1 Boring Old Man

What happened was clear. On Sunday, September 7th, the Federal government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac who guaranteed half the nation’s mortgage market. On Monday, September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and the Stock Market began to fall. By Thursday of that week, President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson were presenting a mammoth Bailout Plan that had to be passed by Congress immediately. It passed after an initial failure and was signed within a week and a half of being presented. Since then, we’ve learned that the Secretary of the Treasury handled the money in a different way than directed by Congress, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis has increasingly worsened crashing both the American and the World economy.

The "Housing Bubble" burst in the fourth quarter of 2005, three years prior to the Stock Market beginning to crash. The timeline of events since the bubble burst shows not a great deal of activity on the part of the government, certainly no consistent plan directed towards trying to resolve the crisis – now called the Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis. Then, in response to the Stock Market dipping, there was suddenly a government spending frenzy that seems to have no bottom.

I don’t doubt the financial crisis itself, nor do I question its cause. The fact that the "Housing bubble" was ignored during what I call the ‘Big Sleep‘ years of the Bush Administration is no surprise to me – a tragedy, but no surprise. We "overlooked" everything during that time, and we "oversaw" nothing. In fact, he established a clear pattern of dealing with anything. At the end of 2002, he and his team went on the warpath about Iraq. He raled at Congress to pass a war-powers act to help him deal with the dire emergency. It was a lie. There was no emergency. In fact, Iraq was not our problem – at all. And when the Iraq War had dragged on and all of us wanted out, he mounted a campaign for a "Surge" to keep it going. He raled at Congress, and got what he wanted. The "Surge" was an immaterial and expensive postponement of the inevitable. Nothing more. Now, after having nothing but platitudes about the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, he suddenly shows up with a huge Bailout Plan. Congress just had to pass it immediately, or else…

So I don’t believe President George Bush. He has never told us the truth before. He has us act in an emergency mode, and later we figure out that whatever course he was determined to send us on was a campaign, a facade, for some other agenda. I don’t know what’s behind this turning on the spigot of the national debt in the way he’s doing it. Clearly, we’re going to have to spend a lot of money [we don’t have] to restore [or prevent the demise of] our economy. But, I predict that somewhere down the line, this course he’s taking us on has another agenda. Maybe he’s bailing out the rich at the expense of the rest of us as many think. Maybe he’s hamstringing Obama by depleting our reserves. Maybe he’s "who knows what?" But whatever it turns out to be, it won’t be the best thing for the country. And he has 50 very long days to do whatever he’s doing. All I know is that I don’t believe President George Bush. It has all been the ‘Big Lie.’