It is all very simple.

The economy is going belly up.

Many people are going to suffer... suffer a lot.

Every day that passes they will become more aware of how much they are going to suffer.

They are afraid today and they will be more afraid with each passing day.

Fear is the mother of anger.

Anger will grow stronger with each passing day as the gravity of the crisis sinks in.

Its normal target would be the Republicans, they have been in power for eight years. Although this catastrophe is not just something the Republicans have done by themselves, but is the product of a consensus of the entire American establishment, the meltdown has happened on the Republican watch and logically they should carry the can.

Their loss should be one of historic proportions, the ruin of dozens of careers. The ruin of hard men and hard women, people who have struggled hard to be where they are. It would be disingenuous to imagine that there is any limit to what they would do to avoid that ruin.

So, it is all very simple.

The only possible chance that the Republicans have of winning, the only possible chance, is to somehow redirect all this hysterical anger toward Barack Obama. To do this they must let all of America's demons off their leash.

That is what they are trying to do... and they can't stop.

To think that they might desist in this tactic is like asking a drowning man to stop treading water.

McCain himself might want to stop, and may try to stop this process as he realizes that through this loosing of the demons he may very well both lose the election and something else of great importance to him, his establishment credentials, his membership in polite society. As much as you might dislike him John McCain is not Richard Milhouse Nixon

But the ghost of Richard Nixon and the shadow of Willy Horton are walking the land and we can only witness what may turn out to be the most nauseating three weeks in American history.

It's all very simple.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism. Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government. The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system. Washington Post
The British and American plans, though far from identical, have two common elements according to officials: injection of government money into banks in return for ownership stakes and guarantees of repayment for various types of loans. (...) In the rescue law passed a week ago, Congress stipulated that the Treasury must strictly limit the pay of executives in banks to which it adds capital — including provisions that ban golden parachutes and that direct the government to recover bonuses based on stated earnings that prove inaccurate. Britain’s plan also hinged on the willingness of several of the largest banks — Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC Holdings, among them — to sell preferred shares to the government. It is not clear, administration officials said, that the largest American banks would agree to this, particularly given the restrictions on executive pay. New York Times
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world's financial markets while they ``rewrite the rules of international finance.'' ``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said (...). A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.'' Bloomberg
The big lesson is that the west can no longer assume the global order will be remade in its own image. For more than two centuries, the US and Europe have exercised an effortless economic, political and cultural hegemony. That era is ending. Philip Stephens - Financial Times

Well, it appears that George W. Bush is going to nationalize American banks...

Holy Moly!

My inner Lenin is having the shivering fits.

My inner Ilyich is in stitches.

I sure never thought that it would be Dubya that would end up building Socialism.

Damn!

Isn't the world a wonderful place?

Isn't life fun?

What other planet can offer such horse shit?
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

 "Although Obama is winning, neither he nor McCain seems to have a genuine grasp of how grave our economic situation is, how stark the prospect of a looming possible Depression. You'd never know from this evening that 5000 Dow points have been lopped since the previous debate and that those retired or near retirement have seen their portfolios crushed and have no hopes of recouping those losses in their nonproductive years. Not to mention all the job losses that the Wall Street plummet portends." James Wolcott - Vanity Fair
"Though both candidates spent a while (and it felt like longer) on the economic emergency, I didn’t feel that either’s comments advanced the discussion, or seemed equal to the gravity of the situation. Almost the first words out of McCain’s mouth were “energy independence”; almost the first words out of Obama’s were “blame deregulation”. We know, we know. Neither gave much indication that the crisis was leading them to think things through afresh; one wonders what it would take to do that." Clive Crook - Financial Times
“These days, you have to struggle,” she said. “As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can’t take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you’ve got to think how you’re going to put food on the table.” Snodgrass’s parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the “very privileged.” She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. “That’s who’s middle-class now,” she said. “Two parents, two kids? That’s over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don’t have nobody to look out for them. You’re one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck.” George Packer - New Yorker

Americans are so used to suffering privately in a general climate of cheerful banality, and have so little knowledge of history, that they may not realize what a potentially perilous moment we are living in.

With the world economy in spitting distance of collapsing, the lame duck President of the United States, in the process of losing two wars, has approval ratings of under thirty percent, and in an exclusively two party system, with no other alternative possible, the Congress, controlled by the opposition, has approval ratings of under twenty percent.

At this juncture, one of the objectively gravest in US history, the American people are being asked to choose for their new leader between two political dwarfs who have not managed put forward any major ideas or to suggest any meaningful, much less inspiring, path out of the situation.

This is as close to systemic failure as I can imagine.

In many extremely civilized countries this would guarantee millions of sullen, if not violent, demonstrators in the streets demanding action.

With much less cause, many countries have suffered coup d'etats.

The question would be: is inane banality and a fundamental lack of seriousness, America's fatal curse or its saving grace?
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

“Events, dear boy, events.”
British Prime Harold Macmillan, when asked what is most likely to blow governments off course.

Handicappers beware: most of what will decide this election in the coming days will happen when neither candidate is on the screen.

At this moment the Republican Party is on what Sun Tzu called "Death Ground", which is defined as when an army is cornered, outnumbered and facing certain annihilation and have nothing left to lose by fighting to the death.

There could be no better description of the Republican Party's present predicament.

Sun Tzu considered confronting a cornered enemy on Death Ground hazardous in the extreme.

Make no mistake, the Republicans could lose the election because of the war(s) and live to fight another day, they could lose the election because of a circumstantial downturn in the economy, as when Clinton defeated the militarily victorious father Bush and come back quickly, but that is not what they are facing today.

The systemic failure of the barely regulated financial structure signals the end of the "Conservative Revolution" sired by Milton Friedman out of Ayn Rand.... the exhumation and desecration of Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the death and transfiguration of Alan Greenspan and Grover Norquist and a host of other calamities.

If the Republicans lose both houses of Congress and the White House this year, they will be simply passive spectators at their own ideological, social, political and financial funeral.

No time to gloat: if after eight years of Bush, you still have not caught on, the Republicans are armed and dangerous.

Ayers/ACORN and Reverend Wright’s supposed book or the adventures of Osama bin Laden could derail Obama just as the meltdown of the economy is in the process of destroying McCain…. and above it all hovers a dark angel, the fell spirit of Tom Bradley’s effect.

Certainly, even if McCain refuses to use these tactics personally, the "independent" conservative groups are going to go atomic, stop at nothing and call up all of America's demons from the depths of the national subconscious and so muddy the well that even a probable Obama victory will leave a nauseating, bitter, aftertaste.

The post victory climate could be so vile, that unless things go very well for President Obama very quickly, (and it's hard to imagine they will in the present world situation), we will experience an unbreathable, Balkan-like political climate in the coming years as all those who have invested their entire lives and fortunes in the Conservative Revolution literally fight for their survival.

This foreboding is why I have always felt that by nominating Barack Obama, in this, their year of years, the Democrats have jumped the shark, have tragically engaged in "look ma, no hands" showboating and have unnecessarily opened a cosmic can of worms.

Al Gore: Ora pro Nobis!
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

There is a rumor making the rounds in Spain that it was Sarah Palin who killed Bambi's mother. Does anyone here have anything on this?

I posted this morning for the early risers and west coast night owls a prediction that the coming days and weeks were going to be rough and now we are there already. I said:

I have been searching for a metaphor to express what the next few weeks are going to seem like, as the economy continues to deteriorate, the presidential race gets low-down and slimy dirty and who knows what else hits the fan.

It came to me that this was going to be like going through a car wash tunnel with the car windows rolled down.

When you go through a car wash tunnel, you sit warm and dry in your car while only a few inches from your face huge rotating brushes dash and dart and rubadub and pound, and torrents of scalding, soapy water spew and spatter as your car moves relentlessly down the belt. Exciting to be so close and yet to be only a spectator.

With the windows down... no fun.

Now the Republicans are taking the only path they have left, which is to attack the personality of Barack Obama, and I think Obama is making a mistake to use the Keating affair to attack McCain. This very old news, it would be like attacking Hillary Clinton at this stage of the game by asking, "when Bill was playing with his cigar, what did Hillary know and when did she know it?".

Obama should stick to (quoting Bill) "the economy stupid". Getting down in the mud with the Republicans, Obama has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

As to the economy it is now China's move. Here is an excerpt from an interesting article by analyst M R Venkatesh:

The recent bailout package being approved in the US Congress needs to be viewed in the context of the spurt in the accumulation of forex reserves of China by about $500 billion in the last six months to about $2 trillion in aggregate. This gargantuan build-up of forex reserves by China has strangely received very little attention of economists, policy analysts, currency traders and, of course, geo-strategists around the world. Why is China engaged in this exercise? What could be its implications on the on going global financial crisis? Could China trip the bailout package announced by the US last week? Crucially what are the implications for the existing global order?(...) It may be noted that the Chinese, unlike the others, have always questioned the global order with the US at the helm of affairs. And the Chinese accumulation of forex reserves is surely a strategy that perhaps has an ominous side to it. All this is not pure economics as it is made out to be. Rather, it was and remains a well-planned economic, political and military strategy of the Chinese. And in a way it is the mirror image of the Star Wars programme that the then US President Reagan unleashed on the erstwhile USSR in the early eighties that eventually bankrupted the later within a few years as it engaged in competitive arms build-up with the former. Statecraft is all about engaging other countries at one's own terms, pace, time and cost. This is what the US did to the USSR in the eighties and succeeded in dynamiting that country. And that is what China could do to a vulnerable US in the coming months. Crucially, if it doesn't, from the Chinese perspective it might well rue this moment forever. The US till date was depending on the Chinese for imports and to finance them as well for such imports. Now they will have to be considerably dependent on the Chinese to protect their currency as well as to ensure liquidity in their money markets. And that completely alters the existing global order.

Anyone who reads Sun Tzu and Mao could tell for some time that China's objective, after the fall of the Soviet Union left them facing America alone, has been to get the USA by the short and curlies and that seems to be just what they have done. They hold the US economy in the palm of their hand. They have a police state with which to control civil disturbance in a great economic upheaval and they could ride it out to be "the last man standing"... as the article says, if they don't do it, they may live to regret it.

So, in the next few days, we may see breathtaking things on the world economic front, an undreamed of humiliation of America's brand and Obama cannot afford to get off message. ES (economy stupid) ES, ES, ES and ES.

Leave the mud to the Republicans because they have had all of what they are going to spring in the next few days prepared for months.  It will be impossible to match it smear for smear. What we are going to see very shortly is every old girlfriend, every old tape, every old dossier: the objective being to be in Bradley distance of Obama in the key states on election day.

This is the time for Obama to be noble, inspiring, nonpartisan and reassuring. His message to the American people as they drive through the car wash with their window down should be in essence "don't cry, come sit on daddy's lap and let him kiss it and make it well".

If he can manage to do that, he might even get my vote.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

I have been searching for a metaphor to express what the next few weeks are going to seem like as the economy continues to deteriorate, the presidential race gets low-down and slimy dirty and who knows what else hits the fan.

It came to me that it was going to be like going through a car wash tunnel with the car windows rolled down.

When you go through a car wash tunnel, you sit warm and dry in your car while only a few inches from your face huge rotating brushes dash and dart and rub a dub and pound, and torrents of scalding, soapy water spew and spatter as your cars moves relentlessly down the belt. Exciting to be so close and yet to be only a spectator.

With the windows down... no fun

The media in my metaphor would be the car windows, what a certain moose dresser calls a "filter" and the tunnel would reality itself... hot water, industrial strength detergent and no turning back.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/