With the economic turmoil well cemented in, many are now maneuvering to play the blame game. While history may in time find anyone in Washington the last 15 years responsible, the 42nd President is quick out of the gates campaigning on his behalf that he is completely innocent.
As he has been running to his much beloved media this week explaining his opinion had he been in office none of this would have ever happened. Let us reflect on the 2 main points his innocents would be questioned.
First of which signing the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) December 8, 1993. Claiming this to be one of his greatest accomplishments in his first year in office. While this bill was in negotiation before he was in office, mind you he campaigned against it to win office calling it irresponsible for the American worker. He was happy at the time to stick this feather in his cap.
Most importantly his signing of the 1999 legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Officially known as the Banking act of 1933, it separated banking types accordingly to commercial and investment banking and also created the FDIC. This was considered in the 80’s and major arguments for not repealing it was as follows:
1) the conflict of interests with the granting of credit, lending investing and the use of credit.
2) the control of money must be a limited power to ensure soundness and competition to remain fair in the market.
3) securities being risky the government could have extremely large payouts if the institutions fail.
4) deposit institutions are supposed to be limited risk, managers may not act prudently without this separation.
One major scale of guilt within this is to look at sub-prime loans only being 5% of all mortgages before the repeal, less than 10 years after sub-prime loans accounted for almost 30% of all mortgages. By the way, major supporters were Sens. Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dick Durbin, Tom Daschle, and Joe Biden. And the authors Sens. Phil Gramm, Jim Leach.
So as we see yet another campaign trail to deny what his guilt is, I guess it is just another case of defining what is ‘IS”.

Terry Tucker

“The tavern has ever played an important part in social, political, and military life, has helped to make history,” wrote Alice Morse Earle in 1900, and never more so than during the tumultuous days of America’s founding. Indeed, despite the dubious scholarship of Mrs. Earle’s romanticized and anecdotal paean to the tavern life of yore, most contemporary historians of the colonial era would agree with her assertion that the “story of our War for Independence could not be dissociated from the old taverns.”4 In fact, her words are paralleled by University of Washington professor W.J. Rorabaugh seventy-nine years later in The Alcoholic Republic, when he notes that “Patriots viewed public houses as the nurseries of freedom,” and that taverns were “certainly seed beds of the Revolution, the places where British tyranny was condemned, militiamen organized, and independence plotted.”5


4. Earle, Alice Morse, Stage-Coach and Tavern Days, The Macmillan Company (Detroit: 1900), 170, 172. In evocative prose that historians could learn a thing or two from, she writes, “The tavern was the rendezvous for patriotic bands who listened to the stirring words of American rebels, and mixed dark treason to King George with every bowl of punch they drank.”

5. Rorabaugh, W.J., The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, Oxford University Press (New York: 1979), 35.

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." Ben Franklin