"Why didn't anybody see this crisis coming?"

You hear that question a lot these days.

The REAL question is: "Why didn't anybody listen to or believe the many people who did see this coming?"

Probably for the same reason nobody wants to listen to or believe the many who are warning of peak oil. There are, and have always been, far too many "experts" in denial that anything really bad could ever happen, and so invested in the status quo that they can't stretch their imaginations around the truly stupendously bad things that CAN and DO happen.

The human race as a whole is just incapable of seeing what it does not want to see. Every generation or so, we pay the price for being caught off guard by some "big surprise" that was blatantly obvious long before it arrived. When will the human race every mature beyond infancy and learn to see what should be obvious?

.. the fascist juggernaut has such a tight hold
on the thought process of those in power, and
on the media, that nobody in power is even having
the conversation that needs to take place.

We need to be talking liberal, people first,
socialist policies.. basically a New New Deal.

Kucinich talks well on this.. but he's been
so ridiculed and marginalized, that hardly anyone
listens to him.

We need people like Kucinich and Bernie Sanders in
the national spotlight, and their views as part
of the policy conversations that will forge a
workable solution.

Like any good pyramid scheme, you got to get the suckers going so that you can abscond with the swag before they notice that it's an empty shell.

The situation has been obviously unsustainable for years. Easy credit has been a smoke screen for the fact that most people were living beyond their means -- and that's because wages have been horribly depressed.

And also the stock market has not reflected reality in like forever. Especially the last few years: things were getting steadily worse and worse, yet the stock market inexplicably kept going up.

of the economy. Pure hogwash.

... because if it was, it would have never risen much after 2002 to begin with.

the problem was not us saying the great lier was going to destory america as we knew it, it was the dumb fucks that thought Reagan was right, deregulation, unions and welfare queens were the only problems america faced in the future.

Even as Wall street comes crashing down on their pointy little heads, the dim wits are trying to paint it as poor people buying houses they couldn't afford because liberal groups like Acorn forced lenders to give the poor loans. Oh and the democratic party is also to blame along with the great republicon deregulators.

Bullshit.

This rathole goes DEEP

So it was still a surprise when it just started.

About the length of time needed for those to remember the last Colossal Fuckup to die or grow too old to be in power, and for the newer generations to repeat their mistakes.

There's even an old name for this length of time: A Seaculum

And I only know that because your post intrigued me so much I spent some time reading on the subject.

Thanks a bunch.

A book called The Fourth Turning:

http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-Str-William/dp/0767900464/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223594201&sr=1-1

An interesting hypothesis, indeed.

According to the book, I am a Nomad. The monniker is not as noble as the others, and I fear the name does not bode well for my generation (Gen X).

n/t.

Let's hope you guys do not have to do what the last Greatest Generation had to do. With less bombs and bullets, anyways.

The book has an excellent message board associated with it:

http://www.fourthturning.com/forum

I'm the poster "Odin" there.

have the money to pay off the the buyers of the contract? I expect it was because they were living like kings, thinking nothing could possibly go wrong.

right or too far left so all their ideas are dismissed.

:shrug:

They were too busy worshiping the "free market" economy.

I am near retirement age and I dollar cost averaged my aggressive allocations in my retirement accounts down to a mostly cash/bond (75%) allocation across the top third of the bubble (both sides). This is something I wasn't planning to do. We saw it in our gut. Something just didn't make any sense. Wealth was air without value or assets. My losses are less than 5% in dollars YTD but, gee, what will those dollars really end up buying? There are no winners down here in ordinary people-ville in the long run. So even if we knew it and acted, what good is our "personal responsibility" world anyway? Great lesson for all if they bother to see it - As goes your country, go you. Maybe we will learn to be a society again.

Optimists have always been a msytery to me as I don't comprehend that way of thinking.

them into buildings or how could we know the levees would break, etc

Usually any newspaper with a decent business section had articles for a few years on the ARMs hitting the wall and the mess it would start, the crazy deficit spending, etc.

I left all my retirement money in the market and have gotten killed, i.e., lost almost half of everything I've diligently put away over the years.

I saw some trouble coming - put a lot into international (which has turned out worse), and some into inflation bonds. But the trouble I saw was that the US was overextended, that there was this mortgage problem, etc. That would lead to some losses, but not horrible. What's happening now is the worst drop since the great depression, and it's worldwide. It's not due to peak oil, it's I guess in part due to the large amounts of credit people have, but the lost market value is larger than the amount of all the mortgage defaults by a factor of 100. It's maybe 10 times larger than all the consumer credit out there other than mortgages.

What's caused it is that all the big investment bankers and bankers and insurance companies and sovereign funds and hedge funds were playing huge games behind the scenes, hiding them, and skimming off the top. Things were much worse than they looked even to someone who was paying attention.

Bottom line, many of us didn't see it coming, and it wasn't ideological blinders. We fell for a great swindle.

so I thought it was just me being a nervous nellie.

screaming kill him and voting for fascist assholes