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http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/04/a-still-moment.html#more

Miss Gayle April 25, 2010 10:43 PM

I'm very pessimistic about the whole thing.

There's not going to be any real shake-down on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs was chosen as the sacrificial goat for the show-trials to placate the "off with their heads" crowd only because they already got in trouble with the EU for their "creative" bookkeeping in Greece. Since they're going down anyway, may as well kill two birds with one stone, right? Lehman and AIG were respective experiment to see what would happen if a major company in those arenas failed, and they didn't like the results - hence the bailouts and/or mergers for just about everyone else. There will be no serious attempt at stopping the abuses on Wall Street. Wall Street owns Congress and most of the Presidential Administration, no doubt about it.

Since the Boomers are very wedded to the idea that they are entitled to a cushy retirement unknown in the history of the human race, they can certainly not be expected to simply yank all their money away from the Fat Cat Robber Barons - after all, that would be, in their opinion, cutting off their own nose to spite their face. They still think they can salvage something out of this mess - they can't actually grasp that there is really nothing to salvage. And since the Boomers outnumber the X-ers some 3 or 4 to one, there is no realistic chance that the unfunded benefits of SS and MC can be reigned in. By the time enough Boomers die off so that the X-ers and Y-ers have a chance to properly restructure entitlements and smack down Wall Street, it will be too late to do so. The *&$^ will have already hit the fan.

Nor will the Boomers give up the massive and unsustainable military-industrial complex and US bases all over the world, regardless of how much the expense of US Imperailism is crippling the domestic economy and denying basic human rights like healthcare to non-Boomers. But hey, they have theirs, so they don't care. No, they won't give up their unsustainable (and contradictory) beliefs without a fight, and right now, there's no way to win against their distorted and unrealistic priorities.