When Mitt Romney announced that Congressman Paul Ryan was his pick for vice-president, a number of prominent Democrats responded with Christmas-come-early joy. On the surface it seemed that Romney had passed up his chance to balance his ticket with someone who could appeal to groups he has alienated—including educated women and minorities. Nor does Ryan have foreign policy cred to compensate for the same lack in Romney.

Nobody doubts that Romney hit the right note in regard to appealing to the conservative base. For those who know him, Ryan is the darling of the deficit hawks, year after year producing budgets that carved out billions from programs for the poor, the young, and the elderly—cutting food stamps, education, job programs, scientific research—and, horror of horrors, threatening to dismantle Medicare as we know it. The budgets always arrived still-born. There was never any chance that they would survive the fiscal reality checks in the Senate. But they sent a message to the choir that Ryan was their boy. His ideology was pure.

How this is all going to play in Romney’s favor is the fact that Ryan is largely unknown outside of his Wisconsin constituency, where he has served seven terms. What the nation as a whole is seeing is a good-looking, energetic, charming young man who tells us there are simple solutions to the bad economy: the deficit is the cause of joblessness, entitlements (Medicare, Social Security, for starters) have to be trimmed or dismantled, and since President Obama hasn’t been able to bring the nation out of the effects of the recession in all this time, he must go.

Some have referred to Paul Ryan as “Sarah Palin with brains.” He is nothing of the sort, except, yes, he has brains.

One would hope that Mitt Romney would have learned from John McCain’s disastrous choice for his running mate in 2008. Sarah Palin was a physically attractive candidate with strong appeal to the conservatives, but it quickly became apparent that she did not have the foreign policy expertise—or any other expertise, for that matter—to fit her for the presidency.

Romney’s pick, also a genial, attractive person with conservative credentials, not only lacks foreign policy experience, but his record during seven terms in the House would seem to disqualify him from understanding the serious social and economic issues facing the nation.

Paul Ryan majored in economics and political science in college and became impressed with the writings of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, among others. He supported the principles of Reaganomics, sometimes described as the “trickle-down theory.” After his election to the House, he focused on economic issues, serving on the Ways and Means Committee and eventually becoming chairman of the Committee of the Budget. Since the Obama presidency, Ryan has been a spokesman, particularly through his budget proposals, for an extreme approach to the federal budget that has brought opposition not only from his party, but also from his church.

Are these facts about Paul Ryan and his economic philosophy going to hurt Mitt Romney’s chance to gain the presidency? Probably not. As any experienced political operative will tell you, an election campaign is not an effective forum to educate the electorate. With Romney’s announcement of his VP pick, the flood of misinformation only accelerated. A prime example is the Romney campaign’s contention that the Obama administration has taken more than $700 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. In response, “The Obama campaign has pointed out that the $700 billion came from eliminating subsidies to insurance companies and cutting waste and fraud — neither of which would affect health services or benefits for seniors. Independent fact-checking groups like Politifact have labeled the Romney charges as “false,” and in a statement Tuesday, Obama’s campaign called the ad ‘dishonest and hypocritical.’”

Inarguable is that Paul Ryan, in his nearly 14 years in the House, has voted for decisions that have contributed to the economic mess we find ourselves in. In the words of Ryan’s Democratic colleague from Wisconsin, Representative Ron Kind, “Paul was one of the architects during the Bush administration that put our nation deep into debt. It jeopardized our economic future. So I was surprised at that pick. You take a look at the Romney/Ryan budget right now. That really is the blueprint—the vision for our country, and it’s really a case of back to the future.

“Let’s be honest. Paul Ryan was there and cast votes for two large tax cuts that benefited the most wealthy—without paying for any of it; two wars that went unpaid for; (he) supported the largest expansion of entitlement spending since Medicare was first created in 1965, with a new prescription drug component and large taxpayer subsidies going to private insurance Medicare Advantage plans without paying a nickel for any of it. And then they wonder why we are facing huge budget deficits today!”

When you compare the Paul Ryan of the George W. Bush presidency with the Paul Ryan of the Obama presidency, you see the same sort of–shall we call it “moral flexibility”—that Mitt Romney has been accused of. It has called into question the character of Mitt Romney, and it should cause us to question the character of Ryan. Do Ryan’s fiscal policies serve the nation, or do they serve the exigencies of politics in an election year?

Paul Ryan’s budgetary numbers may not be clear to someone who has not studied economics, but it doesn’t take a college degree to recognize political opportunism in play. We need to look underneath the attractive wrappings to determine which candidates best serve the country’s needs.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

The 1985 science fiction film Back to the Future stars Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, a teenager who travels back in time 30 years and meets his future mother, who becomes romantically interested in him. Marty then has the task of getting his future parents to fall in love so he will have a future.

This scenario is chillingly like America today. Hardworking people over the past 30 years have invested their money in homes, thinking that the housing market would be stable. And undoubtedly it would have been but for greed and incompetence at every level of government and finance. This is nowhere more evident than in the way that Social Security funds were systematically diverted into the general budget.

In 1968, facing astronomical costs of the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs, President Lyndon Johnson had a projected “budget deficit of somewhere between $2.1 billion and $8.1 billion—no one could say for sure. So President Johnson made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security, and all other trust funds in the budget process. He then projected a budget for 1969 to be in a net balance of $2.4 billion”—a cool $4.5 to $10.5 billion coup d’état. So began the systematic rip-off of Social Security and our other trust funds by a president and Congress.

Congress liked the idea so much that it got into the act and in 1985, passed “the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act,” which allowed them to borrow money “collected under the Social Security” act and spend it “for non-Social Security purposes.”

A week after his 2005 State of the Union speech, President George Bush bluntly put the Social Security Trust Fund in perspective: “Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund—in other words, there’s a pile of money being accumulated. That’s just simply not true. The money—payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They’re spent on benefits and they’re spent on government programs. There is no trust.”

There you have it in a word.—“There is no trust.” The money has been spent for “non-Social Security purposes.”

Thank you, President Bush, for clarifying that. Our hard-earned money taken as FICA taxes to fund Social Security and Medicare, Postal Service profits and their Retiree Health Benefits Fund, Civil Service Retirement System funds, and the Government Life Insurance Fund, established to insure World War I soldiers and their families, has been ripped off, in one way or another, by every president and Congress since 1969.

The next player in this “back to the future” scenario comes—not from Congress or any elected or government official—but from America’s independent central bank, the “Fed.” Greenspan is the culprit—appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987 by President Regan—”Greenspan didn’t believe that fraud was something that needed to be enforced” in the financial market. Thank you, Mr. Greenspan, for your part in the 2008 financial collapse.

What did Congress do to protect the future of the American people? “A prime example is what happened to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, a dedicated and resourceful consumer advocate. Unfortunately, members of the old guard, led by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and a pack of Republicans, prevented the agency’s independent operation, relegating it to “a smaller bureau within the Federal Reserve run by—well, anyone but Elizabeth Warren.”

How tidy. The fox is guarding America’s hen house!

Now we come to President George Bush and the Iraqi war.

“On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail… Tenet never” shared this “intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell.”

“On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. ‘We continued to validate him the whole way through,’ said Drumheller. ‘The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.’”

For reasons we can only surmise, President Bush was determined to invade Iraq.

“In a February 2003 speech to the U.N. Security Council, Powell alleged that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction from inspectors and refusing to disarm. However, after the U.S. had invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam Hussein, no weapons of mass destruction were found.

“‘Of course I regret that a lot of it turned out to be wrong,’ he said.

“But Powell insisted a lot of his intelligence was ‘on point.’”

If we cannot reconstruct a rationale for invading Iraq, the ensuing costs are more traceable.

Cold statistics tell us that the cost of the Iraq war in dollars and cents stands at $806 billion and counting. But the cost in human suffering and loss is much more than a statistic—“Combining IBC civilian data with official Iraqi and US combatant death figures and data from the Iraq War Logs released by WikiLeaks, we estimate the documented death toll across all categories since March 2003 to be 162,000, of whom 79% were civilians.”

All I can do is weep—it didn’t have to happen.

Unfortunately for us, President Bush’s decisions continue to affect us on a daily basis—and it’s not science fiction—it is the now in the loss of jobs, homes and the higher cost of everything from gas to a college education for our young people.

“If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time.”

So we come to the “now.”

We have given examples of a succession of administrations which have made disastrous decisions causing the American people to lose both “blood and treasure.” Now we are trying to fight our way out of a recession that shows no sign of letting go its grip on the economy. Shockingly, a number of leading Republicans think it is to their party’s advantage if the economy does not improve before November. They know that millions of Americans will vote for or against President Obama depending on a couple of economic factors, particularly the level of unemployment. They have mobilized their party to vote against measures that would create more jobs and continually try to pass legislation overturning the Affordable Health Care Act and continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest. Their actions show a callous disregard for the well-being of the rest of us.

However, there is another action that would go a long way to solving the Housing crisis that is being blocked by enemies of the President. “A band of progressive leaders joined the mounting calls to fire America’s housing policy chief Ed DeMarco Thursday.

“You could have the biggest stimulus program in America by getting rid of one person, Van Jones, president and co-founder of the progressive group Rebuild the Dream and former White House adviser, said Thursday. ‘He is single-handedly holding up tens of thousands of jobs.’

“Jones joined Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Leo W. Gerard, international president of United Steelworkers, on a conference call Thursday to encourage President Barack Obama to fire DeMarco, who is acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. DeMarco, a Bush administration appointee, has opposed offering a form of loan forgiveness, known as principal reduction, on mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government-backed housing giants have a hand in about half of all the outstanding mortgages.”

To enhance their chances for reelection, our presidents have auctioned off our Social Security, Postal Service and retirement assets to financial interests. It’s time now for the payback. We speak politely now. Please listen. Tell the American people how they have been defrauded by their presidents and Congress in the past. Assure us that it will not happen again, and we will forgive you and maybe even vote you back into office.

Stall and do nothing and we will not be so kind in the voting booth.

This is America’s Manifesto: Do the will of the people or get out of our White House and Congress and take your freeloading banksters and lobbyists with you!

We want a White House and Congress that goes with us back to the future.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Americans are a thrifty lot—and we have the expressions to prove it. Ben Franklin coined what is probably the best known: “A penny saved is a penny earned.” And if he were to appear on the current scene, he would be the first to agree that the American people are being robbed by their government.

In irony, it has been said that we have the best government money can buy. But that is true only for the lobbyist. The public at large is painfully aware of what our government is costing us—programs, wars and tax cuts that have driven up the deficit, and a refusal by Congress to come to a budget agreement, causing the first ever downgrade of our national credit rating. And that is not to mention our government’s culpability in the failure of our regulatory agencies to foresee and forestall the failure of our banking system, causing the average American citizen the loss of 40% of his net worth. “The stunning drop in median net worth—from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010—indicates that the recession wiped away 18 years of savings and investment by families.”

There is public outrage. Such grassroots movements as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have given voice to widespread concerns, but the message goes largely unheeded. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is a voice crying in the wilderness. His message is sound, but few of his colleagues are listening. Perhaps the problem is that enough of us aren’t listening—or at least responding.

Much has been made of the fact that following the 2010 Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United, the airwaves have been dominated by political messages, most of which are negative and many of which are also misleading. Yet, they have been shown to be effective in influencing people’s opinions and actions.

But we know better! Few people are so naïve as to take as gospel truth something solely because it appears on their favorite news channel. What doesn’t happen enough is for citizens to spend the time and effort to read and watch a spectrum of print and electronic media as a basis for political judgments. There is a reason why freedom of the press is guaranteed by the First Amendment and why democracy is so slow to take root in countries where news and commentary are controlled by the government. Do we ignore a freedom so sacred that men and women in different parts of the world are willing to die to maintain it?

Money undeniably equals influence in our society. But powerful as it is, we still have access to reality—maybe not in the mainstream media, but certainly in the multiplicity of independent blog sites and print media. Yes, it’s time consuming, but it provides the basis to make intelligent decisions in the voting booth—virtually our only weapon.

An old friend told me he believes in term limits for elected officials—one term in office followed by a term in jail. I thought he was a bit extreme—but our current political stalemate calls for extreme measures. The focus of this website, has been on corruption and inaction in our government, particularly in Congress, where legislators spend most of their time raising money to finance their next elections. So, they get reelected (most do), but their constituents get the shaft—read about the Political Theater of the 112th Congress—a tragedy, not a comedy. Why do we keep returning these guys to office when they take their instructions from billionaire lobbyists?

An election is before us. Let’s shake things up! If voting somebody out of office is the only way to get his attention, let’s do it! I’m thinking primarily of men and women in leadership positions who arrogantly dictate party policy with no concern for the needs of their constituents. If we send Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan packing, it has to get the attention of not just the House but also the Senate. None of our elected officials is beyond the reach of the voters! Let’s take back our government now! When the 113th Congress opens, let’s see that we get more bang for our buck!

This is the first of several articles, titled The Perfect Storm, dealing with how our government is failing the American people. The average American citizen lost 40% of his net worth in the 2008 recession as noted above. The next few articles will explore how the checks and balances established between the judicial, executive and legislative branches have been eroded and what can be done to restore them.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…