This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Small Project Practitioners and Residential Knowledge Community .
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We the people generously bailed out a failed banking industry with a trillion dollar hand out. Our profession is 100% dependent on this industry that keeps failing in a predicable 7-10 years. Our industry generates 10% of the nation's GDP and it's interesting how poor the economy has done when we're non-existent! We keep rewarding the banks for failure and now they sit on the sidelines with plenty of capital to lend, but they continue to play the same games that resulted in their past failures. The drunk crashed the car, we gave them the keys back, and we gave them our wallets, our homes, and another beer for the road. In China, businesses get rewarded for doing a better job. In America, businesses get rewarded for doing terrible things. We not only rewarded banks for failing, but we reward corporations for sending jobs overseas, we reward contractors for hiring illegals, we reward health insurance CEOs for assassinating people by defunding HC procedures by breaking contracts over pre-existing sniffles in 1974.
The free market has failed this country. Capitalism is broken, abused, and almost non-existant. Monopolistic behavior has replaced the free market competition that is essential to the idea of Capitalism. We are living in a corporate dictatorship that controls DC like a puppet master. Lobbyists run this country, not Congress or the President. The wealthy private sector holds the country hostage with trillions of dollars on the sidelines while 98% of the rest of us struggle. It doesn't have to be this way.
Call me a Socialist, Nazi, Kenyan, but I'm beginning to believe the banks need some government competition. The profits could go right into the empty tax coffer rather than to those who have clearly shown they don't deserve it. Even a dumb dog knows when it's being abused, yet we have the advanced ability to rationalize things. When the recent bank failure was imminent, a plan for a Nationalized Bank had to be put into place in case the banks did completely fail. Our bailout saved them from this potential government competition. Now they thumb their noses at us for saving them. Fear the banking death panels! Fear the Socialism! Fear all these fantasies because THIS SITUATION is so much better than the hypothetical BS. It's funny how when something different isn't 100% perfect we just accept the status quo no matter how much further from perfect the status quo is from the proposed idea. We are a pathetic bunch and we deserve our fate. I'm sure there were people speaking up just like this as all of the Great Empires began their nose dive into the history books while watching the next one rise to power.
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Eric Rawlings AIA
Owner
Rawlings Design, Inc.
Decatur GA
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