OK, so "failout" is not quite fair. It hasn't had a chance to work yet.
But the Dow got into the 8000's today, putting it 40% down from a year ago. That is, nearly half the value of stocks in the Dow has disappeared. Well, that's not quite fair, either, because those values in the "Bush Boom" were never quite real themselves. Sometimes it's hard to tell irrational exuberance from irrational desperation. I almost wrote, when this all began, that we'd still see the Dow in the 7000's and maybe the 6000's before things turned around. Of course I was thinking some time next year, not already before the election. I don't know whether we're at a bottom yet.
Many Americans feel that because of the failout, the guilty are not paying. And that's not quite the case, either.
The Republican Party is crashing and burning over this. They are headed for losses that only a month ago would have sounded like raving lunacy. And there are few parties more responsible for where we find ourselves today than the Republican Party.
And yet our economy WILL come back from this. The real economy is in even worse shape than the Dow, but it will come back and be strong again. Possibly sooner than anyone imagines. It will require a transformational President like FDR, but some observers believe Obama is that man. I am one of those observers. Oh, I know he's only a man. He has his flaws, he has his limitations. But most important of all, he has the ability and the preparation to rise to this occasion. And rise to it he will.
The take-away lesson is about prosperity. It is absolutely false that real, long-term prosperity begins with the upper 2% and gradually spreads ("trickles down") to everybody else. That has always been a wingnut fantasy. The truth about prosperity is that it grows among ordinary people, "on Main Street" to use the metaphor popular today, and certain groups -- investors, service providers, etc. -- become fantastically wealthy by gathering a small percentage of everyone else's affluence.
Trickle-down is officially dead. Phony wealth through financialization is dead. And it goes without saying that John McCain's hopes for the Presidency are dead.
We must work on rebuilding an economy based on real things and real value, an economy where everyone participates in the work and everyone participates in the resulting prosperity.
We can do that. We will do that. New Energy will be one of the foundations of this new economy. Maybe biotech, though open-source may turn out to be a better model for genetic advances than the traditional models of intellectual property. I'm not prescient enough to know what the others will be. If I were, I'd be fabulously wealthy.
In the long run, it will be good for America that history is sweeping away our phony wealth and forcing us to build something real, something strong, and something better in its place.