This is the top of “The Independent” news online of today, September 16, 2008. We do not analyze these beyond saying that we find a clear connection between these separate items.
Our take is that they represent the sinking of the oil addicted “West” – London is here a stand-in for New York;   the over indulgence represented by what is considered art the day that the economic structure is caving-in.
In Russia’s Moscow, a picture of a Georgian next to a black African man is seen as a symbol of the foreign American beaten by Putin’s Russia, that tells their people that it is now defending its “Lebensraum.”
We are being fixated by our lack of understanding that 8 years of Bush have put us back to the need to restart afresh from where we have been in 1930 – and worse.

TOP STORIES Of September 16, 2008 on THE INDEPENDENT online.

Crash! Shares tumble as Lehman Brothers collapses and fears grow for AIG

Russia shows off the spoils of war in Georgia

A formaldehyde frenzy as buyers snap up Hirst works

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Dean Baker | Big Banks Go Bust: Time to Reform Wall Street.
 http://www.truthout.org/article/big-bank…

Dean Baker, The Campaign for America’s Future: “With the demise of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, IndyMac, Bear Stearns and now Lehman Brothers, we’ve been treated to the failure of more major financial firms
than during any year since the Great Depression. The sight of rich bankers getting the boot might be lots of fun if it were just a spectator sport. Unfortunately, we are in the game with these clowns.”

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Wall Street Crisis Is Culmination of 28 Years of Deregulation.
 http://www.truthout.org/article/wall-str…

David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers: “No one cog in the federal government’s machine of financial regulation let down the country by failing to prevent the latest shakeout on Wall Street. The entire system did.
‘They just haven’t done a particularly good job,’ said James Barth, a senior finance fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Los Angeles. Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the Center
for Responsible Lending, a consumer-oriented research group, explained the regulatory lapses more starkly: ‘The job of regulators is that when the party’s in full swing, make sure the partygoers drink responsibly,’
she said. ‘Instead, they let everyone drink as much as they wanted and then handed them the car keys.’”

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Mother Jones – Monday morning September 15, 2008.

BofA Buys Merrill; Lehman Files for Bankruptcy; AIG, WaMu Teeter

While you were sleeping, the landscape of the US financial system changed dramatically. CNBC is calling it, “The biggest shakeup in the history of the US financial system.” The country is in a “once-in-a century” financial crisis, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. The New York Times reported late Sunday that Bank of America has reached a $44 billion deal to buy troubled investment firm Merrill Lynch. Another firm wasn’t so lucky: Unable to find a buyer over the weekend, 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy Monday morning. Lehman’s liquidation will mark the largest collapse of a Wall Street bank since Drexel Burnham Lambert folded in the wake of the junk bond scandal almost two decades ago.

The problems don’t end there. “We will see other major financial firms fail,” Greenspan said on “This Week.” Giant insurance company American International Group (A.I.G.) asked the Federal Reserve for $40 billion, “without which the company may have only days to survive,” according to the Times. Washington Mutual, too, may be in trouble, after its shares plummeted late last week and Moody’s Investor Service downgraded the bank’s debt to “junk” status. And in Europe, a Swiss newspaper reported that Swiss bank UBS will have to take another $5 billion in write-downs.

We’ll see what happens over the course of the day on Monday, but A.I.G., at least, seems to be in serious trouble. Adam Bakhtiar, a CNBC analyst, called Sunday’s events a “tidal wave of horrific news.” James K. Galbraith, an economist and contributing writer for Mother Jones, wrote in an email that while he has “a pretty good record on attacking Wall Street,” his “schadenfreude is very much under control at the moment”:

The world will not be a better place with two free-standing investment
banks—Goldman [Sachs] and Morgan [Stanley]—and a half-dozen major commercial banks, if that, running everything. Further, there is a risk that the unraveling will become disorderly and out of control from this point, as assets hit the market in fire sales and do not find takers. This will affect pension funds and greatly compound the collapse of the wealth position of the middle class…. The collapse of Wall Street will hit Main Street like Ike hit Houston.

So how do we get out of this crisis? Well, the prime mover of all of these problems is the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States. “There’s no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen, and it still is not resolved and it still has a way to go,” Greenspan said Sunday. “And indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes.”

The collapse of Lehman and the broadening crisis will undoubtedly be topic “A” for the presidential campaigns this week. Barack Obama and John McCain want to lead this country. How do they plan to respond to Monday morning’s news?

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Jan Lundberg of Culture Change has an answer that it makes very much sense for us to consider.

September 16, 2008

Collapse of Wall Street precedes complete disintegration of system - he says.

Do not be distracted by the hysteria of the news-media circus regarding the “credit crunch” and the other names given the process of collapse.   There’s no big picture analysis to include the loss of cheap, abundant energy that cannot be replaced.   And there’s the constant lie that things will get back to “normal.”

You’re probably wondering if this is really it: general collapse, or a major hiccup for the system resulting in mere recession.   Some of us activists privately admit we want collapse now, because it will only be worse the longer it’s delayed.   We look forward to Humpty Dumpty going all the way down — not because we like to see anyone suffer, but we see clearly that the continuation of predation on the ecosystem and on exploited humanity have no future except everyone’s extinction.

Here is how the economic landscape will look, with attendant unraveling of the already frayed and twisted social fabric, and it can be summarized in terms of coming days and weeks, then perhaps months for the intense phase of collapse, and post collapse:

The coming days and weeks – More bank failures.   Government default as well.   Revaluing the currency.   Shortage of fuel, food and jobs.   Otherwise, things are still working as to turning the tap and getting water, throwing the switch to still get electricity, and the various officials and cogs in the machine at their posts.

During the buildup to the collapse as seen by the bankruptcies and bailouts, careful selection of commentators and officials’ pronouncement keep assuring us that a recession and a shake out are possibly underway, but that the economy – globally corporate and guzzling energy that’s costing more and more due to depletion – is of course going to be with us and eventually rebound.   The resumption of growth is a given, just as gods in heaven always and forever.

Height of collapse: Overpopulation may be widely considered obvious, but what’s the difference.

More to be filled in by the writer.

Post collapse and a new world paradigm

More to be filled in by the writer.

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What’s pointing the way now for a livable future?

Ecovillages, intentional communities, anarchist collectives, Community Supported Agriculture, bicycle culture, animal husbandry, natural building techniques, biochar, sail transport network, and the path of the peaceful spiritual warrior.   If you are not a part of these things, or aren’t supporting them, then you are definitely part of the problem.

Nature is the way.   This is “the real thing,” although Coca Cola drummed it into millions of people’s heads that just anything can be the “real thing,” even a bottle of sugar and other drugs and chemicals in water.   Coca Cola and such products, mainly for their packaging, are the enemy of Mother Nature.   If we can’t stop our addictions to soy-milk drink-boxes, who are we fooling that we are hip and green?   What’s a better local drink, you may ask?   Water, and bring your own cup or make one out of your hand in the stream.

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“To build the new economy”?

This is dreamland, perpetrated by those who hold steadfastly to their blinders.   The proponents are paid to keep singing their poorly crafted song of a promised land.   Understand that a single interdependent national or therefore global economy is not only unfeasible, but highly undesirable.   It is believed in by those who do not understand peak oil and those lacking in actual community.   They’re cut off from their evolutionary life boat.

The Green Jobs Now campaign touts a “green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.”   Poverty as defined by what — not being able to buy corporate products?   If people take over some land and make it productive, respecting the existing wild species, they may achieve subsistence and yet be called impoverished.   But they are the survivors.   The green job that gives you money to buy stuff and services from unaccountable strangers is more wage slavery, but we are urged to embrace it as if there’s nothing else conceivable.

As long as we believe in fairy tales of a new and better America for clean, continued consumption, instead of first dismantling the present system and building true alternatives on a local scale, we are eating BS for breakfast lunch and dinner.

Instead of “green jobs now” it would be more accurate to say, “green-job snow job.”

“Green Jobs Now is a project of Green For All, 1Sky, the We Campaign…”   Clearly, green is meant to mean dollar bills’ color, as an old expression.

We need green living, not green jobs.   Why continue to keep capitalism alive or give away your time?   Keep it personal, keep it in the community, and remember that energy is not what we truly need but rather the essential things that today are almost always too energy intensive.