Monetary policy in the US has been designed to punish savings since at least the early 80s. This process was massively accelerated starting the mid 90s.

By keeping interest rates BELOW inflation rates people were driven away from banks. They only way people could earn any extra money was to 'invest' in the stocks or bonds. IE the general public has been actively encouraged to place ever larger amounts of money in riskier and riskier ventures. The principle form of savings being 401k plans. This is fine when the market is going up. But any downturn wipes out huge amounts of investment and bankrupts hordes of ordinary people. Which is what is happening now.

Add to that wage stagflation over the last decade or so and the only source of extra cash becomes credit cards or borrowing against one's home. Again this can be fine in the short term and so long as markets (in this case housing) continue to go up. But as with any Ponzi scheme eventually there are not enough people coming into the system to support those already 'invested'. And hence the bubble bursts.

The rich come out okay or even a ahead since they got in early and cashed out before the bubble burst. The rest of us who were force in later are left holding the bag.

Blackwater is a symptom, not the disease. There are dozens of other private security firms doing business in Iraq for the US and other countries.

The US government has outsourced huge amounts of money, pardon me, I mean services, to outside contractors. On the military side, food service, maintanence, base security, Electronics and even intelligence functions. Haliburton gets billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to provide services to the US military all over the world. Numerous reports have shown massive amounts of waste, abuse and outright fraud and yet the contracts keep rolling in.

And that's just the DOD and State. The process of outsourcing tax dollars to private industry has been going on since Reagan and has never slowed down.

These private firms, who derive virtually all their income from taxpayers, be it federal, state or even even foreign government, operate largely unregulated and in the shadows.

Lets just hope Obama can follow through on most of this once he takes office. Between the disaster that Bush is leaving him and the obstructionism of Republicans in congress (combined with Reid's lack of backbone) it's going to take Heculean effort to accomplish anything.

Given Reid has already backed off his pledge to have a bill by inaguration and his history of caving to Republican obstructionism, those 'congress' comments were aimed just as much at Senate Democrats (especially the 'leadership') as they were at Republicans.

I think it may be time for people to start researching the various ways to recall their Congressperson or Senator. The only way these people will listen is if there are consequences to their usual fiddling while the rest of us burn.

All the underlying problems that caused this mess still exist. The derivatives market is still out there in all its shadowy goodness. Transparency is non-existent in the market due to a lax regulatory environment and failed 'market' forces. Ratings agencies still have incentives to slap 'good' ratings on bad investments (the companies rating securities do business with the companies issuing securities). Banks still have large amounts of unknown potentially toxic assets on their books.

And without some type of transparency there is no way for them to know what assets sit on potential lendee's books. That is the reason the credit market is still largely frozen. Nobody knows what is sitting on their books or how far it extends. And the opaque screen TARP has been operating under (we don't know who got the money or what it was used for) does NOTHING to fix this problem.

Until the prices of the underlying assets stabilize (ie the housing market) and transparency returns to the system the situation will continue to get worse.

As I have said before, the best we can hope for at this point is a long deep recession lasting 3-5 years. More likely we are on the precipice of another depression.

Before he commits himself to a policy.

He's smart enough to know that for all the talk of "openness" Paulson and the Treasury have almost certainly been holding out on him just how bad things are in the financial sector. God knows nobody knows what Paulson and the Treasury did with first $350 billion from the TARP. Before he commits to a policy Geithner wants to actually see what's what with the banks and the TARP money that's been dispersed.

Then we will find out if he can level with the American people about just how deep this hole really is.

In addition to closing Gitmo Obama has also ordered the closing of the CIA's 'secret' prison network.

I normally hate reality tv but the Blogo thing is just awesome. Whoever the producer was that found this guy deserves a serious raise. So far this show has been far more entertaining than ay other tv show curretnly on the air.

Here's hoping they don't canel it too soon. There are not enough good comedies on tv these days.

For those of us living in Dem states its time to start looking up recall provisions in your state election laws. We are way past the point in this country where we can allow the Democrats to continously sabotage themselves and take the country with them.

If your Senator or Congressman keeps this up RECALL them and replace them with a Democrat that actually has a spine. Until Dems pay a real price for their cowardice they will continue it.