McCain: "fundamentals of our economy are strong"

I kid you not; he said that today--Monday, September 15, 2008. How many foreclosures, how many bank failures, how many other financial institutions need to fail, John? Indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing Herbert Hoover was saying after the Wall Street Crash! The point is that the economy is working well--for some. The rich have never had it better, and as we all know, John McCain is in that class. How many houses do you own again, John?
For the rest of us, though, we are heading for some extremely rough waters. The majority of adjustable rate mortgages have yet to reset (meaning that their low teaser rate periods are expiring to be reset at true market value, causing many more people to lose the homes they really can't afford), which will cause another wave of failures to come crashing down on our already beleaguered financial system. Even more catastrophically, Washington Mutual is swiftly collapsing towards bankruptcy, and there are some who question whether the FDIC can afford to cover those losses. This is the nation's 6th largest bank in the US, people!
Thanks to 28 years of vicious conservative leadership--from Reagan to Bush to yes, Clinton, to Smirky, and in cahoots with conservative philosophers/economists/politicians, both in and outside of DC, we are now faced with the near total collapse of our economy. Deregulation of the financial markets, the insistence on "free" trade, the reduction of all of our manufacturing in favor of concentrating on the service and fiscal "industries"--in short, our complete reliance on the Republican canard of "trickle-down economics" has brought us to the brink of disaster unimaginable after the fixes put in place during and after the Great Depression.
And McCain has the gall to claim that we're doing just fine? That is one delusional crank. How on earth can 1/2 the people in the country really believe that he even cares about them, let alone knows how to solve their problems? He doesn't even think that there are any! Scary times.

Deja vu

Tell me if you've heard this one before:
Major financial institutions, encouraged by a lawless Administration's lax enforcement of gutted regulatory statutes, make horrible investments and other fiscally questionable practices common enough for insiders to reap windfall profits, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill when the whole industry crashes.
Right! The S & L scandal of the mid-1980s!
Oh, wait, did you think I was talking about the current hedge fund/mortgage lending crisis? Well, I might as well have, given the parallels, and even some of the players involved.
Wake up, people! This is not a case of incompetence; rich Republicans have been gaming the system at the middle and lower classes expense for decades now, and non-wealthy voters have been enabling them to do so by voting against their economic interests ever since St. Reagan conned them into thinking it was somebody else (remember the fictitious "welfare queens driving Cadillacs"?) stealing from them.
Deregulation and stripping the government of its enforcement powers has done nothing except enrich the wealthy and erode the economy as a whole, and the Republican Party stands for nothing less than a continuation, if not an acceleration, of these destructive policies. The resultant slaughter of middle class financial security and near elimination of the possibility of true upward mobility represents a war against the non-rich, and it has been going on since Jan. 20, 1981. You can tell, because when anyone awake attempts to correct the imbalances these policies have created, invariably the right wing accuses them of fomenting "class warfare". This is classic right wing Republican rhetoric--accuse your opponents of that which you are practicing in a neat verbal sleight-of-hand. And that has been working since 1994.
More and better Democrats. Now.