I want to bring some things to your attention, things that many Americans lived through [suffered through and may still be feeling] but never really connected the dots before, dots that lead directly to policy decisions all made by Democrat Administrations over a period of three decades, from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Government policies so bad they changed the course of history for this country and left indelible marks on its economy and the whole of American society. “Read this and weep” [as they say].

The Disaster That Was LBJ and His “Great Society” ~
This timeline of terrible decisions began after the Geneva Accords split Vietnam into two parts at the 17th Parallel in the early 1950’s. In the meantime, North Vietnam had come under Communist control [by 1945] while the Southern part of the country was still led by a monarchy [sanctioned by French oversight]. The French government lost control of the North to a coup led by Ho Chi Minh. France held provincial control over the country [now known as Vietnam] from the late 1800’s to 1954, as part of their “Indochina” holdings. The French language still remains as one of two dominant languages spoken in Vietnam today. Now let me fast-forward to the early 1960’s, it was during the John. F. Kennedy (JFK) Administration that America’s strategic interest turned toward containing the spread of Communism in Indochina. It was at this time that the French government was pleading for assistance in a war they were losing. In response, JFK sent around 2,000 American military “advisors” to South Vietnam to try and stop the aggression from the Communist-held North. Not too much later, France would pull out of South Vietnam entirely. Meanwhile, the former Texas Congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson, ascends to the Presidency after the assassination of JFK in 1963. With France having abandoned their efforts in Vietnam LBJ makes a fateful decision to escalate the war by sending 50,000 more American troops there in an effort to stop Communist aggression in the region. Guess what happens next? America loses 58,000 troops in the Vietnam War, in a war that lasted a decade [America’s involvement]. Result? Vietnam today is one country, both the North and the South reunited under Communist rule! How would you like to have served there or died there knowing that your effort was all for nil? I visited the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C. a couple times. It’s a wall that Democrat LBJ built with those who have died in vain. Do you have relatives who died or were forever maimed during the Vietnam conflict? Many do. The decision to escalate that war while France [simultaneously] pulled out was one of the worst decisions ever made by a U.S. President.

Next on LBJ’s list was the war on poverty. LBJ decides he will tackle the poverty problem at home but instead places poverty-stricken Americans on a heavy dose of steroids [at least for the poor Black community] by instituting what he referred to as his “Great Society” initiative. The year was 1964 and a series of federal government programs were signed into law which provided poverty checks to be doled out to the poor based on how many children they had. Great idea dumbass! A move that prompted our Black communities to produce even more illegitimate children born into poverty! Under LBJ’s programs the more children that a pregnant female can produce the more money she received. What a total disaster but Democrats smiled all the way through as if they had accomplished something beneficial? By the late 1980’s their program of paying for poverty produced disastrous results – more young Black men were in prison than anywhere else in the country; turned out that being born into poverty with no known way out tends to lead one into a life of crime just to make ends meet as LBJ’s plan created many a single parent household. Incentivizing poverty was the exact wrong answer, a serious program failure from yet another Democrat President, LBJ. In my opinion and I’m certain that many Americans of all races agree, this single move set the Black community back at least 50-60 years, and possibly longer. Decades later it would take Republican Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, as part of his “Contract With America” initiative to undo what Democrat LBJ had done when President Clinton signed the new House Republicans Bill into law.

A Push by Clinton and Cisneros Would Later Result in the Great Recession ~
In the early 1990’s Democrat President Bill Clinton appointed Henry Cisneros as Director of Housing and Urban Development, a cabinet post. Not long after, Cisneros and Bill Clinton took to the road with a new initiative, “Everyone in America who wants to own a house should be able to buy one”, and they called on banks and mortgage lenders [both large and small] to create loans which would allow anyone who wants a home in America to be able to obtain one. What this push actually did was to strong arm banks into changing their underwriting standards and operate outside the common parameters of lending which had served to protect the banking industry against loan losses. What happened next? Banks created “non-verifiable” loans, these were mortgage loans where they may ask for a household income number, however, it would not be verified. So any customer seeking a mortgage loan could effectively lie on the application because the information would go unverified. Born out of this were the monikers “Sub-Prime” mortgage loans, “Alt-A” mortgages and a couple other terms. All these mortgages with relaxed standards fit into the same category, a category known as “junk” in the bond world. However, the major rating agencies placed a high rating, perhaps even AAA on these loans that were packaged for sell by major brokerage firms to investors at the time, creating a sizable systemic risk that [based on false ratings] went undetected at the time.

The Community Reinvestment Act [CRA] of 1977, modified in the 1990s relaxed underwriting standards and placed pressured on private banks to make risky loans, standards that would otherwise have kept these banks out of trouble. Again, this all took place with a nod by then President Bill Clinton and his Housing and Urban Development Appointee, Cisneros from San Antonio. The result led to a bubble in real estate prices in the years that followed. People were buying up multiple properties without having the income to qualify for such holdings. Once the economy slowed and unemployment turned up in the United States we were witnessing record foreclosures; so many foreclosures that a moratorium was placed in certain [qualifying] instances which allowed residents to stay in their homes without paying [for a time anyway]. Home prices plunged and many around the country walked away from properties they could no longer pay for and were now worth less than they owed on them… the “Great Recession” was born!

The Fallout From the Greatest Financial Debacle in the 21st Century –
By 2010 it was deemed a downturn so deep that only the Great Depression of the 1930’s could compare, every major U.S. bank was at risk of collapse. Several large institutions had to be rescued and a special commission was formed by the federal government to stop the contagion. This group of folks included names like the late Federal Reserve savant, Paul Volcker, the legendary architect who quelled hyper-inflation in the 1970’s and 80’s. During this contagion our federal government placed $billions aside to bail out several financial institutions while leaving others to perish. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both seized to exist as they were deemed unsavable, and their 1,000s of employees suddenly found themselves unemployed. Born out of the chaos was “Dodd-Frank” Legislation which places periodic “stress tests” on U.S. banks to make sure they can remain solvent under severe economic downturns, a measure still in practice today.

The stock market crash began in earnest in early 2008 and wouldn’t find a bottom until March, 2009. Simultaneously, news broke across the country that bank customers were making runs on certain banks where long lines were forming to withdraw money. Some banks were forced to turn customers away as they did not have enough liquidity on hand to accommodate all the withdrawal requests, it was scary! The pain became intolerable for many an investment client as well. I had a few clients call and ask me to just sell them out to cash. I talked most of them out of it, prices were so low I felt they would regret that sell decision later. One couple I remember insisted they wanted out on the very day the market had bottomed. It would prove to be THE day the U.S. stock market began it’s recovery; late in the session on the 9th of March, 2009 in the final hour of trading significant buying came in and the major indexes showed the first positive daily return in months. This would prove to be the bottom of the stock index declines on Wall Street. However, on Main Street and for months and months layoffs continued across most industries, unemployment in the United States rose to greater than 10% of the population. And in the years that followed many people were forced to work multiple part-time jobs, or take jobs they were way over-qualified for until things improved.

Obama/Biden Along With Fake News Outlets Perpetuate the Greatest Hoax in American History ~
That among other things. In this section I discuss the recent fallout from several Social Justice initiatives that were begun and continue under the Democrat Obama administrations and were restarted once Democrat Joe Biden was elected to office in January 2021.

The War on Oil, Part of Obama/Biden’s Climate Change Initiative ~
On Joe Biden’s first day in office he announced that domestic drilling for oil is a “no-no” and immediately the price of gasoline began on a tear and inflation we have not seen in this country since the 1980’s – 40-years earlier suddenly exploded! Prices on everything from the smallest items in the grocery store to the largest manufactured items, all went through the roof. Turns out there’s not much in this world that doesn’t need to be transported to its final destination. For three years now inflation has affected the price of everything, especially the cost of rents and housing. This was a major policy error. Instead of having the United States energy independent [a legacy of the Trump Administration] Joe solicits our adversaries like Iran and Venezuela to provide us with fuel for refining. Great idea dumbass!

“Climate Change”, this totally fake Leftist ideology, [I refer to as the greatest hoax in American History!], has created regulations attempting to shame businesses into some environmental controls which have needlessly raised the cost of producing about anything. The Democrat Party line seems to be that humans are in complete control of the weather patterns on Earth as long as they pay a higher tax in the form of regulations aimed at increasing input costs and shuttering the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels come out of the ground from the planet we live on so I cannot think of anything that’s more natural than that! Each day that passes we hear more and more intelligent people who are discounting this idea as pure myth. A volcanic eruption sends more carbon in the atmosphere than humans could in one hundred years? Something like that. However, nothing is real when you’re a progressive, they feel most comfortable living inside make-believe utopian bubbles. They are out promoting the idea that electric cars are the answer while, at the same time, they have no understanding of how the majority of electricity is produced either – fossil fuels, that’s not wind and not solar. What total dumbasses! Don’t worry though, once this lie has been completely discredited these wackos will come up with something new to worry about that we can’t control and they’ll do their very best to tax it too! 🙂

Reparations for Slavery ~
Several Democrats across the country have toyed with the idea of giving Black people reparations for something that occurred two hundred years ago when the country was very new. Slavery in the United States was outlawed beginning in the Abraham Lincoln Administration when he signed into law the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Anyone who was ever enslaved has been dead for well over 100 years and their slave masters? 150 years. The funny thing about slavery is that knowledge of this practice is not known by most seeking reparations, because if it were they would quickly shut the fuck up. The truth of the matter is that slavery was not invented or promoted by white landowners in the new America. Blacks themselves in Africa invented slavery, they sold their own people into slavery, and around the world! In fact, the first American to own slaves that worked his land was a Black man himself. His name was Anthony Johnson, he was a wealthy landowner in the late 1600’s in Virginia. Johnson was taken to court when he refused to release his slaves. Guess what happened? He won his court case! Eventually he did release his slaves but not because he was forced to by law. Again, the government lost the case against this Black man, the first slave owner in America. LMAO!

Socialist Democrats like California Governor, Gavin Newsome, popularized the idea of paying people whose ancestors were slaves. This is a crazy idea that hopefully will not get anymore traction as the taxpayers in California would have to foot the bill. The state of California is already in financial trouble with a state deficit recently reported to exceed $68 billion(?) while, at the same time, homelessness has gone viral in the state. I expect this social justice initiative along with other terrible ideas from Democrats to get shelved. Going forward, I would not be surprised to hear that cities in California such as San Francisco will need to be financially bailed out in the not-too-distant future… municipal bondholders would lose big under that scenario.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [DEI] are Destructive Social Justice Causes ~
Socialism in the form of “Woke” Leftist policies such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion [DEI] has permeated board rooms and C suites across America now for more than a decade. Many U.S. companies contributed money to domestic terrorist organizations like Black Lives Matter [BLM], whose riots resulted in massive destruction of commercial property, an abundant misuse of police resources and even some deaths. Today these companies who supported this organization aren’t saying much because they screwed up and they want to fly below the radar of any consumer discretion. They don’t want anyone to notice how they misjudged an organization as destructive as BLM. In addition, Board rooms and C suites across America somehow think that pushing diversity over skill set will make their organizations stronger when nothing can be further from the truth. Hiring decisions based on someone’s color and/or sexual orientation over their education and training is one terrible idea when you’re tasked with managing a “for-profit” organization. The fallout from this DEI initiative has yet to be fully measured but by the time its all over, it will result in great loss, progressive policies always do.

The Weaponization of All Federal Agencies Against the People ~
Censoring people on social media sites because they do not share woke DEI ideologies and liberal politics has become a huge problem in this country. Since Obama first occupied the White House many federal agencies such as the IRS, the Justice Department, FBI, Securities & Exchange Commission, the U.S. Treasury, Department of Transportation, the FTC and the Department of Energy are all headed by Climate Change radicals and Woke DEI liberals who have targeted American Conservatives. Hence, much of the time the information coming out of these agencies is false; the aim is to maintain the party line at all costs, the Woke Democrat Party line. Luckily, there have been a few whistleblowers come out to uncover some of the constant corruption that is taking place inside today’s federal agencies. One recent example is that of tax evasion and money laundering by the President’s son, Hunter Biden. Other than in a few instances, trust in these agencies has been completely absent for some time now. I know of little that I hear coming out of federal agencies that can be trusted as truth and that’s just pitiful.

The Biden Crime Family Has Accepted Cash From Our Foreign Adversaries ~
The Bidens have committed treason against the people of the United States. The Fake News Media, the Justice Department, and Democrats in Congress have all looked the other way while our President, his son Hunter and brother Jim have been running a cash for influence scheme [for years now]. The main problem is that we do not know yet what these countries, countries like Communist China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and a list of others have been promised in exchange for all that cash. Investigations are ongoing led by Republicans in Congress and thank God for that. We do know that the Bidens have received in excess of $50 million from foreign adversaries/governments. However, what we don’t know is what these countries were promised. We have observed that the Biden Administration is not at all concerned about the raid taking place at our Southern border for three years now where over 7 million illegals have entered the United States unabated since Biden entered the office. Also Communist China faced no consequences from the U.S. government for their production and release of the virus that caused the COVID pandemic. Could the payments to the Biden Crime Family be connected to ignoring all these risks to the United States?

Lastly: Given this plethora of Social Justice moves by the Democrats the intensity of the fallout from these more recent Socialist policies has yet to be measured, recorded. These destructive policies will take their toll in time we can all be certain of it as there exists only two kinds of progressive policies – those that have failed and those that are yet to fail! 😉