It seemed really obvious to me that the Democrats had an incredible opportunity available to them!
I was aware that virtually ALL of the people in Congress are relatively wealthy. They essentially NEEDED to be in order to get elected in the first place! And I was aware that hundreds of millions of dollars is spent during a Presidential election campaign.
My thought? It was that one or more Democrats, IMMEDIATELY AFTER winning the November 2006 election, would hold a Press Conference. Since it seemed clear to me at the time that Barack Obama was likely to soon declare his intention to run for the Presidency, and given his personality, I thought then that he would have been an ideal Spokesperson for however many Democrats would choose to do this action. The action would be to inform the Paymaster for Congress that that INDIVIDUAL (Democratic) Congressman or Senator was CHOOSING to only accept MINIMUM WAGE paychecks UNTIL Congress would pass the Bill raising the Minimum Wage rate!
The point was to let tens of millions of workers KNOW that the Democrats that chose to do this CARED, and that they WANTED TO SHARE IN THE SUFFERING (at least until the Minimum Wage rate was raised.)
Think about how PRACTICAL this idea was! Yes, someone like Barack Obama would have given up some money, in going from $170,000 per year down to around $10,000 per year. In the two years until the November 2008 election, that would total around $320,000 that he would have given up. But we have seen that the 2008 election is going to cost a total of over a BILLION dollars in advertising!
Can't you see EVERY Reporter that would interview Barack Obama spending half of the available time in asking about living on $10,000 per year? And so EVERY voter in the US would be reminded, nearly every day, that Barack had done this amazing thing? For FREE? How much actual advertising would Barack Obama have needed to ever do? Extremely little, I think!
And, guess what? Wouldn't all those Reporters ask the Republican candidates about that subject as well? And what could they say???
Where Obama seems to have had trouble connecting to Factory Workers during the 2008 Campaign, can you imagine their LOYALTY to him if he would have chosen to do this rather simple act?
In fact, try to imaging seeing a "political commercial" that showed Michelle Obama calling Barack and the kids to the kitchen for dinner. Like in all other families, they ask "What's for dinner?" and she says "Macaroni and Cheese" And they all say in unison "Again?"
And then Barack says to Michelle "You know that I like mac and cheese, but we have it so often! Can't you give us more variety in meals? Can't we have steaks?" And Michelle says "Well, get your Senator buddies and the Representatives to pass the Law raising the Minimum Wage rate. THEN we can go back to our normal budget, and you and the kids can have your steaks! But as long as we are living on Minimum Wage, this is about the best food we can hope for, so get used to it!"
Why would ANY voter not vote for him for President? Why would ANY voter vote for any Republican who tried to run against any Democrat who chose to do this? The result would certainly have been the biggest landslide that has ever occurred, and it might have even ended the viability of the Republican Party! I suspect that at least some of the Democrats would win with more than 90% of the votes!
Not bad for just giving up around $300,000, for people who ALL have many millions!
And in any Debates, how could any Republican (still receiving the $170,000 each year), possibly compete against the Democrat where EVERY voter would already know about the "living on Minimum Wage"? In fact, the Moderator of such Debates would certainly choose to bring up the subject, and the Republican could not possibly avoid looking like a selfish jerk who does not care about the voters!
However, there WAS a rather darkly amusing detail! In JUNE 2007, (SEVEN MONTHS LATER), I received FIVE Form Letters from each of Obama's Offices (virtually all on the same day). The (same) Form Letter "thanked me for caring" and asked me to contribute money to his election campaign! The Form Letter also apologized for the delay, saying that Barack gets a lot of mail! But the Form Letters made it crystal clear that NO ONE had actually read my suggestion! Other than using my letters to add more names to the Mailing List for the election campaign, I wonder if any of them even opened my envelopes?
Hmmmmm! Did it inspire confidence in me regarding Obama? Where NO ONE really cared to read my comments? Where it took them seven months to simply send me a Form Letter? What kind of President would that imply that he would be?
So I decided to send E-MAILS to Obama again. They seemed to not have any idea how to confront Palin in the campaign, and she has therefore been freely making the most extreme and vicious attacks on Obama with no response whatever! So it occurred to me that the Obama campaign could make a number of TV ads which centered on the FACT that McCain HAD ONLY EVER EVEN MET PALIN ONCE BEFORE offering her the Vice Presidency!
It seems to me that that incident clearly shows that McCain makes rash and irrational decisions. I thought that proposed ads would ask viewers whether they would have Married their Spouse after only once having met before, for a few minutes!
What I thought was excellent about this was that it did NOT make any attacks or allegations on Palin, but instead pointed out the aberrant decision making of McCain!
Around two weeks later (amazingly fast for them, I suppose), I even received an e-mail response! But the writer was some very minor Secretary working for Obama, and even THAT person never actually read my note! But he/she DID see that the name Palin, and so the response (which might have been a form letter) thanked me for caring, told me that they did not intend to attack Palin, and then got to the IMPORTANT part where they asked me to give a donation!
You can probably imagine that these attempts at helping caused me to become on mailing lists which have been incredibly difficult to get removed from. Someone removes my name, but then someone else finds it and puts my name back on!
Did you realize that YOUR family just gave $10,000 to that bailout for Wall Street? It was $700 billion, and there are around 70 million families in the US. We each will therefore eventually provide another $10,000 for those giant Corporations!
The saddest part is that it WILL have a positive effect, but only a very small one! The CONFIDENCE of Wall Street and some bankers will be better for at least a few weeks (until after the Election!) but any actual benefit is expected to only BEGIN after two or three months! And even though the Government again decided to throw huge amounts of our Taxpayer money at a problem (remember the $100 billion that Bush threw at the Hurricane Katrina damage, where it was later documented that only around ONE billion (1%) of it actually went to productive use [and much of New Orleans STILL has piles of debris from Katrina, now, four years later!]), they entirely missed the CENTRAL problem and simply SAW the Wall Street part of it.
They seem to insist that there will be SIMPLE solutions and EASY ones where Americans could continue to believe they are in prosperity (just like when Bush invaded Iraq, it became the FIRST war ever where Americans did NOT have higher taxes and major personal sacrifices, another sign that no one really understands how enormous this problem really is.)
For at least 20 years, the MAJORITY of Americans have SPENT more than they could possibly afford (mostly due to the existence of credit cards) and the whole CONCEPT of SAVING is something that few modern Americans seem to comprehend! In other words, some REALLY charismatic leader will need to TAKE CHARGE and LEADERSHIP (like Lincoln or FDR or TR or Kennedy or Reagan did) and somehow CONVINCE Americans that they now need to LEARN to live WITHOUT many of the things that they have insisted on having! Maybe FDR or George Washington could have done it, but I do not see ANY current leader capable of that. Is ANYONE going to give up their cel-phone that they pay close to $1,000 each year for? Or their cable TV for which they also pay around $1,000 each year? Or buying and throwing away EVERYTHING very quickly?
The fact that the American people are NOT going to tolerate such changes in their lifestyles is going to force the bad times to last at least another year or two, beyond the couple years that all Economists seem to think. It will ONLY be AFTER most Americans CONCEDE that the good times are over and we will each need to re-evaluate EVERYTHING in our lives. And I am not really sure that a SERVICE ECONOMY will fit in with that very well! Are people who are having trouble finding enough money for food really going to keep paying Lawn Maintenance companies $1,000 each year to mow their lawns? (A thousand other Service businesses could be inserted in that sentence.)
COULD the US ever LEARN to be a manufacturing country again? I actually doubt it! I used to listen to some neighbors who worked for General Motors in a Union job COMPLAINING about the fact that they ONLY were being paid around $70/hour (for essentially WATCHING robot machines actually do the job they used to do). And I knew at the time that there were many people in other countries who were receiving the equivalent of $0.25/hour for similar work! After NAFTA and GATT were enacted around 1992, American workers have now needed to COMPETE with workers throughout the world. And so virtually EVERY manufacturing factory has moved to other countries to have such people do the work. So ARE American workers going to agree to being paid $1/hour, so that the manufacturing Executives would find it attractive to move their factories back to the US? Yeah, right! Of course, WE have Minimum Wage anyway, so even if American workers were WILLING to do that, no Manufacturer would be allowed to pay them such low rates. So it seems to me that all those manufacturing jobs are PERMANENTLY lost from the US.
So what will people be doing in five years to try to earn enough money for food on the table? How high did the Unemployment rate get in the Great Depression of the 1930s? Around 25% of all (male) adults were unemployed in 1933. Even seven years later, the Unemployment Rate was still around 18%. I just heard John McLaughlin say on his TV show that he thinks the current (2008) Unemployment of around 6% will be at least 11% NEXT YEAR (2009). I concur, and suspect that by about 2010, the Unemployment rate figures to start to match that of the Great Depression (and quite possibly, far exceed it, partly because the number of jobs is finite and now the workforce includes nearly twice as many people, men and women.)
Around 1920, Germany went through such a situation, and their government started printing money as fast as they could. Postage stamps of that era soon had face values of BILLIONS of pfennigs, at a time when US stamps were just a penny or two.
So, exactly HOW is the US going to avoid such a situation? Absolutely NO ONE does any thinking about FUTURE problems! They simply CONFRONT each problem as they become aware of it (and throw billions of dollars at it!) Bush's War in Iraq and his Administration's wild spending (while insisting on tax cuts for all Americans, which eliminates much of the possible source of funds) has gotten our country to a point where there ARE situations where it could RUN OUT OF MONEY! Before 2010, it seems certain that it will! But with printing presses, they can just make a lot more (paper) money, which will have the effect of DEVALUATING the almighty dollar. My guess is that by 2010 or 2011, there will be one or more devaluations where the dollar then will be worth about HALF what it is now.
And people who are working will THINK they are making a lot, because they will be paid a lot. But if a gallon of milk is then $10 and a gallon of gasoline is $30, they may THINK that they have a lot of money but it will not BUY very much.
I am a fairly smart person, but even I do not see ANY way that such things could be avoided. No one else seems to have even THOUGHT about such things, which seem to me virtually CERTAIN to occur WITHIN FIVE YEARS or so. They seem to only be interested in thinking about whatever disaster happened TODAY or THIS WEEK!
There is a REALLY bad part of this current situation, which did not exist in the 1930s! OK! So SOMEHOW, YOU scrimp enough to actually be able to put food on your table five years from now, at a time when 25% of American adults are unemployed and not being able to. That IS SUPPOSED to be an example of the American Dream, of working hard and saving and all the rest, and getting ahead. But there is a NEW part of modern life. There are MORE guns in the US than there are people! A HUNDRED starving families near you will quickly realize that YOU have food! And a LOT of them have lots of guns! YOU will either need to buy and use an AK-47 attack weapon and kill hundreds of people who will attack your house and family, or you will be the victims of such people when they decide to TAKE what you have. Since I am a person who already has devices to provide heat and water and electricity and some food crops, I see myself being an early target for such behavior! And since I cannot imagine myself gunning down starving people, I do NOT see what I would do in such situations! (Therefore, I have a 100% expectation to permanently move to New Zealand, hopefully prior to any of that happening to me!)
I do NOT see how there could be enough Police to deal with hundreds of thousands of such attacks every day.
Now, I admit that this is a REALLY dark viewpoint! And I HOPE that such a situation will never happen. But should we really WAIT and sit and trust our leaders to protect us, until we see such things happening to our neighbors? So these thoughts are (currently) intended as potentially prophylactic, of simply THINKING about such possibilities to see how we might deal with them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many people built Bomb Shelters under their houses, IN THE EVENT that there might be a nuclear war. Were they stupid for doing so? Maybe. But what if an American President or a Soviet Premier had a bad day and decided to launch an attack? Since NO ONE knows what the future will actually be, it seems prudent to at least CONSIDER as many contingencies as possible, to try to think of what our reactions might be.
So I HOPE that Wall Street and the Banks and the American public are all able to get back to their rampant prosperity. This is one time that I truly hope that my dark thoughts above are all totally wrong! And I am not a betting person, but I wonder if we even have a 50-50 chance of seeing that prosperity in five years.
Actually, my presenting many of the "self sufficiency concept" web-pages (of simple and economical ways of providing warmth and water and even food), for free, are meant to possible become well enough known that IF we wind up in such desperate situations, individuals MIGHT be able to improve their lives. I AM aware that very few people will really use many of those concepts while prosperity still seems to be the norm. Only tree-huggers are currently really likely to use them now!
Again, I actually HOPE that all of our lives will remain very comfortable and prosperous, where very few people even NEED to use my various concepts and devices in these web-pages. But, just in case ...
However ... I found a description of the Depression of the 1930s in the 1992 Grolier Encyclopedia and it seems to me to be terrifyingly familiar-sounding today! Here is an excerpt. I have highlighted some of the text:
The economic depression that beset the United States and other
countries in the 1930s was unique in its magnitude and its
consequences. At the depth of the depression, in 1933, one
American worker in every four was out of a job. In other countries
unemployment ranged between 15 percent and 25 percent of the labor
force. The great industrial slump continued throughout the 1930s,
shaking the foundations of Western capitalism and the society based
upon it.
Economic Aspects
President Calvin COOLIDGE had said during the long prosperity of the
1920s that "The business of America is business." Despite the
seeming business prosperity of the 1920s, however, there were serious
economic weak spots, a chief one being a depression in the
agricultural sector. Also depressed were such industries as coal
mining, railroads, and textiles. Throughout the 1920s, U. S. banks
had failed--an average of 600 per year--as had thousands of other
business firms. By 1928 the construction boom was over.
The spectacular rise in prices on the Stock Market from 1924 to 1929
bore little relation to actual economic conditions. In fact, the
boom in the stock market and in real estate, along with the expansion
in credit (created, in part, by low-paid workers buying on credit)
and high profits for a few industries, concealed basic problems.
Thus the U. S. stock market crash that occurred in October 1929,
with huge losses, was not the fundamental cause of the Great
Depression, although the crash sparked, and certainly marked the
beginning of, the most traumatic economic period of modern times.
By 1930, the slump was apparent, but few people expected it to
continue; previous financial panics and depressions had reversed
in a year or two. The usual forces of economic expansion had
vanished, however. Technology had eliminated more industrial
jobs than it had created; the supply of goods continued to exceed
demand; the world market system was basically unsound. The
high tariffs of the Smoot-Hawley Act (1930) exacerbated the
downturn. As business failures increased and unemployment
soared--and as people with dwindling incomes nonetheless had to pay
their creditors--it was apparent that the United States was in
the grip of economic breakdown. (Most European countries were
hit even harder, because they had not yet fully recovered from the
ravages of World War I.) The deepening depression essentially
coincided with the term in office (1929-33) of President Herbert
Hoover. The stark statistics scarcely convey the distress of the
millions of people who lost jobs, savings, and homes. From
1930 to 1933 industrial stocks lost 80% of their value. In the
four years from 1929 to 1932 approximately 11,000 U. S. banks
failed (44% of the 1929 total), and about $2 billion in deposits
evaporated. The gross national product (GNP), which for years
had grown at an average annual rate of 3.5%, declined at a rate
of over 10% annually, on average, from 1929 to 1932. Agricultural
distress was intense: farm prices fell by 53% from 1929 to 1932.
President Hoover opposed government intervention to ease the mounting
economic distress. His one major action, creation (1932) of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to ailing
corporations, was seen as inadequate.
Interesting! And rather scarily familiar-sounding!
Thoughts regarding fixing the Wall Street situation are at Fixing The American Economy
( http://mb-soft.com/public/index.html )
C Johnson