Danny Schechter: The Edge of the Abyss

[marmar]

from CommonDreams:



The Edge of the Abyss
As Economic War Threatens, It's Time to Fight Back. Let's Start With National Teach-Ins

by Danny Schechter


The other day as I was out promoting my book Plunder with a talk at a New York bookstore, the market dropped precipitously. It was a day that I led my blog with a quote from financial analyst fearing we are on the edge of the abyss.

I was introduced by Steve Fraser, a scholar, who wrote a major study on Wall Street and the American dream. As we chatted, I asked if he had expected the intensity of the crisis we are now experiencing.

"Yes," he said, "I always knew this was possible, even likely but I am in a state of shock by the severity and seriousness of the crash. Honestly, I thought they would avoid it."

We all want to believe everything will turn out ok. We all tend to believe that the folks in charge at Wall Street are too smart to let their own world go down, along with ours, and that they somehow will fix it because it is in their interest to do so. Most of us don't have much of a sense of how systems and institutions and economic laws and cycles operate.

We expect rationality in a marketplace driven by panicky irrationality.

A night earlier, on CNN, a poll reported that 6 out of ten Americans expect things will get worse and turn into a depression. I am not sure most know what a depression means but that expectation shows diminishing confidence in the public at large. Of course, CNN's financial analyst, an editor of Fortune was soon waxing more optimistically about the need to solve the problem, not go after wrong doers.

Financial writer Mike Whitney disagrees:

"The United States is headed into another Great Depression and has probably dragged the rest of the world along with it. The global financial system will look very different by the time we reach the other end of the tunnel." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/09-3

[Karenina]

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