Things Fall Apart

It seemed like a funny joke back when folks were saying that in the movies the only time America elects a black president is either pre-apocalyptic (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact) or post-apocalyptic (Terry Alan Crews in Idiocracy).

It's maybe not so funny anymore.

Wherever you look, people whom you'd hope would have some inside knowledge of the American near future, seem to be losing their minds.

Sure, Governor Blago might have always been a hoodlum numbskull but how else to explain super lawyer Marc Dreier suddenly gambling an insanely lucrative legitimate career to try to con hedge funds out of as much as $380 million? And just yesterday seventy-year-old Wall Street legend Bernard L. Madoff stands accused of one of the most egregious white collar crimes in history -- bilking his investors of as much as $50 billion.

Do they know something we don't know? It's as if the risk of getting caught was outweighed by their panicked desire to get as much as they could before it's all gone.

It's as if the architect of the Titanic, minutes after they brushed the iceberg, said, "Don't mind me, I'm just going out for a smoke," when really, knowing what he knew about the ship's chances, stole into a lifeboat and set off alone into the dark cold waters.

Comments

[EDM]

From a commentor on another board:
-It's quite obvious that it's the top 7 banks all of which are technically bankrupt from their exposure to credit swap derivative capitalization calls. This is why Paulson shied away from purchasing toxic assets with the TARP...not because he disagreed with the idea...but because the TARP required transparency and because TARP wasn't big enough to cover the dollar amount of toxic assets the banks needed to unload... So the Fed took it over...They are being opaque because if the average citizen understand that All of the top 7 banks are absolutely bankrupt and flooded with toxic assets...there would be a huge loss of confidence and sell offs of the stock in the commercial banks...and collapse of the economic system.... I'm not defending the opacity...merely explaining their reasoning for it-

[Rule Of Law]

Hey, check it out Mr. Censor man--this post can be found over at

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/13/iraq-reconstruction-repor_n_150812.html?page=18&show_comment_id=18781151#comment_18781151

The election, with the rethugs running a brain dead, anger challenged tool and a cheerleader, can only be seen as the elites tossing in their hand so that Obama gets blamed and laying the ground work for a neo return in 2012 or 16. Trey Ellis said it himself with his Titanic allusion--the designers of this ship (The SS Economic Disaster) have bailed and left the passengers to take the heat. Why else do you run a ticket comprised of a sock puppet and a dark ages priestess? So should we be surprised that including the looting of our treasury with the bank bailouts that they've broken stolen everything that wasn't nailed down in Iraq, too? Watch the blame for this come down on Obama too.

And a shout out to Dogman....

So, thanks for playing, better luck next time!

[brooklyncitizen]

It may appear as if the rampant and overwhelming corruption we discover now on a daily basis is a "new" phenomena. However abuse of power will always surge as long as it is allowed to. The only way to dampen the extent of corruption and scams is to have regulations and measures in place to forestall this and catch it in a timely manner. It certainly is one of the things I appreciated about Spitzer. The Bush Administration clearly signal the free for all for the very rich backing Bush and for lobbyists playing the system. Whether through a direct relationship or by creating a climate that looked away from abuse and corruption the Bush administration nurtured corruption to its staggering level. Quite often Bush led by example as in the case of Iraq's missing billions, military contracts awarded based on cronyism rather than merit -all detailed in "Iraq foir Sale".

Nothing scandalizes anymore and we are frankly too numb from our own day to day real economic worries and panics to be shocked by the latest white collar scandal.

[Pdubya]

What is Blago guilty of? Corruption? Hell, most centrist politicians call in illegal favors to get elected and stay in office. Look at our multi-milion increase in campaing funding each year. Corporations have these people by the balls. Blago is guilty of playing cards with the house. Never a good move. The house always wins. I hope he sings like a canary. Perhaps a duet with Spitzer. Both, before their arrest, challenged the banking industry. Blago refused to do Billions of dollars of business with Bank of America. Spitzer was going to sue the investment banking industry. The timing of their arrests is more than suspect. When common criminals will kill over a few thousand dollars, why should we resist the challenge that these folks will stop at ruining a political career over billions of dollars?

[Pdubya]

A quite insightful and understated call on recent events. Yes, the rich are stealing from us, as has been the design ever since the inception of the Federal Reserve. I challenge you to read The Creature from Jekyll Island to see how it was formed, why it was formed, and by whom. You will see the same players and bloodlines are now centrally controlling our money supply and currency today. It is a fiat system designed to keep people in debt. It had some vestige of workability between 1913 and 1971 for the following reasons: a. we were still a production and export based society, b. we were a savings/creditor nation, c. we were still somewhat tied to a gold standard, and d. the Federal Reserve (not a Federal Government entity, nor does it have any reserves as we now know) had more oversight by a now emasculated Congress. When we went off the gold standard in 1971 we went to a complete fiat currency system and since, the Fed has grabbed more power and funnelled more wealth to its underlings (lobby, whoring centrist Congress, and wall street).

We're witnessing a purposeful destruction of our currency by the New World Order globalist elite. They are devaluing real assets and forcing deleveraging and then they will buy up assets and then when the world pulls out of the dollar - the reserve currency - because they don't trust it anymore, we will see hyperinflation and a Greater Depression.

They will be

[Pdubya]

they will be fine. (edit)

[Scarabus]

This has been going on forever. Ask Duke Cunningham or Ted Stevens.

[timetorevolt]

I think that the 'Greed is Good' mentaliity has been adopted by these crooks and our criminal justice system does nothing to deter the white collar crimes. Most of them are allowed to keep their ill gotten gains. They use it for high price lawyers and if convicted get a minimum security country club prison for a few years. After they have completed their country club visit, they still have millions to start a new life.
All the Enron crooks were allowed to keep the money they stole.

Mr junk bond king, Micheal Milken, spent less than 2 years in prison and is currently worth over 2 billion dollars accroding to Forbes. This example proves your point.

[LeonBNJ]

Almost every major economic crises or war has caused people to think we are at the brink of the 'Second Comeing' or the end of the world. Problem is all the cash wealth is worthless in the afterlife (if you believe in the afterlife).
To me many with money have or develop a perverse mentality, a craven need for more and more, never reaching a point of satisfaction. Then they end up destroying enough of the consumers by moving jobs to other cheaper countries or cut wages or raise the costs for housing and food in their greed to make more money they end up losing in the end. We need to change that menatlity of selfishness or not looking at the big picture. We should properly tax and regulate businesses and wealth to curb the worst and most destructive beheaviors of those with wealth. We have got away from that since about 1980 or so and now we are all paying a price.

[laocoon]

both Christ and Buddha essentially taught that greed was the source of evil and suffering.
So what has the been the guiding principal between how we explicitly govern at least since Reagan? Greed is good and greed should be unleashed and unrestrained. who or what have we unleashed by this philosophy.?

[abbywts]

Or maybe it's the chicken and the egg? That these people doing this kind of stuff all along is what led us here? It's possible that the system was previously stable enough so they wouldn't get sold out, because that's what happens, someone sells them out. I don't know if people could handle the shock that would come from lifting up the rock from the dirt that's politics and wealth. I assumed this stuff went on all the time-he just got caught. Keating Five anyone?

[Balzac]

I'm not having apocalyptic thoughts. Not really. I've accepted that the polar ice caps are going to melt completely soon, and there will be increasingly volatile weather, sea-level rise, famine, etc.

I was made aware of the problem in early childhood. I was born in 1975. There had already been significant media attention on "Silent Spring", the Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the energy shortage, and dire projections on global population by the time I was old enough to understand the implications.

So, none of this bad news is new to me, but after decades of denial, we've finally reached the stage in which the phenomena are becoming too obvious to ignore.

Hey, there's a chance a significant number of us will survive. Maybe it will be a very large majority. There's actually a lot of slack in the system if we can subdue @ssholes like Bush for the good of everyone else. We shouldn't underestimate the gains we can achieve from defeating those those anti-social, anti-American miscreants - the Republicans, and defeating all Democrats who even vaguely resemble Republicans in actions and demeanor.

[mountainmama]

Raiderfan 0524 is right about Achiebe being a source of the line. However, Achiebe quotes the first four lines of the Yeats poem in the preface of his 1958 book and titles his book after one of the lines--that very one. So Yeats might be called the originator of the line. If we follow common practice.

[gotalife]

Perhaps or just basic greed.

I do think we need a corruption czar.

[NABNYC]

I just posted a comment, on 11/24 on my blog, about Yeats' poem "The Second Coming." Funny how it seems to perfectly capture today's somber and worrisome (can I hear "terrified") mood. http://NABNYC.blogspot.com

Yeats wrote this poem in 1919 and shared the view of the upperclasses in Europe who sensed an instability in the world and feared more war, more chaos. Remember, the world had just ended years of war, killing, destruction, and would soon face an economic melt-down and another world war. Some people sensed what was coming.

Even Yeats' references at the end, relying on religion to try to interpret or understand what was going on around them ("Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand") sound like the salesmen on Sunday morning TV asking the fearful citizens of the U.S. to send money to save their souls, because surely the end is near. Maybe this time it is. Certainly the U.S. politicians deserve an A for effort. It's hard to think of much else they could have done in the past 8 years to try to destroy the country and the world. We'll see if they succeed.

[katinpuyallup]

Phew. I thought I was the only one with apocalyptical thoughts creeping to the fore. Can you raise chickens on a sailboat?

[JohnDewey]

I don't know about a sailboat, you can raise chickens on an ark...

[mishte]

Chinua Achebe... incredible book. Starkly well put, Mr. Ellis.