Tuesday Musings

Can the picture become any bleaker? Now, as a condition for the auto bailout, Congress gets to appoint a "car czar." Brilliant! Just freakin' brilliant! Has anyone recently looked at Congress's ability to run anything? Social Security? Freddie and Fannie? Medicare? Homeland Security? FEMA? Let's just go right to the budget...what is it now, a $9 trillion dollar national debt? And the fools continue to spend and bailout and.... Maybe it's not the Congressmen and Senators who are the fools. Maybe the fools are looking at us in the mirror.

After all, how can anyone with a straight face say Nancy Pelosi should be Speaker, let along a member of the House? Ditto for Barney and Chris Dodd. Yep, our two Senators can be added in there, too. It shows more than I can write how much clout Levin and Stabenow have in the Senate--where are they? why aren't they all over the news, every darn talk show they can find? where are their defenses of the auto industry? At least Congressman McCotter is speaking up and, in my view, making sense.

I am opposed to bailouts (or loans or whatever euphemism is passing for "bailouts" these days) in principle. When government gets involved, look out, things are bound to get worse. But, several things. First, much of the auto problem is due to government ineptness, be it the mandates on what to produce (why can't the US auto makers make the cars Americans want to and will buy?), the largely government-created credit crunch, or whatever else. Since gov't created this mess, shouldn't gov't fix it? Of course not, don't be silly. Second, our gov't turns a blind eye to the unfair advantages foreign makers have (other gov'ts subsidize, manipulate currencies, etc.) and then tells the Big Three, "Compete!" (This isn't ignore the unbelievably stupid contracts the Big Three agreed to with the UAW over the years. I don't blame the UAW, but the auto cos. How can anyone defend, let alone agree to/with, the silly "work rules," the "jobs bank," etc.? I think the money and benefits the UAW hammered out are perfectly fine. Workers deserve them. Their higher pay created more prosperity and jobs for more Americans in a number of ways. But this is fodder for another blog....) Third, where does it end? First the financial and investment cos, then the Big Three, who's next? Can I wait in line, too? (Just kidding...I don't want to wait in line. I just want government to get out of the picture.)

And, I am furious at the blatant hypocrisy, dishonesty, ignorance, and you can toss in a few more epithets of Congress. What gall, hubris! But what do Senators and Congressmen care? We don't, obviously. We keep sending Ted Kennedy (apparently about to be deified, a God among us; I wonder what Mary Jo Kopechne thinks about this. Oh, she doesn't think about anything!), Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Carl Levin, Debbie Stabenow, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et all back to Congress. Oh, OK, I won't forget that bastion of the Republican Party, Richard Shelby. What a genius! He must have to work at being as ignorant as he is. And, again, he keeps getting re-elected. What do they care? We don't, obviously.

How can so many Americans overlook the unconditional $700 billion given to the credit and investment firms? "Unconditional?" The CEOs didn't even have to go to DC--let alone drive there in hybrids! (Really, our representatives in Congress are stupid!) How can so many overlook that there was little or no oversight of Freddie and Fannie by, get this, Frank and Dodd, who just happened to be the recipients of the two largest campaign contributions of Fannie and Freddie? (The public record of their lack of oversight, their ineptness, is right out there for all to see.) How can so few Americans see that $700 billion would give us all, if Congress had any fortitude and intelligence, a 6-month vacation from federal income taxes and Social Security and Medicare taxes? (Now, that isn't a shortfall of 6-months' of income; Congress can either give the money to Wall Street or to us. The amount of federal monies doesn't change.) How can so few Americans see that the hundreds of billions are not being used to ease the credit crunch? (Of course, gov't is responsible for it, too, along with the stupidity and greed of the lenders--dare I say borrowers, too?) I could go on, but let's sum up with how can so few Americans care????

I'm very worried about the lives my grandchildren will live in this United States of the immediate future. This is not going to be a nice place to live. Things will be difficult and we are and have been breeding citizens who are not equipped to handle difficult times. We give everything to them--they don't have to work for them. They are "entitled" to things. Most of all, government will provide all they need. Government will "do something." Yep, we see what happened to the other countries where government, not people themselves, "did something." But, nobody cares.

I am, perhaps, even more upset with Americans. How can they allow all of this to happen?