Joe Sudbay, AmericaBlog.com, states it:

The Republicans, under the leadership of George Bush, destroyed the American economy. We're on the precipice -- facing a depression. But, the House Republicans are being petulant - they got 33% of the House stimulus bill devoted to questionable tax cuts, but that's not enough. Obama tried...

Bi-partisanship only works when both sides come to the table. The GOP leaders are like little children. If they don't get their way 100%, they won't play. They don't seem to understand the precarious situation we're in. Or, maybe they don't care. The message from today should be pretty simple: A "NO" vote is a vote for a depression.

Simple, huh?

What me panic or fearful?  Well, where I work, which is a nonprofit, there has been jobs eliminated, jobs consolidated and some positions going from full time to part time, with 401k contributions cut (not eliminated yet) on the employer side.

When I see that such retail chains as Circuit City being liquidated there is a palpable fear with people. AP reports:

On Monday alone, roughly 40,000 more U.S. workers got the grim news, including 5,000 workers at heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., which is buying rival drugmaker Wyeth in a $68 billion deal, and Sprint Nextel Corp., the country's third-largest wireless provider, each said they will slash 8,000 jobs.

But wait...I hear conservatives and Republicans using news talk shows to blare about the "fact" that "free markets" are self correcting and that job growth is "linked" to tax cuts for corporations.

What world do they live in?

From the AFLCIO blog:

Since 2000, corporations have shipped more than 525,000 white-collar overseas, according to the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). Some estimates say up to 14 million middle-class jobs could be exported out of our nation in the next 10 years. Accountants, software engineers, X-ray technicians, all are losing their jobs as corporations look for low-wage workers in countries such as India and China.

Robert Roubini, NYU economist states:

“There is nowhere to hide,” Roubini, an economics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who predicted the financial crisis, said from Zurich in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We have for the first time in decades a global synchronized recession. Markets have become perfectly correlated and economies are also becoming perfectly correlated. This is not your kind of traditional minor recession.”

Roubini said the U.S. government should nationalize the biggest banks because losses will exceed assets, threatening to push them into bankruptcy. The banks could be privatized again in two or three years, Roubini said. The professor reiterated his prediction that U.S. financial losses will more than triple to $3.6 trillion and that global equities will fall 20 percent this year from current levels.

‘Zombie Banks’

“Nobody’s in favor of long-term ownership of the U.S. banking system by the government, but if you don’t do it this way, you end up like Japan where you kept alive for a decade zombie banks that were never restructured,” he said. “That’s going to be much worse. It’s better to clean it up, nationalize it and sell it to the private sector.”