Wish I could say I am happy about all the Republicans tanking but...the economy is front and center and nobody is happy. We are, in fact, scared. These are scary times and I am glad my father, who would have been 98 this year, is not alive to see this. Dad lived through the Great Depression. He was not a child. He was working for Florsheim Shoes in downtown Chicago when the market crashed. He actually saw people hit the pavement outside his basement window in an office building. He never forgot the fear, the panic and the aftermath. Nobody who lived through those years forgot the aftermath. My mother-in-law, born in 1927, wore dresses made of flour sacks to school in Pennsylvania. She never forgot the humiliation.
My ability to relate to the Depression is through the stories of my relatives , photographs and books such as The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange photographs. The candidates studiously avoided characterizing the economic free fall we are in with the word "depression". They didn't even want to use the word "recession" although too late for that.
What I want to know is, who's going to be made accountable for this mess? We all know who is going to pay for it...we are. But where is the accountability? I mean, when you have CEOs appearing before Congress, such as the $186+ million dollar compensated CEO of Lehman Bros, Richard Fuld, wanting to know "where's our bailout?" without so much as an apology, you know we are getting screwed, blued and tattooed...and not in a good way.
Unless we, as tax payers, demand accountability and recompense for this debacle, we are going to watch our country become insolvent, our assets diminish and disappear and mortgage our children and grandchildren's future for some time to come.
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