How much more can the American people take?

Every day on the news we watch the oil spill live on TV. The oil is spilling all over the coast and the government and BP are not doing too much to remedy the problem.

This is only the latest of a string of examples of ineffective government and failed regulation. Lately, there have been the Wall Street bank bailouts, the housing bubble, and the failed attacks on New York City.

Over the decade there has been 911 and Katrina. It is like the government can not do any effective job. Despite having a memo, several tips to the FBI about terrorist training in flight schools, and warnings from foreign intelligence, the government failed to stop 911. You would think would all the money spent on intelligence and antiterrorism the government would be able to stop thirty terrorist with box cutters from causing so much destruction. In addition, the government has failed to follow the recommendations of the 911 commission. The government invaded Iraq based on incorrect intelligence that the country had weapons of mass destruction. Recently, they almost let the failed New York City bomber get on plane to leave the country because their computer system did not work despite spending millions of dollars on a new system. Katrina is still a mess. The government did not do much to help there despite reassurances from President Bush that Brownie was doing a heck of a job.

Recently, there have been the bank bailouts of Wall Street firms such as AIG. Despite receiving government money, these firms have paid themselves huge bonuses. Goldman Sachs received money from the Federal Reserve in these bailouts and profits from the issuance of government debt. In addition, firms like Goldman Sachs profited from the housing bubble while selling their clients mortgage backed securities. Goldman Sachs also sold BP shares prior to the oil spill making more huge profits while most Americans are unemployed due to housing bubble AIG contributed to by selling mortgage backed securities leading to the current recession.

Now, we have BP where Obama is saying that BP has the know how to deal with the problems. We know that is not the case, because all the oil companies and BP’s disaster response plans were Xerox copies and mentioned walruses in the Gulf and deceased experts to respond. In addition, the government was not effective in overseeing the operations. The Deep Water Horizon was operating under a foreign flag off our coast making it harder for the coast to inspect. Whose bright idea in government was this? The government is too busy blaming the other party and fighting to use common sense to fix problems. These problems are only getting worse. The next huge problem may be much larger given the state of terrorism in the world. We need to demand that our government stop playing politics and fix problems. Most of the recommendations of the 911 commission have not been implemented. All the politicians have all these hearing to grandstand and get noticed on the news. Will they really do anything to fix the problems facing America?