of its present union contracts and become more competitive. Making U.S. automakers competitive again “is going to require restructuring the wages and benefits they pay to auto workers,” he claims, “Whether that happens in bankruptcy or it’s done in another managed program, that has to happen.” Understandable I think, but I can just imagine what the United Auto Workers will have to say about that! For years, wages (and prices) have skyrocketed in this country or so it seems, and union demands have borne the brunt of the blame for that problem. But are we being fair in blaming the unions? Obviously American workers want the best deal they can get, and can hardly be faulted for that. Of course if they get a pay raise it will be passed along to the consumer in the form of increased prices, and John Q. Consumer, not getting a comparable pay raise, can be expected to be just a bit upset with the union. But don’t overlook executives’ paychecks and perks, the middleman, and the salesman’s commission either. Jumping into all this is government who promptly increased the income tax on the workers wages and the sales tax on the product as well.
A recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months. A sustained recession may become a “depression” which is defined as a period of diminished economic output with at least one year where output is 20% below the trend. An economic collapse is a devastating breakdown of a national, regional, or territorial economy, and is essentially a severe depression often quickly followed by months, years, or even decades of depression, social breakdown and civil unrest. That’s what happened to the USSR in 1990. Recessions and depressions fall soonest (and hardest) on rural areas where farming, mining, and logging are the primary occupations. By the time a collapse occures the ruralites really aren’t effected very much, as they’re already destitute. (Sound familiar?) Proponents of letting the Big Three go bankrupt are using the line "If our guys can't hack it, let 'em go." They are prepared to write America off as a major industrial nation, allowing globalization to make us little more than a consumer of Asian industrial products, mid-eastern oil, and probably South American agricultural products. Of course they don’t mention how we’re going to pay for those products we’re supposed to consume, particularly if Americans are out of work. By that time we wouldn’t even qualify as a forth world country, and Americans would be immigrating to Africa in the hopes of finding a better life!
Talk about redistributing the wealth!
When the subject of the investment banking bailout was first brought up, congressional conservatives rebelled. They acted as the American people demanded (at a ratio of about a hundred to one) and promptly killed the Wall Street bailout. With that, the Dow sank another 1,000 points. Then, charged with “irresponsibility” by the Wall Street elites, the GOP backed down, reversed themselves, and rescued the bailout plan. The Republican rank and file were left seething, most of the countries Democrats were understandably upset, and a lot of GOP candidates were pretty well wiped out on Nov. 4. That’s the first time I ever heard of anyone committing voluntary political suicide just to save their rich buddies from loosing a few bucks! Now we hear from Mr. Paulson that the $700 billion bailout will not be used to buy all that bad paper. Instead, some banks are using their cut of the loot to buy other banks! The American voters are quite right to be upset as we’re victims of what is probably the biggest bait-and-switch scam in political history!
Now we have yet another bailout situation playing in the aisles of Congress. The “Big Three” automakers are presently asking for something like twenty-five billion dollars in bailout funds as well, over and above the $700 billion banking bailout and the $300 and something billion in pork barrel bribes already promised. With GM, Ford, and Chrysler teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, Congress is turning a more or less cold shoulder to the pleas of Detroit. 55 percent of Americans favor federal loans to save the auto industry, 64 percent back President-elect Obama's resolve not to let the U.S. auto industry go under, 78 percent believe the U.S. auto industry is highly or extremely important, and 90 percent of Americans believe the death of the U.S. auto industry would do great damage to our economic future. So now the GOP is playing cute with this potential economic disaster! If they block these loans and the industry dies, they can forget about Ohio, Michigan and the industrial Midwest in the next election!
We bailed out the New York and D.C. city governments. We bailed out Mexico. We bailed out public schools that have been failing us for 40 years. We bailed out (thru the IMF and World Bank) assorted Third World regimes. We bail out Wall Street elites and big banks. But now the GOP “questions” the value of saving the US auto industry, the showpiece of American industrial capability and the envy of the world?! If we consider all the workers, execs, engineers, dealers, salesmen and suppliers, the Big Three employ 3 million people who contribute $21 billion a year to Social Security and Medicare, and another $25 billion in federal income taxes. Include all the nations businesses that are auto industry dependant, and we’re talking about one-tenth of the U.S. labor force (roughly another 20 million people), potentially out of work. There are another 850,000 retirees and their families depending on pensions and health care plans from the Big Three. We’re already in the ballpark of having 7 to 8 percent of our working population unemployed, and if those three companies go under we could expect to see nearly twenty percent of our nation’s workers unemployed. The monetary burden of that would fall on our shoulders, and our already strained pocketbooks. It’s not a pretty picture.
Harvard economics Professor Martin Feldstein says that bankruptcy might be needed for GM to get out of its present union contracts and become more competitive. Making U.S. automakers competitive again “is going to require restructuring the wages and benefits they pay to auto workers,” he claims, “Whether that happens in bankruptcy or it’s done in another managed program, that has to happen.” Understandable I think, but I can just imagine what the United Auto Workers will have to say about that! For years, wages (and prices) have skyrocketed in this country or so it seems, and union demands have borne the brunt of the blame for that problem. But are we being fair in blaming the unions? Obviously American workers want the best deal they can get, and can hardly be faulted for that. Of course if they get a pay raise it will be passed along to the consumer in the form of increased prices, and John Q. Consumer, not getting a comparable pay raise, can be expected to be just a bit upset with the union. But don’t overlook executives’ paychecks and perks, the middleman, and the salesman’s commission either. Jumping into all this is government who promptly increased the income tax on the workers wages and the sales tax on the product as well.
A recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months. A sustained recession may become a “depression” which is defined as a period of diminished economic output with at least one year where output is 20% below the trend. An economic collapse is a devastating breakdown of a national, regional, or territorial economy, and is essentially a severe depression often quickly followed by months, years, or even decades of depression, social breakdown and civil unrest. That’s what happened to the USSR in 1990. Recessions and depressions fall soonest (and hardest) on rural areas where farming, mining, and logging are the primary occupations. By the time a collapse occures the ruralites really aren’t effected very much, as they’re already destitute. (Sound familiar?) Proponents of letting the Big Three go bankrupt are using the line "If our guys can't hack it, let 'em go." They are prepared to write America off as a major industrial nation, allowing globalization to make us little more than a consumer of Asian industrial products, mid-eastern oil, and probably South American agricultural products. Of course they don’t mention how we’re going to pay for those products we’re supposed to consume, particularly if Americans are out of work. By that time we wouldn’t even qualify as a forth world country, and Americans would be immigrating to Africa in the hopes of finding a better life!
Talk about redistributing the wealth!
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