What's in the Water? - A New Heavy Element

Scientists announced today they have discovered a new element, one of the heaviest and definitely one of the most lethal. The discovery came as part of an investigation into the collapse of large molecular structures, which had previously been thought to be extremely stable. As researchers dug through the toxic wasteland, they sampled the black water pooling at the bottom of the newest Superfund Waste Management site. To their surprise, they discovered a new compound.

The new compound had a simple chemical structure, it was an oxide. Most people are very familiar with oxides, especially those that drive by the rusted hulks of once-proud manufacturing plants. There's plenty of iron oxide in public view. What was unusual about this oxide was its weight. Simply put, the more complex an atom is the more it weighs, so whatever was in this sample was very complex. The researchers knew they weren't looking at plain old rust any more.

After more tests, the researchers knew they had discovered a new element. One, that when combined with oxygen destroyed the very foundations of the structures built using that element. Chemical reactions can be very powerful, just ask any explosives expert. The researchers rushed to find the source of the new element because they now knew how dangerous it was. They dug farther into the ruins where they discovered the traces of the compound; there they found records of the research being conducted by the firm, which had been destroyed by the collapse.

The name of the collapsed research firm was Lehman Brothers. The name of the new element discovered by the forensics team and the chemists was Greed, which when exposed to Oxygen forms the compound Greed Oxide, GO2. The toxic waste site was rife with Greed Oxide, as shown in this article on Yahoo Finance News.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081006/ap_on_go_co/meltdown_lehman

Even a Lehman Brothers executive, George W. Bush's cousin, wondered what was in the water.
Now we know, it was GO2. Even as they were asking the federal government to bail them out, they were voting each other millions of dollars in compensation. The question remains how much more GO2 is out there and how many more financial institutions and the lives of the workers supporting them are going to be ruined.

We have no shortage of corporate executives perfectly willing to kill the golden goose for one last taste of goose, blind to the fact that without the goose there will be no more golden eggs.