It's the Economy, It's the Economy, It's the Economy!

This is a real bad time to be a market Republican. Seems the GOP has set its priorities: God first, country second, market fifteenth. Businesspeople (like me) are getting very nervous as it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that the GOP cares about them at all.

It's no wonder - after 8 years of Bush's pretend conservatism, and turning the GOP into "the party that wrecked America", as some are calling it, we have Wall Street banks going bankrupt. It may not be obvious to everybody what a disaster this is for the American economy, in the same way that it's not immediately obvious that your alternator failing is bad for your car. Eventually your lights dim and the thing stops. Dead.

Meanwhile, I just finished The Coming Collapse of China. Its author argued that said collapse would be triggered by a liquidity crisis in the country's banks. It was published in 2001; oddly enough, since then, the Chinese banking system, while still not in great shape, has improved considerably, to the point of tolerating the scrutiny of foreign investors. Interesting! Meanwhile I saw people lining up to withdraw from ATMs at my local Washington Mutual on Saturday morning. When are we going to wake up? The GOP is no longer the party of fiscal responsibility.

So - our major banks going under, our country's in massive debt due to an ongoing war - do you pick the candidate from the same party that's put us in this situation, who expects the war to go on another hundred years, and who will put us in even more debt? How about the candidate who says he's "not an expert on Wall Street" and supports the do-nothing decision not to do anything to avert another meltdown? Meanwhile, how's your job, how's your company doing, how are your 401k and home value holding up? Of course, that's John McCain and his bevy of Bush plants.