Why are the financial markets collapsing and why is talk of recession so pervasive? Perhaps it’s as simple as the Harvard MBA graduate made it sound after the catastrophe of September 11, 2001 in which nearly 3,000 citizens on American soil lost their lives. In a speech following that tragic event G. W. Bush exhorted all Americans to go out and “Spend! Spend!”

Remember that commercial with a young girl who says, “I'm helping to defeat terrorism by going to my best friend’s wedding” shortly after Bush made his speech imploring Americans how to beat terrorism by spending as much and as fast as we can?

In his book, A Charge to Keep, Bush should have expanded on the theme that the “charge” he was talking about is his massive yearly budget deficits and the growing national debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects $410 billion federal budget deficits for 2008 and $450 billion for fiscal year 2009. Because of the timidity of the Democratic Party controlled U.S. Congress, neither year includes the escalating costs of waging wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The national debt is currently at $9,247,980,621,498.77 and growing by the second. What G. W. Bush really meant by a Charge to Keep was the hemorrhaging red ink he has run up during the last seven years. It is a charge that all Americans will keep for generations to come.

Today, we know that the once-esteemed watchdog of corporate accounting methods, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), held corporate CEO’s criminally answerable in charges of corrupt practices which defrauded investors of publicly held stocks and company shares. Those principled overseers disappeared as soon as Harvey Pitt was put in charge of the SEC by G. W. Bush. Pitt, before his appointment, defended those same CEO’s whom he represented in numerous court cases against the SEC.

The SEC which at one time considered oversight a primary responsibility is now complicit in these mega-corporations' unfettered and unrestrained rip-off of our country's treasury. G. W. Bush, in keeping with the Republican policies of gutting and eviscerating federal agencies which were legislated by law to protect the interests of our citizens, under-funded, under-staffed and undermined the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to monitor and audit this massive fraud against the American people.

Now, we have an equally incompetent fox guarding the henhouse, Christopher Cox, another Republican Bush crony who oversees the SEC and the corporate foxes who are running roughshod over the public trust. But, as they say, the chickens, what’s left of them, are coming home to roost.

The foxes who were supposed to guard the henhouse now find that the henhouse has been almost devoured. So, now the fat cats on Wall Street have turned to cannibalizing their own. Boohoo. But it is more than just another sad chapter in the culture of corruption which has seen an unprecedented feeding frenzy and orgy of corporate greed during Bush‘s seven-year tenure.

The domino effect of market manipulation by hedge fund managers, derivative traders, junk bond junkies, leveraged buy-outs, mega mergers and a slew of accounting practices deliberately made confusing by financial officers who have done as much as possible to maximize their corporate bottom lines, is unprecedented.

Lost in this muddled sea of arcane accounting principles is the hard reality that it is no longer just a mounting debt problem for the corporate swindlers and fat cats on Wall Street, the recipients of Bush‘s $1.35 trillion tax cut giveaway. The American consumer is tapped out and jobbed-out too.

Many people who sought to purchase a home fell victim to malevolent, un-regulated financial institutions whose operatives employed highly unethical and sometimes illegal methods to qualify individuals whose credit standing was shaky at best. But, “help” is on the way. In May Bush's trickle down economy stimulus elephant droppings for the chattering masses in the form of tax rebate checks for $600 and $1,200 respectively will be in the mail.

Most economists agree that two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product is consumer spending. But, these economic gurus apparently didn't factor in the source of the capital which has sustained Bush's Potemkin Village economy -- borrowing on high interest plastic credit cards and the cash-out home refinancing which presumed housing sales and home prices would continue skyward. That's gone for the foreseeable future.

As more jobs disappear from the U.S. to overseas companies because of cheaper labor (much of it slave labor, as in China) and investors continue to celebrate the ephemeral global economy the money and investments in the meantime are drying up.

The reality is Bush’s house of cards economy won’t last until he departs the stage on January 20, 2009. We're already in a recession regardless of how many interest rate cuts the Feeding Chairman, Ben Bernanke, doles out to prop up the Ponzi Scheme boys on Wall Street.

The Feeding Chairman, Ben Bernanke, can only shake the money tree so long but the branches are now bare.

Richard A. Stitt
Austin, Texas