financial meltdown

[miriam_e]

I hope all my friends in USA manage to weather this financial storm safely.

I've long disliked the insane dependence upon money these days and felt it to be exceedingly dangerous. Instead of feeling victorious at seeing the proof I can only shudder with horror and wish I'd been wrong.

Hopefully this period passes without too much damage to the ordinary folk. It would be nice, though, if this focusses attention on how much more of a threat the "greed is good" slogan is to life than terrorists. Terrorists never stood a hope of doing much damage, but obscenely wealthy corporate executives running scams could bring the entire country undone.

Comments

[dances-withcats.livejournal.com]

I've been saying for years that the current house of cards the financial system here in the US is built on can't possibly continue to stand, so I'm not surprised that the shit is hitting the fan now. And I'm sure it's hitting a lot harder than our media is telling us.

The thing that pisses me off about this is that they want a $700 billion bailout for a bunch of overpaid fucking fatcats, but they can't manage to scrape together the money for, say, a national health care system or financial aid for low-income college students or research for alternative energy or funding for sustainable agriculture or decent pay for teachers ... or any number of other things that would make life better for the vast majority of Americans who aren't billionaires.

Those fuckers.

I say let the house fall and let's start over again. Roosevelt gave us the New Deal, and the Bush administration is trying to give us the Screw Deal.

Edit: Here's a podcast of an episode of Public Radio International's radio show This American Life called "The Giant Pile of Money," which details how the mortgage crisis came to happen. This episode aired on May 9, 2008, and things have, of course, gotten exponentially worse since then. It's an hour-long show and well worth the listen.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

The thing that bothers me about letting the crooked institutions crash is that the Republicans are in favor of that. This would indicate that the ultra-rich won't be hurt by the crash, only the little people. The crooks running the show will get away clean with their loot and the ordinary people will see all their money vanish.

Ways need to be found to yank all the money from those responsible and pay it back to those who were fleeced. Until that is done it will just happen again, and again, and again, and again, and again...

Thanks for the link to the show. Unfortunately the program is only in proprietary flash or itunes formats. I downloaded the transcript and will read it tonight.

You might be interested in a feature that Background Briefing did in September last year here in Australia about credit crooks from the USA and the shaky underpinnings that led to the credit crisis. They've made the mp3 available for download again.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/features/default.htm
The "find out more..." link takes you to the transcript.