This diary at DailyKos from a woman who got laid off along with 2/3 of her company yesterday is going to become increasingly regular news. For all that I've been swimming in the schadenfreude at watching the banks collapse and multimillionaire CEOs humbled, mass layoffs of ordinary people like this, as well as the evaporation of retirement savings for people unlucky enough to be retiring in a downturn, were inevitable and they give me no joy.

I didn't relish that end of things when, at the end of the dotcom bubble, my Silicon Valley firm essentially shut down completely. The product and one tech support guy were sold to another company and the rest of us were let go. (I'm not sure I should be kidding about their selling the tech support guy. I heard earlier this year that he still works with the remnants of the product as it exists today.) It took quite a while to find another job and my income has yet to recover its 2001 peak.

Not that this empathizing will make you feel better if you got laid off recently. Only another job is really going to help with that and I wish you good fortune. I'm just saying that I snark out of bitterness, as opposed to a glibertarian lack of concern.

But seriously, Pets.com? AOL being worth more than Time-Warner? The business climate in 2001 was a fantasyland, a delusion. It couldn't have gone on like that and (in theory predictably, though no one wanted to listen to the people who did predict it) it didn't.

All the ordinary people who'd built their dreams on the jobs that couldn't last, all of us took a bath. And how were we supposed to know any different? The media and business press were unctously lapping up quotes from tech CEOs, idolizing their lifestyles, luxuriating in E-Trade advertising dollars, and crowing about how business had changed forever. Ha.

It could have been worse, though. We might have lived in a developing country run under the iron thumb of the International Monetary Fund; that was something to be thankful for then, and something to be thankful for still today.

In fact, both the IMF and World Bank are now singing a different tune about the proper response to financial meltdowns, talking about the need for more government oversight, saying that African countries who've refused to integrate with world financial markets will be hurt the least. A stunning admission of reality on their part. Robert Zoellick of the World Bank is quoted in that article describing the current crisis as having "confused" people about free market principles, but countries subject to IMF riots over the years haven't been even remotely confused about the rules of global finance: whatever benefits the big, developed nations is good, period.

Hence we've had trade protectionism for the US and its allies, paired with the merciless extraction of capital and raw materials from developing nations. In fact, hop below the fold with me and let's step through the standard 4 1/2 step IMF crisis recovery plan that will never be fully implemented in the US on account of how no one wants torch-bearing mobs burning stuff down in America del Norte.

There's more...