Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Gross explains, "German department stores pay Vietnamese garment factories, Indian distributors purchase Saudi Arabian oil and black marketers floating dollars around the world not spent here (in the U.S.) are essentially free loans to the United States from foreigners - and they help keep U.S. interest rates low."

But which nation wants to hold on to declining dollars?  Super model Gisele Bundchen of Brazil doesn't want to be paid in U.S. demolished dollar value anymore.  Can you blame her?

Kuwait wised up and disconnected its currency from the dollar.  To be on the safe side Kuwait now links its currency to a basket of currencies.  120 tourist sites in India refuse to accept the once respected, strong U.S. dollar, nowadays signaling how widespread the dollar's decline is known.  China, Russia and Japan are rebalancing their currency holdings quietly.

What are some of the reasons for the drastic dollar decline under the reign of the Republican administration under George Bush?

First off, when Bush took over the reins of power, there was a budget surplus.  As the lame duck, lowest ratings ever President Bush is preparing to leave, the U.S. economy is not only in roller coaster instability shambles, but that whopping debt looms.

The budget deficit this inefficient, ineffective, inadequate White House resident (many still doubt he was ever elected president legitimately) has skyrocketed the national debt ever closer to the $10 trillion mark.  This U.S. national debt is greater than all the national debts combined since the U.S. was founded as a nation.

How could this happen?

President Bush said in November 2007:  "We have a strong dollar policy."  That declaration of the dollar's strength had no more validity than Bush's infamous claim in his State of the Union scare message about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction and developing nuclear weapons.

With this frenzied fright talk, with no proof of validity, the U.S. launched the so-called "pre-emptive war," a tactic so horrifying, so deadly that it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.  This war generated total turmoil in the entire Middle East and caused a worldwide scramble by nations wanting to defend themselves against such deadly aggression.  They are in a nuclear arms race never before known.

The Iraq War costs the U.S. billions every month.  Roadside bomb attacks have killed U.S. service personnel in Iraq.  The Pentagon has plans now to spend $22 billion to buy thousands of what they term mine resistant ambush protected vehicles.  Just this one $22 billion expenditure gives you some idea of how many billions a nearly bankrupt nation pursuing an imperial ruler's design is spending - money it does not have.

As if killing 600,000 to a million Iraqis wasn't enough, 2 ½ million Iraqis have fled for their lives to Syria, Jordan and Iran, and nearly 4,000 U.S. service personnel return to the U.S. in coffins, seldom shown on TV and 55,000 combatants and non-combatants are wounded, which will cost billions in medical care.

From Houston on January 24, 2008 we read an AP release that tells us:

"Record oil prices helped Conoco-Phillips post a 37% increase in fourth quarter profit even though it produced less crude oil and natural gas than a year before."

All this occurred while U.S. truckers complained that gas prices are making it impossible for them to drive their trucks, keep them in proper maintenance, and make a living wage.

Poor people in the U.S. who have seen their jobs outsourced to India and any elsewhere, who have no union protection and have observed Wall Street vultures and scavengers generating profits from the unemployed, suffer repeated economic wounds as inflation grips our nation.

Perhaps one of the most horrifying hoaxes was engineered by U.S. bankers.  What a cruel hoax to allow people to fantasize that they could afford to buy a house with no down payment and interest only loans along with poor credit.  Because housing prices kept surging many naïve home buyers knew they couldn't afford to pay their loans.

These misguided home buyers, almost totally unregulated lenders, built a real estate bubble that burst when it came time for these unqualified home buyers to pay either interest on their loans or a higher rate of interest.  Almost 2 million mortgages went into default in 2007, the worst record since the Great Depression.  

It wasn't just U.S. bankers that were hit.  These corrupt home selling schemes were bundled up and sold to European banks as stable securities.  Of course, if the bankers knew around 2 million of these risky, sure to fail loans were all bundled up by what we now know amounted to scam artists taking their ill gotten gains off the top, they never would have bought into what is tantamount to fraud.

In USA Today January 23 it is clearly revealed how this dreadful deceit worked:

"The European outlook also is clouded by continental banks' exposure to complex U.S. securities, whose values are now suspect.  Of an estimated $1.2 trillion in collateralized debt obligations, the U.S. financial institutions issued in recent years roughly $300 billion to $400 billion that were sold to European banks, says Nariman Behraneshi of Global Insight."

Presently we have Republican Party presidential front runner John McCain praising the work of Alan Greenspan.  While Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve he performed yeoman services in implementing the above-referenced policy of national real estate mortgage disaster.

This is the same John McCain that the New York Times endorses for the Republican presidential nomination and believes would be a good choice to unify America during the next four years.