MORE OCTOBER SURPRISES

October 3rd marked the 19th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall. By 1990 Leonard Bernstein and Pink Floyd were giving concerts to celebrate the occasion. I always wondered what it was like to live in Berlin for the fall of the wall - to personally witness up close and personal the end of the Socialist revolution that arguably started in 1905 with the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin’s sailors against Czar Nicolas II.

The Wall’s demise represented the melting away of the power and ubiquitousness of communism after decades of iron-fisted rule. There would be no more tanks crushing protesters as in Hungary in 1956. The feared East German enforcers, the Stasi, attempted to melt into the very population they intimidated a week before.

October 3, 2008 in New York has partially answered my question. The walls of unfettered capitalism have come crashing down. Not with blood in the streets or workers pulling down the stock exchanges, but with a Honecker/Gorbachev resignation to the inevitable. Now, the titans of the financial industry are on the mat, down for the count. Like the prone Sonny Liston being circled by Cassius Clay, they have been felled in Round 1.
"On the mat"
To see Obama, McCain and Palin channel their respective talking points and call Wall Street “greedy and corrupt” is akin to seeing Lenin atop the burial mound of the Romanovs. They have identified the stock and bond markets, the essence of the free market economy, as responsible for the economic collapse. This drives a stake through the heart of New York. Amazingly, in our video age of “fair and balanced” coverage, there were no defenders of Wall Street. In all the hours of TV crisis coverage, I can’t recall one talking head fighting back and arguing The Street’s position or castigating Washington for being the mirror image (greedy and corrupt), albeit a few miles south.

Clearly, now that everyone from JP Morgan to AIG to Goldman Sachs is on some form of the dole, biting the hand that feeds you would be churlish to say the least. The idea that capitalism’s private bonds and equities could and would provide wealth, security and prosperity, has vanished like the roll of the dice in that famous board game. Capitalism has landed itself in jail. Even the high rollers, like Warren Buffett, now need to pay to get out of jail, or wait it out for a few turns like the average investor.

The bailout, orchestrated and urgently promoted by the very party of less government and free markets, is a form of seppuku. You know what Japanese business executives do when their catering company poisons thousands with tainted meat or their real estate scheme goes south impoverishing retirees? They do the noble thing and thrust a knife into their belly. Henry Paulson has followed suit. He has restored his honor and in essence said, “I give up. It’s your turn Democrats.”
"End of an era"
For the life of me, as an ardent entrepreneur and lover of economic enterprise, I cannot imagine what platform John and Sarah are running on. The deficits, the pork, the trade imbalances, the welfare/prescription spending, and, yes, the “greed and corruption” under the Republicans in Congress during the last 8 years, has caused the final breech in the wall of capitalism. Bill Ayers didn’t have to lift a nitro-coated finger. The one thing I could never imagine after 1989 was Erick Honecker running for office in the new Germany. John McCain should do the same thing as he did and check out Chile.