This may well be premature, but I am assuming Obama will be our next president and how joyful that will be.

But after the exhilaration and emotion recedes, then there is surely coming a titanic battle with the Republican Party.  As I wrote in my Fat Man in the Doorway blog a while back, the modern GOP is interested in only one thing, keeping our government from functioning in the way it was designed to.  As Bill Clinton found to his sorrow, the Republicans are quite ready to hamstring government and any democratic administration when it is in their power to do so.

And it is in their power to do to Barack Obama what they did to Bill Clinton-- put the administration on the defensive with constant legal attacks.  They don't need the House to harass the next president, nor is impeachment the only weapon in their armory.

The coming Obama administration had better be ready for every kind of harassment and obstructionism from the Republican Party.  We are all hoping for a new Camelot, a new bright day in American politics, of reaching across the aisle and bipartisan comity.  But what we are far more likely to see is a barrage of assaults on the administration, originating from all around the country and avidly reported by a controversy-hungry media.

My belief is that Barack Obama is uniquely able to handle such battles and that the GOP will fail; but forewarned is forearmed and we cannot trust the Republican Party, so haughty and over-mighty in ascendancy, to grasp any olive branch of peace we extend to them once we have dethroned them.  They are Strife personified and the next years will show they cannot change their nature.

Or such is my opinion and fear.

We all remember that famous line: "If fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag" (or words to that effect-this is a much quoted and phrased sentiment)

But fascism isn't the worst of all fates.  No, not by far.

Slavery is far worse and we banished it explicitly with the Emancipation Proclamation and with the reconstruction era constitutional amendments.

But bad things live on, albeit in hibernation.

There is something called debt peonage that persisted in the South after Reconstruction.  It was a system of enforced subordination based on credit/debt arrangements.  It gradually came to an end under persistent legal attacks.

Flash forward to the nineties and the last eight years.  Do you remember getting literally scores of credit solicitations in the mail?  Various credit card companies offering you attractive terms to get one of their cards, or to transfer your existing "balances" to them; various banks asking you to re-finance your house under attractive terms or even to refinance your automobile loan...

And the commercials of the era, making the same enticements, the good life in exchange for credit indebtedness.

A lot of institutions wanted us to enter into conditions of indebtedness.

And once there, particularly in its depths, our behavior, our lives,  were no longer our own.

If slavery was ever to return to America, it would come wrapped in terms of easy credit.

The credit industry literally wanted to make debt peonage return to these shores.  And they almost succeeded.    To break free from the system, people in very large numbers will lose their homes and a financial world will be shaken.

Before you go to bed tonight say a little prayer of thanks to the EU's Sunday actions. It made all the difference in the world to the market openings today around the world.