MORALITY AND THE LAW CLXII
By Stephen Ellis

NOW IT’S ALL OBAMA’S PROBLEM


Nobody asked me, but…

Now that the election and the electioneering is over for another couple of years, let’s try and understand what really happened:

In my opinion, Obama did not win a “mandate” as almost every newspaper will allege. He did win a significant majority of the popular vote (approximately 5 million) compared to Bush winning a popular majority of 300,000 in 2004 and losing the popular vote by 200,000 to Al Gore in 2000. The electoral votes were no less impressive. But I do not believe that most people voted “for” Obama…I believe they voted “against” eight years of incredible mismanagement of George W. Bush and the lies and deception of Dick Cheney.

Never, in U.S. history has there been such a bad presidency as there has been with Bush. Nixon was more corrupt and Jimmy Carter was more ignorant. But together, Nixon and Carter did not equal the ineptitude of the Bush administration.

It took Bush eight years of gross mismanagement and stupidity to wreck the economy of the United States and the rest of the world. Please don’t expect Obama to restore it to its former glory in one or two years.

Obama could probably gain a lot from using people like me in his administration, but he will never ask me or the thousands of others who just want to help. Yet, the tasks facing him are no less than Herculean:

The first thing that his attention should be drawn to is the enormous loss of jobs in this country. Creation of new jobs should be his first effort. New jobs can be created by building high-speed rail and by conversion of our motor vehicles from petroleum to the far-less-expensive natural gas. This may only be an “interim” step in stopping our reliance on foreign oil, but until there are hydrogen pumps at every gas station across the country, natural gas is the least expensive and most practical “next-step”. Other projects such as nuclear reactors and huge de-salinezation plants could help solve water and power problems forever and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs

Many of the “institutions: that were created in the great Industrial Revolution are now crumbling. The government is going to have to step in with some major money to re-tool and re-think our “Big Three” auto manufacturers. The top management of these companies has to go and be replaced by younger, forward thinking, executives. Companies that have farmed-out hundreds of thousands of jobs to less-expensive nations have to be encouraged to bring those jobs back to America until the unemployment problems here, at home, are solved.

Credit must be loosened, but with specific restraints: Home mortgages should be made available and cheap…but with a minimum requirement of a ten-percent down payment. Automobile loans should have the same type of regulation on them. The “no money down” and no-payments-for-years credit panacea has to be brought back to reality.

Tax breaks given to some of the richest companies in the world have to be stopped immediately. The oil depletion allowance for oil companies keeps almost a hundred billion dollars a year from being taxed must be ended.

I do not believe anything can stop the lobbying system in Washington, but more strict penalties have to be enforced to prevent our elected officials from accepting gifts and other gratuities from lobbying firms and repaying them with pork-barrel spending.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan must be brought under fiscal control and ended. Maybe Iraq and Afghanistan will have some problems as a result, but it’s their countries…let them solve the problems and not us. The USA is not the world’s policeman. We would be more helpful to the world stopping mass slaughters in Sudan and Congo than “policing” Iraq.

Wall Street speculators have to stand or fall on their own without government help. Deregulation must be ended in order to save these firms from their own greed. Retirement accounts of individuals, like IRAs and 401Ks should be insured by the FDIC (or an offshoot of the FDIC), the premiums for which must be paid by the Wall Street Firm.

The disgrace of the USA’s medical and drug system should be brought up to the level of the rest of the world where medicine and drugs are available at very low prices. Sure the government will have to subsidize this, but the money the government would save on Bush’s wars would more than cover the subsidy.

There are other problems facing Obama, and the suggestions I’ve made are only “stop-gaps”. As the USA returns to profitability, many of these somewhat socialistic programs can be ended and the USA return to a successful capitalistic system. But right now, the government has to step-in and stop these continuing abuses.

As I said…nobody asked me.