Friday, October 10, 2008

Our Financial Mess- Black Friday October 10, 2008

Why?

I am at loss myself and have never seen anything like this ever. Our world has lost all confidence in the US Government and thus in the US Markets. In my opinion they are in fear McBush might win the election and current policies will continue. Once Obama wins I also believe we will start to see a small stabilization and after the New Year when he takes office a recovery will start. Until then many business and people will flat out stop all spending.

Why did happen?

Lets go back 1000 years to the plains and why the American Indian never established towns and cities. They had no regulations and they hunted and chopped wood and when an area had no deer left, they moved to a new area. After 10-20 years the new area had no deer left, firewood was all gone and they moved to a new area, after 10-20 years they had no deer left, firewood was all gone and maybe even moved back to the area they were in 30 years ago as nature let the few remaining deer re-populate and the new trees grew. Now if they had started to build cities and have a real government, they would have understood to replenish the land by regulations and understand forest management.

We only have to go back a few 100 years to see what happened in our land for the same types of examples. Let’s say you were a lumber robber baron and there were no regulations. You started by chopping down every tree near your lumber mill to maximize your profits; you kept expanding your circle of chopped clear land without any regard for the land. When all the land was clear, you packed up the mill and moved it to a new area full of tress. Then came the government and finally stopped you, you yelled, it’s government regulation, stop this, we are free to do whatever our profit hungry business wants to do, get out of our way. But for the good of everyone else, we start to require lumber companies to plant new trees. Establish forest management.

1929 no regulations on Wall Street and in banking, the same greed that the lumber mill had we had in the financial markets. Maximize profits without any regard to anything but your own company, your own profits. Come into the Bush era and the same thing happens, remove regulations, the free market, well this time the mortgage leaders move to maximize profits by chopping every tree, clearing every field and building millions of homes for people who can’t afford the home. The to cover their tracks, they sell the mortgages to one another, so no one can tell who owns what and more greed, give mortgages with no money down. Building contractors who could care less start selling to anyone with no money down and don’t tell the new homeowner about real costs. “I didn’t know I had to pay for gas to heat my home and hot water, the apartment I came from it was included in the rent, I though it was in the mortgage.” Yes, I actually heard this. Then came the property taxes, insurance, etc. Many of these new homeowners started to move back to apartments and just walked away from their homes. They had no investment, it was a no lost for them. I met one home owner, who moved in with a zero down mortgage, had never paid a single mortgage payment and had lived six months free in their home only paying the electric bill. He figured he had a few more months of free “rent” before they got to him.
We as a nation need to understand the greed that comes from a few without regulation and oversight. Make the regulations fair but stop the few crooks, which ruin it for all. The concept of free markets, etc is nice and in a perfect world might work. But we live in a world where a few are willing to steal. In the 1930’s we made a lot of regulations to stop the crooks of the markets of the 20’s. In the next few years we are going to have to look back and start to make new regulation or institute old regulations to stop the type of abuse that caused this mess. It’s not the end of the world to have a few regulations for the benefit of most against a few who want to ruin for all to their benefit.

I hope that my Republican friends can cross the line this election year and vote for the person best to lead in their area, whether the President, Congressman or the State Representative. Look at the person, what they have done in the past or what they propose to do in the future. The ones who want to do nothing or continue what they have been doing it’s time to replace them.

My name is Joe Weingarten and I am running for State Representative in the Indian 29th House District and I approve this message.

Paid for and authorized by the Weingarten for 29th District State Representative Committee.