If a nuclear reactor were to go into meltdown one would expect management to interrupt its vacation and get back to work to fix the problem. Not so with our elected officials who have gone into recess despite the fact our world economy is crumbling and cannot wait until September. Europe is no exception to the lets-go-on-vacation-and worry-about-it-in-September rule.

Now that Standard and Poor’s has downgraded America’s credit rating because Congress took too long to accept to pay for the measures they voted on, we can really expect the shit to hit the fan.

I am especially angry at the press for letting know-nothing Tea Party people like Michele Bachman get away with calling for the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He did not vote the spending. His job is to allocate funds to pay for it and to get those funds, he needs Congress to accept to pay for what they bought. The Treasury Secretary “manages the public debt”.

Don’t get me wrong. Geithner is a rat. As President of the Federal Reserve of New York, he is in great part responsible for the sub-prime crisis by allowing finance to run wild and unregulated. He earned $400 thousand dollars a year to do nothing about the harmful speculation and greed on Wall Street.

Here’s another example of the press failing to do its job. Take John Boehner who is allowed to speak of not giving Obama “a blank check”. It is not “a blank check”. It is a check to pay for what John Boehner voted to spend.

To let these politicians off the hook, especially the Members of Congress, is criminal. To allow them to leave on vacation when the mess they created is going to destroy the lives of tens of millions is criminally insane.

It has been repeatedly pointed out how bad government manages things and so the logical conclusion is don’t let government manage anything. As a matter of fact let us do away with government (Tea Party hacks). The reality is, there is a deliberate attempt to sabotage everything government to make sure American back free enterprise capitalists, and especially the corporations at the top so they can make huge profits and bonuses on our backs. Isn’t that why they call our needs “utilities” rather than “public services”? They don’t want us to believe some things we need should be run by the government for the public good so they mismanage what they can.

If Post Offices work well around the world, they should also work well in the US. The same goes for medical care, power and education. They tell us it all costs too much.

Want to save money? Stop voting for war.

Senator Dick Durbin (Dem. Ill.) summed it up on the Daily Show Thursday when he said “Republicans like war. They like waging war…and when the president says I’m going to have to borrow some money to pay for the war, they say ‘no way!’.” He added “Afghanistan costs us ten billion dollars a week.” Hello? That’s a hundred billion dollars every two-and-a-half months for Afghanistan alone; a senseless war. By the way, Obama must like war too. He is fighting six of them.

It’s been said over and over again. Obama’s wars, because they are now his, are costing us billions and billions a week. A Brown University study says the wars have cost nearly four trillion dollars since 2001 (http://costsofwar.org/). And we are not even talking of the human cost.

Hey, what if the soldiers said they would stop fighting because its time to go on vacation? At least it could save us some money. Some reports say it costs from $400 to $800 a gallon to import the fuel military gas-guzzlers need to operate in Afghanistan.

Want to pay your bills? Make the wealthiest pay their fair share.

Then the Bush tax cuts which benefit the wealthiest have cost between one-and-a-half trillion dollars (low estimate) and three trillion dollars (high estimate). Anybody who does not know that the rich have never paid so little in relation to their income since Eisenhower just does not want to know.

Which brings me back to my problem. Balance in the press does not mean taking the middle ground when the debate is so lop-sided it would sink a ship. The job of the press is to inform the public correctly, and that includes telling them where the ‘sane middle ground’ is.

It also means holding to account those we pay to work in our interests.

I am no economist but I don’t think I need a PhD to understand if I spend less on war and make the very rich pay a fairer share in taxes (at least the share they paid under Reagan) I will be able to invest in projects that will create jobs, thus create tax revenues and reduce welfare/unemployment spending. Isn’t that the ‘sane middle ground’?

How can we allow these public servants and elected officials, who have so mismanaged everything they have touched, to go on vacation? Get back in Washington and fix it!