Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

November 19, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving: Enjoy Your Blessings While You Still Have Them

Ten Thanksgivings from now, will we look back wistfully on this year, recalling days when we had at least the appearance of freedom and liberty and an economy that still functioned?

While prediction is pointless in a universe based on free will, unless we change course, we are headed into what will make today’s sobering troubles seem like good times.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed a new attorney general who cannot say if waterboarding is torture. Of course it’s torture – and against our laws, but Michael Mukasey has to protect his new masters in the Bush Administration, who ordered waterboarding and other forms of torture and have gotten away with it.

This august political body has also voted to provide AT&T, Verizon and their telecom brethren with retroactive immunity for violating U.S. law by providing the government with phone call intercepts without a warrant. This is on top of failing to investigate and prosecute anyone in the U.S. government for violating such laws in the first place.

And, like a time warp back to 2002, the Bush Administration is beating the war drums yet again over Iran’s supposed push to obtain nuclear weapons. Will we witness “Shock and Awe – Part II” early next year?

Perhaps the administration will wait until close to the 2008 presidential election, so either the full extent of the disaster won’t be apparent until after the country votes, or it will be so immediate and of such magnitude that President Bush will have a ready excuse to declare martial law and postpone voting until such time as the country is secure once more. Of course, those in power get to define when the coast is clear and they probably won’t be too eager to blow the “all’s safe” whistle anytime soon.

Moving right along, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown is affecting far more than just the stock market, which can get the jitters over its own shadow. No, this extreme failure to regulate prudently is turning into the second act of the 1980s savings-and-loan scandal, which cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to clean up.

This time, it isn’t just depositors and investors getting burned. Neighborhood after neighborhood and even entire communities are morphing into foreclosure shanty towns, where abandoned and boarded-up houses lower everyone’s property values and former homeowners become renters – or even homeless.

Meanwhile, those who borrowed based on hyper-inflated home prices owe money on equity that no longer exists. Ditto for those who bought homes at the 2005 peak of the housing boom. If they cannot or refuse to continue to pay back these obligations, then the sub-prime Creature from the Black Lagoon becomes the Nightmare on Middle-Class Elm Street.

While we’re counting, just how many billions of dollars does the U.S. government owe the Chinese? The Japanese? Or is it now in the trillions? At some point, the Bush Administration’s borrowing binge does add up to real money.

And just how are we going to pay back these national obligations when they come due, and the lenders refuse to bankroll us any further? The dollar’s value as a currency has sunk so low that it’s only a matter of time before oil producers sell their commodity in euros rather than greenbacks. When that happens, and all those petrodollars come flooding back into this country, the Great Depression will seem like a frolic in the park.

Enjoy this Thanksgiving, then, and be especially grateful, because the blessings we take for granted may soon be gone forever.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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