Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Should the U.S. dollar drop much more it will cease to be the international currency standard.  (That's for sure!)

As the dollar declines, the oil producing nations raise the price of oil.  Why?  If the U.S. pays them in persistently devalued currency, the only way they can receive the same amount for their oil being paid by the free falling dollar is to raise the price of oil to a nation run amok with a devastating debt.

The mortgage crisis was inevitable.  When Alan Greenspan was the Fed chief he apparently thought the only way to salvage what the Bush team was destroying with their wild spending sprees was to partially demolish the dollar's value, letting interest rates sink to the lowest level in 40 years.

Bush then chased around the U.S.A. in Air Force One luxury, stopping long enough at the very well-staged settings where he could count on applause and glowingly tell everybody how very well the economy was doing.

U.S. stock prices indeed were soaring because in some countries where world trade deals enabled employers to hire labor at slave level wages, with almost no workers' laws restricting any hours or conditions of employment.  Profits for transporting slavery to other soil than the U.S. paid off big for some unethical U.S. businesses.

The money generated from building booms in California and Florida was built upon unstable, sub-standard loans.  Buyers not having to make down payments, having poor credit and paying only interest on loans was heaven for the dream team consisting of fast-talking shady realtors, unethical bankers and builders.  Home prices skyrocketed.

Buying houses with rotten credit, no down payment and interest only loans brought about the current collapse of the housing market.  With over one million mortgage foreclosures, as many mortgages folding as during the Great Depression, the short-term phony prosperity had completely collapsed!

Now other industries profiting from this phony economic upturn are suffering.  Builders in many states were delighted with illegal aliens' low labor costs.  They could get rich on ignoring bothersome union labor and let the long-suffering, hard working, tax paying, follow the laws U.S. citizen pay the costs illegal aliens cannot pay.

The cost of education, heath care, and of course, the money illegals earn is often sent back to their countries of origin.  

Now foreign investors have a field day buying U.S. businesses, U.S. housing and all other products at more than 50 percent off for the British and 40 percent lower for Europeans.  

In other words, Bush and his horrifying economic debacle has forced U.S. citizens to compete with the British and Europeans to buy businesses, houses, raw land - everything at a great disadvantage.

Finally we must repeat the cliché that won an election at one time:  "It's the economy, stupid!"

Bush and Cheney have dug this economic debt hole and right at the point in time the so-called "baby boomers" (called this because of the rash of births right after World War Two), 75 million of them asking for their Social Security money they paid for through their hard work over many, many years.

The problem is that many economically corrupt administrations have raided the Social Security trust fund, using it to help balance their budgets so they could boast of that illusory achievement.

Now the I.O.U.'s they placed in the Social Security Trust Fund in place of the cash they confiscated over the years have come due for 75 million people.  

George Bush and this dreadful Republican leadership have everyone wondering where are the Social Security funds coming from?