That whole Dot-com bubble was the tipping off point for me.

Sheesh, Wall Street goes gaga because thousands of new businesses open up that do nothing more than act as online Sears and Roebuck catalogs? They weren't building anything new. They were simply repackaging and remarketing what was already there.

Then the reports started coming in that major firms were outsourcing their workforces. Yeah, that had to be good for our country. No problem. We'd just become the human resource managers, bankers, and stockbrokers of the world.

Then the final straw. As I watched real estate prices go through the roof and saw that if I built a home on a plot of land with my bare hands, I could profit to the tune of up to 1000%, I knew the final nail was in the coffin. The greed had finally won out.

I started telling people at least 3 or 4 years ago that we were in dire danger of going into a second recession. Most scoffed at me. They knew things weren't rosy but soup lines, dust bowl shit? Oh no. Not the might USA. Well, it still can happen.

Obama's win has buoyed me some because he has many of the same qualities in leadership that FDR had and the vision to understand that it takes more than just government cash to fix it. He also talks of sacrifice and work ethic.

The thing that's out of his control though are the sore losers who will scuttle the nation to prove they were right and we were wrong. They really worry me because, while they're largely out of power now, just one disastrous thing such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster could empower them again. Their lust for power and the way their religious fundamentalism wipes out their ability to compromise indicates we're in for very rough waters.

Art