On The Turning Away

If anything, the glee of a sewing circle over the paroxysms underway in the financial market presents a splendid bit of irony in an otherwise tumultuous week.

On the heels of de facto nationalization of Fannie and Freddie, venerable Lehman Brothers fell on its sword, dying an ignominious death, followed by an eleventh-hour rescue of AIG that “brings on bloodbath”, as investors fear more shoes may drop.

Mind you, this is an election year. The “bewildered” candidates offered standard boilerplate responses. While partisans are parsing whether the economy is “fundamentally strong”, political junkies dig the piles and uncover some interesting factoids.

Such as, Fannie and Freddie spent $200m in the last decade to buy influence; Lehman is one of the top 10 corp donors of Sen. Obama. James Johnson, a former Fannie Mae CEO, was head of OBama VP selection team until June 2008 when he quit over controversies about his “lucrative ties to financial corporations and lenders.”

Now that just makes the ‘fierce urgency of now” all the more depressing, doesn’t it?