Nero only fiddled while Rome burned, but for our absentee President, nothing less than a primal hootenanny befits our bottomless financial meltdown.

Today, Bush reiterated his opposition to housing legislation that would bail out lenders in the ongoing credit catastrophe. Doing so, Bush echoes similar hard-nosed jabber from presumptive GOP loser John McCain - all but guaranteeing a disastrous bequest of almost 1929 proportions to President Obama come January.

Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle are weighing measures to ease the credit crunch, and it's a reasonable assumption Bush's naysaying was aimed at that. He's already made rumbles about vetoing a House measure with similar rescue-net mechanisms.

In puffing his dark cloud over the bleak abyss, Bush said the government ought to be helping credit-worthy people stay in their homes. But that ignores growing indications that time may be running out even for the solvent - as notes Breibart.com today:

"The housing bust is feeding on itself: price declines provoke foreclosures, which provoke more price declines. And the problem is not limited to subprime mortgages. There is an entirely different category of risky loans whose impact has yet to be felt - loans made to creditworthy borrowers but with tricky terms and interest rates that will start climbing next year."

Breibart notes "Single-family-home prices dropped 7.6 percent from the first quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2008, the largest year-over-year decline since the National Association of Realtors began reporting prices in 1982. Conservatively estimated, 2.2 million homes will enter foreclosure this year."

All the while, the Senate Banking Committee has yet to produce... anything.

The implications of the "Big Crunch" are formidable. And aiding the situation not at all is the lengthy timeline of the debacle: It's roots go back much further than today's aberrant Greedocracy, and may be yet another case of those overworked chickens coming home to roost.

Sometime in the late-’80s/early-’90s, a caveat emptor compact replaced our traditional, conservative financial commonweal without consumers realizing the full extent of what this meant. With instruments like adjustable interest rates and outright legalized usury, banks, credit institutions and investment firms suddenly were able to compound their profits free of risk. Simply: They always make money.

For consumers, Reagan's steady-state morning in America has been darkened by debt, limitations on bankruptcy relief and the knowledge that at any moment local burgher kings could decide his or her modest two-bedroom would best avail the community by transmuting into a department store or high-rise party keep for coddled twentysomethings.

Most of us still operate on the premise that American business is mostly on the up-and-up. Oh, there have always been scams and frauds – but sheep-shearing has never been the general order of the day, simply because business cannot sustain itself in the long run without at least a modicum of consumer trust.

But these days – who cares? Screw ‘em and forget about tomorrow. Twenty years ago the investment decisions made by credit companies would've been reasonably sound – with risk, of course. But 20 years ago, banks couldn’t legally charge 100 percent interest; although rarely done, banks can now legally apply such a rate.

The culture of avarice ran through the credit approval system from bottom to top, with each approval-stamp paper shuffler along the way getting a cut. This wide-open, "revolutionary" junk-financing has the stink of another Baby-Boomer Brilliant Idea; these time bombs will be shaking out of our culture for decades to come.

Our parents and grandparents were able to ascend to the middle class even if their income was blue-collar, and their existence paycheck-to-paycheck. Banking and credit companies did business without Byzantine legalisms and financial boobytraps designed to catch consumers on tenderhooks and drain them of resources.

It’s a different world today, and with a huge pool of the best politicians money can buy, it’s likely to grow less kinder/gentler for the New American Peasantry.