You are going to have to do it yourself.

  The one thing I've consistently seen on the progressive web sites whenever someone points out an economic problem is an attitude of, "Just wait until Obama gets in. Then he'll fix this."

 This is delusional thinking! It's as bad as the mindless, head nodding of the Republicans when Bush told them that people hated America "because of our freedom."
 For instance, there is talk of a "New New Deal". Obama is promising universal health care.

Where exactly is this money going to come from?
  First of all, we need to get a grip on what we are facing.

 What do you think of when someone says "California"?
Beaches? Sunshine? Hollywood?

  How about the largest act of genocide in American history?

"The idea, strange as it may appear, never occurred to them (the Indians) that they were suffering for the great cause of civilization, which, in the natural course of things, must exterminate Indians."
 - Special Agent J. Ross Browne, Indian Affairs

 No, not the company itself (although Enron does still technically exist).
 I was speaking about the practices that Enron made famous.

 Kenneth Lay liquidated more than $300 million in stock options while at Enron. Tens of millions of this was in the final months before Enron's bankruptcy, even while telling staffers to buy the stock.

 Jeffrey Skilling, the other major Enron CEO, made $132 million in the year ending in 2001 alone. He is currently serving a 24-year, 4-month prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Waseca in Waseca, Minnesota.

 You may remember Enron's partners in crime, the Wall Street investment banks, that the Supreme Court refused to allow investors to sue. They include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Merrill Lynch & Co., Credit Suisse First Boston and Barclays Bank PLC.
 The investment bankers learned their lessons from this experience.

"The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave."
 - Proverbs 22:7 New American Standard Bible

  On the night of July 12, Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mudd was having a quiet night with his wife and a glass of wine when his phone rang. The person calling was Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and he was very worried.
  Fannie Mae, the biggest mortgage finance company in the history of the world, was in trouble. It's stock prices had dropped 45% since the start of the year. It's borrowing costs were rising as creditors became worried about the chances of Fannie Mae defaulting on its debt. "We're trying to solve a crisis of confidence," Paulson told Mudd after he explained the taxpayer bailout designed by the Bush Administration. "Would this do it?"

  It seems that Paulson's boss had called him just a few hours earlier and explained in no uncertain terms that America was in for an economic nightmare if the American taxpayer didn't backstop Fannie Mae.

  The problem was his boss in this case wasn't President Bush.
It was China.

 The headline GDP numbers this week said the economy grew at a 1.9% rate in the second quarter. Like most government numbers, things aren't nearly so rosy once you get past the headlines.
  The first thing you have to understand is what the GDP Deflator is.

 the GDP deflator (implicit price deflator for GDP) is a measure of the change in prices of all new, domestically produced, final goods and services in an economy.
[...]
In practice, the difference between the deflator and a price index like the CPI is often relatively small.

 I was riding my bike home from work yesterday when I saw a pedestrian step off the curb between two parked cars, without looking up. Because I saw him, and because I'm kind of an a**hole, I decided to time it so that I would pass in front of him by just a couple inches when he walked out from behind the parked car.

  He never looked up for even a moment, and I passed in front of him so close that he had to notice and pause his walk for a second. "Sorry," I heard him say. I stopped my bike a few feet beyond him and turned around to look at him. "The reason you are 'sorry' and not dead is because I'm a bike and not a car," I lectured him very pompously.

 Right at that moment a pickup truck came roaring by us at a velocity far greater than the speed limit. It's side mirror clipped my upper arm and knocked me against a parked car, leaving a bruise. The driver of the pickup truck never even slowed down. I saw him run the stop sign at the end of the block, gunning his engine the whole way.

 Reuters: Emperor Cheney vowed once again to destroy Superman today. Hiding in his secret Fortress of Impenetrable Darkness, Cheney released a statement to his press agent at Fox News assuring the world that his latest defeat at the hands of the Justice League would soon be avenged.

"The world will either kneel at my feet or suffer my wrath! But first Superman must pay for stopping my evil plans. Bwahahaha!"

 Emperor Cheney was a relatively unknown super-villian until he burst upon the scene in 2001. Until the Justice League intervened Cheney appeared to be unstoppable. The devastation left in his wake includes the total destruction or near-total destruction of the World Trade Center, Afghanistan, Iraq, the U.S. Constitution, and the American economy.

 Superman was unavailable for comment at press time because he was stopping the Moon from crashing into the Earth, although unidentified sources in contact with Fox News hinted at drug problems and prostitutes. A spokesperson for the Justice League had this to say:

"Emperor Cheney may be the most powerful and evil force the world has ever seen, but truth and justice will always prevail in the end. His nefarious plan cannot succeed."

  Our nation's politicians like to lecture us about free markets whenever we lose our jobs. So maybe the news from yesterday surprised you a little.

 The Financial Accounting Standards Board, under pressure from lawmakers, will reconsider its timeline for a controversial rule change that may force banks to bring trillions of dollars in off-balance sheet assets onto their books at its Wednesday meeting.

The rule changes would have put about $5 Trillion of off-balance sheet assets, mostly consisting of mortgage-backed securities, onto the books of the nation's financial institutions. It now appears that the start date for these new accounting rules won't go into effect until after November 15.

 After years of efforts by regulators to force financial institutions to open their books to investors, why the sudden change of heart?
  To understand that you have to understand what a derivative is, what a Level 3 asset is, and what the National Australia Bank did just a few days ago.

 You would think that if the government was to give $1.43 Trillion (that's trillion, with a 'T') of low-interest, taxpayer-backed loans to wealthy Wall Street investors that tax paying Americans in general would be outraged. But considering the lack of any sort of public protest, that assumption would be wrong.

 Maybe the public simply doesn't understand what has happened. On the off-chance that this is true, here's a quick and dirty explanation of how 10% of the GDP of America is transferred from the public to the "have's and have more's".

 In 1971 America had a currency crisis. Other nations had stopped accepting our paper dollars as payment for our debts and were demanding gold instead. The problem was that America didn't have enough gold to cover the massive debts being run up because of the war in Vietnam.
 
 What did we do? We simply defaulted on our debt by repudiating the promise to back our currency with gold. The situation was epitomized by Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally, when he responded to the complaints of 29 trading and banking allies:
"It may be our currency, but it's your problem."

 37 years of massive budget and trade deficits later it is still our currency and it is still someone else's problem. However, every game must someday end. Eventually the costs of playing the game become so great that the benefits of not playing become attractive.
  The world is now approaching a point where it is being forced to make a choice.

 In the spirit of Bush's declaration that "Wall Street Got Drunk", I'm going to keep this diary short and simple.

Our brave and fearless FDIC Chairperson, Shelia Bair, has tracked down the source of the troubles in the banking system...YOU!

"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied."
 - Otto Von Bismark

 Otto may have been one of history's great bastards, but he was also a Machiavellian genius when it came to modern politics.
 For instance, on March 10, Bear Stearns denied rumors that they were having a liquidity problem. On March 15, Bear Stearns was effectively bankrupt.
 On February 7, 2002, WorldCom denied rumors that it was about to go bankrupt. On July 19, WorldCom went bankrupt.

 This pattern gets repeated almost every single year like clockwork. Which is why the news today is more worrying than normal.

 Eventually the unsustainable will end. It's an immutable law of both physics and economics. For the American dollar, it appears that this day of reckoning is approaching quickly.

 Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign "financing crisis" within months as the full consequences of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle spread through the world.

 The country depends on Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to fund much of its $700bn (£350bn) current account deficit, leaving it far more vulnerable to a collapse of confidence than Japan in the early 1990s after the Nikkei bubble burst. Britain and other Anglo-Saxon deficit states could face a similar retreat by foreign investors.

 America has a savings rate of zero and must borrow about $2 Billion a day, 365 days a year, to maintain its standard of living.

 I usually don't do "Breaking" stories, but this is too important to not bring to everyone's attention.

 US troops in Afghanistan massed close to the border yesterday for a possible attack on al-Qaeda and Taleban bases in the lawless North Waziristan tribal belt in Pakistan.

 This event has multiple sources, but it has been officially denied.
 Pakistan has denied that it is the source of the violence in Afghanistan. Whether or not that is true there is the question of "is it worth the risk?" We are talking about a nuclear power with an unstable government here. Do we want to risk further destabilizing this nation?

Who's to blame for the economy?
It's not just a political question, it's an economic question as well. It is essential that this question be answered because without an answer we won't know what to do to fix it.

 Remember 1999? The federal budget was balanced. The trade deficit was still manageable. The unemployment rate was low, as was the poverty rate. There were plenty of good paying jobs out there. Corporations were making record profits.

 It was also the year that the economy was broken.

"Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters."
 - email sent Dec. 15, 2006, from one rating agency to another

 For those of you who familiar with my writing, you've probably seen me use the term "Wall Street exists to separate you from your money."

  It occurred to me the other day that I need to justify that opinion. Therefore here is a partial list of reasons why you should keep your money out of the hands of the Wall Street crooks and banksters. This article will not encompass every way that Wall Street steals from average people like you and me, but it might inform you of a few ways that you may not have been aware of.
  As the old saying goes, "Forwarned is forearmed."

  So without further delay, here's a list of ways that you are being robbed, day after day, year after year.

"We march on starvation, we march against death,
we're ragged, we've nothing but body and breath;
From north and from south, from east and from west
the army of hunger is marching."
 - Hunger Marcher's song, 1932

 Hard Times have arrived in America.
A little over a week ago, Milwaukee saw its first food riot (or sorts) in many decades.
  With that in mind I decided to repost a diary that didn't get much attention the first time around.

 Individual economic predictions are usually pretty useless, and predictions of catastrophe are as ubiquitous as rednecks at a NASCAR race. Therefore when I see general doom-and-gloom predictions for the economy I tend to ignore them.

 On the other hand, there is a tipping point. When both official and private sources all over the world that aren't known for being alarmist start screaming "fire!" (or in the case of the IMF, "Think the unthinkable") then it is time to pay attention.

 Before I make a few personal comments let me quote my sources.