AYLMER, QUEBEC | I am just as confused about the present financial crisis as everyone else, but there are a few things that strike me as particularly incomprehensible. First, we are not certain that the slippery slope we are on will in fact carry us down to the depths of another Great Depression.

In fact, we are warned of this by the same gang who assured us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Europe was on its last legs, and that the market place will solve all problems.

Why would we turn around and give these pirates $700 billions in the USA and $875 billion in Britain?

Instead of the slippery slope to perdition, this situation looks like the neo-Cons last grab.

We were afraid they would launch an attack on Iran and create an even bigger disaster in the Middle East, but they've made an end run around us and instead ran off with the US treasury.

They are smart. Or we are gullible. Or both.

It is also incomprehensible that we are giving these massive sums to the very crowd who created this mess in the first place. How smart is that?

It was the bankers' and brokers' greed and foolhardiness that drove them into the false mortgage loans that they then sold around the world. Why are we trusting them with our futures and our savings?

It was also the market place itself that spawned these near-criminal lending practices. Do we have to have our noses rubbed in it before we accept that markets are merely economic tools, not the Holy Grail, and that they require as close a regulation as do exercise yards in penitentiaries?

Are we really as dumb as to dump all this money into the market and ask it to sort itself out? Hello, out there!

This financial meltdown or crash could be the history's second shoe dropping: the first was the collapse of the Soviet Union and its command economy. Many economists and political scientists have wondered if the corporate world would follow the Soviets' demise.

Fear is America's most effective tool, and we are getting a full diet of it, almost to the level of 9/11. Will we buy into fear once again and toss common sense to the wind? And mention of 9/11 brings to mind the rumours that the attacks of 9/11 were somehow engineered by the neo-Cons as the motor for their world ambitions. It this happening again?

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Copyright © 2008 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/09.08