Nathan

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In the hopes that we can please think about our current situation with a clear head let us stop referring to these giant cogs we created in our crazy machine as people.  AIG does not have knees... it has broken parts in a machine that is breaking down:

Mr. President I am worried that I may have been a bit right - is the job too big for any man? Even you?

Here's the deal: when you say 'These financial industries are holding us hostage,' I believe you. It strikes me that you are not unlike, well, me perhaps when it comes to fixing something on my car. You look at this once beautiful amazing machine and you realize, 'Man, some of this might be over my head' because the problem is too difficult or the piece of machinery is too unwieldly.

And that to me is what it seems the issue has been all along, not that it might help too much now. We created way too big of cogs in this bastardly (notice how it seems like it has no father) machine we created for ourselves. So many people have been talking on TV about 'the patient' - this strange machine we built for ourselves should never be confused with the beauty that is the human body or any of God's creatures for that matter. We built an ugly Matrix-like machine that is now owning us. We let some pieces get too damn big. We let it get out of control.

So from this small corner of the globe Mr. President here is to you: the mechanic of the ages.

It's funny how quickly one can swing from despair and anger to something more moderate. Many emotions on these heady days when neighbors are being laid off or 'resigning' as the case may be. It is hard to get past the collective anger and confusion and despair and questioning. But then you read a piece such as Ruth's and you start to realize that maybe there just isn't a better solution out there.

We have built ourselves quite a machine here haven't we? We made some really big cogs in this machine that frankly it seems that if one of them goes down (Lehman?) -- this machine goes down.

So anyway this is to say that I hope my worst fears are not realized and the more moderate in me right now says: things will be okay once we get out of this strange emergency.

I can't wait to read the history books about this era.

'They killed the golden goose.'  

'Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”'

This post deserves to be on every blog everywhere.  

Strange wind blowing.  It is odd which way the revolutionary wind blows in on you eh?  Blows in from the most unexpected of sources like the financial establishment we created out of thin air.  

Listening to Howard right now and he is going off on Rush for his contention that he hopes that Obama fails.  Good for him for saying what is true: that Rush is being a traitor.  Oddly though when you listen to a guy like Rush, not unlike Coulter, you know he doesn't even believe what he is saying.  They are just empty suit gas bags who are saying things for the sake of saying them, creating controversy and perhaps making some profit off of it which is the saddest thing of all eh?