confusing. And, where's his invisibility cloak? Stalking the wily moose no doubt.

As the seed is planted so grows the tree

just bring back the FDR reforms that were gutted by the repub congress, including McCain and Gramm. McCain may aspire to be the next Herbert Hoover, but this has all happened under Bush's watch, so he is the current Hoover.

There are two big whammies on the way. First, as a number of economists have pointed out, the subprime crisis was just the first wave. Over the next 1-2 years, the next round of A loans will begin defaulting, and there are more of them than there were subprimes. In addition, US credit card lenders have noticed that credit card defaults are beginning to rise, following the trend that started in the UK a year or two ago. It is expected that there will be massive losses there too.

So how do we fix all this? Almost everything I have read is about how we can prevent it from happening again in the future, but there is almost nothing about how we can fix the current problems, beyond using taxpayer money to bail out the corporations involved. Why do you think that is? Because, simply put, there are no viable solutions. As I have seen detailed elsewhere, we recovered from the Great Depression primarily because of the manufacturing boost from WWII wartime production, and the fact that we actually produced the materiel needed for the war. Today, we don't make much of anything. We are primarily a service economy. Too much manufacturing has moved overseas. So, even if we had something on the scale of WWII that required us to push the economy forward with wartime production, we couldn't make the stuff ourselves, and therefore, we wouldn't see the economic benefit from it.

So, what are the consequences. Well, for one, we are seeing the old adage "When the US sneezes, the world gets a cold" in action. We are dragging down world financial markets with our troubles, and causing economic problems around the world. Everyone is going to suffer for a while. However, after the painful readjustments, the world will discover something important: they don't need the US. For years, China and others have financed our overspending with the purchase of dollars and Treasury bonds. It was in their interest, as it helped their economies, as we used that money to buy their exports. With our economic system falling apart, we will be buying less of that, and it will create repercussions in their economies for a few years. Eventually, they will manufacture to a level comensurate with what can be purchased by the rest of the world, instead of producing to meet the irresponsible spending habits of America. Once they are down to that new adjusted level, they won't need to sell to America to keep their economies going strong; hence, they will have no incentive to keep propping us up financially.

It'll be a great story to tell the grandkids someday. How we grew up in the richest, most powerful nation in the world, and how we participated in destroying it with greed and irresponsibility, leaving us as a second world, or perhaps, a third world nation. It's coming my friends, and about all we can really do is to try to do the best for our families and friends, and hope that the new world order, whatever it may be, will not be too unkind to us. I'm not holding my breath on that one.

The right wingers wish they could claim Bill Clinton as one of theirs. They have to spin this mess by saying the stock market now is about where it was when Bush took office*. But they have to ignore the fact that the DJIA went from around 3500 to over 10k under Clinton's watch.

*This is crap too because the value of the dollar is not what it was when Bush took office by a long shot. And it's not just a market that didn't gain under Bush. It's foreclosures, government bailouts, etc.