Ted Stanke: the Death of Money: My Two Cents

In the year I was born, at about the same time as now, another important presidential election was taking place. This is the first debate I would have seen, when I was about a month and a half old: Jimmy Carter versus Gerald Ford. My developing infant mind would have been sucking in fresh stimuli from all corners of the cosmos at this point, and I'm sure that this debate impacted me tremendously. Watching it again, I am amazed at what I witnessed.

Ford starts out talking about his restructuring of the CIA, which he says is in good hands with George Bush in charge. Carter begins to explain that the government has lost the trust of the people, silence falls, and the television audience hears nothing, nor do the commentators, the voters or the world. Bizarre indeed. As a baby, I was probably able to understand these two men almost as well without the volume, but besides, unable to vote, whether or not I grasped things had little bearing. Watching it now, I wonder if this "glitch" might not have been an orchestrated move by the same people who's previous candidate, Nixon, had resigned a criminal, the same people who went to court over votes in Florida 24 years later for the son of the same CIA director. Perhaps preventing people from hearing the rational words of Carter was a last ditch effort to save their butts. Too little, too late, people did not trust the administration, and Carter won the election.

Our government behaves like a crazy, selfish idiot, and expects us all to play along. It invents as much money as it needs to give to the corporations, then rakes the pockets of the poor to bring it back. I'm glad that our economy is self-destructing, because it's something that needs to be completely rethought anyway. When I was born, the buying power of a quarter was similar to a dollar today.

For all of our corporate sponsored advancements in these 3 decades, we've traded our dignity as Americans and the worth of our nation. These greedy bastards sucked us dry, and they don't care one bit.

My personal opinion is, if these same ruthless fools take the 2008 election, a penny in 1976 will have the buying power of a dollar tomorrow, 10 dollars next week, 100 dollars next month, and 1000 dollars by 2012. Zimbabwe in our backyard: exponential inflation .