#11 Chicklet

Editor,

I see what #11 Chicklet sees when I look around. But I don't get her argument about "Obama's spending" and how replacing Congress with Republicans in November is going to fix everything she sees.

How does the logic work that "Obama's spending" is causing the collapse of our economy? If anything, the meager spending the Republicans allowed through Congress has saved some jobs. I don't see how it is Obama's fault that for 30 years after Ronald Reagan began dismantling the middle class in this country:

** American factories and good-paying American manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas where people work for pennies on an American workers' dollar;

** Deregulation of the financial industry led to CDO's, SCDO's, CDS's, and other abstract gambling instruments that leveraged by orders of magnitude and therefore magnified to catastrophic the impact of the subprime loan scam that otherwise would have been a minor blip on the world economy's radar screen;

** American workers' real wages were stagnant while CEO's and Wall Street sharpies raked in trillions as brazen laissez-faire capitalism distributed more and more of the wealth of this nation into fewer and fewer pockets of wealthier and wealthier individuals;

** Americans went over their heads into debt, mostly by refinancing their houses over and over as home values sky-rocketed in a housing bubble created by criminally irresponsible banking practices in collusion with Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve, to buy all the junk manufactured in China that advertisers dangled in front of their noses on TV -- running up an enormous balance of trade deficit we have no manufacturing power to correct.

Chicklet has identified the symptoms of the American economy's demise, but her diagnosis of their cause is miles off the mark, and her prescription to treat our troubles is a formula for utter ruin at the hands of a Republican party that I am at a loss to understand unless they are invaders from outer space who came here to destroy the planet Earth, starting with the U.S.A.

Re: "Bernanke Signals Fed Is Ready to Prop Up Economy" (8/28/2010)