'Cos Something Is Happening Here

Bob Dylan didn't dedicate Ballad of a Thin Man to Goldman Sachs during his short, blistering set at the minor league ballpark up in New Britain, Connecticut - but as I listened from the general vicinity of second base with the family on this cool summer evening, I couldn't help thinking about the investment bank's obscene profits this last quarter, built on the backs of the American taxpayer nonetheless. Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is. Jim Kunstler has some ideas:

There probably are not fifty-three people in the USA who can explain how this development figures in with last fall's bailout gift from the US treasury, or the $13 billion GS received on the backside of US gift payments to the failed AIG insurance company, plus the reams of necrotic securitized debt paper rotting in the back of the GS vaults. This is a company playing with the fire of world history.

It brings back the question, which has loomed dimly at the margins of America's collective consciousness, as to whether we can get through the long emergency ahead without going through a wringer of domestic political convulsion. At this rate, sooner or later, anything identified with wealth could become a target for the wrath of the unemployed and foreclosed. The first rock that flies through an East Hampton window, or the first firebomb tossed into the lobby of Goldman Sachs Manhattan headquarters could ignite a chain of events that shoves all economic policy out of the political arena and quickly divides everyone at the center of power into armies out for blood.

But don't worry, as Dylan intones on his latest record, it's all good.