Did you read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein? If you haven't gotten around to it, and I understand, I do, put it on your must-read list. Until then, here's my one paragraph summary of how the shock doctrine works:

Come up with an insane plan for national or world domination that no citizenry in their right mind would ever put up with. Wait for something bad to happen. ... Still waiting? Give things a little nudge when no one's looking, say, on a Friday afternoon before a holiday, or during sweeps week. ... Still waiting? Because I know a guy who ... Something bad happens. Propose your totally bughumping plan as the only reasonable option before the rightly angry citizenry can get together a pitchfork-bearing mob. Up the stakes with a plan so crazy that you're verging on gnu buggery, if possible. Implement plan. Ban pitchforks.

The Wall Street banks, who've spent years impoverishing their own customers got their weaselly scrods in a bit of a pinch and are now at risk of losing their pre-eminence to Dubai. It's a crisis because the important people are in trouble and, unlike impoverished single parents living in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores and jobs, they're willing to brook no accountability in being helped. Or they're going to drag the rest of us down with them and kill this dog.

Do you have any idea, btw, how much initial paperwork, and then ongoing weekly paperwork, you have to submit to get a lousy few hundred bucks in welfare payments? Let's just say it adds up. Also, you have to get fingerprinted.

But I digress. And will again, just as I will surely continue the practice of starting sentences with conjunctions. I'll try not to mix too many metaphors, but if I do, you can't stop me. Neener.

Now, while the situation may seem grim, re: the entire nation getting blackmailed for 700,000,000,000 bucks, just remember that we still have Social Security. And the reason we still have it is because when all of the Beltway media and conservative elite stomped their feet and said that we had to privatize, pardon, add private accounts to, Social Security, now!, the public glared them down before they could get to the 'giving things a nudge' part of their long quest to destroy our national pension.

It's a good thing, too. Otherwise now would be time to put some of the nation's Grannies on an all-cat food diet. I'm not even talking Fancy Feast(TM), here. Dry food all the way, Meow Mix(TM) time, Grandma. Oh, you can still find all the usual excuses for that now-shelved idea from the usual helping hands, like Ruth Marcus. They're campaigning for the long haul, it'll be back:

... This is simply false -- even leaving aside the incendiary language about "privatizing" Social Security. As the invaluable FactCheck.org noted, the private account plan suggested by President Bush and backed by McCain would not have applied to anyone born before 1950. It would not have changed benefits by a single penny for current retirees like the nice Florida folks that Obama was trying to rile up. ...

But as Ken from DownWithTyranny explained over email, posted with permission:

Sorry, Ruth, but "privatization" is a perfectly good shorthand description of what the GOP Social Security-killers have been trying to accomplish as their more achievable first step (the only reason they stopped using the term is that they discovered it scares a lot of people), and to the extent that they would have succeeded, the results would have been as devastating as Obama described. All those yuppie dollars diverted into "private" accounts would have gone down the toilet, and we still would have had to find money to pay current SS obligations, because, as the SS "reformers" always neglect to mention, it's current dollars PAID INTO the system that pay for benefits paid out, so every dollar diverted from the system has to be replaced from other sources.

Anyway, they were stopped. It can be done and thank goodness it was.

If people hadn't told trifecta-having Republican lawmakers that they were going to keep their grubby little fists (and gods only know where those fists have been) off Social Security or else, then these bankers would even now be hiding behind cute grandmothers. They'd be all up in our grills saying, 'Dude! We need $700,000,000,000 $1,800,000,000,000 so we can save your grandmother from having to eat her cat, Dolly! Dolly isn't big, Grandma will starve! Don't you love your grandmother!? Give us the money, like, now!!!'

If you've been following along, you may have realized that $1,800,000,000,000 would make for about 54,450 tons worth of unmarked, $100 bills.

But now, they've been caught out asking for help with, basically, a new Lamborghini payment. After they crashed our car. While drunk. With not even a sad-eyed old lady mask laying around to wear into traffic court. They're crazy people, asking for crazy things, betting that no one will call their bluff. And it would verge on funny, if it weren't about our financial future for decades to come.

If you think it's crazy, too, when you call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, tell your Senators and Congresscritter that they'd better not even think about screwing over taxpayers, future generations, and people who know how many homes they have for the sake of Wall Street's lunatic scam artists and their good buddies, like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis.

Just, hell no. Not unless they want to have an electoral crisis of their very own. Because it just isn't that hard to come up with the right answer to a nonsense request by greedy incompetents for $700,000,000,000 $1,800,000,000,000.