FREEDOM IS NOT BEING FREE OF GOVERNMENT

Foolish people, either too young or too ignorant to have read Lord of the Flies, might think they need no leadership, boundaries, controls or consequences for their actions. Those who are proponents of no governmental regulations are like the Lost Boys of Peter Pan, or like Oliver Twist with Fagin. There is always someone to lead the way...usually evading censure until what we would call 'too late'.

Such has our economic system been for far too long with not enough shame being felt by Greenspan for it. Osama bin Laden has promised he will break the USA economy and, while the common person has no way of knowing his direct influence on it, it would be foolish to assume he has had none.

Only macho men assume that power in is physical strength, greater ability to bully, and weapons that result in violence. More damage can be done in more surreptitious ways and have been being done without governmental regulations to stop it from happening. Brooksley Born was silenced by the majority of men who refused to think about her warnings or too selfish for their own financial gains to allow it to be heard publicly. These men do not have to pay for their mistakes. We, the people of the United States, are left to pay for their arrogance or greed.

We need governmental regulations and monitoring of the monitors. We have not learned from the government's mistake in hiring the best illegal hacker( for his knowledge of hacking computers) to watch over the security of consumers financial privacy. We do not need the phalanx of economists, who brought us to this terrible state, to continue. They will not make good; they will only continue to try to obfuscate their own tarnished reputations and misleading with poor advice. If they had known better then we would be in better shape. Why would we allow ourselves to believe they know better now? If they are advising better, there must be some wiser people around, from whom they have learned, who are free of conflicts of interest, who can put the economy on the right track. It is beyond me to believe that Greenspan, Paulson, Geitner, Bernanke, and Summers, et al from the past, have either in the past, or the present, been the sole men to have best managed our economy.

Greenspan, stupidly following Ayn Rand's policy to deregulate, should have proven he is a follower, not a leader. One should never put followers in charge because you never understand from whence their thinking derives. It seems we have been looking at the wrong causes and cures. You do not send a fox into the henhouse to discover why the chickens are missing....or is that what we have done, after all?

CASSANDRA LIVES IN 2009

It wasn't Apollo who made men not believe Cassandra; men in power, in general, do not play truth with a single powerful woman. Instead, they gang up on her and do the little tricks of demeaning her, ruining her reputation, casting innuendos so that they'd tarnish her to the point of a total lack of respect for whatever she had to say. I'm speaking of Brooksley Born, a Stanford University law graduate, who foresaw the collapse of our economy starting with OTC derivatives way back in the 90s. She was ignored by the same men whom Obama has brought in to straighten out our economy, the economy they allowed to fall...in other words, the foxes are now in the hen house. Read more.

On 5/26 the Washington Post wrote about her but it never seemed to make the mainstream media...at least, I never saw anything on her until tonight when Frontline on PBS did a brilliant piece exposing the conditions under which she testified before the Senate (who chose to listen the the 'big boys' instead of this brilliant woman).

Born believed in government regulation. Greenspan, the God of economics through many presidential bipartisan periods, followed his credo, Markets Get It Right and then, after he retired, had the temerity to simply say, "I was wrong." while the country was in economic and emotional shambles. In 1999 Time Magazine was praising the threesome for their great work. Do you think they would dare do a truthful update?

There was only one powerful man who ignored her and who had the manhood to admit that he didn't pay enough attention, swayed by the men who spoke so forcefully. He is a former SEC Chairman, Arthur Levitt. Gentleman that he is, to say he is sorry, doesn't change history and we are still going to have to suffer the mistakes of these men, bankers, investors, and greedy men who care not for their fellow citizens.