Of course it's all about if our president is a Muslim....

Our nation is hurting and how we got here is just as important as how we get ourselves out of it.

Please allow my rant until the end...the title of this blog will then kinda make sense.

It's true that our politicians played a major part in where we are today. Beginning in the 80's our country began to believe that democracy and economics we're the same thing...that capitalism and our constitution meant the same thing. We were told that our government, we the people through our representatives, was the problem and that business, greed, the "free market" was the saviour of our liberty. We were fed the lie that if we only gave massive tax breaks to the wealthy, if we got rid the the regulation on businesses, if we sold off to private corporations our "commons", if we did this, we would see unprecedented economic growth and individual Americans would reap the rewards of greed, avarice, and simply acting our of our own individual naked self interest.

We were told that "free trade" would open up untold markets for American goods and that if we only stopped taxing products coming into our country, that we would see other countries do the same for our products. So Clinton signed NAFTA and bound us to the WTO and the GATT agreement. We agreed and laughed at Ross Perot who predicted that free trade would give us that giant "sucking sound" of our jobs leaving our nation.

For over 30 years, we have seen our good manufacturing jobs all but disappear...out sourced to China and India and Indonesia. All in the name of free-trade, but in fact in the name of cheap labor, no labor standards, no environmental standards, corporate profits, and just plain greed. Before Reagan, manufacturing jobs made up almost 30% of our GDP, now it's around 11%. Now, our job outlook centers around "Do you want fries with that?"

We were also told that if only the banks would be allowed to "gamble" with our deposits in the stock market, that these giants of men, these captains of banking industry would usher in a new era of commerce not through manufacturing, but through finance. Clinton signed the law tearing down the wall between deposit banks and investment banks...he signed the law that allowed banks to create mega-complex derivative contracts that were simply bets, on bets, on bets, on bets...by the late 90's, America and it's representatives had become bought, owned, and operated by 7 major banks, and by a handful of global multi-national corporations.

Before Reagan, American families had personal savings of around 24%. As productivity kept increasing, wages stagnated since unions lost strength and corporations gained more control through mergers and acquizitions. Add to this "free-trade" said American workers now have to compete with workers world wide making pennies an hour. During the 90's Alan Greenspan saw this coming when it was clear that wages were not tracking productivity and while supply increased, demand lagged since folks didn't make the money to buy the stuff being supplied. The fear in the early 90's was "deflation" since prices were too high for the wages being earned. The Fed began a credit policy that lowered interests rates and encouraged more presonal borrowing, more easy credit cards, higher bank leverage of capital, and sure enough....American's kept on purchasing...but with debt. As of 2007, personal saving tanked to -4%.....seriously...NEGATIVE numbers.

Clinton, bound by "pay as you go" requirements in Congress and being a centrist, reduced the size of government, the debt, the deficit, and left office with (arguably) a budget surplus. Bush and the GOP took our country from a lower debt, budget surplus, and relative peace and after 8 years, took the debt to 10 TRILLION dollars, a 1 TRILLION dollar deficit, 2 insane and UNPAID FOR wars, Medicare Part D (unpaid for), saw 7 MILLION JOBS lost and bailed out the big banks to the tune of 750 BILLION dollars of our tax money with NO STRINGS ATTACHED!!!

So after all of this, our country crashes......and the media focuses on why it's all the fault of our black, Afro-Centric, Muslim, Kenyan, communist, socialist, fascist, no birth certificate, tyrannical terrorist loving dictator of a president.