regardless of whether or not the current financial crisis will BE the ”end of american capitalism”, it’s interesting that such a story would even be featured in the major media.

Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation’s wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.

In 1999, Dingell warned on the House floor that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act could lead to a big bailout of banks, urging his colleagues to vote against it.

“I just want to remind my colleagues what happened the last time the committee on banking brought a bill on the floor which deregulated the savings and loans. It wound up imposing upon the taxpayers of this nation about a $500 billion liability,” Dingell said. “Having said that, what we are creating now is a group of institutions which are too big too fail. Not only are they going to be big banks, but they are going to be big everything.”

Dingell warned in that 1999 speech that one day the bill will come due.

“Taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight and it is going to cost a lot of money, and it is coming. Just be prepared for those events,” he said.

President Clinton signed the bill into law in November 1999.

from: Dingell may propose return of banking regulations

from charles bernstein:

Chairman Lehman, Secretary Polito, distinguished poets and readers—I regret having to interrupt the celebrations tonight with an important announcement. As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.

Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.

continue reading poetry bailout will restore confidence of readers…

but collecting links.  try these:

atheistic forum —some good stuff

the 9/11 norad tapes

the national debt chart —scaaaarrrryyyy

op-ed on presidential candidate responses to recession

rogue trader may have caused fed to cut interest rates

op-ed by caroline kennedy, endorsing barack obama—ted and patrick have now also endorsed obama

background story on obama’s church—some people seem so concerned

and for today’s bizarre story: In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?—canadian is beautiful?

“He convicted Mr. Sosa of a double intoxication manslaughter, got a weak jury to give him 12 years in each, and then convinced Judge Wallace to stack the sentences,” Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo. Then came the odd part: “He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”
...
It is unusual that a seasoned attorney like Mr. Trent would not have wondered how a Harris County jury came to be stacked with Canadians. (There were no Canadians on the jury but there were some black members.) “The only way that there could have been Canadians on the jury, was if they were born in Canada and then became U.S. citizens, and then became citizens of the county in which the case was tried,” Mr. Vinson noted.

desktop of the moment: