McCain is New Lord of the Lies, and Dishonesty Built the Wall Street Wall That is Tumbling Down

McCain is the new lord of the lies, but he has a lot of brothers and sisters on Wall Street. Dishonesty built the Wall Street Wall, the financial house of cards that is still falling.

The once defeated, still proposed $700 billion bailout, which I detest, is just a bandage. I think more crap will hit the fan and soon. Too many lies have been told. Too much greed has ruled the day. I fear that more collapse is coming.

I actually think people, Obama included, need to listen to Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Backed by distinguished Emory University Professor Frank Alexander, Kucinich argues that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act will not fulfill its stated goal of preserving homeownership. Unless the Secretary of the Treasury is required to prioritize assets that will give the Treasury a controlling share in the underlying whole mortgage, the Secretary will hold bad assets with no power to make them solid again. Helping people keep their homes should be priority one. Read at: http://kucinich.house.gov/

The economic problem is really a crisis of dishonesty. The problem is that our system is built on a house of cards, divorced from what is true, what is tangible and what is real. It has been a time of greed on steroids, fueled by rampant lies and deceit.

According to the FBI, mortgage fraud is the fastest-growing white-collar crime in America. While certainly not the sole cause of the subprime mortgage crisis, it is likely one of the causes, as unscrupulous brokers talked unwitting people into buying houses they couldn't afford.

And the U.S. government, under the glorious former king of false statements, George W. Bush, has been hiding and manipulating economic indicators for many years. It stopped reporting the size of the money supply in 2006. The government has also spun the economic data, manipulated the economic indicators, and otherwise manipulated the market and the economy. What's wrong with that? Well, consumers have had an unrealistic view of the economy, and have therefore made bad decisions based on false or hidden information.

And many top economists - such as Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz - are saying that the high cost of war in Iraq is the real cause of the current slowdown in the U.S. We have wasted billions and billions of dollars over there for nothing good, and all because of lies. It is now clear, of course, that the Iraq war was launched under false pretenses, created by Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons who control them.

As columnist George Washington (a pen name) wrote in Op Ed News, “The Neo-Cons -- the guys running our nation's foreign policy -- have bragged that they disdain reality and that America can just "create its own reality" since it is an empire and the world's sole superpower. Well, it didn't quite work out that way in Iraq or Afghanistan. And if we invade Iran, it won't work that way there, either. The lies which America's 'leaders' have been using are so blatant that America has lost its credibility. Of course, the government has tried to hide the weakness in the economy by devaluing the dollar. But the chickens are coming home to roost: gaming the system only works for so long.”

Washington goes on to speak about the disastrous "derivatives bubble". He writes: “Basically, the $516 trillion dollar derivatives market doesn't trade in real goods or real services, but abstract ideas and pieces of paper several steps removed from the real goods or services. The problem is that neither the buyers or sellers of derivatives have placed a value on the books of their trades. Indeed, they can't, because no one really knows what a lot of these abstract psuedo-investments are worth: they're so many steps removed from a tangible good or service, and have been re-packaged with a bunch of other derivatives, that even the large banks which hold large amounts of derivatives don't really know what they're holding in their hands.”

This is the crap that will knock over the proverbial fan. As one writer put it: "It’s all smoke and mirrors. The financial system has decoupled from the productive elements of the economy and is now beginning to show disturbing signs of instability."

Dishonesty is the poisoned tree at the base of America’s problems. The economic crisis is its fruit. Capitalism works when there is transparency, honesty, and some checks and balances. But what we have is capitalism sick from cancer of lies.

We will not be able to get out of the downturn until people are willing to stand up and demand that our economy be based on truth. America must return to truth as a building block of our society.