Political ads...

[Tsunami]

...... Because CA has the most electoral college votes and members in the congress, what happens in CA eventually happens in the rest of the country.......

.... against my belief that the few should not be allowed to make decisions on the many.

I find this rather funny since the "few" influencing the "many" statement contradicts itself here since the number of votes in the electoral college is directly linked to the population in that state. You have a couple decent points on the current financial market, but there's a lot more to it than that and I think you know it. I don't blame the banks alone for our current financial state, but rather the average idiot (my parents fall into this category) that borrowed more money than they could pay back then defaulted on loans. Maybe they shouldn't have ever been offered the loan, but the blame goes to both parties.

1. CA has 55 electoral college votes, the next president only needs 270. so CA represent 20% of the total number of electoral votes needed to be the next president. Since you only need 1 vote more than your opponent to take the state and get those votes, CA has more influence than any other state. Yes CA has more people and therefore more electoral votes, but that is assuming everyone votes. voter turn out is historically about 50% of the eligable voters, the winner of 55 electoral votes could be decided by a relatively small percent of the population of CA. In texas, 5 million more voters could vote for McCain than obama, but McCain still only gets 34 electoral votes. but in CA 1,000 more voters could vote Obama and Obama gets 55.

2. the current economic mess isn't because your parents can't pay for their home loan. home foreclosures are still within historic levels reached in the 90's. that is not the problem. the problem is much more complicated than that. what happened was banks didn't want to hold the home loan till maturity and make money slowly, they wanted to make profits today so they sold those loans to investment banks. the investment banks than bundled 1,000's of home loans together, than divided the value of those homes up and sold 100's of bonds based on the future cash flow of those mortgages. (still with me). many money markets, pension funds, endowment funds, banks, and private investment firms bought these bonds because they were told they were as safe as t-bills and could be sold anytime they wanted. what went wrong was house values went down, but home values don't go evenly. homes in florida dropped 30% in one year while homes in ohio dropped less than 10%. the mixture of sub-prime, prime and jumbo loans tied to those bonds is unknown to the bond holder and therefore the future cash flow for that bond is unknown. there is no one to sell these bonds to, so you need to take the hit to your balance sheet, which causes you to add cash to balance the loss. the cash needs to come from someplace, so banks stopped loaning money to you and me and to each other. there is more too it than this, but in a nut shell there was not enough restraint in the leaders of these companies to say no to easy profits.

got to go for now, wife threat meter is off the charts.