BEING SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY SEEMS LIKE A STEP TO ECONOMIC UTOPIA

For some strange reason, there are those who like to ask the question, "Are you better off now with Obama after four years than you were before he came into office?"  Obviously, the number of criteria variables in such a question make any number of responses impossible to understand when lumped as a total 'yes' or 'no'.

Current TV replayed some interesting footage.  They had Michael Moore's film on Wall St., and some wonderful discussions on the Goldman Sachs group, the Wall St. bailout, and the vile mob composed of people like Bob Rubin, former treasury secretary  Henry Paulson, also a former Secretary of the Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Lawrence Summers., also a former Secretary of the Treasury and later President of Harvard.

I missed the name of the person who was discussing the men who brought us down through Wall St and how they have taken control of so much of the total income in the country.  Geithner was referred continually as someone who never achieved anything, but as is customary at that level of playing field, he kept getting promoted up as the only way to get him out while saving face for the rest who hired him and wanted him out.

We have the Republicans who have promised Grover Norquist not to take anything away from the richest 1%.  We have the Romney-Ryan ticket talking about getting rid of programs that they feel unworthy of their current expenditures, like Planned Parenthood, PBS, early intervention programs, so that the poor can only become poorer.  Their greed is for the moment.  They talk about family but their management will leave nothing for their children, though in Romney's case that is not a problem in that he started his five sons off with 100 million dollars each

It does make one wonder whether the ghost of Osama bin Laden isn't laughing somewhere that his promise to being the United States to economic failure is still working, even after his death.

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?