THINK WE CAN .com

Well, don’t collect it just yet.  This is a monumental decision being thrust upon our leaders.  And some experts put the bailout costs closer to two trillion than 700 billion dollars; have our leaders ever fudged any figures before?

Know this—this bailout will change the entire world in many ways.

If we waste this opportunity by doling out this money without proper controls, generations will suffer.  The point is, if we do this wild and crazy thing, it is imperative that we slow down long enough to do it right.  Even the U.S. may not have enough money for another try.  Doing it right means recognizing the process that caused this crisis.  As the Chinese proverb says, “wisdom begins by calling things by their right names.”

So what is the name of the process that got us here?  The answer is simple--in a word--privatization.

The U.S. embraced privatization of critically important segments of our economy some 30 years ago.  For years our leaders have followed the advice of a number of economists who determined that corporate CEOs should make and enforce the laws that control much of the economy of the richest nation on earth.

Now, I know many of your eyes widened upon reading that last sentence.  And you are right, an average 15 year-old, with just a little street savvy, would have questioned the idea that CEOs could be trusted to pay attention to the needs of all our citizens.  And, of course, the result of this unbelievably misguided, economic experiment has proven the 15 year-old to be correct.

We now know that Big Oil should not have been allowed to determine U.S. energy policy.  We now know that Big Pharma thinks good health care policy is to drug 30 percent of the children in the U.S.  And we now know Big Finance thinks just about anything goes as they wreak financial havoc.

There is one good thing that came out of this debacle.  We now know our highly educated economists should have consulted a 15 year-old concerning privatization.  The U.S. would be in much better shape right now.

At this juncture we need to help our leadership put a name to the cause of this terrible situation.  They must address the privatization issue if they are to solve U.S. economic problems.  They must cease their eternal bickering, name-calling and sleaze-media tactics, at least in this matter.  It took a majority of Congress to allow privatization to become the law of the land.  It will take a majority of Congress to change the situation.  Somehow, democrats and republicans must join together to fix this.

We must take back control of critical sectors of the U.S. economy that were handed over to corporate America.  That will require a good deal of planning, especially long-term planning.  We have suffered the results of privatization for far too long.  We were actually at a point a short time ago where the privateers in government wanted to turn over control of trillions of social security dollars to the private sector.

Can you imagine where we would be right now if massive portions of the social security trust fund had been diverted into CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and CDSs (credit default swaps)?  There may not be enough paper upon which to print phony dollars for that bailout.

I will be following and writing about the bailout as it develops.  A situation like this is very educational as we will be afforded a much deeper peek into the hearts and souls of the principle players.  As our politicians twist in the wind while grappling with vastly important decisions they are being forced to make in haste, I am reminded of high-stakes poker where people gamble more than they can afford to lose. 

It appears our leaders either don’t understand privatization or they don’t want to talk about it.  I, for one, intend to call all my U.S. representatives and senators.  If enough of us do this, we may have a chance to get them on the right track.  Frankly, our leaders seem to be roaming in the woods without a GPS.  They just don’t get it.  I have not heard a single one of them utter the word, privatization.

The bottom line is that we need government oversight.  Our leaders need to make the most important decisions concerning our society.  Concerning this bailout, they need more time to develop the right decisions.  Our leaders are being given the bums rush in this matter by a small handful of people.  There is grave danger in moving too fast on the bailout.