...and the rich can only sell to each the other."

Isn't that what the stock market is all about? Money as an abstraction, with no relation to labor or commodities or industrial products. Derivatives, bundled mortgages, financial instruments, this is all fantasy finance, just like the phony football suburban househusbands play to amuse themselves when they're not wife-swapping. Just because they're rich doesn't mean they're necessarily smart. Besides, "rich" and "poor" aren't places, they're directions. The extremes of a continuous spectrum.

Actually, that's not fair, most people with real economic clout (as opposed to the real entrepreneurs you conservatives all fancy yourselves to be) really understand what is going on, and they're not necessarily evil, either. But they can't do what they want, or even what they think is right, because they are part of system that has a dynamic and needs all its own, independent of human requirements.

I find it hard to believe everyone on Wall street didn't know exactly what was happening, way before it happened, but they were powerless to do anything about it because they were too tangled up in the system, too dependent on servicing IT than on the larger society they are a part of. They saw it coming and were powerless to stop it, or talked themselves into believing the system would magically self-regulate itself out of trouble. Just like you did, my son.

The world is process and flow, abstract forces operating on a social and historical substrate, forget all this Randian Neitszche crap, there are no heroes and villains, no great personalities with their fingers on the cusp of history, no Zarathustras Also Spraching. There is just psychohistory, except it is not mathematically predictable and can't be modeled by some button-down Hari Seldon.

Let's just hope there is no Mule, slouching towards Bethlehem...because conditions are rapidly becoming ripe for one.