American writer Erma Bombeck once said, “Never trust a doctor whose office plants have died.”  I’m not exactly sure why this little warning has popped into my head at the exact time the US economy has chosen to get critically ill and go on life support, but it has.  A doctor is desperately needed.  Our economic troubles started, we are told, when back in the nineties, Bill Clinton forced the banks and mortgage lenders to stop loaning money to only those who could pay it back.  Oddly, that turned out to be the group that lived in certain elegant neighborhoods.  The lenders rarely loaned you money if you lived somewhere else.

        The problem, as Bill Clinton and his colleagues saw it, was that this practice discriminated against African-Americans and other minorities who did not live in those elegant neighborhoods.  Bill and the boys passed legislation to ensure that banks and lenders loaned mortgage funds in all neighborhoods to ensure that there was no discrimination going on.  Thus, an era of new kinds of mortgages was born that allowed no or low down payments, low monthly payments with all unpaid principal amounts being added to the loan total to be paid back in the “future” when the property would be worth two or three times the purchase price.  All this sounded great and could still be working if the prices had continued to increase.  They didn’t. 

        The downward spiral began.  First, the lenders had to take the houses back (called foreclosure) by the hundreds, by the thousands and now, by the millions.  There were some greedy individuals who bought homes for speculation and when the crash came, they got hurt, then the greedy lenders who encouraged the greedy speculators got hurt.  Then the huge and corrupt mortgage companies with cutsie names like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who backed up the banks who backed up the speculators got hurt.  Then the giant brokerages and even a few countries that backed up the others have failed, one by one.  And the American Economy and indeed the health of the world economy is in dire straits. 

        If we could learn a lesson from Erma Bombeck’s warning, it might be that the men who are proposing giant loans and guarantees to fix it all again are the doctors whose plants have died.  $85 billion to one group, $50 billion to another and the opening ante for this latest proposal is $700 billion.   This is a shell game, a high stakes shell game with the doctors who caused the illness moving the shells.  And we are all members of the Dead Plant Society.

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that killed the rat
that ate the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt
that lay in the house that Jack built.

1. -Geoffrey
   

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