They wrote the bad paper with a deceptively low initial payment plan, knowing all along that the loans would reset and severely stress the borrower’s ability to pay. They didn’t care because they thought they could just pass the loan to someone else in a bogus “security.” Now many banks, even top ten institutions, are technically insolvent, forced to borrow reserves almost daily from the Fed to stay liquid.

And the Fed? This conglomerate of private banks that congress empowered to print and manage our money was equally responsible, particularly under Greenspan, where low interest policies catalyzed the housing debt bubble to spur a recovery after 9/11. As real estate backed securities fail left and right, the Fed has been forced to face reality as well. With little in the way of  real AAA rated collateral to offer, the banks are becoming desperate. So the Fed has begun accepting a wide range of questionable “assets” as collateral, like student loans, credit card debt, car loans, etc. These are the very things that will falter and fail; as the crisis deepens, further stressing borrower’s ability to repay—and it will deepen, as surely as winter follows autumn.  Far from being over, what we have seen so far is just the autumn of our discontent. The leaves on the banking industry have been blanching out and falling. A few trees, like Bear Stearns, have fallen with them. Stick season is yet to come.

The crisis is not over, by any measure you can find. Foreclosures are increasing exponentially each month, now up to 1000 per day in California alone! April saw foreclosure rates surge up 67%. Home values continue to decline—because  a home is only worth what a buyer will offer to pay you for it, a buyer who can borrow that money from a bank in good standing. That model is seriously skewed now. Banks aren’t  lending as before, so buyers are thinning out, realizing that to buy a home now is to acquire an asset that will immediately depreciate. How’s that for discouraging someone to part with their life savings to make a down payment? The lack of offers and the huge glut of unsold homes puts downward pressure on prices. Prices decline until the home is “underwater,” where the so called “owner” now owes more on his loan than he could ever hope to receive in an offer from a buyer—at least in the near run. In the most overheated markets like Southern California, prices and home values eroded by a staggering 29% in the first  quarter of this year. (By year’s end the slide pushed to nearly 50%). This will continue. The bottom is at least 18 to 24 months away. Have a look at the carnage...

Total mortgage debt now exceeds home equity, for the first time since 1945. People will see virtually every last nickel of “equity” evaporate from their home, phantom wealth that was used as collateral for home equity loans to buy new appliances, cars, fund vacations, and the old ATM will now become a massive debt liability. Borrowers who bought in 2006, with an inflated jumbo loan of say $700,000 to buy an overpriced home in California, will soon realize they still owe that $700,000, while their home is now worth only $400,000. So much for the dream and the false perception of benefit from home ownership. What people fail to realize is that they never owned anything but the debt. The bank owned their home from the day they moved in, and then passed on the lien to some investor in Asia. The buyer bought a place to live, and a massive debt. (They could have rented a similar place to live at half the rate of home ownership, avoiding property taxes, maintenance, and all that debt service!) As these folks falter and fail, some simply walking away, many smaller regional banks who did not play the securities shell game are stuck with the fact that they now own the home, and that debt is back on their books, hidden away in trick accounting reports—another way these banks delude themselves about their own solvency. One thing is certain, however. There is no longer anyone out there paying on that loan when the account goes into foreclosure. That is reality, compounded millions of times as the foreclosure tally rises, and rises.

While banks delude themselves, now hiding an estimated $35 billion in losses off the books, according to Bloomberg, the system as a whole hides behind falsified statistics, a brave Kabuki mask to hide the truth. Bloomberg is also far off the mark when it comes to real losses currently being hidden by the banks. Financial Times reported: “...planned tightening of the rules regarding off-balance sheet vehicles would force banks to reconsider arrangements and could result in up to $5 trillion of assets coming back on to the books.” It seems the banks will soon be “making other arrangements” as James Kunstler would say. The accounting tricks they have been using to hide all these losses are about to be revised.

Meanwhile, the Middle Class soldiers on, and the government tells us inflation is only 4% when it is really much higher. Things like housing costs, food, gasoline were long ago removed from the core inflation index to present an artificially low number as well.  These things are the primary expenses the average person shoulders each month. Like the banks hiding losses, things left in the core inflation index, manufacturing and materials costs, are the things corporations spend for each month. It’s easy to see what the powers that be are concerned with, and it’s not you and me, not the people of this nation. Unemployment statistics have been skewed as well. We don’t want to know how bad things really are.

How bad for the working class, that is. At the corporate CEO level, things are just fine. People often hear about  fat cat CEOs getting golden parachutes as corporations play a shell game of acquisitions and leveraged buyouts. I have a close friend who recently learned that the CEO of her corporation, a medical service company employing about 300 nurses, was graced with a severance package of a cool $60 million during their recent buyout by a big pharmaceutical company. Considering that this company pays their nurses $50,000 per year in salary, that little package netted the CEO a sum equal to 4 years annual wages for all 300 nurses combined! This is what has been happening in America, accelerating under Bush/Cheney and the Republicans--wealth has been flowing up, into fewer and fewer hands. What did this CEO do, what could he possibly do, to justify the annual salaries of his entire work force for the next four years? This is what America’s precious capitalist system has become. A few thousand individuals now hold more wealth and power than millions and millions of us “little people,” you know, the consumers all these corporations rely on for their sales revenues. One day they will realize that we’ll stop buying. But I suppose by then the fat cats will have retired to gated mansions guarded by cohorts of private mercenaries trained by Blackwater, America’s nascent SS.

People are finally getting off the shopping binge they’ve been on the last five years. Car dealers wring their hands as their showrooms and lots are empty of customers. The SUV is dead, a dinosaur to the era of cheap oil. Detroit, always myopically behind the curve, is now realizing people want a fuel efficient car more then their ad-inspired desire to careen about in a two ton gas guzzler that is supposed to represent our freedom and personal power. We can make cars that get 50mpg today, and do much better that that if we put our effort in that direction. (The Germans actually created a prototype vehicle, the Loremo super-sedan that got 150mpg!) Sadly, the most fuel efficient cars in the subcompact class, hybrids aside, still turn in an anemic 29 to 39 mpg rating. Gasoline, always taken for granted in this country along with things like electricity, food, and freedom, is now starting to become a very expensive necessity.  McCain tried to take ownership of the issue with his proposed gas tax holiday, stupidly masking the problem during peak summer driving season before the election, so we can pretend gas is not actually over $4.00 per gallon, (as it was then), and delude ourselves by driving all we want again. Talk about a near-sighted and stupid fix to “the problem” where energy is concerned in this country. What you want is a policy that raises taxes on the old, failing energy model, and gives tax incentives to development of alternatives.

 Hillary Clinton was no better, saying that the oil companies will pay the tax instead. Fat chance. Bush has already said he would immediately veto any such bill, protecting his friends in the business he was born to—big oil. Exxon-Mobil made a whopping $17 billion profit in the first quarter of 2008. Hell if they’ll pay it all to the treasury as a tax so we can have three more months of delusion that all is well. Hillary Clinton isn’t stupid. She knows the gas tax holiday paid for by Exxon is a farce, and that Bush would never sign such a bill, which made her campaign stump speeches about it little more than deceptive vote pandering.  Only one  candidate has stated he would oppose the gas tax holiday in favor of a revamped and realistic energy policy: Barak Obama.  The change he talks about, the change we so desperately need, begins first with facing reality, and letting go of the illusions that prop up our lives in this country.

To most Europeans, our whining about high gas prices is laughable. Have a look at the current price (converted to US Dollars) of gasoline elsewhere in the world.

Average Price per Gallon of Gasoline - May  30, 2008

Germany: $11.49
France: $9.66
Italy: $8.40
United Kingdom: $8.31
Netherlands: $6.43
Japan: $5.77
Belgium: $5.34
United States: $3.91

In wondering why the price of gas is so expensive, Andrew Leonard seemed to hit it well in his recent article  for Salon.com when he talked about everything that was represented by his $65 receipt on a tank of gas earlier this year: “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that it's all in there, in my $65 receipt. Kidnappings of oil executives in Nigeria and the nationalization of Exxon-operated facilities in Venezuela. Chinese economic growth and hedge fund manipulation. ANWR and air quality. The price of gas in the United States is a consequence of global economic growth, rising standards of living, greed, politics and the stresses induced by 6.5 billion people going about their business on a planet with limited resources.” He might have also mentioned the wreck of Iraq after 5 years of needless war, the speculation and Enron-like price manipulation in unregulated black markets, the fact that no new refineries have been built in the US for decades, (deliberately), and the oil tankers sitting off the coast of Manhattan, 40 and 50 at a time, not because of traffic, but because they are waiting to dock when they can get the highest possible price per barrel. But I guess that last one falls under “greed.”

Europeans have not exactly accepted those high prices with a resigned “que sera, sera.” The NY Times reported: “...protests broke out across the Continent this week as irate port workers clashed with the riot police in Marseille and truckers stopped traffic in London to demand government fuel rebates. On Thursday, the protests spread to truckers in the Netherlands and French farmers blocked the entrance to oil depots. Italian and Spanish fishermen were planning strikes for Friday. Less audible, but no less angry, are French nurses fretting about the cost of making home visits in their cars, Italian travel agents worried about fueling tour buses, and families from Madrid to Moscow who are leaving their cars at home..”

Our our national average price of only $3.91/gallon on Memorial Day, 2008 sounds like paradise to the Italians & Germans. The last time Gasoline was that low in Italy was December 2003. Clearly none of these European countries have collapsed because of the price of  gasoline being what it is these days. But Europe has well developed rail and other mass transit options, including river transit, that simply don’t exist in the US. Here the personal automobile is taken as our God given right, and almost everything we buy is shipped about by diesel burning trucks. This is why we experience such angst over the cost of gasoline, and grave doubts about the future.

James Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency” we are now well entangled with, put it this way: “What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. But none of the airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above $120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.”

Update: The scare of oil near $150 / barrel was alleviated by the massive financial collapse it helped to precipitate. Overleveraged traders began to unwind commodities positions in tandem with the sudden drop off in global demand. The result was the whipsaw of oil to prices well below $50/barrel. But the basic fundamentals of 9.1% annual depletion in the world’s major oil fields does not auger well for long term low oil prices. Expect the $100 mark to be retested in 2009.--JS

The “other arrangements” Kunstler insists we make for our lives now will be the heart and soul of this convulsive change. Switching your light bulbs from incandescent to fluorescent, and trading in your SUV will simply not be enough. And hoping for some sudden breakthrough in Detroit where we will see a truly economical car any time soon is also a wil ‘o the wisp. We will not be able to replace our cars as easily as we switch out a light bulb. Even if we could all switch to hybrids today, we simply put off our dilemma for a few more years. The problem is that we have no alternative to turn to now, because we have lived with the misguided belief that our fuel would always be plentiful and cheap. So we have no rail system to speak of in this country, no light rail connecting our cities and neighborhoods, no usage of our rivers or coastal ports for basic transportation. And we have no alternative to diesel and gasoline in the works. To run our autos on ethanol would require land space the size of Africa simply to grow the required amount of corn.

The Wall Street Journal, as main stream as it gets when it comes to the news, is finally catching up with the net bloggers: Steven Pearlstein wrote: “Suddenly, it seems, we're getting hit from all directions. Energy and food prices are soaring. The housing market continues to collapse. Government revenue is falling, and taxes are rising. Airlines are jacking up fares and fees while reducing service. Banks are pulling credit lines. Auto companies are cutting production once again. Even investment bankers are losing their jobs. The tendency is to see these as separate developments, each with its own causes and dynamic. Fundamentally, however, they are all part of the same story -- the story of the global economy purging itself of large and unsustainable imbalances that for a time allowed many Americans to think they were richer than they really were.”

At the personal level Business week summed it up quite nicely: “... gasoline at nearly $4 a gallon is cracking "the survivors," as credit counselor Bruce G. Hamlett calls them. They're the people who played by the rules and kept up their mortgage and utility payments even as neighbors gave up and moved away, leaving empty homes. Now, crazy prices at the pump are pushing even these survivors over the edge. "They're asking, 'Do I put gas in my car or do I pay this utility bill or do I pay the mortgage?'" says Hamlett, director of economic independence for Charlotte's United Family Services. "It's getting to the point where it's an impossible choice ." (But even gas below the $2.00 mark failed to save Christmas for America’s retail sector.)

Add in a trip to the supermarket where a half gallon of milk was selling for $4.69, ($9.38/gallon!), and Americans are increasingly being forced to choose between food and fuel when it comes to the strained budget. If this continues, the strange disconnect between the calm civility over here, and the chaos of Iraq over there will begin to find a new balance. Years ago I wrote about the real reason for the war in Iraq in an article called Ignorance Is Bliss--the effort to keep everything running over here, so we could all continue in the dream of happy consumption. But the pacific order of our society may soon erode. Stories are already appearing about rogue fuel thieves hijacking tanker trucks, creating ingenious ways of tapping into underground fuel tanks, robbing cars to siphon off gasoline. Stresses on the freedom we have enjoyed here for so long could easily follow that hard choice between food and fuel. The predictions made in that article  have come hauntingly true. Now we finally realize just how much we need that cheap oil and gas.

This is reality. This is the grim set of facts that sent the US army to Iraq, where huge undeveloped fields of oil lie dormant beneath the blood stained sands. The Bush/Cheney plan was to keep the illusion going, to maintain the status quo “lifestyle” over here by securing the oil over there. They accomplished neither. They failed. Now the US is hardly able to control Baghdad, let alone dominate the world oil market with its military in the Middle East. This will be the one lasting legacy of the Bush administration--not only that they had the myopic vision and flawed judgment to elect this war strategy as a means of keeping the wheels turning over here, but that they failed, squandering what was left of American power in the process. What did we gain for five years of war in Iraq? It is easy enough to see what we have lost.

So another illusion we must certainly dispel is the notion that the US is the world’s sole remaining superpower, and can do whatever it desires. The US, under Bush/Cheney, invaded two countries, threatening any number of others from Korea, to Venezuela, to Iran, but then saw its supposedly invincible army stalemated in a civil insurgency in Iraq. During the heated election campaign, the illusion still dancing about in the mind of John McCain pandered to America’s hope that all will be well, all will unfold as we wish. McCain shared his vision of an Iraq war concluded by the end of his first term with “victory,” and a free an democratic government there as our boys come home to a long overdue ticker tape parade. Again, nothing could be farther from the truth. First off, there will be no first term for McCain, and there will be no victory in Iraq. The Army knows this, which is why it ended its blundering counter-operations against the Sunni “dead enders” and “former Baathists” and basically recruited these folks to help neutralize the Shia militias and Al Qaeda cells. It was a clear case of “if you can’t beat ‘em—join ‘em.” Calling it victory is illusion, expedient wishful thinking at best, and an insult to all those who died in this war that never should have been fought in the first place. Only one candidate will say that aloud to the American people, speaking the great truth about that misguided and catastrophic squandering of American power and prestige in Iraq—Barak Obama.

Illusion knows no bounds, and our media has been complicit in furthering the somnambulant dream state Americans are only now awakening from. Fox News, America’s Pravda, stalwartly continues to spin its “fair and balanced” news coverage for the 27% that is still enraptured by that dream, or nightmare, that stubborn conservative core who think George Bush has done a good job! A thousand historians were recently surveyed, and 67% placed Bush squarely at the bottom of the list as the worst President in US history. Another 25% ranked him second from the bottom. His approval rating is worse than Nixon just before he resigned, but Fox News continues to fight the good fight, selling its corn to that tiny conservative minority that lives with illusion made of family, home, and hot apple pie—the illusion that Bush is Christian, that war and Christianity have something in common, that torture is a legitimate tool to use against our “enemies,” that ignoring laws and circumventing the constitution, undermining the Geneva Convention, not to mention the will of congress,  with hundreds of presidential findings and signing statements is necessary to “keep us safe.” It seems the freedoms so many generations of Americans have fought to retain are no longer important. Under Bush/Cheney, the constitution became a nuisance, and an obstacle to their manic desire for power and security.

Bush and Cheney created adolescent “enemies lists” and populated them with names of both US citizens and foreign nations alike. They trampled laws, or simply ignored them (like FISA), then built an Orwellian infrastructure of surveillance and domestic security that has not been seen in any western nation since Nazi Germany. We now have the NSA routinely sifting all our internet traffic and phone calls to search for evidence of “evildoers.” Massive data bases like “Main Core” and others have been established and populated with the names of Americans who might be, who just may be, who might possibly  be in league with “our enemies.” At the very least, they have been well established as “persons of interest.” Who are they, one has to wonder. Are they people who speak out against this lawless administration?  People who have opposed the resource war in Iraq? People who exercise inconvenient inalienable rights like freedom of speech? People who just won’t get with the program and bend their knee to corporate power in America? Are they people like you and me? It hasn’t been done since the McCarthy era, this making of dirty little lists. It flies in the face of the solitary reason the US government is empowered to do anything at all—empowered by the people of this nation, not the corporations, to protect and preserve the freedoms guaranteed to us by the US constitution, not to safeguard the profit margins of mega-business. But all that has been trumped by fear and trepidation, because, according to Bush and Cheney,  the world is now full of enemies who wish us harm, instead of other cultures and peoples who simply pursue their own interests, live their own lives, worship in their own way, as we pursue ours.

And of course, we must never talk to these enemies. McCain called Barak Obama naive and reckless for suggesting we meet with the leaders of Iran or Cuba to try and chart a new course, a new relationship. We must never deal with “dictators,” according to McCain, unless, of course, they work for us, like the old Shah of Iran, Mr. Marcos of the Philippines, Noriega, Allende, and let’s not forget Saddam himself, the man we shipped chemical weapons to while we were also shipping weapons to Iran. Remember Iran -Contra? All these upstanding dictators once had very cozy relationships with the United States, but McCain trumpets that his opponent is reckless for suggesting we negotiate with men like Amadinijad and Chavez.

One can only imagine the catastrophic outcome had Bush/Cheney been in office during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thank God JFK had the good sense, and good judgment, to talk to Khrushchev—to realize that agreements between nations must consider the interests of each side, and that communication, good will, and principled, firm negotiations were required to resolve the conflict peacefully. Certainly the threat of force was always available. Kennedy had the USAF on alert to bomb Cuba, and the Navy on patrol to enforce a quarantine. But he had the good sense to talk to his adversaries—just as Barak Obama will. The real naiveté is thinking America can just threaten and bully its enemies into submission, bombing when we don’t get the expected cooperation. That is the truly reckless policy we have seen for the last 8 years, and one McCain would have us embrace again under the false illusion that it somehow makes us strong. If that is the result of McCain’s 20 years of foreign policy “experience,” then, by all means, give us someone else, anyone else, with the clear vision to see that America needs to chart a new course now, and build friendship lists, alliances, partnerships, cooperative agreements—not maintain a huge standing army in the oil rich regions of the world to ensure our control.

The days of American power, both economic and military, are waning now. Technically, this nation is as insolvent as the banks that fuel our economy. Our debt, expanded exponentially from the surplus Clinton handed Bush, is now a staggering $9.3 trillion. We owe it mostly to China, Japan, and a host of other Asian financiers who send us $2 billion per day just to pay the interest. One day they will stop writing the checks, and we will wake up from delusion of deficit spending and face reality. America, the world’s greatest debtor nation, will eventually be forced to default on its massive debt, just as its citizens slowly default on their home mortgages and credit card debt. Then we get all the Internet talk of the North American Union, and the Amero replacing the sagging dollar—a national emergency with a FEMA inspired round up list of US citizens who might not like living under martial law. These are fringe ideas that are being voiced more and more these days.

Martial law… I recently read an article on some dark corner of the Internet that supposedly quoted from a Marine sergeant in Montana boasting about how his highly trained killing machine grunts would be used to enforce government authority here soon, used to round up folks on the ever lengthening FEMA Red, Blue and Black lists for disposition to detention camps, serviced by a fleet of clandestine rail cars outfitted with shackles.

To take us to ideas like this Bush and Cheney had to bankrupt the treasury, break the Army, tear down the constitution, establish a nefarious shadow government buttressed by illegal findings and presidential orders and continuity of government plans, then destroy the American economy to bring on such distress and travail that people would look to anyone who would promise them that they could have the dream back again, if they only do exactly what they are told. Now we have FEMA sponsored detention centers on US soil for the first time since the roundup of Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor. One can only wonder what they are there for, strategically located all over the continental US just like that Marine Sergeant claimed—the next hurricane in Montana?

These sinister developments are a bit like the lines at supermarkets or the shuttering up of windows before a major storm. Would the American people ever accept a declaration of martial law or tolerate the arrest and detention of its citizens on any significant scale? I think not. If the government believes the US army is having a rough time with a few thousand insurgents in Iraq, you can multiply that by tens of millions over here should the they ever attempt anything so preposterous. We are too accustomed to doing exactly what we want in this country. Oh, Americans might give the government a week or two benefit of the doubt in some time of national emergency. After that, we’ll go right on doing exactly what we want, and not FEMA nor the NSA nor the FBI nor the CIA nor the US army and that grumpy Sergeant and all his marines will be able to do very much about it. Order and civility in this country is our gift to each other. They can’t be enforced on a population determined to do something else. Iraq has taught us that.  Let us hope events never warrant the insane attempt to fill those detention centers. Let us hope it is all just Internet speculation and nonsense. If our history has proven anything it is this—Freedom cannot be detained, Liberty will not abide incarceration.

In the meantime, all this black net talk of martial law is far from the minds of the American people, who have enough just to cope with the increasing weight of “normality.” James Kunstler quoted Bernanke’s assessment of the financial markets as being “far from normal.” Americans, as they shop for groceries, fill their gas tanks, and watch the bills stack up each month, also realize that their lives are far from normal. As Kunstler put it: “every mook and minion in the land sees the gas pumps levitate beyond the $4 hash mark, and notes with bugged-out eyes the double-digit price stickers on common supermarket items, and feels the rush of blood from the extremities when some check-out clerk at the WalMart declares that a certain proffered credit card is maxed out, and some strangers in overalls -- the neighbors say -- managed to hot-wire the GMC Sierra in the driveway, and took it away....” Kunstler is right on the mark when he sums things up: “The logical conclusion of all this is not what the American public wants to hear: we have become a much poorer society and are now faced with the unavoidable task of making major changes in how we live…But it's not about politics, really. It's about the entire society's inability to form a workable new consensus of reality.”

Our distress over milk north of $8.00 per gallon is not about some nefarious plot hatched by Bush and Cheney and a Marine Drill Sergeant in Montana. It is about the inevitable fact that we have now entered a time of scarcity that will be prolonged and deep—scarcity for everything from oil to food, to water.  Don’t expect milk prices to suddenly drop to $4.00 per gallon, or gasoline to ever be $1.79 again for any sustained period, as it was only a few short years ago. In the long run, things are all headed the opposite direction. These costs of living, real to most of the world for generations, have finally come home to the land of plenty. I’m fond of quoting World Controller Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s Brave New World, who said it quite plainly: “Happiness has to be paid for.”  The new consensus of reality that Kunstler talks about is an understanding that “business as usual” is now over in America. We are finally being forced by adversity to face the issues Internet writers, myself included, have been harping about for years and years. We have to change the way we live now. The banks will no longer finance the old American dream. The watch words of our future will be “sustainable, renewable, practical, economical, local.” Let us hope “cooperative and equitable” are also thrown in. But before we reach those more hopeful conditions, we will first have to suffer adversity, scarcity, shortfall, loss and the grand depreciation that must come hand in glove with the deleveraging of all the phantom wealth created by Wall Street and the banks. We’ve taken our food, fuel and freedom for granted in this country for oh so very long. Now we’re going to have to pay for it.

Our lives are going to be all about those three things in the months and years ahead: food, fuel and freedom, not whether we want fries with that, or the difficult decision as to whether or not to super-size the order. We will go through all the psychological stages to resist this inevitable change along the way, from denial, to anger to a kind of desperation to secure those three basic things. Seeing the problem clearly by facing this reality and dropping our illusions is job one. The world will never again be as it was . Getting through the anger and desperation is the next stage. Let us hope we do not lose our freedom in trade for the food and fuel. If we survive, and I think we will, then we will do so by building something entirely new in this country. But we’ll never get started until we first realize that we have more to be concerned about than which Chris to vote for on American Idol. MSNBC reported that 100 million people voted for one or another.  That’s about three times the total popular vote for all candidates in this year’s primary season, and that statistic alone says it all when it comes to the preferences of Americans just now. They seem to want to pretend all is well, and just watch TV on the new plasma set, waiting for that all digital signal to beam them to a place of comfort and easy forgetfulness. I think there will be a new kind of “survivor” series show on TV in the years to come—and it won’t be about bikini clad girls and blue collar hunks trapped on some distant tropical island.

John Schettler – May/June 2008

Readers may be interested to follow the progression of this economic crisis in these articles as well: Clueless, Fannie & Freddie, Stormfront, USSA, Panic, The Price of Confidence

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