America's Kings of Poverty use new Weapons of Mass Recession

It's no wonder that so many of us are pretty upset about the way in which the cabal of Bush Paulson & Bernacke is printing and doling out fiat money like it's going out of style. Those who control the money presses, ultimately control everything.

Like many other Americans, I wouldn't care about their shenanigans except that it's obvious they've constructed a hedge scheme using American taxpayers to shoulder the risk and costs of over $2 trillion they've tranched to whomever they like. After draining the Treasury with two costly wars, inaction on our energy dependence, an unattended trade deficit, and the inevitable Fed-inspired inflationary spiral that weakened the dollar and made the Wall Street pundits cry Uncle, I'm more than a little ticked.

They've even used the financial crisis to further expand their regulatory powers, enabling them to snub their noses at any calls for accountability, and to keep secret the recipients of trillions in loans and guarantees.

Now I suppose that Main Street should have confidence in Bush Paulson & Bernacke, and be happy about the possibility of another stimulus package that by the way, will rebate no more than about 10% to 15% of the taxpayer ante for the so-called "financial rescue". Not likely to ease very much pain for average Americans. They're reeling from the madcap economic policies of the New Kings of Poverty. With our own leaders lobing Weapons of Mass RecessionTM on us, who needs enemies?

The recent revelations about skyrocketing corporate bankruptcies, massive unemployment, and credit starved business and individuals reminds me of growing up in poverty in a public housing complex. There was one way in, and one way out. And somehow, I sensed a mighty power in the high halls of "somewhere-there-above" dictating our thoughts, behavior, and collective destiny. I was grateful to be alive, but I didn't realize at the time that I had been programmed to accept and look forward to nothing more than a desperate life of poverty.

Fortunately, I've learned how to add, subtract, multiply and divide.

If you do your own calculations, you'll figure that Bush Paulson & Bernacke has dispensed Monopoly Money to the corporate, financial and political ruling class equivalent to nearly 65% of the FY 2009 US federal budget! Also, you'll probably conclude that after America's middle and working classes finish paying their insurance tax premiums to Bush Paulson & Bernacke, their families will barely have enough money left to pay the rent or mortgage, gas the car, cover their living expenses, and put food on the table. That is, if they can keep their jobs, businesses, and investments. This is no joke, and no laughing matter.

Quiet as it's kept, it wasn't America's subprime mortgage debacle that caused the current worldwide economic Tsunami. Rather, it was an "overly-exuberant" Wall Street that securitized, priced, and traded every asset, liability, event, or other interest as a marketable property right to feed their insatiable greed. When domestic and foreign investors followed the Euro-American model and realized that the securities being traded weren't worth a plumb nickel, they stopped buying, and lenders followed suit by freezing credit to protect their own reserves.

Wall Street (like other global exchanges) changed from a free-rolling casino to an unregulated confederation of glazed-eyed bookies looking for their next cash infusion or credit fix.

Using their evil genius, the Wall Street Katzenjammer whiz kids put their heads together and decided to make the American people pay for their iniquity. Initially, their strategy succeeded because they called on loyal friends in High Places who changed the rules and proceeded to bail them out.

But the Fed's free-wheeling fiat credit money machine broke down, and the Katzies' multi-katzillion dollar credit lines froze up. Wall Street and Main Street had to learn how to live without credit, and consumers had to suffer the ultimate indignity of ginning up extra tax money to cover what some call the worst financial crisis in US economic history since the Great Depression.

Whether or not this scenario seems appropriate, it will be interesting to see if the Obama Administration can thwart the impending re-genetrification of the US economy and the potential dispossession of the American people. The world watches.

Obama may have to contend with absolute power in a few private hands hell-bent on trumping the limited political power in the hands of millions of citizens. Oh my!

(singing softly. . ."Just when you think you're ahead of the game, someone changes the rules!")

A Renewed America With a Renewed Faith

African Americans and others find themselves on the precipice of being unlikely witnesses to an unlikely historical event: the election of America's first African American President.

Now when the Obama Camp dared to reframe America's electoral map, it did so on the premise that America is not white or black, red or blue, Democrat or Republican; rather, it is a diverse nation we call the United States of America. Obama's 50-state strategy was an effort to keep true to his word.

But nearly 143 years after the end of the Civil War, you'd think most of us would finally understand that in fact we are "one nation, under God . . . indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" (written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist!). The themes, tenor, and tone of the General Campaign have suggested otherwise.

Today's election would be no big deal if Americans of African descent weren't turning out in droves (in the wake of an embarrassingly flawed national electoral infrastructure). Their civic engagement portends to be the deciding factor in a race that shouldn't be as close as it seems. And their zeal yearns for a certain vindication.

Latinos are excused from any recognition here because they seem not to have understood that the Civil Rights Movement was as much for them as for anyone. Their tacit ingratitude and historical preference for the Republican brand reveals a putrid collusion and enmity against black leadership and progress. Free riders with an attitude. Tragic.

My focus then stems from the continuing discomfort that white Americans feel when they consider candidates running for the country's highest office. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, it's interesting to note that when African Americans have voted for white candidates, whites don't have a problem. But on the eve of a likely Obama win, many whites have a problem with blacks voting for a black candidate. Simply because he's African American. A disgusting, and hypocritical double standard.

We have to remember that when contemporary whites elect to perpetuate stereotypes and forego apologies and promised reparations on the basis that they had nothing to do with what their forebears did to blacks, blacks are supposed to accept this and not have a problem with it.

It seems not to make any difference to many of them that African Americans were:

1. captured, traded (bought/sold), and shipped to America to suffer the most dreadful of human oppressions: Slavery . . . even the native American Nations enslaved these people!;

2. raped, lynched and worked as free labor without apology or reparations;

3. denied educational, employment, housing and business opportunity;

4. vanquished when they tried to be self-sufficient in their own communities;

5. taken and separated from their families, leaving a fragmented genealogy and historical trail of tears for their descendants;

6. hosed, beaten, tortured, jailed, and murdered in their quest for equal rights, human rights, civil rights, and liberty;

7. stereotyped and humiliated in film, TV and theatre . . .playing vaudevillian characters for the laughing pleasure of white viewers;

8. miscengenated (primarily through rape and sexual trade and bondage) into a mutant race of people with no homogeneous identity, no nation, no rights and privileges, and no self-dignity;

9. conscripted involuntarily as soldiers to fight, bleed, and die for a country that neither respected them nor conferred to them their deserved rights and opportunity;

10. discriminated against in housing and relegated to living conditions of the worst order akin to the ghettos, barrios, and Bantu stands of less-developed countries;

11. denied medical treatment and left to die (not because of their inability to pay for it, but rather because they were African American);

12. victimized, corralled, and imprisoned under various penal policies targeting the societal removal of African American men particularly;

13. caricatured in a way that pits African Americans one against the other based on differences in complexion, hair texture, facial features and other physical attributes, dialect, and social status;

14. subjected to extraordinarily stressful circumstances that have led to a disproportionate percentage of disease, illness, and premature death;

15. denied their rightful payment for their suffering after the so-called "end of Slavery" with the reversal of Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 (revoked by President Andrew Johnson); and

16. humiliated with having to rely on the passage of Congressional legislation (based on a Constitutional Amendment) to ensure their rights as human beings and American citizens.

Even though these facts are an education to some and reminder to others, they wouldn't make a difference to too many others.

So here we are again; at a moment in America's history when we have the opportunity to live out the true meaning of this country's creed.

If African Americans could survive what they endured by faith, maybe all of us can have a better future with an African American president who knows the faith struggle all too well.

What audacity!