Dr. Togba-Nah Tipoteh When anybody who must see clearly, travels around Liberia today, what does he or she see? He or she sees that nearly all the people are catching hard times. Some people do not have food to eat, and most people do not have good food to eat. Some people do not have land to grow food, while some people do not have enough land to grow food for themselves and have some leftover to sell to get things that they do not produce or send their children to school. Are the hard times that the people are catching now new? No, the hard times catching the people is nothing new. These hard times have been catching people for centuries. We remembered the Slave Trade over five hundred years ago when greedy local rulers sold people as slaves to greedy foreign slave buyers. We remember how powerful nations took poor people’s land by force. We remember how greedy local rulers used the Hut Tax to take land from the poor people, making them poorer. We remember how powerful international companies supported greedy local rulers to be elected through a bad electoral system so that they could promote the production of raw materials for export. The local rulers were schooled to copy the values of the company owners by producing what the people do not consume and consuming what the people do not produce.