# The beginning of the end?



## Clarice (Aug 19, 2010)

What are your thoughts on the Detroit Bankruptcy? Could this be the beginning of the dominoes falling?


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## machinist (Jul 4, 2012)

Oh, I think dominoes have been falling for some time now, but it is SO SLOW it is hard to notice it. But yes, Detroit is the first in line, IMHO, to be followed by many others, including some States.

It is the countries failing that worries me. Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, and soon Portugal, Italy, Spain, the whole EU, then probably Japan, UK, and the US.


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## mosquitomountainman (Jan 25, 2010)

Machinist is spot on. The dominoes began to fall long ago but no one noticed (or is noticing). Socialism does not work. Not here, and not overseas.

Get your finances in order folks. The sooner you get prepared the better off you will be. Learn a skill that has value in a collapsed economy. Put back real wealth and work toward sustainability. Government isn't going to help you when the fall comes.


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## machinist (Jul 4, 2012)

Yes! Get as prepared as you can. 

-Get out of debt.
-Get away from those who are not prepared. 
-Get to an area with some sustainable industry. Agriculture is the best IMHO.
-Become a working part of your community. 
-Get a trade that will be needed later. We do repairs on farm equipment. 
-Secure a source of water.
-Grow food and learn to preserve it. 
-Make your savings in real, tangible, needful things. Gold and silver come last, after all needs are provided.


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## FatTire (Mar 20, 2012)

the beginning of the end of what? If youre referring to the end of the corporatist system, well that started as soon as the system was put in place. You cant have infinite growth inside a finite space, and the current system is predicated squarely on that notion. Simple common sense tells us that you cannot simply print more and more money, to be consolidated into fewer and fewer hands, with each bill in your wallet or floating in cyber space having a debt attached to it, and still have all that money continue to be worth something. It is a system that must necessarily collapse eventually.

It doesnt collapse all at once. What we have been seeing pretty much all our lives is the long slow decay of a system that was never viable in the first place, unless you want to live as a population of increasing numbers of slaves, and a decreasing population of masters. Those masters are not simply going to give up on the system that so benefits them, so perhaps you are referring to the beginning of the end of Liberty. Sadly, that notion, Liberty, began to be deconstructed and used as a public relations tool at least as far back as WWII. The only way now to have Liberty now is, i suspect this has always been true, to be as self sufficient as possible. Grow your own food, produce your own electricity, barter your skills for real assets... 

Be prepared to defend yourself and those around you, the 'collapse' will likely be a series of 'new normal' small drop-offs, and it sure looks like soon the 'new normal', is going to be a lot of violence and disease and starvation, punctuated by the corporate state clinging desperately to power.


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## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

mosquitomountainman said:


> The dominoes began to fall long ago but no one noticed (or is noticing).


That's because they are just a small few individual ones on the far corner of the arena where the display is set up (referencing the huge displays often created for show) and they are so insignificant in relation to the "BIG picture" to cause notice. But, sadly, they will only begin to pick up speed... eventually...

The blinders are slowly coming off. Just like "no one raindrop feels responsible for the flood", enough events like this will eventually occur and then the dominoes pick up speed...


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

Clarice said:


> What are your thoughts on the Detroit Bankruptcy? Could this be the beginning of the dominoes falling?


It's really not the beginning of the end. It's really an example of liberalism in action over a long time. Detroit has had liberals running the city for decades. They get in bed with the unions, pay them way too much in wages and benefits over a long period of time. Drive out people and businesses with high taxes and high crime. Philadelphia is a similar basket case.


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## machinist (Jul 4, 2012)

Yes, Louisville, too. It had all the things businesses hate: bad air, bad water, high taxes (city, county and state, whether you were a resident or not), belligerent unions, poor work ethic in the labor force, exploding sewers, masses of regulations, etc., ad nauseum. 

The result is businesses, especially manufacturing has been leaving in droves for decades. Known for a long time by their major industries (horse racing/gambling/whiskey/tobacco) as Sin City, it is not a place that would draw a business startup. They built what they have, so they get to live with it. 

I agree, this has been going on for a very long time and created today's problems. In my 67 years I have seen the rise and fall of union power, the corporatization of the medical field, export of most manufacturing from the US, loss of the work ethic, destruction of the family unit, exhausting of resources, pollution of water, air, and soil, and the complete loss of integrity in both business and government. The pseudo-money thing began long before me, most recently in 1913 with the creation of the Fed, although Andy Jackson fought the central banks, too. 

It doesn't take much more to make the US a 3rd world country. We already have the huge disparity of wages and power, corruption and collusion in govt. and big business, a fractured society along racial and ethnic lines, and moral bankruptcy. Not too far to go from here, I'd say.


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## Tweto (Nov 26, 2011)

I have difficulty identifying any bankrupt or soon to be bankrupt city or state that is not predominantly run by democrats. On the reverse, if anyone knows of a republican run city , county, or state that has or will be filing for bankruptcy I would like to know.

BTW Nebraska is a republican run state and has just announced a 600 million surplus and the governor added that they will be looking at decreasing the taxes.


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## tsrwivey (Dec 31, 2010)

It's simply the natural effect of their choices. How's the free stuff, high taxes, & loose morals workin' for 'em now? Unfortunately, someone will figure out a way Detroit's stupidity must be paid for by everyone else & so my money will be stolen from me & sent to them.


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## mosquitomountainman (Jan 25, 2010)

Tweto said:


> I have difficulty identifying any bankrupt or soon to be bankrupt city of state that is not predominantly run be democrats. On the reverse, if anyone knows of a republican run city , county, or state that has or will be filing for bankruptcy I would like to know.
> 
> BTW Nebraska is a republican run state and has just announced a 600 million surplus and the governor added that they will be looking at decreasing the taxes.


The problem to watch for is that the liberals will come in droves bringing their pollution and decadence with them. That's what's happening to Montana.

Any place that's clean and functional is destined for liberal infestation. They can't help it. Have you ever seen a swarm of locust head for a barren field? Of course not! They'll head straight for the best then totally destroy it.


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

It would take a lot of work to chronicle how Detroit had the unusual luck in having the auto industry to becoming one of the worst cities north of the Rio Grande. But here's one article:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/toxic-government-by-democrats-detroit-2/

Perhaps no other city in America illuminates the failure of Democratic Party policies more brightly than Detroit. Two stories, separated by only four, days are emblematic. On March 11, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatick was found guilty of 24 of 30 charges leveled against him, including fraud, racketeering and extortion. Four days later, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed attorney Kevyn Orr as the city's emergency financial manager, in a last ditch effort to avoid what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation's history. From 1961 to the present, the tragic history of Detroit itself has been written entirely by Democrats such as these individuals.

It was 1961 when Louis C. Miriani, Detroit's last Republican Mayor, lost his re-election bid. It was a well-deserved loss. Miriani was a criminal who served 10 years in prison for tax evasion. The victor in the race was Democrat James Jerome Cavanagh, the only elected official to *serve on LBJ's Model Cities task force, a program that emulated Soviet efforts to reconstruct entire urban areas in Eastern European cities. *Cavanagh decided that a nine-square mile section of Detroit should follow suit, and he got a new income tax, as well as a commuter tax, through the state legislature to pay for Detroit's very own "Model City."

The program became a disaster when residents resisted the command-and-control edicts from Democratic mayors and federal officials, telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open in return for cash, training and healthcare. As a result of such heavy-handedness, a breakdown in civil order occurred, as did the beginnings of Detroit's precipitous population decline. On July 23, 1967, that decline was accelerated when police arrested more than 80 people at a "blind pig," a name given to black American after-hours clubs, in the heart of Model City. Outraged residents staged the worst race riot of the 1960s in retaliation, during which businesses were looted and burned. Five days later, LBJ was forced to send in two divisions of paratroopers to restore calm. Over the next year and a half, 140,000 residents, mostly white, fled the city.

Despite such failure, Democratic policies continued to be implemented. Public employee unions were granted high salaries, exorbitant benefit packages, and allowed to implement inefficient work rules and other requirements that raised the cost of doing business in the city. The same Democrat-fostered union mentality took hold in the private sector with a vengeance, to the point where Detroit's auto industry began moving to right-to-work states in the South in order to survive.

While this economic catastrophe-in-the-making was taking place, Democrats were also undermining the school system. By 2009, Detroit Public Schools (DPS), a system U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called a "national disgrace," was also put under the control of an emergency financial manager in order to prevent bankruptcy. And 2009 was the year that DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. As of last June, only 1.8 percent of DPS students were considered capable of doing college level work, the achievement gap remained one of the highest in the nation, and 79 percent of residents said they don't want their child educated by DPS. Moreover, by 2016, the system that had educated approximately 160,000 students as recently as 2000, will be reduced to serving less than 40,000 children.

Detroit residents have paid a heavy price for such a dysfunctional system: a mind-blowing 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate.

Considering the quality of leaders running the city, Detroit's descent into ruination should surprise no one. From 1974 to 1993, Coleman Young was mayor. Young may have run as a Democrat, but he was subsequently revealed to be a member of the Communist Party. His brand of "us against them" politics, essentially branding anyone who disagreed with him as "racist," exacerbated Detroit's descent into chaos. In 1992, his police chief was convicted of stealing $2.6 million from city taxpayers, even as Young defended him. Michigan's hard-left U.S. Senator Carl Levin was Young's chief supporter, serving as Detroit City Council president.

Such corruption was hardly anomalous. In 2006, former Detroit City Council member Alonzo Bates was convicted of putting a relative on the payroll, for which he served a 33-month sentence. In 2009, City Council member Monica Conyers, wife of U.S. House Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who has represented Detroit for 47 years, pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and served 27 months in a federal prison. As for former Mayor Kwami Kilpatrick, his corruption wasn't limited to the aforementioned conviction. In 2008, he agreed to resign and spend 120 days in jail for two felony counts of obstruction of justice. In 2010, he was sentenced to up to five years for violating the terms of his probation stemming from the 2008 conviction.

In 2012, Kilpatrick was also linked to a dubious pension deal involving ex-Detroit Treasurer and Kilpatrick appointee Jeffrey Beasley, who has been indicted by the federal government for taking bribes and kickbacks as part of a corrupt bargain that cost two Detroit pension funds $84 million in investment losses. Last month, two more city officials, pension fund lawyer Ronald Zajac, and Detroit Police and Fire pension trustee Paul Stewart, were also indicted in the widening pension fund bribery scandal. Also in 2012, Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. retired as the result of a scandal surrounding his sexual involvement with a female officer in the department.

Along with the corruption, Detroit has paid a heavy price for an economy that has been based on Democrats' ideas of governance that derive from "fairness" and "social justice." The city stands on the brink of bankruptcy with a $327 million budget deficit that could have been $900 million if the city hadn't borrowed lots of money. It has an overall liability of $14 billion, that includes an underfunded (read: "looted") municipal pension fund. The city population, as high as 1.8 million in the 1950s, has declined to just over 700,000 currently. Only 54.3 percent of Detroit residents who could be part of the labor force participate in it, meaning they have a job or looking for one. The other 45.7 percent don't have a job and aren't looking. And 15.3 percent of those employed have jobs with the government.

Detroit is in free-fall socially as well. 34.5 percent of residents are on food stamps. Only 9.2 percent are married couple families with children under 18. Single parent households run by females account for 29.7 percent of Detroit's population, and the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the year prior to the Census Bureau survey was more than 75 percent.

Of the 363,281 housing units in Detroit, 99,072 are vacant, and 47 percent of Detroit property owners have paid their property taxes in a city whose 139 square miles have been broken down into four separate categories of deterioration that determine the level of city services they receive - if they receive any at all.

To top it all off, Detroit was the most dangerous city in America in 2012, with a murder rate 11 times that of New York City.

Despite these daunting realities, Detroit residents remained hitched to the Democratic Party wagon. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama received 98 percent of the vote, and other Democrats, including convicted felon Brain Banks, were elected with large margins of victory.

Emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr has been tasked with finding a way to save Detroit from bankruptcy. Yet even if he does somehow succeed, it would likely be a Pyrrhic victory at best. As long as Detroit residents continue voting for a Democratic Party whose ideology has run their city into the ground, bankruptcy will come - sooner or later.


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## Tweto (Nov 26, 2011)

mosquitomountainman said:


> The problem to watch for is that the liberals will come in droves bringing their pollution and decadence with them. That's what's happening to Montana.
> 
> Any place that's clean and functional is destined for liberal infestation. They can't help it. Have you ever seen a swarm of locust head for a barren field? Of course not! They'll head straight for the best then totally destroy it.


I will never talk up Nebraska as a great state to move to because of what you say. I do not want liberals moving here. Yes Montana is turning but so is Texas and has anybody notice the formally conservative state of Colorado and what as happened there. A lot of Californians moved to Colorado when things were going to hell in the sunshine state, I know because my SIL and her husband moved to Colorado Springs from San Diego about 7 years ago for that reason.


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## machinist (Jul 4, 2012)

Right. All you liberals out there don't want to come to south Indiana, 'cuz the ******** would first drive you crazy, then drive you back out again. It's full of hard headed folks who like things pretty much as they are, so you'd bump your heads on that right away. Lots of folks here who LIKE having virtually no zoning laws in the agricultural areas. If you wanna move in, that's fine, but if you wanna try and tell 'em how to do the farming, you'll find a BIG (legal) hog operation right next to your back yard. 

So, keep your libtard ideas out there in the land of fruits and nuts, 'kay??  And your goofy budget ideas, too.


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

But to get back to the original post, there are a number of other cities and even states in deep financial trouble. Chicago will go bankrupt eventually. So will the states of Illinois and California. It's hard to say when it will happen and which state will be the first to declare bankruptcy. It's like a couple with $100,000 in credit card debt. You know they're going bankrupt but you don't know exactly when.


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## BillS (May 30, 2011)

More on Detroit

The Downfall of Detroit

It took only six decades of "progressive" policies to bring a great city to its knees.

By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown's Greatest Hits - 40 percent of its streetlamps don't work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. - Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city's downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn't be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan's Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World - or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city's implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today's Hiroshima with today's Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the "arsenal of democracy," and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit's population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of "per capita income," many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO series Hung recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector work force, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

So, late on Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit's bankruptcy "unconstitutional" because, according to the Detroit Free Press, "the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees." Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.

So a bankrupt ruin unable to declare bankruptcy is now back to selling off its few remaining valuables, as I learned from a Detroit News story headlined "Howdy Doody May Test Limits of Protecting Detroit Assets." For those of you under 40 - okay, under 80 - Howdy Doody is the beloved American children's puppet, in western garb with a beaming smile and 48 freckles, one for every state, which gives you some idea of when his heyday was. The Howdy Doody Show ended its run on September 24, 1960, which would have made sense for Detroit, too. The city's Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet - or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don't get too excited - you can't go to Detroit and see him on display; he's in storage. He's in some warehouse lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees. Instead of selling him off, maybe they should get him moonlighting as a gigolo and sell it to HBO as Hungy Doody ("When you're looking for the real wood"). What else is left to sell? The City of Windsor has already offered to buy the Detroit half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we're told that "innovation hubs" and "enterprise zones" are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit - the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block - is as nothing compared to the decay of the city's human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit "innovation hub"? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn't bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit's Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just "liberal" "progressive" politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, "Oh, well, Detroit's an 'outlier.'" It's an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities - "health" "care" "reform," "immigration" "reform" - are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, "*If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit*."

After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith famously told a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" - and in a great city, too. If your inheritance includes the fruits of visionaries like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, and the Dodge brothers, you can coast for a long time, and then decline incrementally, and then less incrementally, and then catastrophically, until what's left is, as the city's bankruptcy petition puts it, "structurally unsound and in danger of collapse." There is a great deal of ruin in advanced societies, but even in Detroit it took only six decades.

"Structurally unsound and in danger of collapse": Hold that thought. Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it's cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan "immigration reform" actively recruits 50-60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America's governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state - the IRS and Eric Holder's amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of "community organizers" and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review's Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host. But, pending an appeal, that's "unconstitutional," no matter how dead the host is. Beyond that, Detroit needs urgently both to make it non-insane for talented people to live in the city, and to cease subjecting its present population to a public "education" system that's little more than unionized child abuse. Otherwise, Windsor, Ontario, might as well annex it for a War of 1812 theme park - except if General Brock and the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles had done to Detroit what the Democratic party did they'd be on trial for war crimes at The Hague.


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## JayJay (Nov 23, 2010)

~~~All you liberals out there don't want to come to south Indiana, 'cuz the ******** would first drive you crazy~~~

Yep, and Ky. is even worse. Heck, we potty in outhouses here, cook on the back porches--that's where the stove is--and do laundry in the nearest pond or creek. :gaah:


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## machinist (Jul 4, 2012)

Ayup. Got some friends from Harlan County.... :cheers:


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## JayJay (Nov 23, 2010)

machinist said:


> Ayup. Got some friends from Harlan County.... :cheers:


Oh, we loved those movies from Netflix with the good looking guy from Harlan County.artydance:


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## HarleyRider (Mar 1, 2010)

~~~All you liberals out there don't want to come to south Indiana, 'cuz the ******** would first drive you crazy~~~

The same is true for Tennessee. We hunt, fish, tend crops, raise horses, cows, and chickens. We also hate Liberals... the old values still rule here, and we are right in the middle of the Bible Belt.


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## helicopter5472 (Feb 25, 2013)

Judge said carry on with the bankruptcy, Union's are mad. Bet that Obama will bypass everyone and bail out only the Union's as they supported his election


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## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

helicopter5472 said:


> Judge said carry on with the bankruptcy, Union's are mad. Bet that Obama will bypass everyone and bail out only the Union's as they supported his election


Actually, I think he will leave it alone... There are at least 11 major size cities who are on the brink as well, including at least the state of CA... IMO -he will let them figure it out through a bankruptcy and then duplicate it across the country as needed... Only issue - get ready for a beating in the municipal bond holders... My reasoning is he is clueless on how to resolve it and he took a ton of heat for "too big to fail" too.


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## hiwall (Jun 15, 2012)

> The beginning of the end?


I certainly hope so.
The Detroit bankruptcy will likely be in court for years.


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## helicopter5472 (Feb 25, 2013)

invision said:


> Actually, I think he will leave it alone... There are at least 11 major size cities who are on the brink as well, including at least the state of CA... IMO -he will let them figure it out through a bankruptcy and then duplicate it across the country as needed... Only issue - get ready for a beating in the municipal bond holders... My reasoning is he is clueless on how to resolve it and he took a ton of heat for "too big to fail" too.


Lets hope your right, Obama's starts to go into some kind of weird spaz attack if he is not writing a govt. check to someone.


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## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

helicopter5472 said:


> Lets hope your right, Obama's starts to go into some kind of weird spaz attack if he is not writing a govt. check to someone.


You can say that again and again... So true...


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