A word to the more gleeful economic doom-sayers...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

The chickens coming home to roost doesn't hurt the fat-cats and robber barons except by reducing some of them to "less rich." They will have plenty to eat either way. Their kids will go to good schools either way. They will have excellent health care either way.

The S&P 500 is not the sole preserve of the bad guys. When the market goes down it represents real and direct losses in the retirement funds of most middle-class Americans.

This stuff is tragic, not exhilarating. (Even if it confirms ones long-standing predictions.)

Every tick in the unemployment rate represents real, specific quantifiable increases in spousal abuse, child abuse, rape, murder, suicide and addiction.

It is as indecorous to overtly root for economic ruin as it is to root for hurricanes.

___________________________

PS: As with all posts directed at a specific point of view, if that is not your point of view then the OP is not directed at you. Last night some folks were asking sincere questions about the safety of their IRAs and were getting replies about how they are doomed. Real 'the living will envy the dead' stuff.

It struck me that nobody would post such replies if a DUer asked for information about a disease their child had been diagnosed with (she will rot in the street and be food for dogs!!!), or a natural disaster that might affect them.

[cali]

1. agreed. but a lot of the dystopians here- who really are simply

another flavor of end-timers- are wallowing in this like pigs in shit.

[lonestarnot]

2. Well what, who's rooting? The game is over!

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

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[BlooInBloo]

11. Rather like DUers squawking about how proud they were to live in the "reality based" community....

Turns out that was just a lie as well - just good marketing press they heard somewhere and gleefully repeated.

America has a long way to go if this is the best of America.

[bryant69]

7. Which DUers are you talking about?

Or do you not consider yourself a DUer?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bryant69]

36. That's what i get for not paying attention

Somebody responded and i never got to see their response.

Bryant

[SoCalDem]

21. NOT a "23 yr old kid"..a guy who had been there TWENTY THREE years

who was a "trader"..who , no doubt, had been quite "involved" in gambling with "ordinary folks' money" , probably without much thought except for his big fat commissions and bonuses..

MY off the cuff remark was about how , he might be joining the "real world" soon, and starting to worry about things that we all worry about every day..

It's very unfortunate for ANYONE to lose their jobs, but a lot of these "financial wizards" have been mostly immune to the across-the-board job losses that many of us have known about for a long time now..

And with Lehman Bro & Merrill Lynch & Bear Stearns all having "problems" at once, there will not be enough chairs in that Musical Chair game they set in motion by their greed, fraud & ponzi schemes, to go around..

and as "stunned" as that guy seemed, he probably has more than a few Cayman accounts, so I did not actually lose much sleep over his "difficulty"..

[BlooInBloo]

25. Ooooh! That's likely significantly different - DOH!

Dammit - that's my second "nevermind" moment in as many days - I've derailed somehow!




EDIT: My apologies for the misunderstanding.

[SoCalDem]

30. No problem.. The "23-yr" part could have been clearer on my part

:hi:

[psychmommy]

31. my parents and i work or have worked for the state.

our state pension system lost over $50 million dollars from lehmans. we have all worked really hard and someone gambled with our pension funds. i knew the country was in trouble when finances were considered a product. my parents should be ok but i may be in trouble down the line. the new hires are already paying in more for their pensions than the rest of us.

[SoCalDem]

32. I am not really sure what will become of our 401-k

but I fully expect there to be little or nothing when my husband retires.. I have always thought that once the boomers were finally ready to "cash in"..

1) our main asset (our house) would be worthless
2) interest rates on savings would be pennies on the dollar
3) SS would not have been re-imbursed

There was just really NO way the government could manage so many people all "getting out" at the same time...since they were NOT saving that extra money we all were forced to pay into the SS system for 25-30 years now..

The only generation who was "allowed" to retire with any "dignity" was the group who were born in the approximate years of 1919-1936... The years that those folks were "old" were also the same years when we were booming financially (due to all those boomers paying all that money in taxes & SS money)... Those oldsters also had pensions (sometimes 2 or 3)..they also fully participated in the GI BILL and got the $1 down on cheap houses as they entered their prime working lives..

Boomer's parents & grandparents drank the cream, and the rest of us are left with skim..

[Dorian Gray]

39. I know quite a few people

who are in that business. They are in their thirties and forties. They are middle class, they work hard, and they do not scheme to take people's money. They are hit hard by this. People at Lehman have lost all their retirement. It's as disastrous for them as it was for the Enron workers who had no idea what was happening. This is the fault of those in charge, not those working for a living. Even if it was a well paid living.

[melody]

22. The sales person had been there for 23 years, he wasn't 23

I'm still sorry for him.

If you don't like DU, why are you here?

[ElboRuum]

34. I'm not.

Seems to me that he'd been renting out storage space to store all of the bad karma he was accruing.

In answer to the second question, although it wasn't directed at me, should be obvious. When you don't like how your house looks, do you sell it, or do you try to fix what you don't like? Echo chambers do no one any good, and I think it's important that we don't have one here. We are but human, and we are fallible. When we forget that, we do just like any good neocon would, look at our opinions without any criticality and imagine that they must be valid because of the fact that "we know we are right."

[melody]

43. Oy

My comment was rhetorical not an actual quandary -- of course. The obvious intention was if she doesn't like it here ... if she's unhappy here ... why is she here? You DU'ers and the like ... that's not criticism, that's an across the board condemnation that doesn't even approach fairness.

[Warpy]

4. I think people seem to be rooting for it

only because they know a disaster is the only way Democrats can force their own "shock doctrine" on the wealthy and powerful and re institute common sense financial regulations, universal health care, and a mended social safety net.

But yes, we're all going to be in a world of suck if it happens.

[El Pinko]

12. It's not rooting or glee. It's pent-up frustration.

We're the ones who TRIED to tell our friends back in 2005 NOT to overstretch to buy that $300K stucco POS because the whole market was a house of cards built on speculation, and we were ridiculed and told to "buy now and be priced out forever because they aren't making new land".

The fact that we were right is little consolation for the world of shit we are ALL going to have to live in for the next several years.

[Arctic Dave]

18. Good post and good to hear from you again.

[El Pinko]

26. Thanks. I guess I should start posting more stuff...

...a few months ago, I was still trying to "wake people up", but I'm getting the sense that people are getting a whiff of the coffee by now.

[Warpy]

23. It was tough watching everybody take trips to Europe

and buy all the latest toys on plastic and live in new houses and drive new cars on credit while I was living out of thrift shops and in a slum and driving vehicles that were old enough to vote, but I guess the lessons I learned from my depression baby parents really did leave me in good shape now.

Now I'm watching their discomfort at their desperation yard sales when they realize that designer labels aren't worth what they thought they were and that $500 handbag is worth exactly what their daughter's K-Mart knockoff is.

If you want to know where depressions come from, follow the debt. You can substitute debt for wages only so long before paying the interest on that debt to keep the creditors off your back will cut into what you need to buy groceries and gas to get to work. At that point, you stop spending and the collapse of the consumer market is what really characterizes a depression, not a stock market crunch or bank failure.

Yes, we did try to tell them. However, we're going to be in trouble right along with them, if not in as much trouble. The satisfaction of being right is going to be a cold one.

[dkf]

14. You think the collapse of the financial system is going to help us get Universal Health Care?

and a mended social safety net? I think its exactly the opposite.

There is no money. George Bush spent it ALL. The takeover of Fannie and Freddie has doubled the national debt.

AARRRRGH.

[ElboRuum]

28. I wouldn't say that there is rooting going on.

However, what I will say is that people who are not independently wealthy will always feel this pinch first even if those telling us everything is A-OK aren't feeling it at all.

In a lot of ways, people, maybe rightly, think that the only way to really impact the situation is for the situation to smack those individuals who've got enough lucre around to weather a recession right where it hurts. And yes, we are all going to be in a world of epic fail suckery if that happens.

But it is sort of like climate change, some people won't even acknowledge the reality until a calamity strikes. Only when they're being boxed about the ears with material impact to their own standards of living do they ever get the full extent and breadth of the problem. Only then, for them, does it become a problem requiring action.

The problem, as I see it, is one of a lose-lose situation. In order to fix things, those who have been denying the issue must be personally impacted by the problem, however, in order for this to happen, the economy must essentially bottom out and take all of us with it. Every time someone prevents the downward spiral, it spares the deniers their moment of clarity, and thusly, the same crap that caused us to get here continues. We tacitly reaffirm that an economy can run this way, thereby even encouraging the very same excesses that bring us low every goddamn time.

The only win in this situation is to get the people in office who acknowledge these excesses as problematic BEFORE it becomes irreparable. However, this also is quite fail because it does not get the point across to those who never saw it as a problem in the first place. Their attitude is "See? Nothing happened! Typical chicken little shit we've come to expect from liberals." Then they win another election, they institute the same policies, and badabing-badaboom, we're knee deep in another financial fiasco once again. If somehow we could impress upon the electorate the importance of bringing some semblance of long term stability to the market, it might be possible to break this cycle, but they have been of little help so far.

[El Pinko]

5. I've been doomsaying since at least 2003...

...and everything has gone exactly as I expected, and I am not the least bit "gleeful" that I was right, nor am I gleeful to say that it is going to get a LOT worse (if we have a 1981-82 level recession, we will be very lucky, IMO) before it gets better, and we are looking at YEARS, not months of bad times.

[Hubert Flottz]

8. Are we better off now than we were 8 years ago?

McCain thinks so.

[lonestarnot]

13. This morning my car will read. "Republican economics 101. Shocked or awed yet?"

[Fran Kubelik]

9. THANK YOU!!!

[ElboRuum]

10. In the words of The Architect...

"There are levels of survival are prepared to accept."

[DS1]

15. what?

[ElboRuum]

37. The whole economic thing (it's from The Matrix Reloaded)...

The Architect and the machines could be likened to the people capable of weathering an economic storm. What was essentially being stated there is that if Neo chose to try to save Zion instead of returning to the Source, the human race would be completely destroyed. Neo questions this, stating that the machines need humans to survive. At which point the Architect delivers the line, essentially stating that they'd be prepared to survive at a much lower level of subsistence willingly should the One not return to the Source and humanity is completely destroyed.

It also kind of reminds me of an episode of Gilligan's Island where Thurston was reminiscing on the late 20's and the "hard" times they were, quipping that he went from being a billionaire to only being a millionaire.

The point is that the last people to feel the pinch of economic hard times are the ones most buffered from it and they don't feel it nearly as badly as do the rest of us no matter how hard it becomes. The line sort of reminds me of where we are now, economically speaking.

[DS1]

38. I just wondered if there was a word missing from your quote

It's not quite making sense at the moment, but yes, I've seen the movie.

Regretfully

[ElboRuum]

40. You are correct.

Oh. I know why that is. I put in some brackets to re-person the quote, and I guess it thought it was HTML that it didn't know how to render.

It is supposed to read:

"There are levels of survival they are prepared to accept." The original quote was "we" instead of "they", so I thought I'd do the correct quotidinous thing by bracketing the "they". Silly me, that's an unrecognized HTML tag format.

[greguganus]

17. Thank you for posting this. n/t

[El Pinko]

19. I would counter that your anger at "doomsayers" is midirected...

...considering that THEY were not the ones who engineered this whole fiasco we are seeing unwind right now. They are as powerless to do anything about it as anyone else.

I haven't seen the "gloating" you describe, but if it's happening, maybe it's a coping mechanism?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

29. I'm not angry. (For a change)

I'm not saying "You people are assholes and should die!!!"

I am saying, please remember that this stuff affects real people posting here, and that people on the bottom rungs of the ladder are affected the most. Please just be mindful that this is about real people... like everything else we discuss here.

I understand the pleasure of having ones world-view vindicated by events. It's like Iraq going bad. Most of us predicted it, but should take no pleasure in it because that vindication involves the premature death of a million people.

That's all. Just a reminder that real DUers are in real trouble.

[tpsbmam]

20. AMEN!! This affects everyone and believe me, there are

millions of Americans who have pension funds and IRAs and other investments who will be hurting like hell with huge downturns in the market. It is NOT a playground of the rich, it's a critical part of our economy and the retirement livelihood of many of us, me included. Did you cheer when Enron employees lost their pensions? No, I doubt you did. Well then don't get gleeful when millions of us watch our pensions shrink with market downturns.

[melody]

24. excellent post n/t

[OHDEM]

27. If it had to happen, I'm just glad it's on *'s watch!

Otherwise, they'd be blaming the Democrats which they'll probably try anyway. We need to take it to them that's it's their "free market" bs that's gotten us here. They've been accusing us of "whining" well I think we should accuse them of fiddeling while our financial sector burns!

[Liberalynn]

33. I am sad for those of us that have to

be caught in this mess through no fault of our own. As I said in another post its not fair and we don't deserve this. All my sympathies are reserved for those who are innocently getting dragged into the mess.

To the rest, however, who still continue to defend Reaganomics, who don't vote for the most intelligent or qualified person, but the one who they'd most like to have a beer with, I'm sorry but I do think they need to come face to face with the consequences of their own willfull stupidity.

I hope this will serve as a wake up call to the later group, but I sincerely doubt anything could wake them up.

Not glee but just an honest hope that this will open some people's eyes and minds soon, so the rest of us don't have to keep paying for their ignorance. Because there is no doubt as long as people keep voting on personalities, and vague theological doctrines about family values, and not the real life issues that actually matter in day to day life, this and worse is going to keep happening.

That's not glee its common sense.

[OnionPatch]

35. I must have missed those posts.

Yes, I have seen people saying "I told you so!" This doesn't mean they are happy about what's going on. Sorry if that's your perception.

[leftofthedial]

41. CAPITALISM IS TRAGIC

Unless you are at or near the top of the food chain, capitalism is designed to screw you.

[cali]

42. what human economic system isn't tragic?

And yes, capitalism exists in Scandanavia