To rephrase: "It is the holders of the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening masters of leveraged capital — that have become the inheritors of the hugest pile of worthless paper and its associated debt ever to be foisted by one group upon another on this earth."

"The Undefended City" is a nice try at changing the subject from the world as it is back to the we-hate-you-snobs argument.

The person who handles the securities for my husband's family's trust (which is based in DC) observed, when Bear Stearns when down, that our current Secretary of the Treasury Paulson comes to us after having been with Goldman Sachs since the 1970s. She suggested we keep an eye on who else was going to go down without a federal lifeline. Not Goldman Sachs, she said.