Newscoma

Sultanica points us to this:

The markets are perilously close to a tipping point where they will collapse, after which all of the above will come to pass, and Congressional action (or inaction) will be irrelevant.

Congress will then have to face the people, as will President Bush and his Cabinet, and may God have mercy on our Republican form of government, because history shows that when government mismanages things to this degree and refuses to respond to the will of the people, a “messiah” generally appears with a “solution” – but there will be “compromises.”

Like your freedom.

To fix the problem trust must be restored.  To restore trust you must stop the lying, expose the liars, prosecute and jail them all, and stop changing the rules in the middle of the game.

This must happen now.  Today.  Immediately.  Not tomorrow, not next week, not after a series of hearings.

Right now.

Read the whole thing, and remember campers, I need a job pretty soon because I’m practicing “Do you want fries with that?” in my mirror.

European markets are getting soaked.

Awesome. Not.

It is the sixth of October. For those of you who don’t know about the Keating Five, well, you are going to be inundated with information on it today.

Go read about it here and educate yourself about it in an article written nine years ago from the Arizona Republic. I have an excerpt but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

In spinning his side of the Keating story, McCain adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was far more than a constituent to McCain, however.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain’s wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.

McCain also did not pay Keating for the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433.

This is what the news is talking about. I deliberately picked this story that was written nearly a decade ago to stay away from the election spin from both sides of the aisle you will be reading and seeing today.

With that said, I learned today of a small business that lives month to month. On Wednesday, they will have to pay $7,000 dollars in taxes. It’s a cycle. There are no bailouts. There are accountants involved, there has been responsibility taken. There is no credit line. These people work seven days a week. This family business is struggling here in Hoots. They had been paying their tax bill every month for nine years, but it’s never enough.

This small business has no money to buy influence because those are apparently the rules. The Keating Five is just one example of privilege and excess.

So, as you can see, when I see pork money attached to the bailout, the fact that I’m reorganizing the business I work for (a different business than the one mentioned above), looking at which lights to turn out to save everyone’s job and wondering the long-term impact of the actions of politicians last week, it’s disheartening.

I thought aspects of the bailout where needed from a global perspective but it’s the pork that makes me angry. There is no end in sight.

And then I read that some Wall Street execs are taking this “down time” to get facelifts.

Unbelievable.

Zen of Jazz writes at All That’s Evil an interesting post that touches on rural America and the changes in the landscape of this country in the past 70 years.

I had someone ask me how serious I thought the current fiscal crisis is, yesterday. I said, “it depends. How big is your garden? How full is your freezer? Did you pick up that backup generator?” And his answer was “Why? Do those things matter?”

Here’s the thing. The last time the economy was in this kind of shape, around 70 years ago, we were a mostly rural population, with small family farms. That meant that when there were no jobs, you still had your crops, and your livestock. You may or may not have had electricity, but you probably had a fireplace, and a acre or two of firewood growing. Your farm equipment mostly could be pulled by a horse, or a mule. If you were in the city, you were likely in a manufacturing job. If you had money, odds were fair that at least some of it was tucked under a mattress. If you heard about the problems soon enough, you could get at your money, in the bank…

Today, the population is urban and suburban, with very few people having as much as a garden, much less livestock. Your money is so many binary digits, in the memories of the computers at your bank, mortage holder, credit card companies, etc.

It’s a compelling read. The one thing I can say living in rural America is that the small farmers who grew food for their families don’t exist like they did in the past but that’s starting to change as small towns have felt the economic effects due to increases in costs because of transporting items to our humble area. There are more corporate farming operations now.

Oh, and my county has been placed on the ag disaster list that Gov. Phil Bredesen sent out on Tuesday.

Updated to add that Sadcox posted about this as well.

Go read Frank right now! And, when you are done there, go directly to Rex Hammock’s abode.

That is all.

Dr. Ron Paul has written an editorial for CNN on the potential bailouts. In all actuality, it explains the mess we are in pretty darned well.

Many Americans today are asking themselves how the economy got to be in such a bad spot.

For years they thought the economy was booming, growth was up, job numbers and productivity were increasing. Yet now we find ourselves in what is shaping up to be one of the most severe economic downturns since the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the government’s preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.

Yes, I’m getting my libertarian on. Shut up.

If we give Henry Paulsen a blank check without checks and balances, our government is stupider than I thought it was.

UPDATE: More commentary from Robert Allison.