Democracy for Vancouver

But there should be a different George in the cockpit.

From Reuters this morning:

More than 2 million subprime borrowers took out mortgages with low teaser interest rates that are due to reset sharply higher, and officials fear as many as 500,000 could lose their homes because they will be unable to meet the higher payments.
…
Rising defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages, which were repackaged as securities and sold around the globe, have rattled financial markets in recent months, drying up credit and putting the world’s largest economy at risk.

And in another Reuters piece:

U.S. stocks fell on Tuesday after a brokerage cut its earnings outlook for major Wall Street companies and as uncertainty about the outlook for a credit crisis recovery mounted.

Shares of Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley fell after JPMorgan Chase cut its earnings estimates on the brokerages, citing writedowns, slowdowns in mergers and acquisitions and reduced opportunities for other fees.
…
A top U.S. Treasury official said market anxiety had deepened, an assessment borne out by ever tighter interbank rates, and the process of rebuilding confidence would be “long and slow.”

The only positive I can see is that a bad economy generally foreshadows a change in political parties at the top.

But it’s asinine that the richest country in the world is so politically immature that it takes electing a mendacious, narcissistic moron not once, but twice, and allowing that moron to drive the country into the ground environmentally, economically, socially and diplomatically, before we collectively say, “Gee, maybe dogma, a codpiece and a flag lapel pin aren’t enough…”