Salt City Sinner

Every morning I hook up the coffee IV, start the pumps cycling, scrape the brine barnacles off of the hull of my floating fortress on the Great Salt Lake, and fire up the email inbox to check for job leads (I'm in what experts call "the market" for full-time employment right now). Since my skill set and/or qualifications at the moment tend toward the clerical, I get a lot of openings in my mailbox for personal assistant jobs (I even interviewed for one position as an assistant to the COO of a fair-sized company). Long story short, I happened upon one Bruce Lefavi a short while ago. Lefavi is a wealth-management guru with two instructional books under his belt, and he seems like the typical wealth-management type, which is to say cut from the velvety cloth of purest capitalism. I'm not implying he's anything less than a full-fledged capitalist, bless his heart, but when I saw a link on his page that said " The War Against Wall Street ," accompanied by...

A consensus seems to be building amongst a few political writers and policy wonks that the economic situation in America right now is far worse than it seems - that, in fact, what we are witnessing is nothing less than a coup d'etat. Simon Johnson of the Atlantic : In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again)... But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to a...