What a beautiful and profoundly meaningful prayer! I'll file it away for comparison to what Rev. Warren has to say at the inauguration. It will be especially interesting to see if we hear a prayer on Tuesday morning which demonstrates a life of courage and faithfulness, even at the risk of offending many of his followers, or if we just hear a well-known religious figure continuing to ride the wave that crested at just the right time in his life.

This would be a golden opportunity for Rev. Warren to be prophetic on God's behalf, both regarding his own past behavior and in calling his followers to new forms of faithfulness in a new era. But sadly, I suspect he's not up to the task. (And if he is, as has always been the case with true prophets, he's going to make a lot of his "faithful" followers very angry).

In fact, if this were not the case, people would not be defaulting on their mortgages, their credit cards and every other kind of debt, nor would American businesses be entering bankruptcy because their current owners borrowed far too much money at far too high a cost in order to buy up existing businesses (rather than building their own).

With the advent of debit cards as an addition to credit cards, and the reality that most businesses now operate on a line of credit rather than their own cash reserves (which have been allowed to be stripped away by hostile takeover artists), our friendly mega bankers (and some local ones) have created an economy where they have been able to skim off the top a significant percentage of every penny earned, saved, or spent by every American individual and business.

In recent years these same financial institutions have had every reasonable regulation stripped away so that they were free to change the rules of any financial contract they entered into ("fixed" rates that were anything but the standard dictionary definition of fixed, overdraft regulations guaranteed to maximize bank profits on the backs of those who could least afford to contribute but who were also least likely to complain, etc.)

Now the stupidity of these policies is rapidly coming to light as the economy slows. Financial institutions, who, have been gambling on "risks" instead of operating on good old fashioned mathematical calculations, find that the profits upon which they were foolishly depending are evaporating.

Of course it hasn't helped that their own institutional policies were increasingly killing their customers, nor has it helped that their hardball tactics aimed at customers who were struggling tended to drive folks into bankruptcy and cancel any chance of ever collecting even a portion of the debt (whereas seeking to assist their struggling customers would likely have meant they'd be paid in full over a longer period of time).

Far too many Americans are now strapped with debt which will leave them with payments on money already spent eating up the vast majority of their incomes for the rest of their lives. Others will give up and file bankruptcy.

Under these circumstances, the economy CAN NOT recover until rules are changed in the same manner but the opposite direction from the way they have been unilaterally re-written by the banks, themselves - retroactively adjusting interest rates and fees on already existing principal balances on mortgages and other forms of debt to lower levels - reasonable enough to provide for a modest level of profit but also to give good, hard working people enough breathing room to allow them to think about spending a bit of extra money now and then.

On the other hand, giving money to the banks, themselves, who have been responsible for creating this mess, isn't helping anything because, even if they are interested in lending, they have no reason to trust each other (and they don't because they finally discovered that everybody else was lying, too, and no one knows the true value of the assets anyone else is holding). Furthermore, businesses have no reason to trust their banks, nor do banks have any reason to trust the financial statements of businesses at this point. With the perceived insecurity of jobs and the offshoring of so many well-paying jobs, very few individual people now are interested in borrowing money.

So the problem is NOT that the banks are broke (even though they and their overpaid functionaries believe this MUST be the case, since their bloated salaries and bonuses seem to be on the line). The problem IS that too many of the regular folk are in debt up their eyeballs and FEEL broke (even if they're not). Until the regular folks feel reasonably secure in their jobs and feel as if it's safe to spend money, the economy will not improve.

I believe his full handle is "Wherever I am, something stinks." You may draw your own conclusions...