I like to read news from England via the BBC news feed. One article is about massive unemployment in China due to the credit crunch.

The time is past for pointing fingers on who is responsible for the recent financial disaster. The question is how fast can it be fixed and fixed fairly. We know about the mortgage mess. I've not seen anything about unsecured credit card problems. Just like too loose of mortgage requirements, people have been bombarded with credit card offers for years. One very unfair tactic that these credit card companies are allowed to do is to change the rules when they desire and it is usually right when it can hurt consumers the most!

In the past several months credit card companies have increase the minimum payments, frequently breaking the budget of struggling consumers yielding to the glitter and glamor of marketing products that we don't need and replacing items still good but no longer fashionable. These changes in the rules frequently cause late payments which in turn can change reasonable interest rates to loan shark levels approaching 30% interest or more! Now a difficult payment becomes impossible to make and it results in phone calls to the many bankruptcy lawyers that hawk themselves on television.

Not too long ago people never heard about a credit score. Now many worry about it. Why? Because of unfair credit practices!

Consumer protection is one area where I do have a spark of hope that the now dominated Democratic government will review and make right. After all, it is affecting more of their supporters than the rich Republicans who allegedly created this unfairness. Or those that appear to be rich.

By this time Tuesday I'll know whether to worry or not. Monday's Journal has several things that I must comment on.

Page One, the undecideds. I consider myself very informed on the presidential politics and it really baffles me how anyone can continue to be undecided. Now, I don't know this fine young family and I do remember when Pat and I were that age with a couple small children, we were too busy trying to survive to worry about politics. However, thirty years later there is a wealth of information out there. The only difficulty is sifting through all the snippets, incomplete stories and outright lies. Forget what they say. Look at their records. Oh, some don't have a record? Well, then look at their character and acquaintances. Perhaps look at the money raised by the candidates. Which party has the money? Where does the money come from?

Politics of personal destruction. Have a presidential candidate wander by your house and you ask a question. It isn't the softball that is generally allowed to be asked. So the media proceeds to tear you apart. Make a statement at a rally that many people agree with and Daniel Bice of the Journal gives you a colonoscopy that has nothing to do with the statement. We are permitted to only ask "the right questions". Please preapprove them with "The Media".

Campaigning and lies. Politicians can say anything they want and get away with it. I never liked it. I wish it wasn't that way. However, the Journal's vendetta against Michael Gableman and the Democrats unprecedented court action against The Coalition For American Families smacks of political heavy handedness and judicial bias. Normally I would applaud any action to shine the light on lies but when it is only used against one political philosophy while anything goes for the other, I cannot help but to be appalled by it.

Wednesday we shall see if the process of checks and balances goes unchecked and out of balance.

Happy 4th of July. Independence day.  We celebrate our independence from the oppressive British monarchy.  We shot their soldiers and theirs killed ours. In Brookfield there is the grave of a man who fought in the Revolutionary War. Private Nathan Hatch. Since we are now buddy buddy with the British, it seems that today should be more of a birthday celebration of becoming a country rather than the day we officially flipped the bird to the king of England.

Which brings me to the point of the blog today.  You see, we still owe England. We also owe China along with some of the oil producing countries. It's called the national debt. It something that we've all heard about but is obscure to most of us. I understand that we are actually borrowing money from these countries to pay for things that we do. How is it that we need to borrow money from other countries? I though we were the rich people in the subdivision.

My dad once said, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?". I'm sure he heard that from someone else and it won't be found in the book of famous quotes but it does say a lot. I'm not rich so I'm not ashamed to say I don't understand money well. I understand gold and silver being worth something and exchanging pieces of same for value received. We used to do that. Gold coins could change value but our silver certificates were always worth a dollar's piece of silver. No more silver, no more silver certificates.  Now we exchange numbers. We can print as many dollar bills as we want because we'll never run out of numbers. 

I've got some stocks. One had numbers of being worth $44 a share when I bought it. Before last Christmas the numbers ran up to $128. Now it's got numbers of around $46. Same company. Doing good business too. Sales are way up. Like I said, I'm not ashamed admitting to ignorance of money and speculation. Nobody in the government seems to understand speculation on oil commodities or they'd be clambering to announce opening new areas for exploration and drilling for oil. It seems when there is more supply, the prices these speculators are willing to bid for oil goes down. Politicians don't understand that. Some think more taxes on the people that do the work keeping gasoline available for our tanks will lower the price of gasoline. Further, these same politicians believe that the cost of the taxes won't be passed along to us, the consumers. So let me modify my dad's quote to; "You may be an elected official but that doesn't mean you know squat about money!".

So continue to celebrate Independence Day. After the grill is put away and the firecrackers are all fired off, remember that Uncle Sam has loans out there from some nasty countries so we can appear to be a wealthy nation. Uncle Sam needs to better explain what this really means to those making the payments on everything that Sam does. It appears that the finance charges are greater than our minimum payments. What politician is going to tell us what we need to hear rather than what it take to get on their power trip and stay on it?

Happy Dependence Day.