Doom and gloom never win. In the last few weeks all the talking heads on the news shows and the cable shows, and all the newspapers are predicting that the financial industry is going to collapse. The big banks – Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Citigroup – they’re all in trouble. Our financial system is going to collapse! Here we are in an election year, and the Democrats want to make it sound just as bad as they can, and I don’t blame them. Then we have the dirty short-sellers – short-sellers have been a problem in our markets for years. They basically go unregulated and they are free to start rumors. And these rumors drive down the price of these stocks. Can you imagine that Bank Of America’s stock price dropped down a week or 10 days ago to $18 and change a share? The biggest bank in the world, a company that is financially sound, facing a plunge in their stock value because of the rumor mongers!

And of course we all get in a state of fear, don't we? Oh, the depression is coming back. We’ve got 5-1/2 % unemployment. Do you know what the unemployment rate was during the depression years? 25%! The financial system DID collapse. But because of the safeguards that we have in place now, the greatest economy and the greatest marketplace in the world is in America! Have we got challenges? Absolutely! Do we historically go and tackle our challenges? Absolutely! And Bank of America, which traded at $18.50 a share a week ago, is all of a sudden trading at over $30 a share again. What happened? Bank of America came out with their earnings – with facts, not with rumors – and they’ve beat the street and made billions of dollars in profits in a down, tough market with having write-downs and what have you. Wells Fargo beat the expectations. JP Morgan beat the expectations. Even Citigroup, as downtrodden as they have been, has beaten the expectations. Look at our energy situation. You know, 70% of the oil we get in this country we have to import. And why? Because of the tree-huggers and the liberals who don’t want us to dare drill offshore. And we are finding that we CAN drill offshore, where we have massive amounts of oil, even on the Santa Barbara coast. And by drilling off that coast we might even help the environment because the oil is seeping into the city and causing havoc. We’ve got oil all round our great country that we can tap into if our mealy- mouth congress and this administration would back the will of the American people and say “we can do it safely without harming the environment and we need to put all of our resources in play in our country.” Is offshore drilling the end all end all solution? No! We have to do everything, but we have to start somewhere, do we not? We just cannot sit here and caucus forever and ever and ever. Then we have Boone Pickens – 85 year old American man. Boone Pickens, the man who coined the saying, “An idiot with a plan will always beat a genius with no plan.” Boone Pickens – multi-billionaire oil man, and he is now going in front of Congress, in front of the world on TV talking about his plan to drive wind energy, and make this work in America. That is what America is all about because we are people of solving problems. We don’t go and hide in a corner. We get out and we fight. The high oil prices are despicable. But how are we going to get out of this situation? By jawboning, or by doing something? Congress has got to do something. Drill. Wind energy. And what is so great is that now these other energies can be affordable because of where the price of oil is. I think the worst thing that these people in the Mid-East have done is let the price of oil get to where it is because America will respond. The will of our people will respond. Each one of us has got to put the pressure on our politicians, Democrat or Republican, to give us the green light to go and solve this problem. We have the greatest market system in the world and there are so many people on the wild left who think that everything about capitalism is bad. Big business is bad, big oil companies are bad, we need to raise taxes, we need to stop business from happening here. God forbid that the masses of Americans will fall into this trap. Let me take you back to 1998. Ireland had no growth, no business activity, and no work for their citizens. They had a terrible economy. And their corporate tax rate was 32%. Over the next 5 years, culminating in 2003, their tax rate went from 32% to 12.5%, taxing big oil and big, mean corporations. And you know what happened? It was a boom to their economy. They got jobs. They got buildings, there are cranes going up everywhere. Things are good in Ireland. While the rest of the world is struggling, the Irish economy is booming and I’m going to suggest to you one of the major reasons is that the people that are generating the jobs, the people who are building the economy – corporate Ireland, corporate America, corporate China, corporate Russia – you’ve got to give them a chance. You’ve got to be able to give your corporations a chance to compete in a world marketplace, and in Ireland, they responded by lowering their corporate tax rate from 32% to 12.5%. In America we want to go from X to XXL. Have we forgotten what a successful free market system is about? Do we think that we are going to raise the tax rate of the rich and the near rich, and of the corporations, and that is going to create a more healthy and bountiful economy? It never has before and it won’t tomorrow. Just think about that as you go to the polls to vote in any kind of election in this country, because remember – you and I control what’s going to happen. The politicians don’t. But if you and I are quiet and we don’t cast our vote for the people who are looking to protect our free market system, we will all be in danger. It’s not about doom and gloom. It’s about doing what is necessary and what is right for this country and for this country’s future.