The 1929 disaster was called the "great depression." No-one was blamed. This mess we're in was caused by greed, bad leadership and a lot of other secondary reasons. It should be named to reflect those failures.
I just got a tweet, on twitter, from jayfarrington suggesting that we name this economic nightmare the "Bush" depression. "Give credit where credit's due," he says.
But I'm not sure. Bush was put there by the Supreme court, kept there by NEOcons and THEOcons, REPUBLIcons and MOR-ons.
The coporatists funded him. The Catholic cardinals and megachurch ministers endorsed him, mainstream media covered for him.
But not JUST for Bush. They all conspired to enable a few things to happen. The theocons were working to amp up the death, carnage, hate and destruction in the middle east to quicken the coming of the rapture.
We're seeing how Sarah Palin has been able to so quickly raise the level of hate and intolerance. We're seeing how the weak character of John McCain, who probably did have good intentions, has fallen to the pressures of the right wing win-by-any-means toxic political machine.
We know and are reminded every day, when we watch the network news, morning news, just about any news except for Olbermann, Maddow and Caffrey, how the sellout, fake journalists pander to and provide cover for the lies and half truths told to promote the neocon, corporatist, theocon, miitary-industrial, globalist agendas.
My point is, let's nail a name to this economic disaster so credit given where credit is due, as Jay suggested. But let's get really creative and see if we can come up with a name that really creative.
I don't have an ultimate idea. It'll be fun to see what readers come up with. Then, I'll pick the ones that look best and that get more comments agreeing with them to a few sites that do polls.
So what will it be?
NeoTheocon depression?
Should it be called a depression. It could be an econotastropy.
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com and is a columnist with Northstarwriters.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here.
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Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation.
So before we start playing with who should be blamed for what, bear in mind that according to the folks at fact check, the answer is EVERYONE is to blame.
Ciao, CZ
by
steve scheetz (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 693 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 12:28:45 PM
Well, there you have it, the ultimate authority is ...
... FACT CHECK.
Strange how Adolf Hitler rose to power in a popular election, but people still blame Hitler and his cronies for WWII and the Holocaust instead of saying, “We are all responsible for Hitler”.
I’ll cast a second vote for Depression 2.0, because this is a replay of the Depression 1.0 crash in the money supply, caused by the excessive creation of unstable credit-money by the banking system and financial sector.
Just because home buyers, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and collective delusion are involved in the popular delusion that credit is capital and real wealth, does not mean that they are to blame.As any detective would say, “Follow the money”and it will lead you to who is to blame for fostering the delusion.
The money leads to the Fed, JPMorgan, Citibank, Bank of America, the Bank of England, central banks of Europe, the IMF, and the World Bank.In the US, JPMorgan represents the house of Morgan, and Citbank represents the house of Rockefeller.In England, the Bank of England represents the house of Rothschild.
It looks bad for some of these banks right now, but wait and see if the banking industry does not come out after Depression 2.0: more centralized and consolidated, more powerful, more entrenched in law, and more in control of national governments around the world.
Even now, Congress is falling all over itself: throwing money at the banks, giving blanket immunity to Paulson for whatever he chooses to do with the money, just plain licking the bankers’ boots,helping to make ithappen.
Yeah, “we” are all to blame.Speak for yourself.
by
Paul Rye (7 articles, 2 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 354 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 1:18:29 PM
"Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up."
I suppose you forgot that according to your own post, the collective delusion is not, "It's not MY fault", it is the belief that home prices would rise forever. Apparently, you participated in that delusion and you assume that everyone else did too, or you would not have posted what you did.
I did not participate in that delusion, so again, speak for yourself.
If you would study the problem instead of letting FACT CHECK do your thinking for you, and let go of the weepy idea that "we" are all to blame, you might discover for yourself the source of the credit crisis, and in all probability that you were not the cause of it either.
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Paul Rye (7 articles, 2 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 354 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 9:05:41 PM
Can't be confused with thinking. Your statement about allowing Fact Check to think for me is absurd. I posted the facts in a list.. Your ignoring the facts is not thinking.
by
steve scheetz (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 693 comments)
on Monday, October 13, 2008 at 7:43:30 AM
It is silly to think that readers of this site haven’t seen those “facts” a hundred times before and taken them into account.Spending hundreds of hours following where they lead is not ignoring them.Deciding on the pertinent facts and not only what happened but why it happened is not ignoring the facts; it is thinking.
What were you thinking?FACT CHECK implies “we are all to blame”.That does not exactly strike the root, does it? It almost sounds like you just discovered this problem.
Blame yourself if you want, but the near-simultaneous breakdown of the entire Western banking system did not “just happen”.It had a historical trajectory involving villains, victims, and plain old standers-by.
A permanent solution requires identifying the key players and their methods, who are running cons, how the cons work, and most important - what is the BIG CON (credit is money). Including the victims and the standers-by with the villains is just plain foolish and unhelpful.
Sure, I'm getting more abrasive the more I write on this topic. It's my frustration and impatience coming out watching so many people chase red herrings, bark up the wrong tree, or just not-get-it. I apologize for that.
This financial crisis is almost purely monetary in origin, revolves around a shortage of money (credit), a shrinking money supply, and shrinking or non-existent bank capital-ratios. Yet, who led us to the edge of this cliff fully aware of where they were going?
Questions to investigate: Who creates 98% of all money, pushes for repeal of all significant banking regulation, and contributes more to political campaigns than any other industry? What industry siphons off 25% of all U.S. GNP? Why was fractional-reserve money-lending considered fraud at one time in history. Why did kings and queens of imperial states legalize the practice? How have money-lenders made and broken nations since 1600?
Money-lending, central banks and Wall Street have a long and colorful history, and we are all part of that historical, albeit peripherally, because money is ubiquitous, but saying we are all to blame does not get us any closer to the crux of the problem or a solution.
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Paul Rye (7 articles, 2 quicklinks, 17 diaries, 354 comments)
on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 4:33:42 PM
one of my history books has a subtitle in a chapter:
The Visigoths Sack Rome
I'm just now learning about how the various religions used to ban the application of interest. It makes me think we humans have been duped by the great "money" scheme in the ancient past.
(This is premised on the theory that "civilization" predates 10,000 BC, since Homo sapiens have been around for about 100-150,000 years - men and women as smart as you me. I adhere to this idea simply because I find it inconceivable we've been around this long and only started building cities 5-7,000 years ago. That just doesn't compute!)
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Rady Ananda (128 articles, 290 quicklinks, 37 diaries, 1130 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 7:09:13 PM
Great money schemes have recurred many times in recorded history. Get ahold of Stephen Zarlenga's book, The Lost Science of Money. You'll get a much clearer picture of why we are where we are now.
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Jim Eldon (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 138 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 10:28:44 PM
Of any robbery described anywhere in history, the Bush regime pulled-off the greatest robbery in world history. To add insult to injury, the robbers are still raking in the cash - and no one knows when it will stop. That's our money, our banking system is changed forever, and now the government is in many cases, our landlord, "Decider", and arbitrary decision-maker because of a Congress that is too paralyzed with fear to take action against a lame-duck President with the worst ratings in history.
I hope that in just a couple of months, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief and admit that we may be financially insolvent, our Constitution and Bill of Rights were shredded, but through it all, somehow we survived eight (8) long years being governed by an individual that couldn't speak publicly the first four years without reading from a teleprompter and was obviously being manipulated by others who at least knew how to communicate with the public. It was a robbery of our money and our liberty; let’s hope that something good can be salvaged from this mess during the next Presidency.
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William Cormier (133 articles, 7 quicklinks, 18 diaries, 332 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 5:27:04 PM
... January looks a loooong way off. There is still plenty of time for these cretins to pull the lever on the trap-door and hang all of us.
And even if we make it to January with no more major sucker-punches what makes anyone think that an Obama or McCain hand-over is going to stop this rock from falling? For it's not just a matter of personnel, it's the entire system that needs changing, and not only is it not changing, as you've pointed out the same criminals that robbed us are still robbing us, let alone being even threatened with being held accountable.
No, I think it's delusional to believe that anything for the better is going to happen coming from the same people and system that got us into the mess to begin with. Ballot-boxes aren't going to do it. We need to stop participating in the system all together and hopefully enough police and military come to our side to resist this corrupt system, not just here, but world-wide.
But I don't see that happening either. Maybe 1 in 500 are aware of how dire our situation is and maybe 1 in 500 of them are doing anything about it whereas the cretins have massive armies working 24/7/365 and have paid-off most people in authority that could stave-off the assault that's happening before our eyes.
For as the G-8 meet as we speak I would bet what little I have left that they're not discussing anything but our demise and just how quickly and effectively it can be achieved.
One can only wonder just how fast our problems would disappear if an Earthquake were to swallow all those attending that G-8 meeting.
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Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 20 diaries, 1782 comments)
on Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 10:35:47 AM
If you want to name the cause it should make explicit the privatized control of the money system as well as the deliberate manipulation of that system to benefit the plutocrats. New World Order Rampage, perhaps.
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Jim Eldon (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 138 comments)
on Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 7:13:07 PM
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