The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Goose Island is the ­only island ­located on the Chicago River. I suspect most Chicagoans would need MapQuest to even find Goose Island. Once a center for manufacturing, the neighborhoods surrounding it have been quietly gentrified over the years. Until quite recently, the island was most famous for the beer that is brewed at its local Goose Island Brewery.

But that was before the December 2008 sit-in by the employees of the Republic Windows and Doors plant located on Goose Island. When their plant suddenly and illegally shut down, the workers demanded a fair severance package and the payment of accrued and unused leave.They occupied the plant in an effort to win their demands.

Meet Michael J. Lotito of the firm Jackson Lewis LLP. He was among the many individuals in expensive suits who worked very hard to bring on the current global economic disaster. Michael J. Lotito did not peddle subprime mortgages in hardscrabble neighborhoods. He didn't sit in a bank and lie to people about the advantages of interest-only home loans. He didn't hawk bundled exotic securities in the global marketplace. His firm, Jackson Lewis LLP, isn't even located on Wall Street. Their New York office is on Staten Island. It's not a mortgage lender, an investment bank, or a stock brokerage house.

Trust me folks, you hav­en't seen the last of Sarah Palin. The "Disasta from Alaska" is about to become the new Queen of a New Dixie. I know what you are thinking. Alaska is about as far north of the Mason-Dixon Line as you can get and not fall into the Arctic Ocean. There aren't any cotton fields up there and Alaska was still in Russia when we had the Civil War.

But stick with me for a moment before you give up and click away to some other blog. When states like Virginia and North Carolina are seriously considering a black man for president and even Georgia is showing signs of sanity, the old geographical Traditional Dixie is cracking up like pond ice on a warm spring day.

First of all, it's not the fault of "the market". Blaming the market for the estimated 1.7 million foreclosures this year means that no one is responsible and everyone is off the hook. But market fluctuations are not the weather, nor are they "Acts of God", to use the favorite expression of the insurance industry. Markets are constructed by real human beings. Markets have rules written by real human beings. Markets have referees and judges who are real human beings. Markets have participants who are real human beings.

Forget about the "invisible hand of the marketplace" so beloved by ivory tower econ professors and overpaid media pundits. There is no invisible hand of the marketplace. Real human hands shape the marketplace and they have left plenty of fingerprints behind. Those estimated 1.7 million foreclosures mean a lot of fingerprints.

They stand over the city like the great predatory wading birds they are named after. And from time to time, like those great predatory wading birds, they come down swiftly on those below and take a life...often more than one. They are the construction cranes, whose numbers grew with the massive lending sprees that fueled the hi-rise building boom in our great cities.

But the construction cranes don't take lives with sharp beaks and unerring vision like their avian namesakes. Instead people get electrocuted when the cranes collide with power lines, operators fall out of them, they fall on top of people, or they crush people in the other gruesome ways that heavy complex machinery can destroy the human body.