There is a real symmetry between what is happening right
now on Wall Street and what happened in the 9th Ward of New Orleans
when Katrina struck. Both that hurricane and the financial down turn we are now in were acts of nature. Hurricane seasons brings nasty storms, and stocks go down as well as up.
The job of a government agency – FEMA or the SEC – is to
make sure that as few people as possible are hurt by the laws of physics. But if you are a committed Neocon and believe that if you can’t have less government you can at least make
sure the government you do have will work less well, then the
crooks and cronies you have manning the levies and policing the street when the shit inevitably hits the fan will be predictably
incompetent. This isn’t a mistake. It is the result of doctrine.
According to Andrew Leonard at “How the World Works” John McCain is trying to get ahead of this story by calling for the firing of
SEC head Christopher Cox. Aside from the slight “lets eat our own young” aspect
to this, it is a good story move by McCain. A bad move would have been to say
Cox was “doing a heck of a job.”
But Cox alone isn’t the real culprit. Over at “The Big
Picture” Barry Ritholtz makes it clear that the real decisions that put us in
this mess happened in 2004. So it now seems there might actually be a smoking gun here. Unfortunately for
McCain if his suggestion to have a 9/11-style
investigation of this mess were to actually take it looks like there would be plenty of GOP
fingerprints on the pistol.
If it is all seems too much
of a bummer to bare believe me I understand, and so does Jon Stewart. He’ll put it in perspective.