“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice” Sometimes you have those moments when the world makes you feel like a character in a Lewis Carroll novel.
The economic system is reportedly in meltdown (Washington Mutual gave us the largest bank failure in U.S. history tonight). The political system is reeling from an inability to actually deal with any of it. The media keeps evoking images of the Great Depression era bank runs. And a lot of people are seriously pissed off.
This post won’t have much to do with coal, climate or the environment, but I just wanted to say something about the thousands of folks that self-organized and hit the streets today in protest of the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street’s financial institutions and banking elites. It’s pretty impressive that hundreds gathered in Washington and New York, but even more impressive that places like Hickory North Carolina, Akron Ohio and Boise Idaho had people gathering in public to express their outrage and dismay.
And nothing evokes a community organizers’ ire and creativity like massive amounts of corruption and cronyism benefiting the wealthy elite.
Here’s the pics from today’s protest on Wall Street. 
One website has been particularly creative– http://www.buymyshitpile.com/— in asking the U.S. government to buy the shit in our attics and basements that even Goodwill won’t take. That’s what they are doing by buying all of Wall Street’s trash assets and what’s good for Wall Street should be good enough for Main Street.
And even Al Gore got into the populist spirit of the things when he said of Wall Street’s investors yesterday “I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact,” Wall Street’s risky behavior with other people’s money and America’s future. Wall Street’s risky behavior with the climate. Not that different. (Ok, so maybe one little dig about the climate in this post.)
See you in the streets.