Neither Slick Willie nor Dumb Dbya is responsible for the decline in the market. The factors that contributed to the Crash of 2002 aren't that simple. The weed seeds that have led to this bitter harvest were sown long ago and the failure to root them out can be apportioned over decades of benign neglect and optimistic forecasts of endless growth. The prescient among us saw the day coming when the bear would rouse from hibernation and hungrily rampage among the bulls with blood dripping from its jaws.

Those of us in the mid-country are watching another market. Last weekend we went for a drive in the country. In field after field we saw corn not knee high by the 20th of July. Stunted, brown and wilted from lack of water this year's crop is lost to a multitude of Midwestern farmers. The soybeans are just as stunted. Their harvests won't pay for the fuel to run the combines across the fields. Their operating loans will go unpaid and we will see a flood of farm foreclosures and tenant bankruptcies. For those few who have been lucky in the weather lottery the annual gamble will have paid off with $5 corn and $10 beans. The economic impact of the farm crisis on the horizon will be as great or greater than that wrought by the running of the Wall Street Bulls. You see, you can't eat stock options or puts or calls. You can't say that the 49 state drought is Dubya's fault either.

What is Dubya's fault is that in the face of his trifecta - his War Against Anybody; The Crash of 2002; and The Twenty-First Century Dustbowl - their ain't no money in the bank 'cause he done already gave it away to his boardroom buddies. Make no mistake about it, we are facing the greatest economic crisis since Herbert Hoover told us that prosperity was just around the corner and it took us a decade and FDR to put America back to work that time.

The conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression can't happen again. We put safeguards in place to insure that it didn't happen again. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Those safeguards are no longer in place. Since the Gingrich Contract on America the Republican Congress has spent the better part of a decade destroying the defenses of America's economic security.

Picture of the Corn Field