From LaVern F. Isely

Monroe

To the editor:

What got Republican President Donald Trump elected was his comment that he was going to Make America Great Again which is definitely a desirable goal. It did decline when Bush-Cheney were in office when the banking system really got corrupt and they exploited the home buyers by telling them they could afford a home when they really couldn’t. They even told them to lie about their income which led to the 2008 $700 billion TARP bank bailout.

This was brought out in an excellent book “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy” by Christopher Hayes who works for MSNBC and endorsed by Rachel Maddow, who also works for MSNBC. In Chapter 6: “Out of Touch” on page 207 under “The Financial Crisis,” he talks about the Center for Responsible Lending who tracked the declining housing market and contacted the Federal Reserve and said it was heading for trouble which the Federal Reserve ignored.

I quote: “The Fed, however, the one entity with the most authority and power to crack down on the abuses, looked the other way, while the Office of Comptroller of the Currency set about gutting tougher state-based regulations by preempting state regulations.”

This is why whoever the Democrats select in the Aug. 14 primary as their governor candidate must pay attention to what the Republican-controlled Congress did by weakening Dodd-Frank, as well as almost gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which protected the consumers from payday lenders which will again open it up to higher interest rates on payday loans.

These moves done by the Republican-controlled Congress will not Make America Great Again. Nor will the comment President Trump made in Helsinki, Finland that he thought Russian President Putin had nothing to do in interfering in our election. You should have read the comments in some of the newspapers around the world about President Trump giving away the store. Even Russian newspapers bragged up their leader and how he defeated President Trump, who the next day, tried to back off of his comment.

What makes any political government work is to see just how democratically run their political system is on a local level. When the candidates are elected in your area respond to the voters. When you call them, do they have a live person answering the telephone or do they have a tape saying “Thank you” and your questions still haven’t gotten answered?