OK - we live in a great country and there is no doubt about it. I ask you, where else can we witness our elected lawmakers demonstrate their given powers to lead this country to the brink of bankruptcy? To give this a more detailed look I think it is important to understand how our founding fathers - wait let me make a very important change to that phrase. I want to change it to "our founding families" or shorten it our "founders". Let's face it - do you actually believe these guys made all of their decisions without the input of their respective spouses? If you do then I want what you are smoking!!!!
And since we are talking about the founders, do you actually think these guys represented the majority of the settlers in the 13 colonies? I don't see any workers on the list or small business owners or real farmers. Rather there were the major landowners and the very wealthy of the colonies. And, to make matters even more like today, we had the "we want more for less" type along with the "we don't want to pay more for more type" (sound familiar?). So thing haven't changed too much over these past 200+ years from our origins.
Let's explore these origins again - we came here to get away from religious persecution, high taxes and a very mean king with very mean advisers. So when our founders (sounds much better doesn't it?) decided to create "democracy" they wanted to stay far away from the "one leader" concept of government. So our type of democracy was born. This is a very different type of democracy which is practiced in many other parts of the world. The evolution of British democracy (while still maintaining the royalty) gave the world the "Parliamentary System" of government. This is practiced in many countries of the world but (this is a major but) with modifications by country. I will not go into the major differences but having lived in Australia for 21 years I can say I do understand their way of government and know the subtle differences with England, Israel, Canada, etc). Having said that and for most of the readers of this blog who are not familiar with this type of system, it is probably a good thing to understand the major differences. They have Parliament which is our Congress (2 houses which are elected separately and have different terms of service) - our Senate is loosely on the original House of Lords and our House is very similar to our "House" with some major differences; the biggest is that the Parliamentary System does not have a separation of powers between the Legislative Branch and the Executive Branch. In the Parliamentary System all Executive Members are members of Parliament (MP) so they design the laws and vote on them. We would never see what is happening here in Australia. Actually we wouldn't see this at all as there are very few countries that have a debt ceiling.
OK, so what am I trying to say in this blog? I have to start this section off by being very open in that I voted for our current president in the last election. Having said that and without defending why I did it and what I am going to do next year, I have to also admit I am not a fan of the president. OK, having that out of the way I must now start my comments on what I believe is going on with our country and what is going to happen.
The debt crisis will be taken care of this weekend and we will avoid the crisis with the president having received some of what he wanted and the Republicans having received much of what they wanted. What I am hoping will be in the compromise is the avoidance of having to go through all of this again in 6 months. The House Republicans want this to happen as that will ensure the 2012 Presidential Campaign will focus on that and not on the real problems of the economy, jobs, tax reform and a myriad of other things our governing representatives should be focusing on in both Houses and for the election campaign. So I think this is an important part of the compromise and will be in the Bill that will be voted on Monday.
I am now going to go out on a limb with my next comments. If I was a major leader in the Democratic Party (a behind the scenes type) I would recommend they hire Karl Rove or someone like him to start the planning for the 2016 campaign. I am saying this as I am in awe at the forward thinking shown by Mr. Rove. I am not a fan of his for other factors but I take my hat off to the forward thinking and the ongoing 4 year campaign of "making Obama a one term president". Having said that will cause many eyebrows to raise (those of you who still have real eyebrows) but I think you see my point.
OK, I have now had the chance to vent. This came about during my 4 mile walk this morning at 5am (my regular time I must add) and I wanted to share it with you.
I will look forward to comments if you so care.
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