At least, the voicemail system for Missouri members of Congress.
I'm curious if people from other states have run into this? I've called Senator McCaskill's office and Representative Clay's office in DC and got their voice messages, only to find I couldn't leave a message because so many other people had called leaving messages that the boxes were full.
I was however able to leave a message for Senator Bond a couple days ago. Well I just tried this morning about 8:05 eastern, and his mailbox is now full, too.
I consider that a job well done. I hope very much the staffers assigned to listen to all those actually listen to them and take the comments seriously. We the People know what we are talking about, and we are quite passionate about this issue.
I also want to add my voice that I do not believe our whole system is crashing. Just like not being able to leave a voice message doesn't mean our whole telecommunications infrastructure is failing, hiccups in the DJIA or the bankruptcy of some companies does not mean our whole lending system, let alone our whole economy, is crashing. We have very explicit, powerful government intervention for failing companies already. They're called bankruptcy courts.
A little while ago I wrote this post about not making decisions based on fear, but rather on the confidence that we have lots of options. I spelled out a couple basic scenarios, one where the problem is liquidity, ie, cash flow, and the other insolvency, ie, the underlying assets ain't worth jack. I would point my particular frustration at option #3 in the second scenario, my guess at the 'conventional wisdom', which is almost exactly the Paulson plan turned out to be-use taxpayer money to buy assets from private companies at prices higher than any rational private investor would offer.
American workers have been hurting for a long, long time. This is death by a thousand cuts, not a cataclysmic emergency that just happened last week. The best decisions are those made through an open and exhaustive process. It's at junctures like this that it is most important to avoid rash decisions based upon woefully limited information.
And if you can't shut off your panic switch, try deflecting it to something else. You think the Dow looks bad, look at Pakistan. While a former Goldman Sachs executive is trying to steal a trillion dollars from us, the Bush Administration has basically expanded our Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan war to include Pakistan. There are about 280 million people who live in those four countries, and a lot more of them are of fighting age than here in the US.
In the wager of what will cost more, wars in the Middle East/Southwest Asia or bailing out Wall Street speculators, it looks about to be a coin toss at the moment. Don't forget all this debt you're saddling my generation with when you ask us for help with your nursing home bills in about twenty years.