More Wall Street Woes

Yesterday, the stock market continued it's tumble downward. It dropped around 500 points, and currently rests at its lowest point in the last five years. Just last year at this time, the market (Dow) was at its highest point ever at 14,164.53. Yesterday, it finished at 9,447.11. That's a drop of 4,717.42 in the last year (33%).

That means that a third of the money that was there in October of 2007 has now disappeared. These are not just figures we're talking about, and it hurts the small investor much more than the rich. Millions of American workers now have 401k portfolios for their retirement. For the last year, they have seen these accounts just grow smaller and smaller.

A few days ago, the market fell about 770 points. At that time, we were told by financial experts that translated into a loss of $1.2 trillion. Using that as a base figure, that means about $6.1 trillion has vanished into thin air in the last year. That is devastating for American workers. And sadly, it doesn't look like the market has bottomed out yet.

Americans know who is to blame for this mess. It is the "get-rid-of-regulations-trickle-down economics" of the Republican party supported by George Bush and, yes, John McCain. McCain supported and voted for all of the Bush economic policies.

These same policies led to the same result in 1929. But our modern Republican leaders assured us it couldn't happen again, because there were too many safeguards in place that would prevent it. Then they proceeded to dismantle those safeguards so their rich corporate buddies could get even richer. Now 1929 is doing a repeat performance.

Just as in the past, we're going to have to put the Democrats back in power so we can start to dig ourselves out of this mess. It won't be easy and it'll take a while to accomplish, but it won't happen at all if we continue to believe the Republican lies.