Today is the first day of December, 2008. I like to work to the sound of music, usually soft Jazz or soft ClassicalI  Public Service Ra­dio fills both orders for me, with it's uninterrupted ses­sions of both. I had planned to start the month with a more joyful Christmas season time of writing by losing myself in the music as I wrote. 
     No such luck though,my ecstasy was interrupted by the news-flash that the country is." officially" in a recession. Apparently since December of last year. It's about time somebody in Washington noticed what the rest of us have known for years before December of. 2007. 
Why are we there? 
      As far as Wall Street and the Conservative News Media is concerned it's all because poor people were given credit, unions demanded too much in wages for their members, and too many illegal immigrants overloading our welfare rolls.  As far as they are concerned, it has nothing to do with G.W. Bush's stupidity for allowing the GOP to change the status of our Government to a Wartime economy with his insane ambition to be the leader, not of a Democracy, but of an empire. That alone puts him on an even footing with the Mus­lim leaders, who still believe in fighting wars and govern­ing with tactics that went out in the fourteenth and fif­teenth century. How empires exist in the world today? The last to go were the Chinese and Japanese empires, but one has to look no further than New Mexico History to know how empires operate and what the inevitable out­come is when, as in the case of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires affected us as each fell to in­dividual continental Ameri­can countries, although the Spanish were defeated in the 1840's we are still undoing the negative aspects of the culture they left behind. The last incident or public note was the Fernando C De Vaca, the now ex- Country Chair of NM GOP. 
    So adverse to our state culture are new resi­dents that they shun even the reading of its past. If they did read, they would find out that The Spanish funded the conquest of the state with private money, every single one of those initial expeditions was financed with pri­vate money, as was the conquest of the other countries in the American Continent. The empires involved did not lift a hand to retrieve areas that feli to aboriginal uprisings. Empires were quick to claim the wealth and natural resources of the conquered lands, reaping where they did not sew, yet each went broke and could not defend their conquests. 
History was repeated in Afghanistan here of late. The Soviet Union went broke and had to withdraw. Today the Soviet Union is no more. 
     Let's just hope that the GOPI  via the present Bush administration has not led us too far into the same financial disaster and that the CEO's of the United States Wealthiest institutions have not exploited our financial wealth beyond redemption. 
Is there any hope that the new administration will be able to make as much as a dent on the damaged economy in the first four years in office?  Perhaps, but not with out our help. 
     If we want to get this country out of the debtor's prison in which the GOP, through this Bush administration placed it, we must do it from the outside, by not getting involved in the credit game ourselves, or we'll end up in the adjoining cell.  Banks and big business can count on unse­cured bail-outs. not us. If we get in trouble it takes everything we own to get us out. Before you buy, ask yourself if you realty need it and if so save Up to get it.