Attaturk, are you sure that you are authorized by the Church to do exorcisms? It seems unlikely on the face of it. And attempting an exorcism without express approval from a Higher Authority can be dangerous. Your invocation of the spirit of Jeff Gerth would seem to prove the point that perhaps you don’t know what you’re doing.

The stock market is another scam to extract “transaction” fees for selling useless certificates.

Everyone’s social security contribution she be based on the complete earnings AND wealth. The we could have a reasonable equitable livable retirement.

Off with the heads of management in Detroit.

That is what all these slackers and I include Krugman in that lot don’t want to come out and say, even if they know it’s true. The more progressive economists and “librals” seem to think that if only we regulated the market it would not have come to this. But no, it WOULD have, just on a longer time frame.

Our system is based on extracting wealth from labor, spread between cost of production and selling price and capital has been driving labor cost down to nothing (if they only could). They have gone to basically slave market regions, used that to leverage labor down in industrialized nations, all the time extracting profit and putting it in the same pockets.

Labor has been weak in “fighting” back in this system and were it not for the fact that the money freaks uber wealthy zealots got exceptionally greedy and wanted sky high profits and unbounded wealth, demanded any and all stops be removed to their games, the Ponzi scheme might have gone on a bit longer than it is.

Now it can do nothing but completely unwind.

The uber wealthy will remain extremely wealthy and the down turn will turn billionaires back to multi millionaires effectively no change for them. But it will crush the middle class and lower classes.

And the real “test” will be how government – “the people” respond. Will the people take to pitchforks and storm the bastille? Will the government “see the light” and re distribute the wealth by taking the ill gotten accumulated wealth of decades and start a controlled/managed/regulated sustainable economy based on merit? Or will they allow the plutocracy/oligarchs to remain in their ivory towers where “we the people” go to them for “finance”?

The signs are that the same creeps who created this ponzi scheme are trying to save it by shoveling tax dollars and tax payer debt at the same players who were partying in the casino and calling it “finance” and “investment” and “risk management” and “mergers and acquisitions” and privite equity “funds” and “hedge funds” and derivatives financial products, and credit default swaps and collaterialized debt obligations. Have you ever heard such hooey pass off as “work” before?

I’d sentence Summers, Greenspan, Rubin, Geithner, Volker and ALL THE TOP MANAGEMENT OF EVERY MAJOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION to hard labor for a few years. Now that’s work we can believe in. Go lay some concrete you lying mendacants.

There was an article in the science section of the NYT several years ago that showed the cycle with mast, deer, ticks, Lyme diseases.