The Great Renewal?

It's too late now!

TARP isn't going to work.

Banning short selling isn't going to work.

Eventually, the SEC will probably ban all selling of stocks - i.e. the U.S. government may legislate that stocks can only go up!  But I don't think that will work either.

Because the real problem is simply that, since Reagan, the U.S. economy has steadily evolved into a Ponzi scheme -- more akin to the Soviet Union of America than to a Democracy with transparent and accountable markets.  In short, today, America is no longer capable of providing real economic opportunity for Joe Sixpack.  And, finally, Joe's as mad as hell and he doesn't want to take it any more.

Thus, I assign no blame for the millions of people that have and will soon default on their mortgages.  Rather, I admire their courage -- for finally making sound financial choices -- contrary to the buy, buy, buy mantra broadcast 24x7 over the corporate media that shapes public opinion in this country.

Today we see that the stolen 2000 election of George W. Bush, followed by his subsequent reelection, marks the collapse of the fake American economy.  The one that spent the Social Security trust.  The one that created the illegal and immoral Iraq war to further transfer public money into private crony hands.  The one that spawned and exacerbated the housing collapse.

This is why I have for years labeled George W. Bush the Marie Antoinette of the 21st Century.

Today, before our very eyes, the Soviet Union of American Ponzi scheme is collapsing -- and Joe Sixpack is so indebted, so tapped and finally, so angry, that Joe will join liberal/anarchists like myself and vote for a Black President.

Thus, it probably only gets worse -- for the 1% Wall Street-Washington ruling class.  And I believe that's a good thing!  Because for 99% of us, this period of economic contraction and de-leveraging finally marks an opportunity for American renewal!

Because America is so much more than its cynical, decadent, jejune ruling class. 

America is 300 million, mostly well meaning, people -- working hard, honoring the rule of law, and desperately looking for a reason to have and to hold faith -- something other than a plastic Jesus on a plastic cross hanging in an overpriced McMansion made of fake wood and leaching cancer-inducing cyanide gas.

Yes!  America has promise!  But first it must become leaner, decentralized, localized, pluralistic and sustainable.  First, America must get off fossil fuels, stop lying to itself and the rest of the world about its economic and military greatness and start living within its means.

Absent that, the end of America is at hand.