Don't count out the Snake Oil merchants so fast. There are too many dollars to be made by these idiots, and there will always be hacks like Greenspan and Phil Gramm to get the party started all over again. Obama will have to drive a stake through their hearts and keep hammering on it it day and night.

It baffles comprehension that so much could go so wrong so fast.

Anybody who witnessed how the Right fucked up the last time they were put in charge - during the 1920's - certainly isn't surprised to see so much of what they managed collapse so quickly.

And don't even ask the Germans how their Reichwing fools managed the country. Hey, it's what happens when you try to propagandize your way around reality - reality has a funny way of turning around and biting your ass off. And reality has a left wing bias.

The only surprising thing about this latest crash is that the wingnuts managed to keep such an obvious scam going for as long as they did - from roughly 1968 thru 2008, a span of about 40 years. But I guess it helps when half the country gets its news from media conglomerates owned by the same batch of crooked billionaires. If you can shovel out a 24/7 stream of free market propaganda, you can get enough greedy suckers to buy into it even as their jobs and bank accounts slowly boil off. It takes a total collapse before the frogs finally wise up and start to jump out of the pot.

And of course, there was so much infrastructure built up by the left, under fairly Socialist administrations run by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. That couldn't all be brought down overnight, even by the Right's idiotic mismanagement. But no system is foolproof when control is handed over to a group of sufficiently corrupt fools, and now it's gonna take another Roosevelt to save capitalism from the capitalists.

I hope Obama's up to it. They'd better hope so, too - otherwise, this is likely to end with a lot of rightwingers heads atop a lot of pikes.

Party over? They robbed us blind and got away with it. Wealth doesn't evaporate - it is transfered. These are con artists, not economists.

Question: Who has caused more damage to the US and to the world economies and other parts of our societal systems? -

Alan Greenspan or GW Bush?

Answer: Good question.

-- GSC

....but free-spending liberalism will be continually blamed as the real cause of all economic problems past, present and (in an Obama-led) future....in the daily barrage led by the sour and curdled Kudlow, the ever-deluded Limbaugh, the ass-ignorant Hannity.

It feels great to read a line as simple as "they were wrong" to describe the Wall Street's state of affairs for the past many years. Simple and unambiguous!

The only point I disagree with is the last line in the article - a new world is born. The world of well-regulation existed already on the other side of the planet - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/20/business/20nocera.html?scp=1&sq=how%20india%20avoided%20crisis&st=cse

.....because Conservatives are Always Wrong (as further explained in the article to which my name below is a link).

and all my fellow letter writers have important facets of the truth to share. My candidate for underappreciated facet of this worldwide f.u.b.a.r. is the absolutely uninhibited lack of any ethical brakes on the juggernaut of post-Reagan "Masters of the Universe" capitalism. Along with creativity, a mindblowing stimulus package, and a truckload of good luck, we need a new Edmund Burke or a Frank Capra to teach us all over again that we must protect our civilization from the anarchy of thoughtless greed. Ethics is not that difficult; it's simply the reprioritization of the other over the self, of the future over the present, and of personal sacrifice over convenience whenever it helps the helpless.

For the foreseeable future those of us who actually KNOW that Wall Street and its lapdogs were wrong will have to keep saying it over and over. And pointing to specific, real world examples ad nauseum.

This isn't just a "numbers game" that can be neatly combated: it is a belief system with the all the intricacies of a religion. "Free Market" Conservatives will not be disabused of their mantras so quickly, EVEN IN THE FACE OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. Witness the blaming of "minority homeowners" or Fannie and Freddie, (or,incredibly, Bill Clinton,) to explain why we are in the mess we are in. Anything but poor planning, deregulation, or ordinary human greed.

I think Mr. Greenspan probably experienced a Biblical-grade revelation. (How else to explain a three word sentence from him?)

He saw, first hand, irrefutably, that applying cash to people (even People with Money) does not magically transform them into Responsible,Forward-Thinking, Benevolent Geniuses. Instead, it turns them into the same greed heads populating the world's casinos and three card monte stands. This, according to the mantra, was Not Supposed to Happen.

However, Mr. Greenspan has the benefits of intelligence and long life, regardless of his backward ideology. Many, many others do not possess these gifts. They will latch on to any of a number of "reasons" to explain the Collapse, most of which will have nothing to do with reality. (I do not exclude our elected officials from this group. In fact, I imagine them leading the pack.)

Which is why the clear-eyed among us will have to keep repeating the facts.

This writer is a total fearmonger. His recent posts are the equivalent of an announcer exclaiming that this is the greatest baseball game he has ever seen in the middle of the third inning.

(Contrary to the total collapse of the r.e. market, et al if you bought your house 4 years ago or before, you could sell it now for a profit.)

Relax, have a Mr. Pibb and tell us the effects after a year or two of the economic situation. Meanwhile, you are scaring the shit out of the 99% of Americans who do not work on Wall Street.