I would like to use the reminder of this tragic anniversary to inform everyone of my personal crusade to pass a federal law banning the sale of assault grade box cutters in the United States. Imagine the number of lives we could save each year if we simply removed all of the box cutters from our city streets. Remember, people don’t kill people… box cutters kill people. Did you ever wonder why we usually blame the guns for our local crimes but NOBODY blamed the box cutters on 9/11?
Okay, this took me a little while but I think that I finally have it all figured out. I am very serious about this theory so please follow my logic closely. Donald Trump was a Democrat for years and has been a very close friend to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and their family members have attended each other’s weddings in the past. Donald Trump and the Clintons have historically been very close. A few years after President Obama took office, Mr. Trump “decided” to become a very outspoken Republican against Barack Obama. Now that Hillary Clinton is running for President, Donald Trump decided to jump into the race and immediately start bad mouthing other Republicans. Suddenly, Donald Trump shoots up in the political polls over the past week and starts having too much success within the Republican Party. Within a few days of these poll results, he comes out and starts bad mouthing John McCain and prisoners-of-war everywhere which is political suicide. Now it all makes sense! Why could I not see it? Donald Trump was never supposed to WIN the Republican nomination. The plan has always been to disrupt the Republican Party and then run as an independent to split the conservative vote and win the election for Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton won his election in 1992 when Ross Perot split the vote with George H.W. Bush. His wife wants to win in a similar manner. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may be working together to split the conservative vote and ultimately put her in the oval office. This pisses me off… but this is also brilliant if it turns out to be true.
There has been quite a bit of talk in the news recently about Christian people being forced to provided business services that violate their personal beliefs. I do sympathize with Christian people who feel like their beliefs sometimes run against the grain of society. I really do. The best personal example that I can give is regarding the subject of abortion. I strongly believe that abortion is the premeditated murder of innocent life. I try to understand it’s utilization in extreme cases of rape or risk to the mother’s life… but I have seen abortion used repeatedly as a form of birth control and it makes me sick to my stomach.
As a family doctor, I would sometimes face a conundrum. I would sometimes find myself sitting in an exam room with a young woman who did not want to continue with her pregnancy. It would be easy for me to look down my nose at this woman or treat her with contempt. I would never allow myself to behave in this manner. I would smile at her and say that I know what she was going through must be very difficult. I would sit and talk with her for a few minutes about her decision-making process. I would make sure she had considered the possibilities of actually keeping the baby or giving the child up for adoption. I would then tell the patient that I was going to have my nurse come in and talk with her about all of her available options. At the end of the visit, I would excuse myself from the room and find a quiet area to pray. Her life was already difficult enough… it was not my place to make it more difficult. I asked God to forgive her for what she might be about to do. My patient had no idea that I did not approve because it was not my job to be her judge. She came to me because I was her doctor. I did not endorse her decision in any way but the rest of our society has already told us both that what she was doing is currently acceptable. And if being a family doctor meant that I was required to physically perform the abortion myself then I would have already found another line of work years ago. I have always treated my patients the exact same way regardless of my own religious beliefs. That is exactly how an intelligent Christian florist or caterer should handle being asked to provide services for a gay wedding in our civilized society.
Those are the rules when your principles and religious beliefs are being held by a shrinking minority of the population.
You pick a profession you can live with.
You approach life with a good attitude and a smile.
You are pleasant to people who are pleasant to you.
You do your job as required within the restrictions of the law.
And you pray for the sinners when you get home.
Madonna made big news last night when she was yanked from behind down a flight of stairs after being pulled by her cape that was reportedly tied too tightly around her neck. This is the most attention that Madonna has received in years. If I were Madonna’s agent, I would recommend that she leave her cape tied too tightly for the remainder of her tour. Madonna gave us “Like a Prayer” and “Like a Virgin”… we could call this her “Like a Slinky” tour! I can already hear her new hit song in my head:
“I made it through the factory
Somehow I made it through
Didn’t know how fun I was
Until I found you
I was neat
At your feet
On your stairs
Alone or in pairs
And you made me feel
Yeah you made me feel
Shiny and new
Like a slinky
Touched like a wonderful toy
Like a slinky
Fun for a girl… or a boy.”
A terrible law was just passed in Arkansas earlier this week which indirectly makes it legal to deny someone service from a business based on their sexual orientation. This law actually prevents local cities and counties from passing their own anti-discrimination legislation and forces these municipalities to adhere to the state law, which just happens to allow legal discrimination against homosexuals. This is one of the proudest moments in our state history ever since banning those nine black children from Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
We have learned throughout history that discriminatory practices can tear at the very fabric of our society. As a civilized society, we have a responsibility to level the playing field though the laws that we pass. Anti-discrimination laws have done a great deal to restore social order. However, these laws must be limited so that they do not violate the constitutional rights of the individual. A free society cannot simply force an individual to provide a service if they choose not to do so. However, a free society can tell an individual that IF they choose to provide a service to the public then they must indiscriminately provide that same service to everyone. This does not undermine anyone’s constitutional rights. The individual provider of a service always has the freedom to simply walk away if they don’t like the rules.
It should be obvious to everyone involved that the act of providing a service for a homosexual person is NOT an endorsement of that person’s lifestyle. It should not violate someone’s Christian sensibilities to provide flowers or a cake for a gay customer. Allow me to give you a personal example. There was a three-week period in the late nineties when I kept a child rapist alive in the ICU. A local father caught this man raping his young daughter in her own bed and proceeded to beat this man within an inch of his life. I did NOT decide to take care of this patient because I endorse the rape of children. I did not show support for this person’s actions by keeping him alive. I did exactly what I was required to do in that ICU because it was my damn job.
Nobody forced me to be an ICU doctor in the United States, but when I decided to become an ICU doctor then I made an agreement with the rest of society to treat everyone the same way. If my so-called “Christian beliefs” were so strong that I could not allow myself to save the life of a child rapist, then I should have looked for employment that did not involve my daily interaction with the general public. If a local florist or baker cannot muster the intellectual courage to provide service for a homosexual customer then perhaps they should also pursue a different line of work. I would also like to state for the record that while child rapists are absolutely abhorrent… most homosexual men and women are the nicest and most harmless people that you will ever meet. I use this analogy only to point out the absurdity of the opposing argument but I want to make it clear that I do NOT morally equate these two groups in any way.
If you call yourself a Christian and you still support the foolish laws such as the one recently passed in the state of Arkansas then you need to get over yourself. A real Christian takes care of all people and leaves the judging up to God. I would recommend for Christians throughout this nation to stop praying so much for the “hedonistic sinners” that you perceive to be all around you and to start praying instead to be forgiven for your own ugly intolerance. God is watching us all.
I watched a mixed martial arts fight recently which pitted a large muscled-up brute against a scrawny little opponent. A loud guffaw was released from the crowd as the two fighters stepped into the ring. I thought MMA fighters had to be from the same weight class but this was clearly not the case for this fight. I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “This little dude is about to be destroyed.” The big man started the fight with a flurry of punches. The little guy kept retreating when approached and continued to run in circles around the octagon. The big fighter proceeded to chase his opponent while constantly swinging and missing. This continued for the first two rounds. In the final round, the big guy became frustrated. His arms had become tired and he looked exhausted. Suddenly, the little fighter came in with a right hook and landed it right on the other guy’s chin. The big man fell to his knees and the little guy pounced. The fight ended with the smaller fighter sitting on the big guy’s chest and pounding away at his defenseless skull. The big guy was powerful and aggressive. He was determined and he was fearless. But most importantly… the big fighter was dumb. The smaller guy did not have to be as powerful because he was patient and he was smart.
This fight that I just described is very similar to the United States and its current war on terror. We are fighting in a manner that is profoundly stupid. We initially came out flailing wildly after we were blindsided on 9/11. We were using an old and tired fighting tactic against a new enemy. We are now becoming frustrated and exhausted while our enemy circles us. We know deep down that we are losing but we seem bewildered. If we don’t change our fighting tactics soon, we run the risk of losing the fight.
In order to understand this concept, you need to look at the age of the typical Islamic militant. The average age of an ISIS fighter in Iraq right now is just twenty-two years old. Just think about that for a second. This means that our current enemy was approximately eight years old when the 9/11 attacks took place. An angry American public cried for revenge after the twin towers fell back then. Our strategy became focused on getting Osama bin Laden and blowing up terrorists anywhere that we could find them. The United States couldn’t have cared less what the average eight-year-old Muslim child was thinking when this fight started.
We launched our counterattack with drone strikes and hellfire missile while our enemy launched a new war with false promises and propaganda. We provided our enemies with the ammunition for their war with our mea culpa regarding mistreatment at the Abu Ghraib prison. We fed into our enemy’s narrative by attacking innocent wedding parties with predator drones. We supported brutal dictators in their region because it served our best interest. Hell… we should have just printed up their propaganda pamphlets for them and dropped them from our own airplanes. In summary, we did not give the average eight-year-old Muslim child living in the Middle East back then any reason whatsoever to trust us.
It is much easier to prevent an innocent young person from becoming radicalized than it is to return this person back to the civilized world once they have already converted. We cannot continue to fight these battles on the wrong front. Most conventional wars in our past had a leader whom we could directly focus on. If you toppled that leader then you won the war. The war we find ourselves engaged in today is not with any one military leader or country. The civilized world is at war today with an idea… and that idea is called radical Islam. This war will not be won with military power alone. This war will either be won or lost in the arena of ideas. We have to start fighting intelligently or otherwise this smaller opponent will soon be sitting directly on our chest while pounding in our skull.
The best way to fight propaganda is with counter propaganda. Of course these brutal Islamic militants need to be killed… but even more importantly, their message needs to be silenced. We need real leadership to rally Muslim countries to counter radial Islam. These radical Islamic militants need to be defeated by good Muslim people willing to fight for what is right. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates would be willing to lead the way if the United States would offer real leadership and support. The United States should be willing to provide tactical support and equipment. Our non-Muslim allies could assist as well but the main fighting on the ground must be from a groundswell of Muslims willing to attack other Muslims. This will counter our enemy’s own propaganda if they are defeated at the hand of other Muslims. We are never going to win the hearts and minds of this current batch of Islamic militants on the battlefield today. Every single one of these Islamic extremists must eventually be eliminated.
The most important role for the United States going forward is to focus on the next batch of young and impressionable Muslim children that are currently being brought into this world. We have to show them the goodness that is the United States of America. We have to work with local Muslim leaders regarding education and prevention of future radicalization. Most importantly, we have to conduct ourselves in a manner where we do not leave these children with the impression that we might be the evil bad guys that our enemies describe. We have to be patient and we have to be smart. We have to stop chasing our opponent endlessly around the octagon. We have to study our opponent and adapt accordingly.
It would be a glaring omission to finish discussing my fighting analogy without even mentioning the “bolo punch”. You do know what the “bolo punch” is, right? The bolo punch is a fighting technique in which a fighter will move one arm in a large circular motion in order to distract the opponent from the other hand. While the opponent is focusing all of his attention on the movement of the one hand, the fighter will then use the other hand to blindside the opponent. Right now, ISIS is the circling hand that is getting everyone’s attention… but Iran is sitting quietly with the other clenched fist. Iran has a vast stockpile of enriched uranium and they have just developed an intercontinental ballistic missile according to recent reports. The mullahs of Iran have already vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. ISIS may be “small potatoes” compared to what might actually lie ahead in this fight.
If we are not careful… the world may soon receive the mother of all bolo punches.
The time for training camp is now over.
The gloves have come off.
It is time to learn how to fight properly in this new world order or we are soon going to get knocked the hell out.
Raif Badawi is a popular blogger in Saudi Arabia who was recently sentenced to 1000 lashes for insulting Islam. A stranger takes him outside each day and whips him 50 times near a mosque as punishment for speaking his mind. As tragic as this unjust court ruling may be, I just can’t help but notice that it has given birth to one of the strangest sounding job titles in the history of mankind. I challenge anyone out there to name a more ridiculous sounding job position than that of a “blogger flogger”.
Just a few weeks ago, President Obama used Yemen as the perfect example of success regarding his recent foreign policy decisions. Yemen now has no functioning government whatsoever and is currently being run by terrorists. I just can’t wait to see what kind of diplomatic successes that he has planned for us regarding Iran.
Chris Kyle was the most lethal military sniper in the history of the United States. He became highly decorated after four tours of duty in Iraq while he recorded up to one hundred and sixty confirmed kills. A very popular movie was just released out of Hollywood depicting his life story. If you listen to some of the people on the far left, you quickly realize that they have a far different perception of Chris Kyle than the person portrayed in the movie. Film director Michael Moore implied that Chris Kyle is a coward and was the invader of another sovereign nation. Actor Seth Rogan compared the movie about Chris Kyle to a fictional piece of Nazi propaganda. Many on the left argue that the people of the United States military were unwelcome invaders during the start of the Iraq War in 2003. They laugh when looking back at Vice President Dick Cheney’s speculation that the people of the United States military “would be greeted as liberators”. They perceive Chris Kyle as an unwelcome invader in an unjustified war. This is an overly simplistic view of a very complex story.
In order to understand the complicated relationship between the United States and Iraq, one really has to go all the way back to 1982. Islamic extremists had already overthrown the Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein feared that radical Islamic ideas would start spreading rapidly through his predominantly Shi’ite population. Hussein then invaded Iran and attempted to overthrow the new radical Islamic government. Two years into the Iraq-Iran War, Saddam Hussein was clearly losing. President Ronald Reagan was growing concerned about Iran’s repeated success on the battlefield. You have to remember that this was just two years after the Iranian hostage crisis. Iran was clearly our greater potential enemy during this period. America decided that Iraq would be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The United States began to supply the Iraqi military with communication and radar equipment. Saddam Hussein started receiving billions of dollars in aid from the United States. The U.S. military provided intelligence and advice to the Iraqi military including how to arm itself via third-party weapons dealers. The citizens of Iraq could see that the United States government was clearly in Saddam Hussein’s corner.
Did you ever see that old Frankenstein movie when the crazy doctor starts yelling, “It’s alive”? Well, that is pretty much what the United States government should have yelled after we propped up the President of Iraq. The United States created this monster and then completely lost control of it. Over the next eight years, Saddam Hussein would rule over his people with a ruthless iron fist. His citizens lived in constant fear of his wrath. He kept most of his nation’s wealth for himself as his people lived in abject poverty. During the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq. It has been estimated that up to 182,000 people were killed in this genocide. The United States turned a blind eye to the plight of the Iraqi people during this time because it was not in our own country’s best interest. Now, let us all check in on our Frankenstein’s monster by fast-forwarding to 1990.
War has its costs, and for Saddam Hussein the cost of his prolonged war with Iran included a 30-billion-dollar debt to the tiny adjacent oil-rich country of Kuwait. Saddam asked Kuwait to forgive this debt, which Kuwait promptly refused. Saddam deeply resented this refusal considering his perception that Kuwait had historically always been a part of Iraq. Using the weaponry and power granted to him by the United States government, Saddam Hussein suddenly invaded and quickly took over Kuwait… much to the surprise of the international community. Within the course of just a few days, Saddam Hussein suddenly flipped in his role from a trusted ally to public enemy number one. The United States started encouraging the Iraqi people to rise up against their brutal dictator.
After a few months of failed negotiations, the first Gulf War had begun. The United States military along with its allies moved in and quickly pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Within just a few days, allied tanks were blazing at full speed across southern Iraq while the so-called “elite Iraqi Republican Guard” were sent fleeing up north back to Baghdad. Many of the citizens across Iraq greeted the United States military as liberators. Citizens cheered in the streets as the allied tanks rolled past them. The Iraqi people started to do what the United States had encouraged them to do… they rose up against their brutal dictator. Trusting in the United States government would eventually prove to be a fatal error.
Iraqi military resistance was much lighter than almost anyone expected. Most of the Iraqi military would surrender almost immediately when encountered. It became obvious that Saddam Hussein would be quite easy to topple. At this point, President George Herbert Walker Bush had to make a quick choice. Would he want to push into Baghdad and remove the head from the snake? There was concern that a leadership vacuum in Iraq would quickly lead to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. The choice was suddenly made to withdraw our troops from Iraq and leave Saddam Hussein in power. The Iraqi citizens who rose up to join our fight against Saddam Hussein would later be slaughtered. The deaths of these brave Iraqi rebels would not soon be forgotten. Let us now jump ahead once again to 2003.
The World Trade Center has now fallen. Saddam Hussein has already initiated multiple failed assassination attempts on our current President’s father as an act of revenge for the previous Iraqi invasion. The United States military has already been at war for two years with terrorists in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Colin Powell sits before the United Nations Security Council giving the most famous speech of his life. He told the world that Saddam Hussein possessed extremely dangerous weapons of mass destruction that could be used for an imminent attack. In retrospect, it would seem that the evidence presented that day was likely falsified and presented to the CIA by an Iraqi citizen with a brilliantly devious plan to remove his brutal dictator from power.
Do I believe that President Bush and Secretary Powell believed everything that they were telling the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? I have never been given any reason not to believe them. But I do believe that President Bush was just looking for a reason to finish the job that his father admittedly failed to do. I think that President Bush was in a very vulnerable position to “take the bait”. Just recently, some new evidence has come to light indicating that there may indeed have been some actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, given the leadership vacuum and growth of radical Islamism created in the invasion’s wake… I do suspect that most historians will eventually agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a tactical mistake.
It is within the context of this history that you must view the current mindset of the average Iraqi citizen. The average Iraqi citizen does not fear the American military. The Iraqi people did not greet the American military as liberators the second time around because they justifiably did not trust the American government. Saddam Hussein had two male sons who had walked around the streets of Iraq absolutely terrorizing and repeatedly torturing them. When Saddam and his evil offspring were finally put to death, military commanders felt the need to broadcast these images throughout Iraq due to the understandable distrust of the American government. As the Iraq War dragged on, most of the opposition that our troops were facing was not from the Iraqi citizens… we were fighting Islamic extremists who were crossing the borders and engaging us from other countries like Iran and Syria.
There are three factors that should be considered when any country engages in a war: the military, the government, and the citizens. The United States military has always been our strongest and most admirable variable. It is not a soldier’s job to decide if we go to war or why we go to war. It is not the soldier’s responsibility to empathize with the people who are trying to kill him. Chris Kyle was not an enemy to the Iraqi people. He was a hero to the citizens in the United States and the citizens in Iraq. Most of the people of Iraq are just like many of us. They are afraid of Islamic extremism. They are highly educated and cultured. Many of them believe in Jesus Christ and pray to him regularly. Chris Kyle volunteered to go half way across the world to protect these people along with his fellow soldiers. Meanwhile, Michael Moore and many of the rest of us stayed over here to safely judge his actions from a distance.
The second factor that should be considered when a country engages in war is its government. Our government has repeatedly let down the people of Iraq. The only thing worse than not helping a group of people is when you only half-help them. You eventually set these people up for an even greater failure than if you never even got involved in the first place. Large numbers of peaceful citizens around the globe do not hate the United States because we are rich or because we are “freedom loving”… they hate us because our government constantly screws around with their country’s infrastructure and then abruptly abandons them. Our government often props up brutal dictators because it serves our own personal interest. Just recently, our government was led by President Obama in pulling completely out of Iraq and abandoning any of our previous commitments that we made to its people. Hard fought military gains were simply handed over to our enemy. This action was executed with very little protest from the American people. This leads me to the third and most important factor when dealing with a nation’s war: its citizens.
The citizens of the United States are our country’s “weakest link”. Our enemies fear our government and they most certainly fear our military… but our enemy understands that the true weakness of the United States lies within the civilian population. They know that we don’t have the stomach for a prolonged fight. They realize that we lack the same intestinal fortitude that they do over the long haul. They know that we are intellectually lazy and easily distracted. We allow our government to run amok and we tend to mindlessly defend our political leaders. Our enemies will prolong conflicts instead of simply trying to win them because they know that American citizens will eventually lose their resolve over time. Our government attempts to mitigate this risk by not showing us the body bags or the flag draped coffins on our televisions.
The citizens of the United States do not want to constantly hear about the war overseas because it makes them feel badly in general.
We have become distracted and uninformed as a nation.
We have become hesitant in supporting the act of doing the right thing in the world simply because it is right.
We are blurring the previously distinct lines between good and evil.
We are becoming more godless as a people.
I have met the true enemy of the Iraqi people and it is not Chris Kyle nor any members of the United States military.
I have met the true enemy of the Iraqi people… and the enemy is us.
Pure capitalism is a beautiful thing when working as designed. Capitalism works as a catalyst for invention. The money one strives for through capitalism is the perpetually hanging carrot on a stick. It motivates people to give extra effort going forward with the expectation of additional rewards in the future. Capitalism allows the choice for people to live extraordinary lives rather that just ordinary ones should they desire.
Unfettered capitalism has allowed for much of the innovation that the rest of the world has enjoyed over this past century. Just image what the world would look like today without capitalism. Much of the technology we use today would look like witchcraft in that parallel universe. Capitalism makes all of our lives easier over the long run whether we realize it or not.
There is also a very important downside to capitalism that is often overlooked. True capitalism punishes bad decisions. It quickly separates the fools from their money. Private enterprise is supposed to act as the unforgiving graveyard where bad ideas go off to die. Well functioning capitalism works like a giant reset button that periodically levels the playing field for intelligent young go-getters on the bottom rung of the economy. When true capitalism is working as designed, it is supposed to eventually weed out the idiots and the bad apples.
A few years ago, the rules of capitalism in the United States were changed forever. The origin of this change is rooted in the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This law had been in place ever since the Great Depression. This law allowed for banks to take deposits and make loans and it also allowed for investment brokers to underwrite and sell securities. However, this law restricted ONE single entity from performing BOTH tasks at the same time due to an inherent conflict of interest. After repeated lobbying from big banks, Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Phil Gramm worked together to successfully repeal Glass-Steagall in 1999… and capitalism as previously known in the United States would NEVER be the same. This was an exercise in bipartisan stupidity.
A few years after being unshackled by Glass-Steagall, investment banks on Wall Street started making a series of ridiculously bad bets on the subprime mortgage industry. They were granting large mortgage loans to the poorest among us and were even being encouraged to do so by our government. They leveraged themselves beyond idiocy. Investment bankers with small penises and large egos got into a pissing contest with other people’s money. They started making bets that low-income people with no savings would be able to continue making enormous mortgage payments in perpetuity. Were these poor fools with no money and large mortgages partially to blame for this problem? You bet they were! But these investment bankers did not even seem to care if the whole system was rigged… because they were getting rich. Bankers would bundle these bad loans into small packages and then sell them to third parties. They would basically create these steaming investment turds, light them on fire, and then leave them at someone else’s doorstep.
Eventually, this house of cards came crashing down. The collapse of Lehman Brothers was the canary in the coal mine. Other investment banks and insurance companies soon came crashing down as well. The whole economic system started to look like it was about to go under. Credit markets became frozen and global panic quickly set in.
Goldman Sachs was the Wall Street investment bank that almost had this whole thing figured out… almost. Goldman Sachs saw much of this subprime mortgage disaster coming and attempted to invest in such a way to profit handsomely from it. They purchased a high volume of “credit default swaps” from the insurance company AIG that insured against a subprime mortgage meltdown. This is like you buying insurance just in case your neighbor’s house burns down. This is not insurance designed to protect you from individual loss. Credit default swaps are basically a means of placing bets on an external market… and in this analogy it even ENCOURAGES you to go burn your neighbor’s house down in order to get paid. Goldman Sachs made very large bets via credit default swaps that the subprime mortgage market would collapse and when they made the correct bet… they wanted their bookie named AIG to pay up!
There was one glaring problem with Goldman Sachs and their brilliant strategy. AIG was about to go “belly up” and assume room temperature along with Lehman Brothers. It appeared that there would be no giant insurance company remaining in the near future to reward Goldman Sachs for their wise investment move. These capitalist masterminds had lined themselves up like a row of dominos and they were all about to knock each other down.
There would be one man to save them all. His name was Hank Paulson. He was the Secretary of the Treasury and the top economic advisor to President Bush. In an instant, he became the “Chicken Little” of the President’s cabinet. Hank Paulson approached the President and told him that our economic sky was falling. Hank Paulson joined forces with the Federal Reserve to establish a plan of action in order to prop up the banking system. Hank Paulson literally got down on his hands and knees and begged the Speaker of the House to pass a trillion-dollar stimulus package to save the banking industry. Oh by the way, you DO know what Hank Paulson did for a living before becoming the Secretary of the Treasury right? If not, you are going to absolutely LOVE this! Before becoming a top advisor to the President of the United States… Hank Paulson was the CEO of Goldman Sachs! Small world, right?
As Wall Street got down on its knees and begged Congress for its forgiveness… America was at a crossroads. Our society was staring down into the dark uncharted abyss that was the downside of capitalism. I was frantically writing letters to my representatives begging them not to pass this trillion-dollar stimulus package for the banking industry. I recommended that any and all stimulus money should go to help provide a backstop for FDIC insurance so that most individuals could at least recuperate some of their savings in a few months. Fate had its hand firmly planted over capitalism’s large reset button. The idiots and the bad apples were about to be weeded out. The intelligent young go-getters were about to get their chance in this land of opportunity to start the process of rebuilding our economy from the ground up.
But in an instant… America blinked. Capitalism looked too frightening from so high up with no safe place to land. Our leaders allowed for almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer stimulus money to be distributed among all of the losers on Wall Street. We were told that these institutions were “too big to fail”. AIG was given over 182 billion dollars, much of which was then repaid to Goldman Sachs. Within the span of just a few days, capitalism in the United States was officially dead. What is now left in its place is some bastardized form of “pseudo-capitalism” in which a few undeserving investment bankers on Wall Street gather up the last remaining “hanging carrots of motivation” while the intelligent young go-getters spend their time looking for jobs on the internet while living in their parent’s basement. These brilliant investment bankers now know that they are too big too fail which makes crushing their opposition even easier.
Nowadays when I complain about the current state of capitalism and Wall Street in the United States, some people look at me like I’m some kind of communist. There are other people like many in the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd who tend to vilify rich people simply because they are rich and uninformed onlookers tend to lump people like me in together with them. I would like to announce to everyone that I am not an “Occupy Wall Street” guy. I am not a fan of “pseudo-capitalism” but I have absolutely no problem with rich people. In fact, I have always aspired to join the ranks of the rich. I will still chase an occasional hanging carrot on a stick on the rare occasion that I can actually find one. I would also like to state for the record that I was raised to believe in the American dream and I still love the concept of capitalism… I just don’t see it anywhere. Real capitalism in the United States apparently died a few years ago when it was somehow caught in the careless crossfire between unfettered greed and unfathomable stupidity.