That Hopeless Feeling

So here we are, America in 2010, oil drifting in large amounts ever closer toward our beautiful, wildlife laden coast along the Gulf of Mexico. Americans wake up and go to bed to pictures of oil drenched animals and a live camera showing oil spewing forth from an underwater oil well. We see fishing boats tied up at docks, owners and employees waiting...waiting...waiting. What will happen?

For the past few decades we've heard how "government needs to get out of the way" for private business, and now we find that private business can't solve problems of their own making. The financial crisis should have been a wake-up call to all Americans that private business cannot regulate itself. Old Randy doesn't have special powers that can see the future, but Old Randy kept telling readers just about every week for several years what we were heading for, and I certainly wish that I'd been wrong. It didn't take Jean Dixon..ah, wait a minute, she's dead; well whoever the latest seer is, to tell me something had to give.

When what we call the "liberal" philosophy became the dominant political philosophy during the Great Depression, it remained strong for decades, until finally, after some spits and sputters, its agenda was exhausted. We voted in what we call the "conservative" philosophy to replace the worn out ideas of the past. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that gradually we had our collective soul taken over by greed. All of us can take blame. We wanted everything, and we didn't want to pay for much of it. The government has run huge deficits for most of the last thirty plus years, except for the last few years of the Clinton Administration and the first year of the Bush (George W.) Administration. Credit card debt and other forms of private debt trailed right along with the government trend. It seemed there was nothing we couldn't buy on credit, whether public or private. The government surpluses went the way of a picnic table full of hot dogs set in front of a bunch of burly guys in leather jackets who just pulled up on Harley-Davidsons....they disappeared, and quickly!

There are several reasons the government surpluses evaporated, including the spending in response to the 9/11 attacks, and the economic downturn precipitated by those attacks, but we also gave tax cuts to most Americans, although nearly 40% of those cuts went to the top 1% of the income ladder. As I've written here before, those multi-millionaires and billionaires have a tough time of it! We got into two wars, almost seemingly on a permanent basis, and we didn't pay for either of them, except in the worst way, through the blood and hardships of our soldiers sent to fight those wars. We gave senior citizens a prescription drug plan, and out came the national credit card again. Hmm, I thought these folks said they were "conservatives." Instead we got politicians who fell all over themselves promising us they wouldn't raise taxes, and some who actually said we should cut taxes even more. Then, as the skies darkened overhead, we did indeed cut taxes again in an effort to avert what was becoming an increasingly evident economic downturn, and a potential unraveling of our whole system. It didn't work, as the wealthy investors simply jumped the price of oil and gas, transferring the tax cut money into their bank accounts as fast as you could watch the dollar amounts tabulate on the gas pumps. Government deficits soared to record levels.

I won't go into the actual financial crisis itself, but you all know the basics: bankers and investment pros came up with lots of complicated special financial "products," often tied with mortgages, to make money. Democrat Bill Clinton's administration went along with the Republican-led congress dismantling laws that had been in place for decades to protect the banking industry; the legitimate banking industry that is. You know, where you deposit your paycheck, go for a car loan, and the like. Not the merged entities called "banks," that took money they didn't have and used it in casino-like fashion to line their accounts. If you don't get the picture, they gambled with money they DIDN'T have. The Bush Administration, ever hateful of ANY regulation, turned them loose, and off they went. Of course, when the roulette wheel came up bust, the entire system, and therefore the COUNTRY and the WORLD, could have gone into the tank. Out came the national credit card. Hundreds of billions were used to prop up ailing financial entities, and TRILLIONS (that's with a "T," folks) more were put forth to guarantee their solvency. These bailouts all started under those stalwart anti-government intervention, anti-government regulation, just plain anti-government folks in the Bush Administration, and was continued by the Obama Administration. The country seems to have averted a new "Great Depression," but we're now drowning in debt, and there's no end in sight. And here you thought we were just hopeless about drowning in oil.

WORD HISTORY:
Carve-This word goes back to Indo European "gerebh/gerbh," which meant "to scratch," which back a few thousand years ago had the further notion of "writing;" that is, "to scratch on stone or clay tablets with a sharp instrument." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "kerfanan," which then was passed down to West Germanic (English, German, Dutch, Frisian are all West Germanic languages) as "kerfan," which meant "to cut, notch." This gave Anglo-Saxon (Old English) "ceorfan," with the same meaning. Eventually the actual word "cut" overtook "carve" in the meaning "to cut," but "carve" was further extended to art and decorative work (sculptures and wood, stone, or plaster trimmings, for example), and finally to meat ("carve the roast"). Of our close relatives, German has "kerben," which means "to cut notches, to carve patterns (German also has a noun, "Kerbe," meaning "notch"), Dutch has "kerven" (verb) and "kerf" (noun).