I Have Just a Few Items to Talk About This Month…

Dr. Errington Thompson

A couple of weeks ago, President Barack Obama decided he and his wife would vacation in Asheville, North Carolina. Although I was on call and manacled to the hospital all weekend, the feeling in the hospital was one of the most unique that I’ve ever experienced.

Everyone was happy and proud that the president chose our community of Asheville to vacation. Everybody wanted to know where the president was and what he was doing. There were hourly updates. Even some of the patients were caught up in the fervor. I think it’s now official — our secret of the beauty and greatness of Asheville is out of the bag.

53 Hours

Fifty-three hours after a homeless veteran reported that a
suspicious car was on fire, authorities pulled Faisal Shahzad off a
plane at John F. Kennedy Airport. The plane Shahzad had boarded was
bound for Dubai. This near miss should show us once again how vulnerable
we can be: as a free society, we are going to be vulnerable to those
who want to do us harm.

But we should congratulate New York and the Obama administration
for quickly capturing this terrorist. Over the past several years, we’ve
heard lots of criticisms of the “law enforcement” approach to
terrorism. This legal, Constitutional approach appeared to work very
well.

There are some Americans who say they love the Constitution; but
at times of crisis they seem to be the first ones willing to throw the
Constitution in the trash. After word of Faisal Shahzad’s capture was
leaked to the press, John McCain asserted that reading this naturalized
American citizen his Miranda rights would be a mistake. A mistake? Does
the United States Constitution apply to all American citizens? If so,
then there was no mistake.

Over the past 200 years, we’ve often seen our Constitution
selectively applied. Only certain citizens were “American enough” for
all our laws to apply to them. It is clearly time for the Constitution
to apply to everyone who is an American citizen. If you’d like to
discuss whether he should have been naturalized in the first place —
well, that’s another discussion. What the heck are they thinking?

The “How Low Can You Go Award” goes to a few senators who want to
strip Shahzad’s citizenship before he has been tried and convicted.
They have no faith in the Constitutional system of American justice. How
sad. After the trial, the Senate can do what they want; until then they
should be quiet and let the wheels of justice turn.

Profiling in Arizona

The immigration law that was signed by the Arizona governor
several weeks ago is an excellent example of the overreach of
government. Where are the tea baggers now? The law basically states that
law enforcement should and must stop anyone they suspect of not being
in this country legally.

What would happen if Arizona went about this differently? What
would the reaction have been if the law stated that any business that
hires illegal workers (economic refugees) will be subject to a fine of
up to $100,000 per economic refugee, and is subject to the cost of
deportation of that economic refugee? If we strengthen our borders and
enforce the laws we have, our immigration problem would be 90-percent
fixed.

Fixing Wall Street

Finally, we need to fix Wall Street. Now, do not let your
eyes glaze over. Focus. The guys on Wall Street want us to let Wall
Street do it own thing. They want our eyes to glaze over at the sound of
Credit Default Swaps. Three things got us into this mess: 1.
Unregulated non-bank lenders. 2. Low or no interest rates. 3. Rating
agencies stamping AAA on stuff that smelled like junk.

So, to fix this we need a bill that is going to fix the rating
agencies. We need to regulate mortgage lenders. Finally, we need to fix
the too-big-to-fail guys! Regulation is not going to fix everything. A
couple of banks (six to be exact) — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase,
Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — own assets
totalling more than 60 percent of our GDP!
I’m sorry, but that’s too much money in the hands of six banks. These
banks are currently free to do whatever they please because they know
they are too big to fail. No matter how much these guys screw up we
would have to bail them out in order to prevent our economy from
completely imploding. They need to be cut down to a size that we, the
American taxpayer, can live with. This is a must.

So, when you are listening to the news in the coming weeks,
listen to see if Congress is going to break up the big banks, regulate
the mortgage industry, and fix the rating agencies. This is the least
that Congress should do.