The credibility problem has now spread from the US financial system to the US political system. This is from Rupert Cornwell in the UK Independent:

Yesterday was not only a black Monday for markets. It was the blackest of Mondays too for the US political system, saddled with a discredited president who has completely lost control of his own party and a Congress that responds to a national emergency with little except snarling partisanship.

The stunning defeat of the financial bailout bill has exposed the weakness of the system at its moment of maximum vulnerability, in the quasi-interregnum of the weeks immediately before and after a presidential election...

But in a deeper sense this is a crisis of the political system. The stately and endless process of electing a new president has produced a power vacuum at the worst possible moment.

Mr Bush's power, it has been conclusively demonstrated, is exhausted. Yet more than five weeks remain until election day – when either John McCain or Barack Obama morally takes power – and three and a half months until Inauguration Day, when one of them actually moves into the Oval Office.

They say a week is a long time in politics, but right now even 24 hours seems like an eternity.

As a person who has regularly been labeled anti-Semitic for daring to question Washington's extraordinary fawning to the Israeli lobby, I have to say that this is the most hilarious thing I have seen today:

The House and Senate are both out of session for at least the next two days to observe the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.

Does Wall Street shut down too? Does everybody in the USA get a couple of days off? Or is this just another of those special "rewards" that politicians like to vote for themselves? I'm guessing somebody stood up one day and said "We should all observe Jewish holidays!" and nobody dared vote against the measure.

I am not a religious man, but this bizarre political holiday, coming at just this moment, is enough to make me believe that there really is a God, and He (or She, or It) has a terrific sense of humour.

Of course, I might change my mind next week when I lose my job.

This is extraordinary:

On Monday, the Dow finished lower than when George W. Bush assumed the presidency: 10,587.59 on January 19, 2001 compared to 10,365.45 at its close on September 29, 2008.

NASDAQ, the American stock exchange, too, was lower now than it was when Bush took office: 2770.38 on January 19, 2001 compared to 1983.73 on September 29, 2008. The dollar exchange with the Euro was lower than when Bush was elected: 1.068 on January 19, 2001 compared to .695 on September 29, 2008.

Some things have risen, but not the good economic indicators. The Consumer Price Index was at 175 on January 19, 2001 and 219 by September 29, 2008. Unemployment, meanwhile, stood at 4.2 percent when Bush came into power. Today, it is at 6.1 percent.

"It's a striking phenomenon," said Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton White House years. "The reckless negligence and mismanagement of the country's financial markets by the White House, the Treasury and the Fed over the last several years has now produced a crisis that has wiped out all of the increase in the market value of America's companies from five years of record corporate profits, strong productivity gains, and reasonable growth. Bush has now run the table on presidential failure."

Via HuffPo, link at my sig.

PS: Pinky, your call for personal violence against anyone with a McCain-Palin bumper sticker is outrageously offensive and should be deleted asap. Get a grip. A lot of decent, well-meaning people have been hoodwinked, along with the others.

What bugs me is that you get all these people bombarding their Senators and Congressmen with phone calls and letters when it's their money on the line, but you cannot get the same levels of public outrage when other people are being tortured, invaded, killed, imprisoned, etc.

You can't get them this outraged about the massive, looming threat of climate change, or the daily horrors of global poverty. You can't even get them this outraged when their own privacy is under attack, because they refuse to believe such matters will ever seriously affect them.

So we have greedy politicians cracking down on greedy businessmen purely because there's an election around the corner and they are desperate to save their seats. And we are all supposed to applaud this great show of "democracy"? Puh-lease! We all know they would tow the party line if we were not a month out from Nov 2nd.

What we see in the USA today is a nation driven by personal greed, starting at the top. The faux altruism of the Cold War battle against "evil" communists has been revealed as a shallow excuse for rampant self-interest.

Confucius once said that a good leader should set an example to his people by showing firm morals:

"Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it."

The USA, which once pretended to be a beacon of hope and freedom for the world's poor and oppressed, desperately needs some more enlightened leadership, and a more altruistic vision of where, as a nation, it is heading.