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Ben Stein's Diary
The Age of Fraud
(Page 3 of 3)
I learned how many mistakes I could make about investing. Too many. I learned just how stupid I am.
I learned how incompetent a treasury secretary could be. Letting Lehman fail was by far the single worst financial error of the last 200 years. Really beyond imagining. That idiocy by Paulson and Bernanke will be costing us for decades, maybe centuries. Because of the cataclysm that decision caused, we now have a socialist American banking system. We are very close to having a socialized auto sector. It all could have been avoided by a Lehman bailout but Paulson and Bernanke were too stupid to do the right thing. Now we are all paying for it and will be for a long time.
I really never thought I would see socialist America under a GOP president. But once Paulson and Bernanke pressed the “history erase” button, we were doomed. All of the good decisions since the Reconstruction Finance Corporation simply tossed out the window. My pal John Coyne says we as a nation have simply forgotten good sense. He’s right.
To think of the hundreds of billions looted by excess compensation on Wall Street, and now they leave us with this disaster. To think of these guys looting the savers of the nation, looting the men and women who fight in Afghanistan, looting the men who lie in hospital beds at Walter Reed… and they get away with it and we have to pick up the tab.
Something awful has happened and now we have socialized finance. Too many Bernie Madoffs. Not enough human decency.
As my sister says, “Your basic human is not such a hot item.”
Except at Walter Reed. One day a few weeks ago I met a wounded medic named Isaac Jensen. He had been horribly maimed by a bomb in a refrigerator at a home where terrorists had lurked. Despite his wounds, he had saved the lives of two of his squad mates even more gravely wounded. “That’s what I do,” he said, “that’s what we all do. Put someone else first.” He lay in a narrow bed. His incredibly beautiful wife was with him. Her staggeringly beautiful sister and his father were there, too. I would swear they glowed. As my pal Phil said when I sent his photo, they make the women of Beverly Hills look like chunks of stone. These men and women are our salvation, God willing. Otherwise, we will just be sucked dry by our own kleptocracy.
Happy New Year. God help us.
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Michele San Pietro| 2.1.09 @ 1:37PM
I hope Blagojevich will receive the punishment he deserves for his wrongdoings.
Ken Donnelly| 2.1.09 @ 2:01PM
I, too, am grateful to God everyday. It took a long time for the fire of faith to burn in me, but now it does, and everyday I thank God for all He has given me. especially the gift of a son. It was only after receiving the gift of a son, that I began to understand God's gift of His Son for all of us.
Alan Brooks| 3.2.09 @ 4:46PM
without faith the world is a cold, dead, empty place...
getting colder by the decade.
Ray Moran| 3.4.09 @ 2:57PM
Little do people know today that it is a fact that the world will burn and melt (2 Peter 3:10-13) along with the great majority of mankind who have not obeyed the gospel of Christ, and their suffering will be endless (Rev. 14:10-11). Seek God while He may yet be found (Matt. 7:7-9)
acheapmom| 3.10.09 @ 10:01AM
I come from Chicago area where I grew up hearing jokes about "the dead rising to vote". People laughed but didn't seem to care.
I now live in Chicago's eastern neighbor - which shares some political DNA - Lake County, IN where "the dead rose up even earlier - to REGISTER to vote". People (overall) did not seem to care...even when the 2007 death certificate was shown next to the 2008 votor registration form.
We Chicago Metro Area viewers all despised Chicago's corruption around the edges; BUT we all laughed at how Teflon(tm) coated Mayor Daley and other high officials were/are in whatever the current sting, corruption charge, politically related crime was.
Yet - once the votors were ENRAGED by a politician's failure. We suburbanites watched as Chicagoans ROSE UP in the late 1970's to throw out a mayor who had failed...
Not failed morally...
but failed to shovel out a huge snowfall that paralyzed Chicago.
---------Now we all watch as we must shovel thru "Chicago Style" politics as they engulf our nation---at least for the next two years as an almost one party government...wreaks major social and economic changes upon us.
*********************************
Maybe God's judgment will be the mere sitting back and WATCHING the consequences of our poorly researched and definitely AMORAL electoral choices....
Brittany| 5.6.09 @ 4:32PM
I always love to read about someone who acknowledges that God exists in the real world. The same God that knew Moses knows Bernie Madoff and Ben Stein...and all of us.
Richie| 5.25.09 @ 3:40AM
Thank You Ben. I just watched "Expelled" tonight for the first time. It was recommended by my church. They actually had movie night at the church to watch it, with popcorn and everything.
I am grateful everyday that I have a friend in Yahweh. He is my armor in the world.
As far as Madoff, Hitler, and every other EVIL person in the world............Phil. 2:10....That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.
Every knee will eventually bow. And everything will be answered. Everything.
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